ABSTRACTS
All times listed in MST (JST).
Friday, December 3, 2021
3:30 – 5:00p (7:30 – 9:00a)
Panel 1 - Inter-Asian and Transpacific Exchanges
Zainichi Chinese Media and Zainichi Koreans in Early Postwar Osaka
UNODA Shoya (Osaka University)
TKTK
Langston Hughes and Kim Saryang in Exchange
Nayoung Aimee KWON (Duke University)
This paper puts racialized divisions from colonial Korea and segregated United States in conversation. Through forging new transpacific methodologies, it aims to connect minoritarian legacies across oceanic and postcolonial divides and across the borderlines of U.S and Japanese empires. Select works including epistolary exchanges by minor modernists writing in the shadows of metropolitan centers will be examined in relation to shared impasses of racial passing.
5:30 – 7:00p (9:30 – 11:00a)
Panel 2 – To the Colonies and Back Again
Nakajima Atsushi: More Skeptic than Participant in Empire
Nobuko YAMASAKI (Lehigh University)
This paper analyzes how the ideological structure of the Japanese empire regulates, fixes, and generates everyday life in colonial Korea. I explore the intersections between Nakajima's depiction of Korean street-prostitutes and censorship in his early short stories on colonial Korea, which he published when he was 20 years old. I argue that Nakajima Atsushi’s insights about the injustice of colonialism both implicitly and explicitly stood against the Japanese empire’s totalitarian ambitions, even though he served as an agent for the empire. This approach furthermore demonstrates the similarity of Nakajima’s major and minor works, revealed in the rhetorical choices he makes and his ethical orientation toward others – no previous scholarly work has examined these parallels. I offer the first scholarly revised reading of his canonical works (which are frequently employed as Japanese textbooks and authorized by the Japanese government), in light of his other writings, which are critical of colonialism within the race-gendered colonial narrative.
Contrapuntal Writing: Kobayashi Masaru’s “Bridge Building” and Japan’s Korean War
Nicholas LAMBRECHT (Osaka University)
While the process of postwar repatriation physically removed Japanese colonists from the former Japanese empire, it also deferred the necessary process of coming to terms with Japan’s imperial past. However, writings by and about Japanese repatriates have often called attention to the incomplete nature of postwar Japanese decolonization. This presentation examines how unresolved memories of empire reemerged in the works of Kobayashi Masaru (1927–1971), who was a Japanese author born and raised in colonial Korea. It concentrates upon Kobayashi’s short story “Bridge Building” (“Kakyō”, 1960). “Bridge Building” was nominated for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize but has since received little attention in Japan. In this story, Kobayashi portrays an uncomfortable alliance between a young Japanese repatriate and a Zainichi Korean activist involved in radical protest actions in Japan during the Korean War. This paper shows that although Kobayashi depicts Japanese and Korean characters who are united by a common goal and their past experiences of imperial violence, the gap between them remains insurmountable. The presentation further argues that “Bridge Building” undermines reader identification with the Japanese protagonist by highlighting the protagonist’s insufficient perspective on the history of Japanese colonialism. In this way, it illustrates how Kobayashi’s work represents an attempt to counteract romanticized repatriation narratives that were coopted for new nationalist ends at the beginning of the Cold War.
7:30 – 9:00p (11:30 – 1:00p)
Panel 3 – Ethnic “Homeland” and the Cross-Straits Gaze
Standing on the Shores of Memory: Listening in to Kim Sijong’s Song of Clementine
Catherine RYU (Michigan State University)
This paper focuses on the multifaceted significance of an ocean as it relates to the history and experience of what have come to be known as Zainichi— Korean diasporic communities in Japan. Whereas the historical origin of Zainichi reaches back to Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945) and the initial arrivals of Koreans in Japan were through a sea-borne journey, the notion of Zainichi (literally, “residing in Japan”) itself has taken root in postwar Japan in the context of the Cold War being fought out on the Korean peninsula, resulting in two Koreas along the 38th parallel. Since the truce of the Korean War (1950-1953), this division of the homeland in turn has come to signify, to a majority of Koreans remaining in Japan, no possibility for “home coming,” be it geographical or ideological. This study examines in particular how the first-generation Zainichi poet Kim Sijong (b.1929), an escapee to Japan as a lone seafarer in the aftermath of the Jeju 4.3 Incident who could no longer return “home” to redress his past, evokes the figure of an ocean with its attendant attributes such as the shore, the waves, the wind, and others as a set of metaphors with which to give shape and meaning to his life and memory as Zainichi. More specifically, this study analyzes the centrality of such ocean-inspired imagery in Kim’s seminal essay, “The Song of Clementine” (Kurementain no uta), an autobiographical account of his life. This essay was first published in 1979, when he was 50 years old and had resided in Japan for over 30 years as a stateless person since age 17. This study will ultimately demonstrate the ways in which Kim shares with the reader not only the trauma he experienced in youth vis-à-vis language, nation, and identity but also the effect of which he conveys via the recurring words, thoughts, events, and emotions, which together conjure up the engulfing imagery of the ocean with its unrelenting power fueled by his living memory of his late father steeped in guilt, remorse, and regret.
