Colonialism

Keen to be clean: Sanitation reforms in the “diseased city” of Colonial Keijō

Hygiene rituals in the city of Seoul – known as Keijō during the Japanese occupation – were formally institutionalised and led by police forces bi-annually during the Japanese occupation of the peninsula in 1910 until the end of Japanese occupation in 1945.  The power over sanitation and welfare policy was transferred from the Home Ministry of Sanitation Bureau to the Police Supervisory Board in 1912.1 This article will analyse the sanitation chapter of the Annual Report on Reforms and Progress in Korea by the Government-General in 1913-14 to outline the structural failings of colonial policy and the contradictory nature of government rhetoric which promised the assimilation of Seoul’s Korean citizens into a hygienic Japanese city and simultaneously implemented a Japanese-settler-centric programme of sanitation reform.2 The Governor-General of Seoul aimed to produce clean streets and active citizens who they wanted to condition into a habit of self-regulated cleaning. This article maps the enforcement of policed hygiene standards in Seoul’s densely populated residential areas and their racially charged origins.3 Although reports by the Police Supervisory Board imply that enforcing cleaning was introduced to encourage residents to associate cleanliness with their health, this assertion assumes prior knowledge that would enable the unification of cleanliness with health.4 In contrast, Korean newspapers make it clear that the monetary cost of non-compliance and the avoidance of aggravating the police force were the factors motivating residents, not a consciousness surrounding sanitation5

Government reports consistently reflect the Japanese officials’ prioritisation of the Japanese expatriate population, who were more susceptible to illness,  despite their relatively higher wealth level and capacity to install household waste disposal and hygienic food disposal, were at the forefront of policy and the construction of service to support sanitation improvements6 The Annual Report on the Reforms and Progress in Korea in 1913-14 highlights that a series of epidemic diseases broke out on the Korean Peninsula in 1913 like cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery, diphtheria and smallpox.  Whilst the report highlights that there was a 160-person decrease in the number of deaths compared to 1912, the report is clear that there is a significantly higher number of Japanese settlers who reported epidemic cases than Koreans. For example, 1,250 Japanese caught typhoid fever and 284 died, comparatively, 700 Koreans caught typhoid fever and only 86 died of the disease.7 The report’s data emphasises that colonial policy, which enforced police-imposed standards of hygiene,  aimed to protect Japanese settlers by mobilising the Korean population, rather than establishing constructive sanitation systems that would tangibly benefit Korean citizen and align with the government’s assimilation rhetoric.8

Chart from the Annual Report on Reforms and Progress in Korea 1913-14, Epidemic diseases in Choson

Figure 1: Chart explains the number of Japanese, Korean, and foreign people with epidemic diseases and the number of people who died from those diseases. Chart from the Annual report on reforms and Progress in Korea 1913-14.9

Furthermore, the report states that to tackle these epidemic diseases “qualified Japanese physicians [will be] attached to police stations to attend to public sanitation”. The draconian method of police enforcing semi-annual cleanups was an intrusive manner through which the government restructured Korean notions of cleanliness and government reports suggest that this was done with little resistance.10 However, evasion of government officials regularly occurred due to the implementation of hospital quarantine and the enforcement of a treatment plan for Koreans once they had informed officials of their symptoms. From a cultural perspective, Koreans also deeply feared dying outside of their homes because this was a space where they believed spirits could come to venerate them after death.11  An overarching insensitivity to the social and cultural consciousness of Korean citizens curbed the efficiency of colonial policy and directly contradicted the government’s assimilation project. This can be illustrated further in the measures taken to sanitise the streets and sewage systems of Korean populated areas of Seoul.

