This article is by Michael Lee and read by an artificial voice.

When K-pop megaband BTS announced that its comeback album would be titled "Arirang," after the famous Korean folk song, it became clear there was no more fitting stage for the first performance of its upcoming world tour than the avenue of Sejong-daero and Gwanghwamun Square in downtown Seoul.
Without the modern skyscrapers, the backdrop to the band's return closely resembles what Koreans and visitors would have seen at the end of the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910), when the central road led to Gwanghwamun — the main gate of Gyeongbok Palace, framed by mountains to the north.
It is a vista BTS fans will likely associate with their time in the capital long after the concert is over. But this background was not always the same.
For much of the 20th century, the view north of Sejong-daero ended at the former Japanese Government-General Building — a domed Neoclassical edifice that loomed as a reminder of Tokyo's occupation (1910–45) of the Korean Peninsula. After liberation, the building became so closely associated with the South Korean government and the city that English-language media often referred to it as the "Seoul Capitol," despite mounting controversy over the painful history it represented.

But across the East China Sea, an edifice built for a similar purpose escaped such perceptions.
In Taipei, Ketagalan Boulevard — renamed in 1996 after the indigenous people who once inhabited the area — leads to a Baroque-style redbrick building constructed by the Japanese as the center of the island's colonial administration in 1919.
While Seoul demolished the Government-General Building in 1995, its counterpart in Taipei serves as Taiwan's Presidential Office today. This divergence reflects how two societies, both shaped by occupation, war, dictatorship and late democratization, came to interpret the architecture of Japan's empire in fundamentally different ways: as something to be erased in one capital and absorbed into the national landscape in the other.

Remaking capitals
The divergence began not only with the imperial intent the buildings embodied, but with the cities that Japanese builders entered.
"Seoul was already a fully formed capital with a deeply established symbolic order," said Lee Yeon-kyung, an architecture professor at Yonsei University, referring to its layout along pungsu jiri, or geomantic principles.

Before the Japanese occupation began, that order included a meridian running through Gyeongbok Palace and along Yukjo Street — now Sejong-daero — which linked the royal residence to six government ministries just south of Gwanghwamun. This axis from the mountains to the north and Cheonggye Stream to the south was seen as an auspicious conduit for geomantic energy. It intersected at its southern end with the city's main east-west road, Jongno, where commerce and everyday activity unfolded.
Taipei, by contrast, offered Japanese colonizers a far emptier canvas.
"Historically, the center of power on the island had been Tainan," Lee said, noting that Taipei "was only designated as the provincial capital late in the Qing period." Its walls, built just a decade before Japan took control in 1895, enclosed what was still a small settlement surrounded by vast tracts of undeveloped land.

That contrast shaped how colonial rule was experienced. According to Lee, building projects in Taipei "were experienced as urban expansion," while such developments in Seoul "felt much more like a foreign intrusion into an established historical core."
Nowhere was this more evident than at Gyeongbok Palace, where Japanese authorities demolished all but 36 of some 300 structures to make way for the Government-General Building, which was completed in 1926 in what was once the forecourt of the royal residence.
Han Jung-sun, a professor of international studies at Korea University, said the Japanese chose this location to "mutilate and imperfectly erase the icon of the conquered ...