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Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 by Todd A. Henry (review)

power of human creativity influenced the way not only Yi but also Hong and Pae envisioned the expected results of their social activism. Moon and Park have given us very different books, even though they both deal with the impact of religious beliefs and organizations on reactions to the intrusion of the Japanese into life on the peninsula. Unlike Moon, Park does not let the non-elite speak. He tells us that his book is an intellectual history, which means that we hear what Christian and Ch’ŏndogyo intellectuals and social activists wanted to do for the impoverished peasantry, but not what the peasants thought about what was being done for them. We do not know if they found those efforts helpful or patronizing. But it would be unfair to take Park to task for failing to write a book he did not intend to write. His monograph is still a very informative work that introduces aspects of modern Korean history that have been previously overlooked. Park’s study of religious attempts to improve village life, as well as Moon’s study of a peasant movement with roots in Korea’s first indigenous organized religion, should be in every serious Korean-studies library. They both make significant contributions to the study of modern Korea by reminding us that religious beliefs often motivate important historical actors and actions, and that religious organizations often play important roles in bringing about political and social change. The Western academy generally adopts a largely secular approach to understanding the past, and as a result many historians are uncomfortable dealing with religion in the modern world (preferring to talk about it primarily in the context of the formative periods of the world’s different civilizations). Moon and Park are exceptions to this bias toward the secular. We should be grateful to them for giving us a broader view of how Korea changed the way it did over the first half of the twentieth century.