The reports served the government by reconstructing national understandings of city management by delegitimised Korean notions of health and sanitation. In section 122, the report states that “numerous natives who only know old-fashioned Chinese methods and nothing of modern medical science”. In contrast to the government’s proliferation of Korean incompetence, the Seoul Sanitation Association (SSA), directed by the Residency-General, imposed a fee for excrement collection on the city’s Korean population when Korean fertiliser merchants were completing their task more effectively and free of charge.12 Resultantly, newspaper interviews reflect that waste was collected much less frequently, exacerbating hygiene issues whilst rural farmers suffered a resource deficit in manure.13 The SSA enforced using a top-down approach to managing sanitation which ignored the knowledge of seasoned local professionals and citizens, resultantly, many Koreans failed to pay their share due to poverty in the region and fears it was a financial fraud due to this service already being provided by local fertiliser collectors. Henry highlights that either a heavy fine or labour instead of a wage would be requested if the two sen fee was not paid.14 These policy’s did not focus on the integration of Koreans through education suited to their understandings of sanitation or the use of methods which respected the privacy of Korean people, instead, these policies ritualised cleaning and fee paying which the government felt would help to curb the infection rate of the expatriate population. Although sanitisation cooperatives and talks surrounding education on sanitation were set up partly to educate the population, their association with police enforcement significantly impacted engagement with these groups and ultimately decreased the effectiveness of lectures and other communication techniques imposed on the Korean population.

In conclusion, Henry argues that the evident subordination of Seoul’s Korean population during Japanese colonial governance is illustrative of the continual privileging of the Japanese settlers and the hegemony of the pervasion of the euro-asian power-knowledge concept into their style of colonial policy.15 Despite the Governor-Generals insistence that the aim was to assimilate the Korean peninsula into Japanese society, medical reports and municipal government data highlight that the production of knowledge regarding the causal relationship between the city’s sanitation infrastructure and the knowledge Seoul’s colonised residents had regarding sanitation was constructed to present the Japanese as superior in their understanding of health.16 Using partial knowledge of pre-established sanitation efforts used by Korean’s to ‘solve’ the city’s sanitation issues, the colonial government diagnosed the so-called “diseased city” of Keijō with issues that were only exacerbated by their presence.

  1. Todd A. Henry, Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, (Berkley, 1972), p.137. [↩]
  2. Governor-General of Chosen, Annual Report on Reforms and Progress in Korea by the Government-General in 1913-14, (Seoul, 1915), pp. 123 -131, Accessed at: https://archive.org/details/annualreportonreformsandprogressinchosenkorea191314/page/n171/mode/2up (Accessed on: 6/11/2023). [↩]
  3. Henry, Assimilating Seoul, p.136. [↩]
  4. Ibid, p.139. [↩]
  5. Ibid.  [↩]
  6. Ibid, p.155 [↩]
  7. “Report on Reforms and Progress in Korea 1913-14”, Accessed at: https://archive.org/details/annualreportonreformsandprogressinchosenkorea191314/page/n171/mode/2up, (Accessed 6/10/2023), pp.125 [↩]
  8. Henry, Assimilating Seoul, p.131. [↩]
  9. Annual Report on Reforms and Progress in Korea 1913-14, pp.123-131. [↩]
  10. Henry, Assimilating Seoul, p.139. [↩]
  11. Ibid, p.142. [↩]
  12. Ibid.p.135. [↩]
  13. Ibid, p.136. [↩]
  14. Ibid. p.135. [↩]
  15. Ibid. p.139. [↩]
  16. Ibid. [↩]

Building on Tradition: From Kampong to High-Rise, the ‘tropical city’ and its manifestation in Singapore

The elusive topic of tropicality has pervaded conversations surrounding the design and function of Singaporean architecture since the imposition of Western architectural styles and layouts following the ratification of the Treaty of Singapore in 1819. This article will argue that the categorisation of Singapore as a ‘tropical city’ comprised of ‘tropical architecture’ is the product of colonial power that was integrated into the production of knowledge about the built environment and is therefore inherently responsible for the continuation of discourses that associate Southeast East cities as the ‘other’ to those in Western, temperate climates.1 However, as architects like Mr Tay Kheng Soon illustrate the term ‘tropical city’ has also served as a reclamation of Singaporean independence and the celebration of the city’s culture and agency through a selective incorporation of European modernity.2 This article analyses a Straits Times interview conducted in 1989 by Patrick Daniel and Caroline Chan of the Singaporean architect Mr Tay Kheng Soon who applied his vision of the tropical city to Singapore to detach the independent city-state from the epistemic conquest of British hegemony.3

Figure 1: Article in The Straits Times, “Concept for future city: Living in a work of art”.4

