Once the capital of the five-hundred-year Chosŏn dynasty (1392"“1897) and the Taehan Empire (1897"“1910), the city of Seoul posed unique challenges to urban reform and modernization under Japanese colonial rule in the early twentieth century, constrained by the labyrinthian built environment of the old Korean capital. Colonial authorities attempted to employ a strategy of "erasure"-monumental Japanese architecture was, for instance, superimposed upon existing palace structures-to articulate to colonized Korean subjects the transition from the pre-modern to the modern, and the naturalization of colonial rule as inevitable historical change. Drawing from and analyzing a wide range of materials, from architecture and photography to print media and sound recordings,