Aug 17, 1945 文化住宅 (Bunka Jyūtaku), Japanese-Western Eclectic Architecture, 2023

By August 15, 1945, Japan’s surrender ostensibly signaled Korea’s liberation, yet the event unfolded through juridico-mediatic sequestration of meaning. The Emperor’s broadcast, delivered in imperial Japanese, enacted a linguistic exclusivity accessible only to elite strata, producing stratified legibility among the broader colonial public. Media organs, operating under censorship protocols, systematically displaced official terms of “surrender” or “defeat” with euphemisms such as “end of war,” producing a formal deferral of the annulment of imperial sovereignty. Only on August 17, when newspapers like the Asahi Shimbun explicitly invoked “surrender” and “defeat,” did the formal finality of capitulation become publicly legible—an enforced delay that conditioned collective memory through archival-semiotic regulation.

The Kyūjō Incident—a failed palace coup staged on August 14–15 to seize the Imperial Palace and annihilate the surrender recording—exposed the fissures within the architecture of imperial authority at its terminal stage. This attempted erasure of juridical speech acts, tied to media obfuscation, generated an archival-temporal disorientation among colonial subjects. Liberation was thus not experienced as a singular moment but as a political misrecognition, suspended between imperial collapse and its archival concealment.

Architecture simultaneously operated as a colonial apparatus, linked with media infrastructures in order to discipline cultural and spatial imaginaries. The construction of bunka jyūtaku—hybrid Japanese-Western dwellings—functioned not as neutral housing initiatives but as spatial technologies of colonization. By conjoining Western modernist aesthetics with Japanese traditional forms, these structures inscribed imperial narratives into domestic space, embedding symbolic claims to sovereignty within everyday life. Domesticity was thereby converted into a site of intervention. Quotidian practices aligned with the ideological ambitions of empire.

The parallel between bunka jyūtaku and media censorship reveals synchronized modalities of colonial governance. As broadcasts obscured surrender to project a performative continuity of imperial rule, so too the architectural landscape projected stability amid dissolution. These interventions—both mediatic and architectural—fabricated cohesion and extended claims of colonial legitimacy into the sphere of the everyday. Hybrid homes, far from being benign shelters, materialized an ongoing assertion of presence, collapsing the boundary between occupation and liberation.

The convergence of media, architecture, and militarized ideology demonstrates how colonial power pervaded infrastructures and symbolic orders alike. The bunka jyūtaku, seemingly pragmatic dwellings, operated as mechanisms of ideological conditioning, sustaining imperial authority even as it disintegrated. Together, broadcast obfuscation and architectural inscription reveal the entangled apparatuses through which colonial governance orchestrated the very perception of liberation—staging sovereignty as an afterimage that left a juridico-spatial residue persisting well beyond the empire’s formal surrender.