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Abstract

1. Introduction

This paper examines the history of mask-wearing in barbershop regulation in colonial Korea, especially in Keijō (modern-day Seoul) during the 1910s and 1920s,¹⁾ with a focus on its introduction, implementation, and political involvement with colonial hygiene governance and ethnic politics in the barbering industry. In 1911, the Government-General of Korea (朝鮮総督府, Chōsen Sōtokufu, hereinafter GGK) introduced a mask-wearing mandate for barbers as part of the Barbering Business Regulation Rule (理髮營業取締規則, rihatsu ēigyō torishimari kisoku, hereinafter the Barbering Rule), making it one of the earliest mask mandates in the Japanese Empire. Initially, the colonial police enforced this rule to discipline colonial subjects under the guise of hygiene. However, from the mid-1910s onward, Korean and Japanese settler barbers began to utilize this regulation to control the growing number of Chinese migrant barbershops. This case study illuminates the interaction between mask-wearing practice and the politics of hygiene in the colonial Korean barbering industry. By doing so, it sheds new light on the history of hygienic masks, which has so far mostly focused on medical settings.

Medical historians have examined the emergence and use of hygienic masks in medical settings and understood this artifact’s history from a diffusionist perspective. For instance, medical historian Thomas Schlich and historian of science Bruno Strasser have identified the origin of modern medical masks as coming from the surgeon Johannes Mikulicz’s (1850-1905) introduction of masks into his surgery room at the University of Breslau in 1897. Through interdisciplinary cooperation with an emerging discipline called bacteriology, German surgeons, including Mikulicz, developed an aseptic surgery strategy to deal with wounded patients, and masks were included in this bacteriology-inspired strategy. This strategy used in a surgery room was soon adopted in other places, such as hospitals and sanitoria, for anti-infectious purposes and was finally imported into epidemic control (Schlich and Strasser, 2022). From this perspective, the use of masks for sanitary purposes in non-medical settings was a result of the chain of movements of medical masks (accompanied by aseptic strategies) starting from an operating room at the hospital.

Despite the differences in their starting point, East Asian historians also seem to adopt a diffusionist viewpoint, noting that mask-wearing practice began as a response to epidemic control. According to their explanations, masks were first introduced during significant outbreaks, such as the Osaka Plague in late 19^th-century Japan, the Manchurian Plague in China, and the Spanish Influenza in colonial Korea, and spread into everyday life (Sumida, 2022; Zhang, 2020; Hyun, 2022a).

Meanwhile, recently, medical historian Park Seungman claims that this medical mask focus in the previous studies often leads historians to overlook other important settings and political engagements. Studying the history of gas masks in South Korea, especially during the Park Chung Hee regime, Park shows how mask development and mandate in the industrial hygiene context were engaged with military and labor policy (Park, 2024). If I borrow anthropologist Arjun Appardurai’s expression, Park’s case study highlights that different masks would have different social lives, even though all masks share hygienic purposes in each respective context (Appadurai, 1986). Agreeing with Park’s criticism, this paper suggests a need for studying heterogeneous origins and strands of the use of hygienic masks, paying attention to the history of the mask mandate for barbers in colonial Korea.

This paper consists of three sections. Tracing the early history of the introduction and implementation of mask-wearing in barbershop regulations in the early and mid-1910s, the first section revisits the medical mask-centered historiography, which has viewed colonial Korea’s acceptance of hygienic masks as happening much later than in neighboring regions. Although public masking became popular in colonial Korea only after the Spanish flu pandemic, the mask-wearing practice of a certain profession—barbers—was even much earlier than in many regions of Japan proper. In the following section, I examine how the mask-wearing regulation worked in practice. In its early period, when this artifact was unknown to the colonial society, except for a few Japanese settlers, the colonial police had to distribute masks to barbers and organize educational events. These activities encouraging barbers to be accustomed to mask-wearing were supplemented by occasional surprise inspections and punishments. In the third section, I illustrate that mask-wearing and other hygienic practices in barbershops—practices which were collectively called barbering hygiene (理髪衛生, rihatsu eisei)—were used to criticize market competitors, especially Chinese migrant barbers, by colonial Korean and Japanese settler barbers. Challenging fierce price competition made by Chinese migrant barbers, Korean and Japanese barbers tried to eliminate them by criticizing their lack of hygienic knowledge and unhygienic management. Finally, I will conclude the paper with some historiographical reflections on this case study as an intersection of the global history of masks and the social history of medicine

