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The “Asami” Collection is a 900 title, 4000+ volume collection of pre-colonial Korean artifacts that is housed in UC Berkeley’s CV Starr East Asian Library. It was acquired and assembled between 1906 and 1918 by Asami Rintaro (1869-1943), a prosecutor and judge in the Japanese colonial governor general’s office during the Japanese occupation of Korea.

The artifacts’ origins range from the 13th to the 20th centuries (1200-1915), covering a substantial and important part of Korean history. Among the thousands of rare historical items is the likely only known original writing by Lady Hyegyong in existence, the Memoir of 1795 (Haboush, 2013).

The “Asami” collection also holds captive one of the only three complete copies of all of the manuscripts of the Memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong (한중록) and a copy of the national treasure of the Daedongyeojido (대동여지도): one of the first maps of the Korean peninsula and one of the only major copies “in its original form without any coloring.” (Center for Overseas Resources on Korean Studies) These landmark cultural artifacts would be celebrated as national treasures in Korea.

Asami’s acquisition of Korean artifacts occurred against a backdrop of brutal, violent colonial occupation of Korea by Japan. As a colonial judge and prosecutor working for war criminal Hirobumi Ito, Asami wielded extreme power over the lives of Korean people, advocating for the imposition of Japanese legal codes in Korea. In addition, Asami leveraged his collection of Korean texts to rewrite Korean history in a way that justified Japanese colonial expansion. Asami believed that elements of Korean society such as inheritance customs were indicative of a “disease of backwardness that the colonial state aimed to cure.”

He characterized Korean people as “poor, without culture, without progress, and living in a simple nomadic state” (Lim, 2011). This rhetoric was used to justify the brutal Japanese occupation of Korea and is situated in the current-day context of delayed and denied reparations for Japanese war crimes that has continued today. As a colonial official, Asami infantilized Koreans and rewrote Korean history to manufacture support for the Japanese empire’s mass murder, enslavement, and cultural genocide of our people. 

The collection should not bear Asami’s name. It is unacceptable that a collection of Korean artifacts is named after a colonial judge who aided and abetted the mass slaughter and enslavement of Koreans. UC Berkeley’s continued use of the Asami name for the collection demonstrates continued indifference to the mass suffering of the Korean people. In addition to the name, UC Berkeley’s official description for the collection fails to convey the realities of Japanese occupation and, inadvertently or not, verges on colonial apologia. The description uses the colonial name for Seoul, “Kyungsung,” and depicts Asami as a legal “scholar” and “professional” who merely “lived and worked” in occupied Korea, conspicuously leaving out Asami’s career as a racist imperial propagandist. Furthermore, it centers Asami and his personal “interest in law and institutions” in the acquisition of the collection while neglecting to mention any Korean history or artifacts, reducing its culture to “literature, Buddhism, and Confucianism” in the collection. These insufficient commentaries and their anachronistic, colonial language must be amended. 

Koreans for Decolonization is advocating for a name change of the Asami Collection to the Korean People’s Collection and the Han Minjok Collection (한민족 컬렉션) as well as an elimination of the colonial language in the descriptions of the collection. Such actions would be a significant historical corrective; they would properly situate the collection within the context of Japanese and American imperial occupation and violence.

A new name and description would be an important measure pushing back against the long history of American scholars omitting, ignoring, and distorting the histories and experiences of Koreans. They would also be in line with the University’s own stated principles, which are to “promote an inclusive, global perspective of the peoples and cultures of the world, particularly in view of past and current scholarship in the United States that may omit, ignore, or silence the perspectives of many groups, such as ethnic minorities [and] people from non-European nations.” (UC Berkeley Office of the Chancellor, Building Name Review Committee Principles) We find that renaming the Asami collection is consistent with and especially timely considering the University’s recent initiatives to unname buildings on campus, including the former Moses Hall, on similar historical, moral, and intellectual grounds. 

We believe in the resistance of all colonized people against their oppressors. To this day, the Japanese government actively denies its war crimes against millions of people in Asia and the Pacific. We cannot accept this as normal. For the Korean community on campus, for the memory of the souls lost to violence, for the truth of history, and for our ancestors, rename the Asami Collection!

References

“Building Name Review Committee Principles.” Building Name Review Committee Principles | Office of the Chancellor, https://chancellor.berkeley.edu/building-name-review-committee/principles Accessed 23 Jan. 2024. 

Lee, Deok-Il. “[이덕일의 역사를 말하다] 근초고왕이 백제의 시조라고 우기는 역사학자들.” 경기신문 - 기본에 충실한 경기·인천 지역 바른 신문, 22 Sept. 2020, https://kgnews.co.kr/mobile/article.html?no=604096

Translated: Lee, Deok-Il. “[Lee Deok-Il’s Talking About History] Historians who insist that King Geunchogo is the founder of Baekje.” Gyeonggi Newspaper - Committed to the basics, Gyeonggi-Incheon Area’s Just Newspaper, 22 Sept. 2020, https://kgnews.co.kr/mobile/article.html?no=604096 

Haboush, JaHyun Kim. The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2013.

Lim, Sungyun. “Enemies of the Lineage: Widows and Customary Rights in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945.” 2011. UC Berkeley, PHD dissertation.