The Japanese Botanists Cataloging Korean Endemic Species, 2024

In the Koishikawa Botanical Garden, the colonial research site of Tokyo Imperial University, Japanese botanists rendered Korea’s endemic flora legible through imperial nomenclature and archival registry. Institutional records never included photographs of classificatory routines, so reconstructing these missing scenes in image form does not supply evidence but visualizes their absence, appropriating the evidentiary rhetoric of photography to mark what was never archived. What posed as neutral science operated as a classificatory regime. It mapped plants onto cadastral grids, reconfiguring ecology into an administrative form.

This dismantled ecological metis—practical, place-bound ways of knowing, such as the orally transmitted medicinal plant knowledge (217 species across 77 families) documented in 1930s ethnobotanical surveys of Korea’s southern mountains. When Korean botanists in 1937 attempted to compile vernacular plant names (Jong et al., Joseon singmul hyangmyeongjip) as a counter-practice to Japanese taxonomic standardization, they found Nakai’s binomials had already displaced local nomenclatures, grounded in continuous practice and adaptation rather than codified systems. Within this archive-driven logic, herbaria reinscribed plant bodies as taxonomic regimes, translating ecological complexity into administrative units.

Colonial taxonomy functioned as annexation, simultaneously legal and territorial, systematically replacing Korea’s vernacular plant names with Nakai Takenoshin’s 4,733 Linnaean binomials, detaching native species from metis and reinstalling them within imperial jurisdictions and archival infrastructures. Specimen cataloguing embedded this sovereignty in scholarly routine, converting Korean flora into quantifiable units and inscribing imperial authority into curatorial and scholarly practices. That 4,172 plant names required renaming by the Korea Forest Service in 2015 attests to the persistence of this nomenclatural colonization seventy years after liberation.

The University of Tokyo’s herbarium holds ~1.7 million specimens, including >20,000 type specimens from Korea, Taiwan, and China—an archive where juridical sovereignty was materialized through taxonomic authority. Korean biodiversity portals integrate with GBIF, yet endemic species like Abeliophyllum distichum remain indexed through colonial specimen coding and collection categories stabilized under occupation, with over 34,000 pre-1945 TI and KYO records now embedded within international databases, including specimen numbers, collector names, and collection dates.

The temporal standardization of colonial archives persists in digital protocols that now govern environmental administration, from phytosanitary lists to CITES-linked customs routines, indicating that digitization has entrenched rather than neutralized imperial epistemics. The 2018 GBIF project on historical Korean specimens mobilized pre-1945 collections (Nakai, Ohwi, Komarov et al.) as international heritage, digitizing tens of thousands of records across foreign herbaria and naturalizing colonial extraction as research infrastructure. These visual reconstructions do more than fill gaps—they expose the politics of visibility, revealing how colonial archives rendered some practices visible as specimens while consigning others to oblivion.

The Korea National Arboretum’s reliance on Tokyo specimen numbers for taxonomic verification institutionalizes imperial authority inside national infrastructure, as contemporary bioinformatics structures biodiversity data for institutional governance rather than ecological autonomy; institutions such as the TI Herbarium perpetuate occupation-era protocols and numbering, ensuring that Koishikawa’s and the University of Tokyo’s collections continue to discipline Korean biodiversity scholarship today.