2. Revisiting the ‘Late Arrival’ Thesis

In recent years, with the rising interest in the impact of the Spanish flu on colonial Korea during the late 1910s and early 1920s, historians have focused on the use of hygienic masks in the epidemic control context (Kim, 2017; Baek, 2019; Hyun, 2022a; Kim, 2023). More explicitly, historian of science Hyun Jaehwan argued that masks were introduced to colonial Korea later than in neighboring regions where mask-wearing had already been practiced against infectious diseases in the late 19^th century and the first decade of the 20th century. According to his analysis, visual evidence of the use of masks in an operating room first appeared in 1916, and the Korean terminology referring to masks was not settled until the late 1910s. Only after late 1919 and early 1920, when the GGK began to suggest mask-wearing as part of anti-epidemic tools against the Spanish flu pandemic, hygienic masks appeared in the public sphere. In the following decades, hygienic masks were made widespread by the colonial government’s adoption of mask-wearing practice as a cost-effective measure to contain infectious diseases and colonial Korean doctors’ educational efforts to teach Korean housewives to manage mask-wearing among family members for family health purposes (Hyun, 2022a).

This ‘late arrival’ thesis heavily focuses on medical settings, including surgery rooms in hospitals, anti-epidemic control, and medical advice for household healthcare. It assumes that the places where strict hygienic requirements, including mask-wearing, were in place in medical settings or medical practitioner-engaged situations. Yet hospitals, clinics, and quarantine sites were not the only places where hygiene discourses dominated. Other particular sites also began to be managed by modern hygiene at almost the same time as medical places. For instance, because of pasteurization, a bacteriology-oriented aseptic strategy was actively discussed and introduced into the milk industry as early as its introduction to operating rooms (Atkins, 2010).²⁾

Figure 1.

A masked barber shaving a customer

(“A Barbershop Bustling with Activity as the New Year Approaches 세 밑에 한창 바쁜 리발소,” Maeil Sinbo, 30 December 1917)

In colonial Korea, barbershops were one of the sites that were regulated by modern hygiene standards. Unlike neighboring countries, barber-like professions were absent in Korea until the pre-colonial era, when they emerged as part of the modernization effort. When King Gojong announced the Hair-Cropping Edict (斷髮令, tanballyŏng) on December 30, 1895, advised by the Japanese minister to Korea, “well-being” (養生, yangsaeng) was emphasized together with “convenience” (便利, p’yŏlli) for hair cutting.³⁾ Following the edict, the first Korean barbershops in Hansung first opened in 1901 and rapidly increased their number from 4 in 1905 to 140 in 1915.

Although the hygiene argument of the edict was likely a rhetorical strategy to justify this radical measure, which faced substantial backlash nationwide, barbering hygiene became a significant concern for Korean intellectuals and the imperial government during the Korean Empire period (1897-1910). For instance, in 1907, enlightenment activist Lee Dalwon (李達元, birth and death dates unknown) introduced “barbershops” (理髮所) as a crucial site for hygiene, while mentioning that “many people visit and leave” there so “germs (病毒, pyŏngdok) of alopecia (禿頭病, toktubyŏng) or other infectious diseases” could be easily transmitted. Thus, “barbers must learn aseptic methods (病毒消滅方法)” (Lee, 1907). Responding to this hygienic caution, Korean barbers in Hansung tried to organize a barber association in order to study how to disinfect their hair-cutting tools.”⁴⁾ In March 1910, five months before the Japanese Empire’s annexation of Korea, the Korean imperial government also planned to control barbershop hygiene by introducing regulations to check the disinfection status of hair clippers in order to contain the spread of alopecia.⁵⁾

On May 2, 1911, approximately one year after the annexation of Korea, the GGK enacted the Barbering Rule, one of the first public health regulations introduced by the colonial government (Kim, 1991). This rule assigned the regulatory work to the GGK’s Hygiene Division of the Police Department (警務摠監府衛生課, Keimu Sōkanfu Eiseika, reestablished as 警務局衛生課 in 1919). It outlined the health qualifications required for barbers and specified disinfection methods for hair-cutting tools and towels. Additionally, the rule included regulations regarding the hygiene of work attire. According to the decree, barbers were required to wear a white dressing gown, and when shaving customers, they had to wear “respirators (呼吸器, kokyūki).”⁶⁾