Tay envisioned an “intelligent tropical city” and argued that a tropical city could emancipate Singaporeans from the economic dominance of Britain in the region.5 He aimed to re-politicise urban planning by separating the city from the “mono-cultural compactness” of colonial offices and housing by designing Singapore to be a “work of art” and a compact city capable of “increasing business opportunities” and “providing a medium for intense, social, cultural and economic exchange.6 By using the tropical city concept, Tay identifies that the architectural aesthetics of tropicality were attached to colonial and post-colonial power relations and seeks to separate Singapore from these streams of power. By designing a city which prioritises “poly-cultural compactness”  to form a  “support structure for their [people’s] activities… and yet contribute to the cooling of the city as a whole” he illustrated that colonial power was ingrained in the construction of Tropicality. Equally, he highlights that Signporean architects had the necessary tools to begin deconstructing this discourse.7

The introduction of ‘tropical architecture’ established a sphere of knowledge which ran through Imperial networks during the colonisation of Singapore and was utilised by the Colonial Office to ‘other’ Southeast Asian architecture in opposition to temperate architecture.8 The term tropical architecture prioritises the climate in its terminology whereas temperate architecture is categorised by regional geographic zones or nations, imposing a homogenous staticity onto Singaporean urban development.9 Tropicalisation involved the surface-level modification of Western governmentalities to tropical conditions rather than the necessary transformation.10 Tay emphasises that in the 1980s tropicality was not considered “another symbol of modernity” and he asserted that the “big bland blocks” of highrises that covered the city were “still a sign of the captive mind”.11 Indeed, the “captive mind” he refers to in the Straits Times interview illustrates the power-knowledge concept and the overt control colonial powers had over conceptions of tropical architecture and their subsequent limitation of the built environment to benefit colonial wealth and power.12  The perpetuation of this reductive understanding of the city’s needs justified the colonial administration’s choice to prioritise Singapore’s sanitation and fears of reassuring contamination issues, rather than holistically solving civic issues through the optimisation of the built environment.13

Tay’s Straits Times interview and his successive proposals for tropical urbanism began to combat the circulation of British colonial networks and their epistemic conquest over the focal point of Singapore’s housing strategies by proposing socio-economic structural problems were addressed which would in turn resolve sanitation issues.14 By proposing that the tropical city is defined by its interconnectedness, Tay defined the tropical city by its, “combination of tropical rain forest with the city by increasing transpiration”.15 To establish Singaporean independence from colonial power relations Tay designed a climate-responsive built environment, working in favour of its citizens.16 His holistic approach to the city and its economy assimilated tropical architecture into the tropical climate rather than adopting temperate architectural models that exacerbate the urban heat island effect.17 As Chang explains, the architectural aesthetics of tropicality are inseparably bound to colonial and postcolonial power relations and the implementation of Western hegemony through ideals of social order and the application of policy.18 These concepts are closely linked to the sanitisation movement and the colonial government’s preoccupation with contamination, these fears greatly influenced the structure and organisation of Singapore’s housing and the developments that occurred beyond the European socio-spatial enclaves of the city.19

Tay’s reclamation of the term ‘tropical city’ reflects the complex relationship between language and the built environment in Singapore’s postcolonial legacy. Alongside other regional architects, Tay produced a deviating discourse on tropical architecture that challenged the cultural and economic supremacy of the West by proposing a multi-tiered city. By prioritising the city’s functionality, his urban planning methods and vision were ahead of their time and later were used to distinguish Singaporean identity as heterogonous and separate from Western notions of tropicality.

