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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the actual and metaphorical aspects of Japanese imperial hunting policies and practices in colonial Korea, and how they impacted both human and non-human animal life.

Paper long abstract

Japan’s thirty-five-year period of imperial rule in Korea was of epochal significance to more than just homo sapiens. Japan’s “imperial hunting regime” succeeded in eradicating animal species deemed “harmful” to the colonial state but also failed to protect animals the state tried to preserve.

This paper focuses on Japan’s colonial hunting regulations that reshaped Korea’s nonhuman and human landscape. Japanese colonizers created systematic laws that inextricably altered pre-existing animal-human relationships. The hunting regime entailed not only the issuance of hunting licenses, the marginalization of Korean hunters, and temporal restraints on hunters in the form of hunting seasons. It also redefined hunters’ relationships to their animal quarry by defining what they could or could not kill. While some animal species were deemed off-limits to hunters, others were labelled “vermin” that could be pursued and killed at any time.

These policies had immense ecological consequences. Classification as “harmful animals” accelerated the eradication of Korea’s tigers, leopards, bears, and wolves. But even animals the regime tried to protect, such as the crane or gamebirds like pheasants, saw their numbers rapidly depleted because of poaching, habitat loss, and overhunting.

This paper will also examine the social dynamics and cultural expressions of this hunting regime. The shooting of wild animals became an expression of colonial masculinity by both hunters from the metropole and Japanese residents on the peninsula. Over a fifth of Japanese residents of Korea had hunting licenses. Few Koreans did. The Ryōyū (Hunting friend), the monthly magazine of the Greater Japan Hunters Association, portrayed Korea as a hunting paradise. Early on it may have been. But as hunting and habitat destruction decimated wildlife, photographs in the Ryōyū increasingly featured target shooting competitions rather than hunters displaying the profuse number of animals they had killed. Both scenes, though, conveyed colonial control.