The barber regulation itself was not unique; rather, it was a part of the Japanese Empire’s public hygiene management. According to Japanese historian Kurata Kenichi’s study of the barber rules in Japan, already from 1899 to 1906, all forty-seven prefectures issued similar regulations to control alopecia infection in barbershops (Kurata, 2021; 2022). Also, the colonial Korean case was not the first mask mandate for barbers within the Japanese Empire. The earliest barber regulation with a mask mandate was made by Kanagawa Prefecture in 1904, followed by a similar decree from Chiba Prefecture in December 1910. However, they were different from the colonial Korean barber regulations, as these prefectural decrees required barbers to use a respirator during all their work, instead of solely when shaving customers. According to Japanese historian Sumida Tomohisa, a similar regulation to the colonial Korean one, requiring mask-wearing while shaving faces, was announced by the Japanese Consul in Niuzhuang (Newchwang) at the treaty port of Yingkou in northeast China six months earlier than the colonial Korean legislation (Sumida, 2023: 695).

Sumida Tomohisa shows that the barber mask mandate became widespread in Japan proper and other Japanese territories, as well as China, from the 1910s to the 1930s (Sumida, 2023). Within the history of the barber mask mandate in the Japanese Empire and beyond, the case of colonial Korea was one of the earliest instances, although it was not the very first. Here, I do not claim or evaluate which country or region introduced mask-wearing practices earlier; rather, I want to point out that the timeline for adopting hygienic masks can vary by shifting our focus from medical settings to other sanitary situations.

I argue that more important questions than searching for the earliest date or origin of hygienic masks involve examining how these things became intertwined with the politics of hygiene in the colonial context. By the politics of hygiene, I mean the use of hygiene discourses to justify the regulation of colonial subjects or the stigmatization and exclusion of ethnic minorities. Analyzing the barber mask mandate in colonial Korea offers valuable insight into the politics that emerged within the barbering industry.

3. Masks Forced on Barbers

At the end of May 1911, the same month when the Barbering Rule was announced, the colonial government ordered barbers in each district to gather at the police stations and be taught about hygienic principles related to the Barbering Rule. For instance, the chief of the Higashidaimon (Dongdaemun) Police Station (東大門分署) organized a gathering of barbers in its district and lectured about “the importance of hygiene and disinfection, the organization of a regional profession association, cleaning the interior of barbershops, and disinfecting tools thoroughly, in order to prevent the harm of germs (黴菌).”⁷⁾ Together with this, each barber was “provided with respirators.”⁸⁾ Why did the chief distribute masks to Korean barbers?

In contrast to Japan and China, before the Spanish flu pandemic, the Korean population under colonial rule rarely used respirators, even during epidemics. There was also no standardized terminology for these devices (Hyun, 2022a). For example, in the Korean edition of the Barbering Rule, the term used was “resŭbara-tol” (레스바라-돌), which is a Korean translation of the Katakana word for respirator. During the 1910s, colonial Korean media struggled to describe this item, using various terms such as “resŭbara-tol,” “resŭppiradodu,” “mouth cover,” and “snorting cover.” Like many other Koreans, barbers were largely unaware of respirators, prompting the colonial police to step in and educate them about what masks are and their purpose.

If the free distribution of respirators was viewed as a benefit, the colonial police opted for strict measures and punishments to control Korean barbers. As demonstrated by Korean historian Baek Seon Lye, the GGK kept sanitation expenses to a minimum (Baek, 2022). Consequently, forcing barbers to purchase respirators at their own expense under threat of punishment was the most cost-effective approach. Surprise inspections and punishments began a year after the free distribution events. In the sweltering days of August 1912, a colonial barber named Yu Yangho (柳養浩, dates unknown) was arrested for violating the Barber Rule, specifically for “not covering his mouth while shaving.”⁹⁾ This arrest might have been intended by the colonial police because Yu was the first ethnically Korean barber to establish a barbershop in Hansung in 1901 and was a Korean leader in the barber industry (Choi, 2006). By arresting and fining this influential figure in the Korean barber community, the colonial police emphasized the importance of wearing masks. The fine for not wearing a mask was notably higher than for other violations, likely to underscore the necessity of these unusual artifacts. Yu Yangho was fined two won/yen for not wearing a mask while shaving, whereas another Korean barber in Keijō had been fined one won/yen for not wearing a white gown three months earlier.¹⁰⁾

