Reframing Colonial Korea's Forests Through Protection Forests: The Forests of Joseon (1938)

This study examines The Forests of Joseon (1938), a forestry survey compiled by Tokumitsu Nobuyuki under Japanese colonial rule, as a key site of epistemic negotiation between imperial forestry science and Korean indigenous knowledge. Focusing on bíbo forests-geomantic forests believed to regulate energy flow between mountains and villages-the paper analyzes how these sites were reclassified as "protection forests" within the functionalist logic of imperial forestry. Drawing on the framework of boundary objects, the study reveals how the same forests were interpreted both as cosmological entities and as disaster prevention infrastructure. While many entries reduce bíbo forests to technical utilities, others-like the Hanjiwon case-retain traces of pungsu cosmology and present forests as nonhuman actors. This tension highlights the partial and uneven nature of colonial knowledge-making, in which local ontologies were subordinated but not fully erased. The paper situates this classificatory project within broader imperial strategies of environmental governance and argues that bíbo forests, despite ontological reduction, continued to exert agentive force. Through a close reading of The Forests of Joseon, the study demonstrates how forests operated as sites of translation between divergent epistemologies, revealing the limits of imperial science and the persistence of relational, cosmological understandings of the environment.