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1937 皇國臣民ノ誓詞 (Kōkoku Shinmin No Seishi), The Oath of Imperial Subjects, 2024
By 1937, Japan’s colonial regime had become an educational formation embedded within Korea’s school system. The Oath of Imperial Subjects, recited daily by students, was more than a loyalty pledge. It functioned as discursive-juridical conditioning, recasting Korean youth as imperial subjects while erasing Korean national consciousness. This ritual conditioning, coupled with assimilation programs, exemplified Japan’s reterritorialization of Korean identity through school mandates and youth organizations.
Occupation authorities imposed Japanese as the ‘national language,’ enacting legal-linguistic protocols through classroom and examination mandates; these routine mechanisms severed vernacular ties and enforced colonial authority. Language became a technosocial medium of domination, distancing Koreans from traditional knowledge and reforming identities to match the imperial narrative. This legal-linguistic imposition mirrored suppression tactics in Taiwan and Manchuria, where language policy was deployed as an explicit mechanism of rule.
Beyond language imposition, colonial power consolidated its reach through pedagogical infrastructures. Japan’s colonial administration restructured Korea’s social and educational landscape through educational apparatuses. These infrastructures centered Japanese-language instruction and allegiance to the Empire.
Schools materialized colonial power across multiple registers: as pedagogical infrastructures that organized classrooms and curricula; as educational apparatuses that tied learning to imperial jurisprudence; and as disciplinary apparatuses where infrastructural protocols (attendance logs, timetables, daily oaths) operated as soft-law routines of subject formation. Education became central to population management and social control, reworking historical imaginaries and modes of selfhood in the service of empire.
The absence of photographic documentation of the Oath’s recitation revealed an archival lacuna that both constrained and illuminated our understanding of colonial pedagogy—even as surviving exercise books with copied oaths beneath official seals attested to its daily enforcement. Within this lacuna, subsequent descriptions relied on student notebooks, administrative directives, and instructional pamphlets to infer the ritual’s form, making visible how colonial authority controlled what could be seen and remembered.
Desks aligned in rows regulated bodily posture, while maps and flags fixed at eye level inscribed imperial sovereignty into students’ daily vision. Posters along the classroom perimeter staged obedience as aspiration. This spatial-material configuration functioned as an infrastructural protocol, regulating sightlines and gestures as effectively as it conveyed ideology.
These institutions also constituted epistemic jurisdictions, where standardized curricula and state examinations operated as regulatory protocols: soft-law mechanisms governing the validation of institutional knowledge. Colonial administrators enrolled student bodies in administrative registers—attendance logs, physical fitness tests, moral character assessments—with notations that registered traces of subjectivity beneath the juridico-administrative gaze. The materiality of textbooks and examination papers circulated as textual protocols, imprinting imperial epistemologies in everyday school life and foreclosing alternate pedagogical imaginaries.
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1937 皇國臣民ノ誓詞 (Kōkoku Shinmin No Seishi), The Oath of Imperial Subjects, 2024
By 1937, Japan’s colonial regime had become an educational formation embedded within Korea’s school system. The Oath of Imperial Subjects, recited daily by students, was more than a loyalty pledge. It functioned as discursive-juridical conditioning, recasting Korean youth as imperial subjects while erasing Korean national consciousness. This ritual conditioning, coupled with assimilation programs, exemplified Japan’s reterritorialization of Korean identity through school mandates and youth organizations.
Occupation authorities imposed Japanese as the ‘national language,’ enacting legal-linguistic protocols through classroom and examination mandates; these routine mechanisms severed vernacular ties and enforced colonial authority. Language became a technosocial medium of domination, distancing Koreans from traditional knowledge and reforming identities to match the imperial narrative. This legal-linguistic imposition mirrored suppression tactics in Taiwan and Manchuria, where language policy was deployed as an explicit mechanism of rule.
Beyond language imposition, colonial power consolidated its reach through pedagogical infrastructures. Japan’s colonial administration restructured Korea’s social and educational landscape through educational apparatuses. These infrastructures centered Japanese-language instruction and allegiance to the Empire.