Inspections and penalties for barbers continued, especially during the summer when wearing masks became increasingly uncomfortable due to the hot and humid weather of Keijō. For instance, two barbers were fined in July 1916 for failing to cover their mouths with a device referred to as “resŭppiradodu” (레스삐라도두). Three months later, one of the punished barbers’ assistants faced a similar penalty for the same reason.¹¹⁾ Again, in August and early September 1917, barbers were once again arrested for not wearing “snorting covers” (코김가리는 것) while shaving customers.¹²⁾ The enforcement of these penalties extended beyond Keijō; for instance, in December 1924, police in Kunsan (Gunsan) announced they would be inspecting barbershops for hygiene, as many barbers had been observed not wearing masks while shaving.¹³⁾

As a result of nearly a decade of punitive measures by the colonial police, the public began to view masks as symbols of barbering hygiene, alongside disinfection practices. In October 1919, a reader, referring to him- or herself as a “short-haircut customer in Keijō” (京城 斷髮客), submitted a letter to Maeil Sinbo (每日申報), a newspaper published by the GGK. The letter was titled “What I Want from Barbers.” In this correspondence, the reader criticized barbers who failed to disinfect their tools, referring to them as “devils.” The reader urged “barbers to take hygiene seriously” and suggested that “they should wear respirators (호흡긔) at least while shaving.”¹⁴⁾ By the 1920s, respirators became an essential part of the required equipment for haircuts in colonial Korea. An advertisement for haircut supplies that appeared in Tong-a ilbo (東亞日報), a Korean newspaper, in 1925 included respirators as part of a set of barbering tools, along with hair cutters, razors, combs, earpicks, and liquid disinfectants.¹⁵⁾

Figure 2.

A list of barbering tools in an advertisement during the mid-1920s

(Tong-a ilbo, 13 August 1925.)

Interestingly, until the mid-1910s, in media reports and police documents, there was no clear explanation for why barbers were required to wear masks while shaving their customers. This lack of clarity does not imply that the colonial police were unaware of the role that masks played in infection control within barbershops.¹⁶⁾ Rather, it suggests that specific hygienic reasons were not a priority in their punitive actions against colonial Korean barbers. The primary aim of these punishments may have been more closely linked to the broader goal of the colonial police: to discipline colonial subjects in the name of hygiene (Park, 2004). Additionally, punishment reports from the colonial media reveal that the hygienic objectives of the colonial police regarding the mask mandate were vague. For instance, in the above cases, some barbers were punished for failing to cover their noses when they sneezed, while others faced penalties for not covering their mouths. Covering the nose was meant to protect barbers from potential infections transmitted by customers, whereas covering the mouth aimed to safeguard customers from possible transmission risks.

The earliest official police statement regarding barbering hygiene in colonial Korea was issued by Shiraishi Hosei (白石保成, dates unknown), the Captain of the Hygiene Division of the Police Department, in 1918. In his book, titled The Handbook of Hygiene in Korea (朝鮮衛生要覧, Chōsen Eisei Yōran), published by the GGK, he stated that the hygiene police should oversee the barbering sector to prevent infectious diseases, although he did not provide a detailed list of these diseases (Shiraishi, 1918). It was not until 1925 that Kodama Roichi (兒玉魯一, 1887-1969), a professor at the Police Training School (警察官講習所) of the GGK, elaborated on the Barbering Rule. He explained that the rule was meant “to mitigate the risks associated with using hairdressing tools and to prevent infections caused by skin diseases and other communicable diseases transmitted by barbers, their tools, and their clothing” (Kodama, 1925: 353). Kodama emphasized that particular hygienic precautions were necessary when serving “patients who have pulmonary tuberculosis, epilepsy (顚癇病), and skin diseases” (Kodama, 1925: 353). Although not explicitly stated, he seemed to believe that barbers could transmit infectious diseases like pulmonary tuberculosis from one customer to another, and that wearing masks might help prevent this transmission.

By the 1920s, it seemed that containing the transmission of respiratory tuberculosis became the main preventative target of the mask mandate. At the 4th National Korean Barber’s Association Conference (朝鮮全道理髪業連合組 合大会), which was held in Wonsan on July 16-17, 1924, Inoue Kametarō (井上 龜太郞, dates unknown), a hygiene official at Kankyōnan (South Hamgyong) Province said in a lecture that the transmission of tuberculosis was the most serious sanitary problem in barbershops, and suggested barbers’ “maskwearing (マスクヲ用フル事)” as the first among eight preventative methods (Gensanfu Rihatsugyō Kumiai, 1924: 26).