Filming “Homeland” in South Korean and Zainichi Films on Chosŏn Schools
So Hye KIM (Korea University)
This paper explores the mutual influences between the Korean diasporic community in Japan and South Korean filmmakers in contemporary documentary films featuring Chosŏn schools, affiliated with Ch’ongryŏn, a pro-DPRK Zainichi organization. Commonly called “Zainichi,” Korean residents in Japan had rarely been represented in South Korean cinema until the late 90s. However, Kim Myŏng-jun’s 2005 documentary film, Our School, attracted significant public attention not only for the film but also toward the Zainichi community, and namely, Chosŏn schools. Since then, a few more documentary films about Chosŏn schools have been made by South Korean filmmakers. Set in trilateral locations—South Korea, North Korea, and Japan—these films depict how the Zainichi students connect with their homeland and redeem their ethnic identity. Influenced by those South Korean films, Zainichi filmmaker Pak Yŏng-i made the documentary film, The Sky-Blue Symphony, in 2016. This paper analyzes The Sky-Blue Symphony and Our School as main texts and examines South Korean and Zainichi filmmakers’ imagination of the homeland, focusing on the depictions of the students’ school trips to North Korea. By closely reading the texts and contexts of the films, this paper scrutinizes the tensions and dialogic relationship between homeland and diaspora and illuminates how cinema functions as an important medium and channel in mediating Zainichi Koreans’ longing for homeland as well as South Korean filmmakers’ imagination of unified homeland, across the passage of time, spatial distance, and inexorable politics of the Cold War.
Saturday, December 4, 2021
1:00 – 3:00p (5:00 – 7:00a)
Panel 4 – The Transnational Imagination: Pitfalls and Potentials of Japan-Korea Solidarity
In the “Company of Treacherous Malcontents”:
Refiguring “Futei” Insubordination as Korea-Japan Federation at the Margins of Metropolitan Media and Narratives
Andre HAAG (University of Hawai’i at Mānoa)
The opening scenes of the 2017 South Korean film Pak Yŏl: Anarchist from the Colony depict the moment that one rebellious Japanese woman finds herself deeply affected by the “treasonous spirit” pulsing through an unpublished poem written by the film’s eponymous Korean anarchist. The poem, “Son of a Bitch” (Inukoro), was slated to appear in a magazine published by a group of malcontented Korean exchange students in Japan, but government interference ensured that it never saw the light of day. During the early 1920s, the partners Kaneko Fumiko and Pak Yŏl would go on to publish an intermittent and elusive series of small magazines of their own: Black Wave, Stalwart Koreans, and Actual Society. These publications opposed all forms of oppression and exploitation, whether in the name of empire, nation, or capital, and openly called for righteous terror against unjust power. The furtive publishing efforts that brought the pair—and a network of other writers, activists, and print media—together before their implication in a “Great Treason” conspiracy case have often been neglected. This presentation thus focuses on the provocative gestures toward transnational federation suggested in joint publishing efforts by anti-establishment Korean and Japanese writers to explore how marginal, de-nationalized media proposed new forms of solidarity as they subversively navigated dominant discourses and censorship regimes in the metropolitan contact zone of Tokyo. As suggested by the name of their underground organization, the ‘Company of Treacherous Malcontents’ (Futeisha), Kaneko and Pak’s publishing activism proved most threatening to the watchful authorities because it reclaimed an imperial slur to call for an alliance against empire between all dissidents regardless of ethnicity, gender, or class origins. At a time when the category of “futei” served as a keyword regulating relations between metropole and periphery, furthermore, these marginal interventions can be re-centered in wide-ranging debates about the meaning of treacherous disaffection that also attracted Taishō luminaries like Yoshino Sakuzō and a diverse array of ethnic Japanese literary figures including Uno Chiyo, Nakanishi Inosuke, and Shiga Naoya.