  1. Chang Jiat-Hwee, A Geneology of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (New York, 2016), p.7. [↩]
  2. Chang, A Geneology of Tropical Architecture, p.1. [↩]
  3. Chang Jiat-Hwee, “Deviating Discourse: Tay Keng Soon and the Architecture of Postcolonial Development in Tropical Asia”, The Journal of Architectural Education, 63:2 (2010): 153. [↩]
  4.  Kheng Soon Tay, “Concept for the future city: Living in a work of art”, The Straits Times, Singapore, 8th May 1989, p.16 Accessed at: https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/straitstimes19890508-1.2.49.2 (Accessed 24/10/2023) [↩]
  5.  Kheng Soon, “Concept for the future city: Living in a work of art”. [↩]
  6. Ibid. [↩]
  7. Ibid. [↩]
  8. Chang, A Geneology of Tropical Architecture, p.5 [↩]
  9. Ibid, p.6 [↩]
  10. Chang Jiat-Kwee, “Tropicalizing Planning, Sanitation, Housing and Technologies of Improvement in Colonial Singapore, 1907-1942”, in Robert Pecham and David Pomfret (eds.) Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene and Cultures of Planning in Asia, ( Hong Kong, 2013), p.41. [↩]
  11. Kheng Soon, “Concept for the future city: living in a work of art”.  [↩]
  12. Chang, A Geneology of Tropical Architecture, p.6. [↩]
  13. Chang, “Tropicalizing Planning, Sanitation, Housing and Technologies”, p.37. [↩]
  14. Chang, “Deviating Discourse”: 154. [↩]
  15. Kheng Soon, “Concept for the future city: living in a work of art”. [↩]
  16. Ibid. [↩]
  17. Chang, “Deviating Discourse”: 157. [↩]
  18. Chang, A Geneology of Tropical Architecture, p.2. [↩]
  19. Chang, “Tropicalizing Planning, Sanitation, Housing and Technologies”, p.38. [↩]

‘Town Planning in British Malaya’ – Charles Reade’s Depiction of the Challenges facing Colonial Town Planning

The article entitled ‘Town Planning in British Malaya’ provides an insight into the unique challenges that faced town planners in their attempts to design new urban spaces in the colonies, particularly at a time when town planning was still considered a ‘tentative experiment’ and little legal and administrative frameworks existed to support it1. The author of the article is Charles Reade who was possibly the most active and influential figure of the first generation of town planners. Significantly he wrote this piece in 1921, at the very beginning of his appointment in the Federated States of Malaya, and published in the first, and seminal, international journal of town planning the Town Planning Review. This article then, acts as a very public documentation of an influential planner’s process. 
 
Reade may have even fancied this article as the start of a guide to planning in the region. As Robert Home points out he did see himself as somewhat of a missionary: ‘There never was a time in the history of the whole [town planning} movement when the need for enlightened missionary effort throughout the civilised world was greater…’2. Born in New Zealand, Reade initially made an impact in town planning circles in New Zealand and Australia most notably in his design of an Adelaide suburb, the Colonel Light Gardens. However, political opposition to his methods led him to leave Australia in 1921, the year the article was written, and accept the position of Government town planner in the Federated States of Malaya. As tentatively optimistic as Reade presents his prospects in the colony, his strict approach would lead him to be manoeuvred out of power. He would then go on to work in North Rhodesia and South Africa before he tragically took his own life in Johannesburg. 
 
As someone who was ‘endeavouring to apply strictly scientific, and consequently really practical methods’ to his planning, it is unsurprising that within this article he stresses the need for legislation, specifically shaped for the Colonial context: ‘Most important of all is the devising of legislation and machinery suited to the requirements of a British Protectorate or Federation of States largely peopled and worked by Malays, Chinese and various Indian Workers.’.3 As an early figure in town planning, little legislative and administrative provisions existed during Reade’s career. By 1921 two central acts existed. The first was the British Housing and Town Planning Act 1909 which most notably banned the practice of ‘back to back’ housing commonplace at the time and required that local authorities had to introduce systems of town planning.4
 
The second was the 1915 Bombay Town Planning Act, the first significant colonial town planning legislation. Building off of the 1909 Act, the 1915 legislation wanted to provide better financial provisions by the betterment levy and the integration of land pooling and redistribution practices. It is this very practice that leads Reade to invoke the Bombay Act in the article when he is describing the problem of awkwardly shaped holdings in ‘the East’ poses to those involved in the replanning process. The assumptive tone he uses when bringing up the act ‘Under the “Bombay Town Planning Act” city planners will know of the replanning schemes…’ implies that, given the international nature of the journal, this piece of legislation has already become a mainstay model in the global town planning discipline.5 Aside from these two acts, from 1917 in Malaya the provisions for town planning were largely confined to sanitary boards, which were primarily concerned with public health improvements (6). Reade acknowledges that these authorities have completed ‘much good work’ but finds an ‘inadequacy of existing powers and machinery when it comes to dealing with economic and administrative questions relating to resumption, methods of rating and valuation of land, also exchanges and redistribution of ownerships, etc’ (7). 
 