The first media record explaining the reason for mask-wearing at barbershops appeared in the summer of 1916. The news article highlighted the serious health risks associated with unsanitary practices in some barbershops, noting that “some careless barbers do not consider their contact with the public and fail to clean the interiors of their shops. They also neglect proper disinfection and do not cover their mouths with respirators or anything similar (호흡긔가튼것) while attending to customers. As a result, concerns about respiratory infections in these establishments are inevitable.”¹⁷⁾

The news article highlighted Chinese migrant barbershops as typically unsanitary places. The reporter noted that “while Korean and Japanese barbershops are highly committed to sanitation, Chinese barbershops tend to offer lower prices but are significantly less hygienic.” Consequently, “they do not compare favorably to other ethnic barbershops in terms of sanitation and hygiene.”¹⁸⁾ This perception of Chinese barbershops as unhygienic is closely tied to the intense competition among Chinese migrants and their Korean and Japanese counterparts. The following section will explore how barbering hygiene has become a critical factor for Japanese and Korean barbers in their ethnic politics.

4. Barbering Hygiene Mobilized for Ethnic Politics

From the mid-1910s onward, the barbershop industry faced intense competition along ethnic lines, especially between Japanese/Korean barbers and Chinese migrants. This ethnic rivalry in the barbering sector was not a new phenomenon. Earlier conflicts had already emerged between Korean and Japanese barbers before colonization. Following the Russo-Japanese War, the number of Japanese settlers in Hansung surged from 331 in 1895 to 4,229 in 1904, and during this time, the number of Japanese barbers also grew significantly, from 8 to 58 (Lee, 2017: 73-76). By around 1908 and 1909, competition between Korean and Japanese barbers escalated, particularly in terms of pricing.¹⁹⁾ This situation fueled the efforts of Korean Enlightenment activists, such as Lee Dalwon, who advocated for Korean barbershops to adopt better hygiene practices, believing that this would enhance the competitiveness of Korean commerce against the economic encroachment of Japanese settlers. However, this ethnic rivalry was forcibly curtailed by Japanese colonization, along with the colonial police’s control over both ethnic barbershops through the Barbering Rule, which included strict management of service prices through their local police oversight of ethnic barber associations.

In contrast, Chinese migrants took advantage of their outsider status by avoiding association-based management. The number of Chinese migrants significantly increased after the Russo-Japanese War, rising from 2,182 in 1893 to 11,818 in 1910. By 1920, the Chinese migrant population had doubled, and it reached 67,794 by 1930. Most of these migrants originated from Shandong, seeking employment in colonial Korea due to its wages, which were three times higher than those in their hometowns. Barbering became one of the most common professions among Chinese migrants (Yi, 2017). By not joining Japanese or Korean associations, they were able to offer lower prices than those set by these associations. This price competitiveness allowed Chinese barbershops to experience significant growth from the early 1910s to the mid-1920s. In 1910, there were six Chinese migrant barbershops in Keijō, but this number rose to 15 in 1915 and reached 31 by 1924 (Yi, 2017: 24-25).²⁰⁾

Historian Yi Jung-hee analyzed how Japanese and Korean barbers collaborated to compete against their Chinese counterparts, with the GGK siding with the Japanese and Korean barbers. In 1915, Japanese and Korean barbers reported to the colonial police that Chinese barbershops were offering lower prices, which did not comply with the regulations set by Japanese and Korean associations. However, the colonial police were hesitant to intervene in the conflict. Following this, Japanese and Korean barber associations attempted to create pan-ethnic barber associations, including Chinese barbers, in an effort to enforce uniform pricing across all establishments, but these efforts did not succeed during the late 1910s. Yi argued that this conflict reached a resolution in Keijō, with two key institutionalizations caused by the GGK’s interventions in the early 1920s: the unification of all ethnic barber associations into a single organization by the orchestration of the colonial police in 1921 and the introduction of a qualification exam and barber license system in 1924 (Yi, 2017: 28-29). The latter was a response from the Hygiene Division of the Police Department to the concerns raised by Japanese and Korean barbers, who claimed their difficulties stemmed from the low-price policies of Chinese barbershops and appealed to the Hygiene Division of the Police Department for the “extermination of Chinese barbershops” in 1923.²¹⁾ As the barber qualification examination was conducted in Japanese, Chinese migrants faced significant disadvantages. Also, the Chinese barbers were forced to adhere to the same prices set by the associations. Those factors led to a decline in Chinese barbershops in colonial Korea, especially after the Second Sino-Japanese War (Yi, 2017: 35).