The Transnational View from Ikaino: Japan-Korea Solidarity and “Feminist” Discourses in Ajukkari (1975-1983)
Julia Hansell CLARK (University of California, Los Angeles)
The 1970s and 1980s saw a rapid rise in interest in the concept of “transnational solidarity” among both South Korean and Japanese activists and intellectuals, as prominent members of the Japanese left including Oda Makoto and Wada Hiroki sought to offer discursive and material support to the South Korean democratization movement and intervene in the Park regime’s human rights abuses of political prisoners through petition campaigns and hunger strikes. The journal Ajukkari, founded as the Japan-Korea solidarity movement reached its peak in 1975 by Won Soo-il and other members of the Ikuno North branch of the Zainichi Korean Youth League (Hanch’ŏng), serves as a concrete example of how these theoretical notions of transnational solidarity between Korea and Japan played out within the ethnic Korean community on a local level. Throughout its run, the journal frames itself within the terms of the discourse on Japan-Korea solidarity, featuring essays arguing for the particular roles and responsibilities of second generation Zainichi Koreans within that transnational activist movement, alongside the literary experimentations that would eventually form the basis of Won Soo-il’s volume Ikaino monogatari (1987). Perhaps most interestingly, the (mostly male) writers of Ajukkari continuously struggle to incorporate “women’s liberation” discourses emerging from both Japan and South Korea into their construction of a new Zainichi political subjectivity, demonstrating both the centrality of feminist discourse to the politics of transnational activism at the time and the many erasures and contradictions inherent in the development of what would become a transnational feminist discourse centered on South Korea.
“Apache” Koreans in Postwar Osaka: Figures of Indigeneity in the Postwar Transpacific
Andrew HARDING (Cornell University)
The period between 1945 and 1960 was a tumultuous time in East Asia, particularly for those Koreans who, for various reasons, had remained in Japan after the defeat of the Pan-Asian imperial project. Caught in a temporally and spatially liminal "post" colonial zone (and still very much "waiting for the 'post'", to paraphrase Jodi Byrd), Koreans in Japan were trapped not only between the borders of rescinded imperial citizenship and two, as yet unrecognized Korean states, but also between the neo-colonial rivalries of U.S. and Soviet geopolitics. Within this milieu, a group of largely Korean black-marketeers subsisting on the fringes of what is now Osaka Castle Park caught the national imagination. Labelled as "Japan's Apache Tribe", first by the local press in Osaka, and later by Kaiko Takeshi in his novel "Japan's Threepenny Opera", the group were often depicted as a semi-indigenous tribe subsisting on the scraps of empire in the heart of postwar Osaka. While very much a work in progress, I read this use of indigeneity as a metaphor in Japan alongside forms of indigenous representation emerging from white settler colonial culture in North America at the same time. Tracing the connection to postwar Japan via the flow of U.S. consumer culture, I examine the role that indigeneity-as-metaphor played in the re-figuration of Koreans, particularly in relation to assertions of postwar and postimperial arrival (in contrast to Asian belatedness) within Japanese discourse.
