earticle

영어

The national language (=Japanese) education became one of the defining features of the Kôminka policies in colonial Korea. This paper examines how the Japanese colonial government tried to subjugate all Koreans, including the illiterate and impoverished, by setting up “Imperial Classrooms” outside the school system. Keijo Yamatojuku classrooms intended for children in the areas of Mapo and A'hyon demonstrate the colonial state's ambition to salvage the bottom rung of the colonized population. Through a close reading of Yamatojuku nikki documented by Asano Shigeko who taught at the Keijo Yamatojuku in 1942 this paper seeks to underscore different strategies and dynamics specific to the “Imperial Classrooms” that reached out to the unmotivated, un-desiring and illiterate colonial subjects.