While Yi Jung-hee primarily focused on the economic aspects of ethnic rivalry, particularly price competition, as well as the efforts of Japanese and Korean barbers to regulate the prices of Chinese barbershops, I want to emphasize the importance of hygiene discourses in this ethnic politics. These discourses were mobilized and played a central role in the dynamics of this ethnic politics. From the perspective of the politics of hygiene, the colonial police already sided with the Japanese and Korean barbers in the mid-1910s. In early November 1915, Maeil Sinbo reported, “In recent years, several barbershops run by Chinese migrants have been opened, and there has been an implicit competition between these barbershops and Korean and Japanese people’s barbershops. Among Chinese barbershops, some shops charge service prices cheaper than the rules [set by the associations] or are unhygienic and incautious about sanitation.”²²⁾ Although the colonial police did not mention the price issue, they gathered Chinese barbers in their districts and admonished them about hygiene.²³⁾ In the following year, when the ethnic rivalry became fiercer, the colonial police framed Chinese barbershops as less sanitary than Japanese and Korean ones and cautioned that they would make thorough hygiene inspections in each barbershop in Keijō.²⁴⁾

Despite ongoing penalties imposed on both Japanese and Korean barbershops for breaching hygiene-related regulations,²⁵⁾ a perception that Chinese barbershops were particularly unhygienic was widely promoted by Korean and Japanese barbers, as well as by the colonial police. Korean barbers often used this narrative, often intertwined with xenophobic sentiments, to persuade Korean customers to avoid Chinese competitor shops. In July 1921, Maeil Sinbo introduced a story of a Korean barber, as part of a series of “professions leading a hard life during the summer.”²⁶⁾

Chinese barbers gradually became rampant in Keijō in recent years, and they charged 10 jeon/sen less than Japanese barbers or Korean barbers, so people have been rushing to the Chinese shops even if it meant neglecting their own hygiene and just saving a penny… The customers who help Chinese people collect a lot of money and help them buy land in their home country every year are all Koreans. It is really pathetic to think about the hearts of those who push their heads in and go there with the stench of dirty sweat and fishy smell (더러운 땀내와 노린내) in order to save a penny. How sad it is for the Korean economy when we think about the money that Chinese barbers spend every year to go to their country to buy land and then move to China and disappear. Who has ever seen a Chinese person visiting a Korean barbershop? No one has. Do you know that the Chinese barbers have already expanded their power and are heading north of Gwanggyo? I can’t help but shed tears and sigh when I think about Koreans selling their humanity to Chinese people for 10 jeon/sen.²⁷⁾

Korean barbers viewed their Chinese counterparts as unhygienic outsiders who adversely affected both the Korean economy and the health of the Korean populace. This viewpoint was closely linked to the prevalent xenophobic stereotypes surrounding Chinese migrants in colonial Korea, which depicted them as unhygienic and economically driven. Seo Chun (徐椿, 1884-1944), the editor-in-chief of the colonial Korean newspaper Chosun ilbo (朝鮮日報), characterized Chinese migrants in Manchuria as “Cherishing money and taking life lightly” (貴金賤身). He argued that they maintained a cheap but unsanitary lifestyle to maximize their earnings.²⁸⁾

The colonial police shared a similar viewpoint regarding Chinese barbers. During the 4th National Korean Barber’s Association Conference held in 1924, Kishigami Shigejirō (岸上繁次郎, dates unknown), a hygiene official from the Hygiene Division of the Department of Police, commended Chinese migrants for their diligence and passion in comparison to Japanese settlers and colonial Koreans. However, he noted that the flaws of Chinese barbers included “their unhygienic lifestyle and insufficient sanitary facilities” (Gensanfu Rihatsugyō Kumiai, 1924: 23-24).²⁹⁾ This perception that “Chinese barbershops are the dirtiest and the most hideous” among sanitary sectors and “needed to be inspected” by the colonial police was widespread among the Korean public.³⁰⁾

