Beyond “imagined” nostalgia: Gunsan's heritagization of Japanese colonial architecture in South Korea

Abstract In South Korea, romanticization of the era of Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945) has long been taboo: the period is widely regarded as one of the most painful and shameful parts of South Korean history. However, during the past decade unexpected cracks have appeared in established national narratives on the colonial period. This paper explores the dissonance between long-standing national narratives and the commodification of local heritage sites for tourism, by examining the heritagization of Japanese colonial architecture in the city of Gunsan. Despite the Gunsan Municipal Government positions the city's colonial stories in ways that largely align with national official narratives on Japanese colonial history, such efforts have unexpectedly generated feelings of imagined nostalgia in three ways: (1) through clashes between official colonial history and the means by which colonial daily life is depicted in Gunsan's Modern Cultural Belt; (2) through the interwoven colonial and post-colonial stories presented in the city's Modern Historic Landscape District and (3) through the commercialized colonial and post-colonial stories articulated by private businesses in Gunsan. This paper suggests that productive nostalgia can help to overcome the limit of the current form of Gunsan's heritagization, and to construct Gunsan's diverse local memories