Militarized landscapes of Yongsan: From Japanese imperial to Little Americas in early cold war korea

The Yongsan Garrison, which has housed foreign troops in the central cityscape of Seoul since the late 19th century, is to be returned and reintegrated into the greater Seoul Metropolitan City in 2018, once the United States Forces in Korea (USFK) moves to its new headquarters located southwest of the capital. Prior to the current transition, the Yongsan landscape underwent two previous transformations: first, the construction of the foreign military base (1904-1908) and its occupancy by the Japanese Imperial Army; and second, the conversion from a Japanese imperial center to an American Cold War headquarters. This study historicizes the second transfiguration by examining the "transitional" process through which the U.S. military "rehabilitated" Yongsan landscape during the early Cold War period, from 1945 through the late 1960s. In Yongsan, the militarized landscape and its coloniality are evident in the "Americanism" built atop the remnants of the Japanese imperial space. This particular militarized landscape encompassed the dominant Americanism expressed in the hybridized built-structures and the Little Americas constructed within the garrison and in the vernacular landscapes of camptowns that functioned as inter-dependent extensions of the camps. The Americanism engendered in this militarized landscape represented both the lure of the materialism and the American modern of camps as well as its coloniality reinforced in the racially stratified, gendered and sexualized, and highly temporary and ultimately dispensable spaces of camptowns.