Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the role of Shintō in justifying Japanese colonial rule in Korea. Special emphasis is placed on discourses of cultural affinity between colonizer and colonized and the question of whether in this context polytheistic Shintō served as a technique of intercultural translation.

Paper long abstract:

The Egyptologist Jan Assmann characterizes the polytheisms of antiquity as “techniques of translation” that helped to overcome the ethnocentrism of earlier ages. According to this hypothesis, deities of different polytheistic pantheons might have been called by different names and honored through different rituals, but their functions were so similar that one culture’s deity could easily be “translated” into another one’s. This paper tests Assmann’s hypothesis by discussing modern political Shintō and its function in legitimizing Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1910–1945). A special focus will be placed on the so-called “theory of common ancestry of Japanese and Koreans” (Nissen dōsoron). This theory, which claimed that in antiquity Japan and Korea had formed a unified cultural, political, and ethnic entity, was widely disseminated in Japanese media in the weeks before and after the annexation of Korea and actively promoted by the government-general in Korea after the March First Independence Movement of 1919. The ancient Japanese myths recorded in the sacred scriptures of Shintō, Kojiki (712) and Nihon shoki (720), served as important “historical” precedents in this context. Proponents of the theory, for instance, equated the Shintō deity Susanoo with Tan’gun, the mythological founder of the oldest Korean state, thus incorporating the latter into the Shintō pantheon. Subsequently, a controversial discussion erupted between Shintō activists and politicians in the metropole and the colony about whether it was appropriate to enshrine “Korean” deities such as Tan’gun in Shintō shrines. Based on this case study, the paper discusses how a polytheistic culture legitimizes the colonization of another polytheistic culture. In this way, the paper attempts to gain a deeper understanding of Japanese colonialism and its ideological justification. Japan’s exceptionality as an Asian imperialist power colonizing other neighboring Asian countries has often been juxtaposed with European powers colonizing countries that were far removed geographically and culturally from their metropoles. The role of Christian proselytization in Western imperialism is well researched. This paper tries to answer the question of how polytheistic Shintō’s role in modern imperialism differs from that of monotheistic Christianity.