Hook Opening

Good evening, and welcome back to “100 Years Ago Today.” A century ago tonight, the slopes of Namsan mountain in Gyeongseong — colonial-era Seoul — had been busy since dawn. Tomorrow, on October 15, the Joseon Shrine would hold its enshrinement ceremony, a religious and political spectacle meant to bind the colony spiritually to the Japanese empire. But on this Wednesday, the day before, the city was already tightening. Police lined the roads leading up the mountain. Students marched in rehearsal instead of sitting in classrooms. And just a few kilometers away, families who had lost everything to a catastrophic flood two months earlier were still living under makeshift roofs, bracing for winter. Two very different Gyeongseongs existed within the same city limits that day — one being polished for a colonial pageant, the other still waiting for help to arrive.

Korea Under Colonial Rule

By the autumn of 1925, the Japanese colonial government had spent five years building the Joseon Shrine on Namsan, the mountain overlooking Gyeongseong. On September 24, the Japanese cabinet had formally fixed the enshrinement ceremony for October 15, with an annual grand festival to follow every October 17. Two days before our date, on October 13, an imperial envoy named Sonoike Saneyasu — the deputy chief of the Imperial Household’s Bureau of Rituals — arrived at Gyeongseong Station carrying a sacred mirror sent from Ise Shrine and a sword once worn by the Meiji Emperor. Officials, students, and residents lined the station platform to receive him.

On October 14, with the ceremony now just a day away, security tightened noticeably. Nearly every police officer in the city was mobilized to guard the roads leading toward the shrine and the wider Namsan area. Plans were already set for October 15: soldiers and students would be deployed in large numbers to give Sonoike’s procession a suitably grand welcome. Inside the shrine grounds, workers rushed through final preparations. Along the route from Namdaemun gate up toward Namsan, foot traffic was suddenly, visibly more cautious than it had been the week before.

The shrine project was never simply about religion. It was a deliberate instrument of assimilation policy — an attempt to make Shinto worship, and by extension loyalty to the Japanese emperor, part of everyday colonial life. That is precisely why the mobilization reached beyond Gyeongseong: offices and schools across the peninsula had already received instructions to prepare local delegations to mark the shrine’s dedication.

East Asia in Turmoil

The shrine ceremony was part of a broader pattern across the Japanese empire in the 1920s: state Shinto shrines were being built not only in Korea but across occupied and annexed territories, each one designed to project the same message of imperial unity. In Japan itself, newspapers were following the final preparations in Gyeongseong as a matter of imperial prestige — a showcase of how thoroughly the colonial administration could organize both the sacred and the mundane, from ritual objects to police rosters.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Asia, the decade’s instability continued. Warlord conflicts still simmered across China, and Japan’s own political establishment was absorbed in debates over how far to extend imperial administration and “assimilation” policy into its colonies — Korea foremost among them, but Taiwan too. The Joseon Shrine, in that sense, was not an isolated event in Gyeongseong; it was one node in a much larger imperial project of building sacred architecture to anchor political control.

The World Stage

Far to the west, in the Swiss town of Locarno, representatives from seven European nations — Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Poland — were in the seventh day of a conference meant to stabilize borders and prevent another war like the one that had ended just seven years earlier. Benito Mussolini, who had stayed away from the proceedings until then, made his first appearance at the conference on this very day, October 14, as talks moved toward their conclusion. The eventual Locarno Treaties, initialed two days later, would be remembered as a genuine — if ultimately short-lived — attempt to reintegrate Germany into the community of nations through diplomacy rather than punishment.

Colonial Parallels

While European diplomats spoke of peace in Locarno, French-mandated Syria was sliding toward violence. Since the summer of 1925, the Great Syrian Revolt — led initially by Druze fighters under Sultan al-Atrash — had spread far beyond its original region. By mid-October, rebel fighters were pushing into Damascus itself, and French colonial authorities were preparing a response that would, within days, become one of the most brutal episodes of the interwar colonial period: an unannounced, nearly day-long bombardment of the old city by French artillery and aircraft.

The parallel to Korea is not exact, but it is instructive. Both Korea under Japan and Syria under France were territories governed through a legal and administrative framework designed to look orderly and even progressive on paper — a League of Nations mandate in Syria’s case, an integrated “prefecture” in Korea’s — while resistance to that rule was met, in both places, with overwhelming force disguised as routine policing. In Gyeongseong on October 14, that force took the form of a fully mobilized police presence guarding a religious procession. In Damascus, it would soon take the form of open bombardment. Colonial rule in the 1920s wore many faces, but its underlying logic — control dressed as order — repeated itself across continents.

Understanding Daily Life

For ordinary residents of Gyeongseong, October 14 meant disruption dressed as duty. In several city schools, regular classes were suspended so students could rehearse the procession route in full uniform, marching in formation toward Namsan while teachers walked alongside, correcting their pace. Local youth associations gathered near the mountain to prepare flags and lanterns for the following day. Police whistles sounded more frequently than usual through the afternoon as officers directed both foot traffic and the rehearsing students.

Not far away, in the Ichon-dong district, a very different daily rhythm continued. Two months after the catastrophic “Eulchuk Year Flood” — twin flood waves in July that had left an estimated forty thousand people homeless — many residents there were still living in makeshift shelters, relying on relief funds cobbled together from newspaper donation drives, youth-group fundraising, and the colonial government’s limited emergency reserves. As the rehearsing students returned home at dusk, they passed flood-displaced children walking the same streets — two groups moving through the same city, but living in entirely different realities.

Century Mirror

A century later, the mountain still stands. What has changed is who gets to decide how a city moves — and who is left waiting for help when the water rises.

Tomorrow’s Preview

Tomorrow, October 15, 1925, the Joseon Shrine enshrinement ceremony takes place on Namsan — the moment all of today’s preparation was building toward. The same day, Gyeongseong’s new train station building was also set to open. Join us tomorrow evening at 10:10 PM KST for the next chapter.