Seoul’s Bando Hotel: A Postwar Space of Americanism and Cold War Internationalism

The hovering Bando Hotel in central Seoul, built by a Japanese industrial mogul in 1938, enjoyed notoriety as a key landmark in the capital cityscape for thirty-some years. The Bando also occupied political and cultural centerstage, visually signifying Japan’s colonial modernity during its foundational years, followed by representing a political nerve center for both the American military occupation (1945–1948) in southern Korea and the postwar Syngman Rhee regime throughout the 1950s. This study examines the Bando Hotel as an ensconced space of political power and Cold War internationalism in Seoul, under Rhee’s postwar translation of the hotel from its Japanese foundation into Americanism from 1954 to 1960. Reflecting Rhee’s desires to be intimately integrated into the American-led Free Asia, the Bando Hotel embodied American modernity and Cold War cosmopolitanism. This spatial and symbolic transformation, however, was more superficial than actual, much like Rhee’s precarious and fraught support from the United States; despite his attempt to control and project this exclusive space of power and Americanism, the emblematic significance of this spatial facade also diffused following Rhee’s fall from power. The spatial history of the Bando encapsulated the interpenetrating desires and failures of his regime.