In answer to Reade’s frustration, in India, a proto-form of town planning was emerging through bodies called Improvement trusts. They primarily introduced procedures to clear slum neighbourhoods in cities. Below the plea for more legislation, Reade highlights the significance of the upcoming ordinance which will create the Singapore Improvement Trust (8). If Home is right that they acted as a form of pre-cursor to town planning legislation, and Bombay, with its influential planning act, was one of the earliest towns to have one in 1898, then we can understand why he views this as an important next step to secure more legislation (9). Certainly only 2 years after this article he introduced into Malaya the Town Planning Act of 1923 which brought together development, leasing land, town improvement and building regulations into one piece of legislation. Given that control of town planning in Malaya was reverted back to sanitary boards in 1927, one can’t draw a definite general timeline of town planning infrastructure from this example, however, it could potentially illustrate a common legislative trend in colonies. 
 
Aside from legislative concerns, Reade spends much of the article outlining specific regional considerations he has to make before he can begin the project of town planning. Broadly these concerns fall under the category of inherited problems from rapid urban growth and colonial rule. One such issue is the industry of mining, which was central to the economy of the colony, In fact as early as 1891, a government newspaper stated that mining was successful enough to be independent from the aid of the state and that the country was dependent on its resources (10). Yet Reade bemoans its environmental impact, specifically the rising river levels, the flooding, and the influx of silt that has forced some towns to be abandoned (11). Given how spatially disruptive mining can be, it follows that town planners and commercial mining enterprises might have often been at odds. Indeed, later in Reade’s career, in Northern Rhodesia, he faced tension when a mining company and the colonial authorities clashed over the nature of the town planning, with the former wanting to quickly erect a company town and the latter wishing to keep governmental functions out of private hands (12). If Reade’s generation of planners found an under-implementation of their designs, much of that derived from the local opposition from settler and commercial interest groups (13). 
 
Indeed, in this article what stands out as a major concern for Reade is negotiating the ideals of settlers during the replanning process. Reade explains that because of a common trend of awkwardly shaped holdings in Asia, a land pooling and redistribution system is necessary to allow the process of urban replanning to occur (14). However, despite its necessity, he worries that the implementation of such a strategy will be difficult due to the ideal of individualism held fiercely by Western settlers in the colonies. He indicates that even the temporary termination of individual ownership to create communal land could invoke an extreme response. He admits that without land pooling, he fears ‘that the big stride forward, so often desired, will still remain the merest shuffle in civic shoe leather.’ (15). And as Home asserts, this was the result of much of the first generation of planners’ efforts (16). 
 
Overall, aside from legislative underdevelopment and local opposition, what this frank appraisal of the issues that faced Reade in Malaya reveals is twofold. Firstly, while the city planners were integrated into the colonial machinery, they were afforded enough separation to outline concerns about the colony – such as the rubber and tin industry being in a ‘slump’ and the existence of uncooperative settlers – in a public forum – the Town Planning Review – which many government employees weren’t afforded. Secondly, it is apparent that Reade, having spent most of his career managing largely settler populations in New Zealand and Australia, views the prospect of planning a city with an added racial consideration as a problem to negotiate rather than the opportunity that a planner like Patrick Geddes saw it for. He viewed land pooling and replanning subdivisions of land as particularly problematic because the majority of the landowners are Asiatic (17). Relatedly, earlier in the article he refers to ‘incidences of racial problems’ which he urges need to be ‘studied and clearly understood’ (18). While neither of these statements are expanded on, generally there appears, returning to the quote about legislation and machinery for ‘States largely peopled and worked by Malays, Chinese and various Indian Workers’, to be an anxiety that the tools and mechanisms of city planners and the state are not equipped to handle the governance of a multi-ethnic state and the challenges it poses (19). Given that two decades later the process of decolonisation in the British Empire began, this anxiety was not completely ill-founded. 