Schools materialized colonial power across multiple registers: as pedagogical infrastructures that organized classrooms and curricula; as educational apparatuses that tied learning to imperial jurisprudence; and as disciplinary apparatuses where infrastructural protocols (attendance logs, timetables, daily oaths) operated as soft-law routines of subject formation. Education became central to population management and social control, reworking historical imaginaries and modes of selfhood in the service of empire.
The absence of photographic documentation of the Oath’s recitation revealed an archival lacuna that both constrained and illuminated our understanding of colonial pedagogy—even as surviving exercise books with copied oaths beneath official seals attested to its daily enforcement. Within this lacuna, subsequent descriptions relied on student notebooks, administrative directives, and instructional pamphlets to infer the ritual’s form, making visible how colonial authority controlled what could be seen and remembered.
Desks aligned in rows regulated bodily posture, while maps and flags fixed at eye level inscribed imperial sovereignty into students’ daily vision. Posters along the classroom perimeter staged obedience as aspiration. This spatial-material configuration functioned as an infrastructural protocol, regulating sightlines and gestures as effectively as it conveyed ideology.
These institutions also constituted epistemic jurisdictions, where standardized curricula and state examinations operated as regulatory protocols: soft-law mechanisms governing the validation of institutional knowledge. Colonial administrators enrolled student bodies in administrative registers—attendance logs, physical fitness tests, moral character assessments—with notations that registered traces of subjectivity beneath the juridico-administrative gaze. The materiality of textbooks and examination papers circulated as textual protocols, imprinting imperial epistemologies in everyday school life and foreclosing alternate pedagogical imaginaries.
1937 皇國臣民ノ誓詞 (Kōkoku Shinmin No Seishi), The Oath of Imperial Subjects ,2024
By 1937, Japan’s colonial regime had become an educational formation embedded within Korea’s school system. The Oath of Imperial Subjects, recited daily by students, was more than a loyalty pledge. It functioned as discursive-juridical conditioning, recasting Korean youth as imperial subjects while erasing Korean national consciousness. This ritual conditioning, coupled with assimilation programs, exemplified Japan’s reterritorialization of Korean identity through school mandates and youth organizations.
Occupation authorities imposed Japanese as the ‘national language,’ enacting legal-linguistic protocols through classroom and examination mandates; these routine mechanisms severed vernacular ties and enforced colonial authority. Language became a technosocial medium of domination, distancing Koreans from traditional knowledge and reforming identities to match the imperial narrative. This legal-linguistic imposition mirrored suppression tactics in Taiwan and Manchuria, where language policy was deployed as an explicit mechanism of rule.
Beyond language imposition, colonial power consolidated its reach through pedagogical infrastructures. Japan’s colonial administration restructured Korea’s social and educational landscape through educational apparatuses. These infrastructures centered Japanese-language instruction and allegiance to the Empire.
Schools materialized colonial power across multiple registers: as pedagogical infrastructures that organized classrooms and curricula; as educational apparatuses that tied learning to imperial jurisprudence; and as disciplinary apparatuses where infrastructural protocols (attendance logs, timetables, daily oaths) operated as soft-law routines of subject formation. Education became central to population management and social control, reworking historical imaginaries and modes of selfhood in the service of empire.
The absence of photographic documentation of the Oath’s recitation revealed an archival lacuna that both constrained and illuminated our understanding of colonial pedagogy—even as surviving exercise books with copied oaths beneath official seals attested to its daily enforcement. Within this lacuna, subsequent descriptions relied on student notebooks, administrative directives, and instructional pamphlets to infer the ritual’s form, making visible how colonial authority controlled what could be seen and remembered.
Desks aligned in rows regulated bodily posture, while maps and flags fixed at eye level inscribed imperial sovereignty into students’ daily vision. Posters along the classroom perimeter staged obedience as aspiration. This spatial-material configuration functioned as an infrastructural protocol, regulating sightlines and gestures as effectively as it conveyed ideology.
These institutions also constituted epistemic jurisdictions, where standardized curricula and state examinations operated as regulatory protocols: soft-law mechanisms governing the validation of institutional knowledge. Colonial administrators enrolled student bodies in administrative registers—attendance logs, physical fitness tests, moral character assessments—with notations that registered traces of subjectivity beneath the juridico-administrative gaze. The materiality of textbooks and examination papers circulated as textual protocols, imprinting imperial epistemologies in everyday school life and foreclosing alternate pedagogical imaginaries.
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