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"Travel is known to have a broadening effect, at least if the traveler is willing to keep his mind open. The amount of enlightenment which is gained from travel usually depends upon the amount of difference there is between the civilization from which the traveler starts his journey and that of the country at which he arrives. The more unlike the two are, the more opportunity there is for learning." -John Dewey1
"From Tokyo to Seoul" (Tonggyong eso Kyongsong kkaji) was published in Ch'ongch'un (Youth, vol. 9, June, 1917) as eleven short letters written by Yi Kwang-su, the Waseda University student, to a friend he leaves behind in Tokyo.2 It reads ostensibly like a light, even self-indulgent impression piece. However, the group of letters embodies thematic elements which shed important light on the positionality of Yi Kwang-su and his contemporaries within the Japanese empire, and depicts a formative shared experience for colonial intellectuals across the globe-the physical return journey home from study abroad (yuhak) in the imperial metropole (in Yi's case via the Japanese railway and the Shimonoseki-Pusan ferry).
For many bright young Korean men and women matriculated in Japanese schools in the 1910s, the cultural and economic unevenness between the metropole (naiji) and the colonial periphery (gaiji) was so pronounced that the homecoming experience was akin to traveling backward in time. Against such a historical context, "From Tokyo to Seoul" captures the travel experienced as a doubling which the non-West (Japan) and colonies were subject to at the turn of the twentieth century.3 "Backward" societies transformed by imperial expansion whose modern forms were introduced through the import of capital and colonial de-territorialization were constantly "shadowed . . . by images of their sister . . . [forms] in Europe" [or the imperial centers] and vice versa. For example, a colonial writer viewing gardens in Manila in the Philippines is reminded of the doubled "sister gardens" in Spain. The gardens of his native city can "no longer be seen in their immediacy but only from a perspective simultaneously close up and faraway" and in comparison to another form.4 Benedict Anderson calls this doubling effect the "spectre of comparison," something non-Western countries experienced when compared to the originary spaces of...