 
(6) Home, Of Planting and Planning, p.182 
 
(7) Reade, ‘Town Planning’, p.162 
 
(8) Reade, ‘Town Planning’, p. 164 
 
(9) Home, Of Planting and Planning, pp. 177-179 
 
(10) ‘Notes – Planting’, The British North Borneo Herald and Monthly Record, (Sandakan, 1st of August, 1892), p.256 
 
(11) Reade, ‘Town Planning’, p. 163 
 
(12) Home, Of Planting and Planning, pp. 185-187 
 
(13) Home, Of Planting and Planning, pp.149-176, specifically p.173-174 
 
(14) Reade, ‘Town Planning’, p.165 
 
(15) Ibid. 
 
(16) Home, Of Planting and Planning, pp.149-176, specifically p.173-174 
 
(17) Reade, ‘Town Planning’, p.162, 165 
 
(18) Reade, ‘Town Planning’, p.162 
 
(19) Reade, ‘Town Planning’, p.164 

  1. 1931 Garden Cities and Town Planning article cited in Home, Robert K., Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities, (Taylor & Francis, 1996), p.173 [↩]
  2. Home, Of Planting and Planning, p. 165 [↩]
  3. Charles Reade cited in, Home, Of Planting and Planning, p. 167, Charles C. Reade, ‘Town Planning in British Malaya’, Town Planning Review, 9;3, (1921), pp. 162-165, p.164 [↩]
  4. ‘The Birth of Town Planning’, UK Government, accessed 2nd of October, 2023, The birth of town planning – UK Parliament [↩]
  5. Reade, ‘Town Planning’, p.165  [↩]

The American Clubhouse and Identity in the Philippines

In 1898, after U.S. forces had invaded during the Spanish-American War, the Philippines was ceded as a concessionary territory to the U.S. The American colonial period lasted until 1946. During this era, there was an increase in immigration to the Philippines, as U.S. forces attempted to “create a country and a people in the American image”.[1] Kiyoko Yamaguchi examines the Philippine architecture built under this influence, and argues that buildings constructed during this time labelled as ‘American’ were not built by U.S. colonisers, but by the elite urban Filipinos in what they interpreted to be the ‘American’ style.[2] In actuality, immigrants from America isolated themselves and their community through social clubs and viewed their residence there as temporary.[3] This post will examine how these colonial residents became uniformly ‘American’ by examining the spaces, both perceived and physical, in and around exclusive social club houses in the Philippines.

[4]

[5]

Much of the history written about the Philippines relies on oral and biographical histories, mainly originating from the memories of  American immigrants who grew up there during the colonial period. Consequently, narratives of the American lifestyle during the 1920s and 1930s in particular are often filled with idealistic notions of “serenity”, and take the social segregation of Filipinos and Americans as the norm.[6] Examine this 1939 excerpt by Walter Robb:

“Filipinos were accustomed enough to dealing with strangers… On their part the Americans displayed a remarkable adaptability; without destroying what existed, they set to building upon it and to patterning for the Philippines a government of the American type that was effective against a Latin background…”[7]

Or view these quotes from Merv Simpson, manager at the Corinthian Plaza in Manila, talking about his life in the Philippines in the 1930s:

“It was a peaceful life. We had parties, or at least my parents had parties, but nobody got bombed, at least as I can remember… Before the war we didn’t play with Filipino kids or associate with them very much. It wasn’t any snobbish thing; we just didn’t do it.”

“It was pretty sheltered. We went to the American School. No Filipino kids [but some] mestizos… I’d ask my mother – I’d want to go to the Polo Club, it would be Saturday morning – so she’d give me a peso. That was big dough back then. I’d take a taxi out there… At the Polo Club we used to swim, badminton, bowling, tennis – it was a nice life. We would just sign [for the bill]…”[8]

Recorded in this nature, the colonial spaces of the Philippines become subject to consumption through sentimental regard, which Vicente L. Rafael argues allows for a domestication of “what is seen as native and natural into aspects of the colonial, which is at once also national.”[9] He maintains that through these types of historical accounts, colonialism is invested with a sense of domesticity, allowing for the pervasiveness of Western gendered and racialized notions into the colonial experience.[10] Thus, the colonial experience recounted here simultaneously normalises and sentimentalises the racial divisions of the American period. One of the key ways in which this occurs is through mentions of the social clubs that American residents in the Philippines engaged in, but which Filipinos were barred from.

