ABSTRACTS
Revealing Difference: Marking Ethnicity in Zainichi Literature
Jonathan Glade
Published twelve years apart, Kim Sa-ryang’s “Into the Light” (1939) and Kim Tal-su’s “Village with a View of Mt. Fuji” (1951) straddle the August 15, 1945 border that separates Imperial Japan (or colonial Korea) from postwar occupied Japan (or “liberated” Korea). Since these two works represent different sides of this chronological binary, it is telling that both represent Japanese society as being stratified based on an insurmountable imperial structure of ethnic difference. Both texts are critical of this stratification and endeavor to bridge these ethnic divides: “Into the Light” by exploring the liminal spaces of “hybrid” identity and “Village with a View of Mt. Fuji” by attempting to form a bond of solidarity between ethnic Koreans and Burakumin. Yet, at the same time, these two short stories both rely upon essentialized, insurmountable notions of ethnicity in their representations of ethnic difference. This paper explores this seeming contradiction between connection and disconnection as a means of understanding the ways in these two texts simultaneously critique and reinforce a hierarchical social structure of ethnic difference.
Beyond Language: Reading Yi Yanji’s Yuhi
Jimin Ha
Yi Yanji’s novel Yuhi (1988), winner of the 100th Akutagawa prize in 1988, revolves around the unnamed narrator’s recollection of a zainichi woman, Yuhi, who at the time of narration, has returned to Japan following an unsuccessful visit to discover her roots in Korea. The narrator’s reminiscence begins with the 400-page-document, which Yuhi wrote in Japanese but titled “Our Country” in Korean. Yuhi leaves it behind with the narrator who does not know Japanese. Alongside with the Freudian notion of melancholy, this paper reads the narrator’s act of recalling as her way of deciphering the writing that she cannot understand. This paper considers three melancholic subjects-- the narrator, Yuhi, and the narrator's aunt-- and argues that Yuhi's melancholy, resulting from her denial to pass either as Japanese or Korean and loss of both Japanese and Korean identity, allows her and the narrator to approach modes of communication beyond language. This paper also argues that Yuhi’s denial to pass reveals that zainichi’s lack of language to express the complexity of their lives.
Passing Perils: In/Visibility and Im/Permeable Boundaries in Zainichi-Japanese Narrations of the 1923 Kantō Korean Massacres
Andre Haag
The violent “Korean Panic” after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake exposed like few other events from the prewar imperial period the permeability of borders separating Japanese and Korean bodies, and the attendant perils of illicit passing. The near impossibility of identifying on sight ethnic Korean individuals, let alone telling law-abiding Koreans from rumored insurgents (futei senjin), awoke anxieties about passing and mistaken identities inherent in colonial discourses that produced both surface similarities and less visible, tangible differences in subjects. Against this backdrop, language, specifically spoken language and pronunciation—“the tongue that divided life and death,” in Sonia Ryang’s words—became indispensable in establishing identity and difference during the Panic. Yet, language itself proved an unstable category of differentiation.
This paper examines the significance of the Kantō Earthquake massacres as written word, in Japanese, subsequently produced by both colonizer and (post-)colonized authors. The 1923 violence was reconstructed and attributed meaning through textual inscriptions (most powerfully literary narratives) that made the resident Korean community visible within Japanese literature, while often obscuring the perils of passing on both sides of imperial subjectivity’s bleeding edges. Postcolonial Japanese literary narratives by Zainichi writers have rendered the experience of post-earthquake persecution not merely a touchstone substantiating precarious ethnic identity, but an impermeable border dividing the communities of victims and perpetrators. Resisting the tendency to regard retellings of the historic violence in Zainichi literature as de rigueur signaling of ethnic origins, however, this paper reads idiosyncratic literary reflections on 1923 by ethnic Korean writers from Chŏng Yŏn-kyu to Yu Miri, in dialogue with majority Japanese novelists’ narrations, for how they enact other, more devious forms of textual and narrative passing: i.e., by channeling the dead, inhabiting unauthorized subject positions, and proposing alternative solidarities across ethnonational boundaries proven once again to be permeable.
The Minority Machine: Alterity and Excess in the Films of Sai Yōichi
Nathaniel Heneghan
This paper examines the cinema of zainichi Korean filmmaker Sai Yōichi, focusing primarily on two of his more overlooked films —his debut feature, Mosquito on the 10th Floor (1983), and Soo (2007), a Japanese-Korean coproduction and his first (and only) work filmed entirely in Korean with an all-Korean cast. Using John Lie's writing on zainichi Korean culture and Deleuze's Difference and Repetition as a theoretical framework, I contend that the instances of doubleness and excess in these works serve as an expression of zainichi alterity by reconstituting passing as a subversive mode of ideological critique that underscores the fluidity and instability of ethnic identity. This paper reads the sense of alienation that pervades Mosquito on the 10th Floor as a form of zainichi "disrecognition," or state of being both insulted and unacknowledged in Japanese society that is coextensive with the act of passing. Unlike Sai's previous works, Soo does not overtly address issues of zainichi subjectivity. However, I read the coproduction as an instance of creolization for its potential to destabilize nationalist cinematic discourses and interrogate notions of transnational hybrid identity. While masquerading (or “passing”) as "pure entertainment" (marked by an ostensible absence of political content), this paper contends that, by using events in Korea to discuss zainichi subjectivity, the film signifies Sai's concerted attempt to participate in the tradition of "serious" zainichi literature.
