Nichibunken Evening Seminar

Since the 1990s, with the rise of postcolonial studies in Japanese scholarship, increasing attention has been paid to the production of knowledge in and about the colonies. A growing body of research has examined how the “knowledge empire” was constructed—how information on the colonies’ flora and fauna, geography and geology, racial and cultural characteristics was systematically incorporated into the broader epistemic framework of the Japanese Empire. Yet the social sciences—long treated as universal fields with minimal local specificity—have often been marginalized within this discussion. Despite the existence of some important scholarship, key questions remain insufficiently addressed: How did colonial conditions shape the paradigms and methods of social scientific inquiry? And, conversely, how did social scientists themselves participate in and contribute to the colonial order?

This presentation takes a small group of economic professors serving at Keijō (Gyeongseong) Imperial University as a case study for understanding how social scientific knowledge was produced within the Japanese colonial empire. It examines how the colonial context in Korea shaped these economists’ a priori assumptions, hypotheses, and methodologies, and how these scholars, in turn, responded to and engaged with that context. The first part of the presentation seeks to uncover the empire-related commonalities that characterized the writings of the Keijō economists. The second part aims to situate these economists within the broader process of knowledge production in colonial Korea, identifying their intellectual positions and the roles they played within the colonial academic landscape.