3:30 – 5:00 (7:30 – 9:00a)
Panel 5 – Challenges in Diaspora Studies: The Position of Koreans in Japan
Beyond the Kokuhaku: Passing and the Tenacity of Confession in Zainichi Cultural Production
Nathaniel HENEGHAN (Independent Scholar)
This paper explores notions of passing and confession in literary and cinematic representations of the Korean minority in Japan. Zainichi Korean author and literary theorist Kim Sok-pom has relentlessly criticized works such as Kim Hagyon’s “A Frozen Mouth” for its perceived perpetuation of what Tomi Suzuki terms “I-novel discourse.” This literary framework, which assumes a privileged position in Japanese “pure literature,” constructs its narrative around the trope of “confession,” thereby suppressing political content in favor of the personal, a trend that Kim views as coextensive with Japanese imperialism. Interestingly, many contemporary cinematic and literary works that foreground Zainichi subjectivity, such as the films GO (2001), Pacchigi! Love & Peace (2007), and Annyong Kimchi (1999) and the novel Jini no pazuru (2016) similarly structure their narratives around a “confession” or “coming out” that implies a possible resolution to issues of discrimination or ethnic identity with confession posited as the binary opposite of “passing.” This paper interrogates these cinematic instances of confession to ask questions such as: Do these acts signify, as Kim Sok-pom might suggest, a recapitulation of the colonial logic of Japanese pure literature or do they constitute a creolization or “deterritorializing” of the I-novel framework, which aims to subvert or challenge this hegemonic trope in the process? What is the relationship that exists between the acts of “passing” and confession in these films—are they viewed as mutually exclusive or is there a more complex notion of negotiation that suggests the potential for intersectionality and the coexistence of multiple identities? Finally, this paper will compare notions of confession (or “kamingu auto”) to that of the LGBTQ context, the latter of which has also been subject to much criticism in recent years for both reifying heteronormative binaries and suppressing racial difference. I will argue that, for Zainichi, the visual politics of passing is even further complicated through its association with queerness, simultaneously divorcing the act of “coming out” from its original context while also racializing/reracinating the confessional narrative that has been so framed by colonial discourse.
Writing Literary History Across Languages: Moving Beyond the Challenges of Zainichi Studies in Korean/Japanese
SONG Hyewon (Osaka City University)
This paper discusses the challenges of writing a literary history of Zainichi Koreans. No such history has been attempted in recent years, whether the starting point is understood as the beginning of the 20th century, when the Korean peninsula was colonized by the Japanese empire, or August 15th 1945, the collapse of the empire and "liberation" of the peninsula. Some of the challenges to writing and understanding this history include: the absence of an authority on Zainichi literature and literary studies, the deep-rooted colonialism in Japanese society, the fierce conflict between North and South Korea, the persistent academic nationalism in Japan and the Koreas, the conventional scholarly divide between the periods before and after the “liberation” of Korea, and the neglect of bilingualism and gender in Zainichi Korean literature. These combined causes have even prevented scholars of Zainichi literature from conducting fundamental research such as the collection and organization of primary documents such as literary works. In this presentation, I will cover the challenges of writing a “literary history of Zainichi Chōsenjin/Jaeil Chosŏnin” based on my experiences, primarily, in Japanese academia.
5:30 – 7:00 (9:30 – 11:00a)
Panel 6 – Co-opted Colonial Figures
Son Kijŏng and the Malleability of Representation
Jonathan GLADE (University of Melbourne)
Although the emergence of the category of “Zainichi” is most often located in the early postwar period, many of the keys issues that shape and define the struggles of Koreans in postwar Japan—identity, naming, agency, etc.—have roots, similar to population itself, in Japan’s earlier colonization of the Korean Peninsula. Among the most famous of Koreans in Imperial Japan, the case of Olympic gold medalist Son Ki-jŏng is particularly instructive in terms of understanding how Korean identity was constructed and mobilized during Japan’s colonial rule. Through analyzing images of Son Ki-jŏng, Ch’oe Sŭng-hŭi, and the nameless masses of Koreans spread throughout the empire, I focus on three key “oppositional” categories of representation: (1) multi-ethnicity versus unity, (2) exotic other and national hero, and (3) allies and threats. While these categories designate contrasting images, they share the same imperial logic. Further, I address the subtlety of Imperial Japanese ideology and the malleability of images of the colonized, and in so doing, move past the binary of collaborator versus resistor framework employed by historians of colonial Korean and argue that much of the rhetoric around “resistance” and “collaboration” stems from the ways in which images are read and not from the actions of the colonized subjects.
Authoritative Gentleness around Colonial Children’s Compositions: On Ch’oi Ingyu’s Tuition (1940)
TOBA Koji (Waseda University)
This paper explores the entangled power relationships around Ch’oi Ingyu’s Tuition (1940). The film is based on a composition written by U Yeongdal, who was a fourth grader in Gwangju. His composition of the same title won the Academic Affairs Director Award, given by the Office of the Korean Government-General. The process of its writing and adaptation bears similarity to that of Toyoda Masako’s Composition Class (1937) which was made into a movie of the same title directed by Yamamoto Kajiro, but the colonial situation made Tuition more complicated. By examining the relationships between the Japanese teacher and the Korean students in the film, and between the judges and students who wrote compositions, we will discover implications of authoritarianism in the strange gentleness of Japanese figures.