Historical Places of the Colonial Period through the Eyes of a Female Traveler

Abstract

This paper aims to reveal the meaning and significance of Hwa-Seong Park’s two trip essays, “Geuripdeon yet teoreul chaja” (Visiting Longed-for Ancient Remains) and “Haeseogihaeng” (A Writing of Travel to Haeseo). With development of tourism industry in modern times of Korean history, many people started to go on a trip for sightseeing purposes. However, they were mostly men. During the Japanese colonial period, it was very rare that Korean women made a trip with personal reasons. The author describes the true aspect of Korean women as a traveler in modern age in her two trip essays. In this paper, her perspective on the women she met at tourist destinations as a tourist has been investigated. In particular, her trip was closely related with the cultural site trip which was boomed during the 1930s as one of the most common types of trip in Korea. The colonized people’s trip to historical sites during the colonial period can be very paradoxical because their consciousness may not be matched with the reality unwittingly. From this perspective, this paper has thoroughly examined the paradox of the trip to historical sites during the colonial period through news articles, trip essays and school trip essays. And then this paper has tried to discover the meaning of her trip essays by analyzing the historical space during the Japanese colonial period.