Turning Local Available to Purchase

This chapter examines the different ways in which the Korean peninsula became associated with the notion of “locality” within the empire in the late 1930s. Through the examination of local editions of the Osaka mainichi newspaper, this chapter examines how an interconnectedness of empire (in the form of newly opening transportation routes, for example) serves to figure the Japanese metropole, or naichi, as modern, while the outer areas, or gaichi, become not spatial others but localities within the expanding imperial grid. The chapter then moves to a discussion of the “colonial collection” in Japan, unpacking the ways in which the “Collection on Korean Women Writers” and other collections of Korean images and stories serve to decontextualize the conditions of production and to order and classify knowledge about the local for metropolitan consumption.