The Urban Poor in Modern Busan and the Affect Settler Colonialism

This paper aims to examine the hierarchy between Japanese settlers and Koreans and the relational dynamics that occurred between them by exploring the urban space of modern Busan. Japanese colonial settlers developed the city of Busan in colonial Korea and made it their own, owning the land and becoming one with it. In the vicinity of the Japanese settlement in Busan, which has been transformed into a modern city, slums of Koreans who have gathered to make a living have formed, where they are excluded from modern amenities and left in such a filthy and dilapidated state that their right to survival is threatened. The Japanese labeled and excluded the Koreans with hateful symbols that could push the boundaries of their rights and safety. As Sara Ahmed has shown, these emotions can be operationalized in a way that binds people together and justifies violence against minorities. A territorialized sense of the land that settlers owned is imprinted on individual and collective bodies and memories. It shows that these senses and collective memories can still be operationalized in a colonialist way for some on the far right.