ABSTRACT
In the early 1930s, Korean intellectuals began to use the term Americanism to point out the newly emerging social and cultural phenomena of the time. 1 This Americanism under Japanese Occupation was a neglected area of study for the modernization in Korea, and raised two topics of research for colonial Korea. One is that apart from institutional modernization taking place under the colonial conditions, there was another important process that deserves due attention, the modernization of the individual. The individual modernization under colonial circumstance was confined to, and carried on, the body level. In other words, individual modernization under Japanese Occupation was getting reduced to bodily modernization, as strongly suggested by the usage of the term ‘Americanism’. The discussions then were always about bodily senses and experiences, such as heterosexual relationships, individual speech manners, walking style and bodily movements (Oh 1931: 29, Chung 1930, Kim 1933, Paikaksanin 1941). 2 Such observations bring us to the other problem that modernization of the individual/body was quite a different process from that of institutional modernization in its orientation and working mechanism – a process of inscribing American modernity on the colonial body of Korea.