Yamaguchi recognises this, and through her discussions develops the idea of an ‘imagined America’ in the Philippines. She explores how the self-perception of U.S. citizens living in the Philippines evolved by analysing the exclusive social club houses set up by the colonial American community. Many of the Americans who arrived in the Philippines were second- or third-generation European immigrants to the U.S. themselves, and so their American identities became strengthened by the role they played in these colonial communities.[11]

“The Americans were not Filipinized by living in the Philippines; they became more self-consciously and assertively American, a fact most apparent in the club premises, where they confined themselves in particular buildings.” [12]

Yamaguchi argues that these exclusive clubhouses prescribed an American “uniformity” to the blurred identities of these colonial residents.[13] The diversity of the cultural backgrounds of these Americans meant it was likely they would have never befriended one another if they had met in the U.S.. Because of their location in the Philippines, and through the sociality of the spaces offered through membership to these clubhouses (spaces which became the metaphorical petri dish for colonial politics), these differences faded in the face of attachment to a specific U.S. identity.[14] The spaces within the clubhouse also solidified other identities, namely, that of the Filipinos who they excluded. The Filipino residents in these areas were barred from membership despite the fact that many Filipino urban elites were often just as wealthy as their American counterparts.[15] This exclusion also sought to define the Filipino identity categorisation, vis-à-vis what was not considered American.

Thus, the architecture of this period reflects the nature of the changing social groups in the Philippines, and articulates Filipino elite ambitions and interpretations of ‘American-ness’. These social clubs allowed for the standardisation of the American imperial lifestyle and identity, whilst simultaneously sentimentalising a social hierarchy based on race.

 

[1] McCallus, Joseph P. (2010) The MacArthur Highway and Other Relics of American Empire in the Philippines, Potomac Books. (page number unavailable).

[2] Yamaguchi, Kiyoko. “The New ‘American’ Houses in the Colonial Philippines and the Rise of the Urban Filipino Elite.” Philippine Studies 54, no. 3 (January 1, 2006): p. 413-14

[3] Ibid, p. 447

[4] Best, Jonathan (1994) Philippine album: American era photographs 1900-1930, Makati: Bookmark, p. 232

[5] ‘Lodge History: The Manila Elks Lodge 761 in its 114th Year’, https://www.manilaelks.org/about-us/manila-elks-lodge-761/lodge-history/ [Accessed 28/10/21]

[6] McCallus (2010) (page number unavailable)

[7] Ibid (page number unavailable)

[8] Ibid (page number unavailable)

[9] Rafael, Vicente L. (2000) ‘Colonial Domesticity: Engendering Race at the Edge of Empire, 1899-1912,’ White love and other events in Filipino history, Durham, NC: Duke University Press (page number unavailable)

[10] Ibid (page number unavailable)

[11] Yamaguchi, (2006) p. 424-26

[12] Ibid, p. 426

[13] Ibid, p. 425

[14] Yamaguchi, (2006) p. 426; Rafael, (2000) p. 56

[15] Yamaguchi, (2006) p. 431

Bibliography

  • Best, Jonathan (1994) Philippine album: American era photographs 1900-1930, Makati: Bookmark
  • McCallus, Joseph P. (2010) The MacArthur Highway and Other Relics of American Empire in the Philippines, Potomac Books. (page numbers unavailable)*
  • Rafael, Vicente L. (2000) ‘Colonial Domesticity: Engendering Race at the Edge of Empire, 1899-1912,’ White love and other events in Filipino history, Durham, NC: Duke University Press (page numbers unavailable)**
  • Yamaguchi, Kiyoko. “The New ‘American’ Houses in the Colonial Philippines and the Rise of the Urban Filipino Elite.” Philippine Studies 54, no. 3 (January 1, 2006): 412–51
  • ‘Lodge History: The Manila Elks Lodge 761 in its 114th Year’, https://www.manilaelks.org/about-us/manila-elks-lodge-761/lodge-history/ [Accessed 28/10/21]

*Limited access available to book online due to lack of institutional access, quotes taken from ‘Look inside’ excerpt available on Amazon listing: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005CWJMFU/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 [Accessed 28/10/21]

**Limited access available to book online due to lack of institutional access, quotes taken from excerpt found through Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/2618760 [Accessed 28/10/21]