Meanwhile, in contrast to Yi Jung-hee’s argument that a unified ethnic association was established in 1921, conflicts continued between Korean/Japanese associations and Chinese barber associations in Keijō the following year.³¹⁾ In August of 1922, Japanese barber Seto Tahei (瀬戸多平, dates unknown) convened a meeting with representatives from both Japanese and Korean associations in Keijō in order to discuss the “counterplot against Chinese migrants.” While they acknowledged the dedication of Chinese barbers, who worked long hours without breaks, they concluded that it was necessary to request the colonial police to inspect the sanitary conditions of Chinese barbershops. Their plan involved closing many of these shops, which they deemed unhygienic, after comprehensive inspections. Additionally, the meeting raised the possibility of requesting the colonial police to implement a qualification exam to prevent Chinese migrants from working as barbers on an institutional level.³²⁾

In early September of the same year, Japanese and Korean barber associations in the district of the Ryūsan (Yongsan) Police Station (龍山警察署) officially demanded that Chinese barbershops raise their service charges to match the prices established by Japanese and Korean associations.³³⁾ Amid this conflict, the colonial police initially expressed reservations about siding with Japanese and Korean barbers. Later that month, they warned that they would begin to liberalize service pricing, moving away from the control of barber associations.³⁴⁾ In fact, at the time, the GGK was implementing various measures aimed at reducing prices to achieve price stabilization.³⁵⁾ The price increase demanded of Chinese barbershops was not a solution that the colonial police could accept.

Instead, they proposed the integration of the different ethnic associations. By December of 1922, the colonial police in Keijō negotiated with the Chinese embassy and decided to merge the Chinese and Korean barber associations into a single entity.³⁶⁾ Two years later, the Shōro (Jongno) Police Station (鍾路警察署) standardized service charges across its jurisdiction, establishing uniform prices for all ethnic barbers.³⁷⁾ Despite this measure, Chinese barbers continued to unofficially offer discounts, leading to complaints from Korean barbers about their economic difficulties.³⁸⁾

Ultimately, in responding to these complaints, the colonial police decided to implement a barber license system and a qualification exam as the solution to the “Chinese barber problem.” In the summer of 1923, Japanese and Korean barbers in Keijō petitioned the GGK to resolve the “Chinese barber problem,” by introducing this qualification exam and licensing system.³⁹⁾ As mentioned earlier, they had discussed the introduction of it one year prior, which was connected to the fact that similar licensing and qualification systems had already been established in Japan proper. This was intended to systematically exclude Chinese migrants from the barbering sector (Chen, 2007).

In 1923, the GGK announced its introduction of the qualification exam and the license system by revising the Barbering Rule. It is crucial to note that the qualification exam was not intended to test candidates’ hair-cutting skills but their knowledge about barbering hygiene. This hygiene-oriented exam would be effective in “exterminating Chinese barbers,” as Korean and Japanese barbers suggested in their petition in the summer of the same year, because they viewed Chinese barbers as being naturally unsanitary.⁴⁰⁾ The textbook for the exam was written by the head of Keiki (Gyeonggi) Province’s Hygiene Bureau, Suō Masasue (周防正季, 1885-1942) in 1923, and titled “Barbering Hygiene Reader” (理髮衛生). The textbook, written in Korean and Chinese characters in combination, consisted of four chapters: anatomy, physiology, epidemiology, and disinfection (Suo, 1923). It highlighted the importance of hygienic activities to contain the transmission of infectious diseases in barbershops. Copies of this textbook were distributed to barbers, who were expected to take the exam in August of the same year to obtain a barber license. In terms of the test styles, there were two types of exams—written exams and exams for illiterate people. The former was carried out in Japanese, while the latter was in two languages: Japanese and Korean. The Chinese migrants were expected to take the latter—exams for illiterate people.⁴¹⁾

It is significant that only Japanese and Korean barbers were invited to the ceremony event for the beginning of the qualification exam and licensing system.⁴²⁾ It was an indication that the colonial police promoted this system to expel Chinese migrants from the barbering industry while avoiding any diplomatic troubles with the Republic of China. Indeed, the discrimination against Chinese barbers through implementing this new system was evident. In this respect, both colonial Korean and Japanese settler newspapers seriously paid attention to the number of Chinese migrants in successful applicants.⁴³⁾ In 1925, after Chinese migrants showed unexpectedly high passing rates in the license exam through oral tests in 1924, the GGK tried to make the exam more difficult for Chinese migrants by announcing that Chinese migrants would also conduct the oral tests in Japanese.⁴⁴⁾

The stereotype that Chinese barbershops were unhygienic also persisted despite the reality being different. In 1925, police stations in Keijō and Jinsen (Incheon) conducted a joint hygiene inspection of 232 barbershops in their regions, which included 66 Japanese-owned shops, 131 Korean-owned shops, and 35 Chinese migrant shops.⁴⁵⁾ The inspection was particularly aimed at Chinese barbershops, with the expectation that they employed unqualified barbers who had failed to pass licensing exams and that their tools and facilities were unsanitary.⁴⁶⁾ However, a news article reporting on the results of this joint inspection noted that “Chinese barbershops unexpectedly showed good results,” without specifying which ethnic groups’ barbershops were punished.⁴⁷⁾ As this episode suggests, if the GGK continued to support Japanese and Korean barbers through the Barbering Rule to expel the Chinese populations from the barbering sector, it happened through the politics of hygiene—framing Chinese migrants as unsanitary and targeting them in their hygiene inspections.

5. Conclusion

In March 1930, a reader of the colonial Korean newspaper Tong-a ilbo posed the following question in its hygiene consultation column: “Why don’t Chinese workers, who handle feces and urine while not wearing masks, contract infectious diseases?”⁴⁸⁾ This portrayal of unmasked Chinese workers was closely tied to the perception of Chinese-operated businesses as unsanitary, a view that persisted in colonial Korean society throughout the colonial period.

In the barbering sector, a similar image emerged, promoted by Japanese and Korean barbers, along with the colonial police, during the ethnic rivalry between Japanese/Korean barbers and Chinese migrants from the mid-1910s to the mid-1920s. It is ironic that the image of unmasked barbers in unhygienic conditions was originally framed by the colonial police to target colonial Korean barbers. However, Korean barbers, with the support of Japanese barbers, appropriated this narrative from the colonial police to strengthen their position in the ethnic competition with Chinese migrants.

Meanwhile, even after the significant marginalization of Chinese barbers and the repatriation of Japanese settler barbers following Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in August 1945, remnants of the colonial police’s hygiene regulations for Korean barbershops persisted. The Barbering Rule continued to be enforced as a means to regulate barbershops under the guise of hygiene inspection.⁴⁹⁾ The mask mandate in barbershops remained in place as well. The Barbering and Beauty Hygiene Reader (美容理容 衛生讀本 Miyongiyong wisaeng dokpon), published in 1955 as a textbook for the barber and hairdresser licensing exam, highlighted the importance of wearing masks while shaving customers to prevent the transmission of respiratory diseases, particularly tuberculosis (Lee, 1955: 34-35; 306-307).

This paper examined the history of mask-wearing regulations in barbershops during colonial Korea to highlight the often-overlooked material and political roles of hygiene artifacts in this region. It illustrated the complex dynamics between Korean barbers and the colonial police regarding the politics of hygiene. In some instances, their relationship resembled that of the colonized and colonizers, with the latter attempting to impose modernization in the name of hygiene. Conversely, in other situations, colonial Korean barbers formed alliances with the colonial police, adopting their hygiene narratives and regulations to exclude Chinese migrants. The Barbering Rule and its related hygiene regulations, such as the requirement for mask-wearing, provided Korean barbers with an effective tool to compete against their Chinese counterparts. Although the hygiene control implemented by the colonial police has often been viewed as a prime example of everyday colonial brutality, this analysis shows that the politics of hygiene in colonial Korea cannot be simplified to a mere binary of coercion and resistance and that it is crucial to interrogate the complex dynamics of this politics in a specific historical context more thoroughly (Henry, 2016; Park, 2022).

The non-medical focus of this case study also expands upon previous historiography of masks that has primarily concentrated on medical contexts, moving away from a singular narrative that has been a bit hastily established in recent years. As some scholars have already noted, this origin-seeking approach risks essentializing certain groups’ behaviors regarding mask-wearing within a nationalist or racial framework. For example, Japanese writer Hirai Tamotsu argues that Japan’s “mask culture” has roots back to the Edo period, suggesting that Japan is a hygienic nation. Similarly, the Western media has often depicted Asians as a docile race, readily wearing masks during the COVID-19 pandemic (Hyun and Hong, forthcoming; Hyun, 2022b). To create a meaningful connection between the history of material culture and the social history of medicine, historians of masks might need to investigate the diverse social roles of various hygienic masks beyond just medical sectors before hastily attempting to map the big picture.

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