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The Limits of Empathy: Documenting Zainichi Students' Honmyō Sengen
So Hye Kim
This paper analyzes a South Korean documentary film describing zainichi students’ honmyō sengen (lit., “declaration of autonym”), and the ensuing dispute with a zainichi filmmaker over authorship. In recent years, more South Korean independent documentary films have portrayed zainichi students at Chosŏn Schools (Chōsen gakkō), schools for ethnic Koreans administered by the pro-DPRK zainichi organization Ch’ongryŏn in Japan. Compared with the relative visibility of zainichi students in this Korean ethnic education system, representations of zainichi’s complicated ethnic identity are rare in South Korean films. Hong Hyŏng-suk’s 1998 film, Ponmyŏng Sŏnŏn [Reclaiming Our Names] is the only South Korean film depicting zainichi Korean students’ struggle with their two names, tsūmei (Japanese proper name) and honmyō (Korean original name). This film was screened to critical acclaim at the Pusan Film Festival in 1998, even winning the Unp’a prize for Best Documentary. However, a few days after the festival, zainichi filmmaker Yang Yong-hi claimed that Reclaiming Our Names used about 10-minutes of footage from her own film without permission and the overall story was plagiarized from her own film on the same topic.
This paper scrutinizes the sociocultural context of the films, wherein the Korean film industry witnessed significant shifts toward democratization and globalization, which subsequently raised the visibility of zainichi in South Korea. By following the film texts and surrounding debates about plagiarism, this paper examines the disparate interpretations of two filmmakers on the issue of zainichi students’ ethnic passing in Japan. It illuminates the shifting positions of zainichi Koreans in and out of the Korean film industry and underlying disparities in the directors’ mobility across the border. I argue that the dispute over Reclaiming Our Names reveals South Korean filmmakers’ limitations in understanding zainichi Koreans’ contested position under Cold War politics and in turn, exposes the limits of their empathy with those questions of ethnic identity.
Politics and Poetics of Passings and Impasses: Japanophone Literature and Kim Saryang
Nayoung Aimee Kwon
As a follow-up to my recent work on the absence of a Japanophone Literature as a symptom of the contested legacies of Japan as a “minor empire” in global discussions on empires, this paper examines the figure of the translator, the counterfeit, and other linguistic “phonies” in the writings of Kim Saryang (1914-1950?) and other Japanophone writers from the Japanese empire. These figures, often seen trespassing linguistically and literally back and forth between the colony and metropole, are ubiquitious in the works of Kim and his counterparts who lived and worked along the borderlines of the colonial divide. Not all of them manage to “pass” smoothly across however; some get themselves stuck at the border or find themselves moving in circles in an endlessly repetitive impasse. I trace the borderlines of (post)colonial literary and historical divides that differentiate the stories and histories of those who can and cannot pass into significance in the unequal context of empire and its still ongoing repercussions today.
More than Child’s Play:
Children’s Self-Fashioning in Kim Ch’ang-Saeng’s “Akai mi”
Catherine Ryu
This study aims to illuminate the anatomy of childhood fantasies in Kim Ch’ang-Saeng’s 1988 novella “Akai mi” (Crimson Fruit). Kim is a relatively unknown second-generation zainichi author, hailing from Ikaino—the heartland of the Korean community in Japan. Her novella depicts the inner landscape of the protagonist On-nyo—a single mother, second-generation zainichi woman—ruminating one evening on her life and her family history over three generations. The novella does not necessarily focus either on the notion of fantasies or that of passing. Yet, examining On-nyo’s recollected childhood fantasies in light of her psychologically perturbed young daughter’s fantasies, both refracted through the lens of passing, can serve as an effective conduit into Kim’s conceptualization of zainichi identity and its formation. In particular, by analyzing the similarities and differences in multifaceted childhood fantasies—some imagined and others embodied— by young girls from two generations in “Akai mi,” this study elucidates a set of key components such as desire, gender, and history, to name just a few, that are constituents of fantasies and passing alike. In so doing, this study will unveil the import of children’s self-fashioning not merely as child’s play but as a telling manifestation of the intricate interactions between a child’s perceived reality and the realm of her imagination that are deeply inflected by the familial, national, and global legacies into which she is born. Children’s self-fashioning thus analyzed can potentially contribute to theorizing and articulating the poetics of passing as an established form of social practice in zainichi communities and beyond.
“Zainichi” Literature and the Rhetoric of Colorblindness
Cindi Textor
Contemporaneously with the release of the eighteen volume Collected Works of “Zainichi” Literature (“Zainichi” bungaku zenshū), discussions began to emerge as to whether the end of “Zainichi” literature was nigh, with one elder statesman of the genre claiming that after he died, “Zainichi” literature would cease to exist. Compounding this anxiety was the refusal of high profile writers of the youngest generation such as Yū Miri to have their work included. Yū’s wholesale rejection of the Zainichi label could perhaps be called “post-Zainichi,” in reference to the “post-racial” discourse of the United States, and with no less irony, given the emboldened nativist sentiments and hate speech campaigns targeted specifically at “Zainichi” Koreans occurring in Japan at the same time.
In the case of the United States, the rhetoric of colorblindness is central to the notion of a “post-race” timeline. As Patricia Williams points out, this rhetoric reconfigures racial anxiety as physical deficiency. “Colorblindness,” then, carries with it not only the self-confounding irony of the “post-race,” but also a slippage between the ability to see and the will to see. In this paper, I explore the trope of blindness in Zainichi narratives as a site of intersection between disability as constructed vis-à-vis the normative body and the politics of racial recognition. Specifically, I ask what possibilities for Zainichi futures are enabled by a (dis)ability-inflected understanding of Zainichi difference, in which the invisible is made visible.
安部公房と民族意識 Abe Kobo and His Consciousness of Ethnicity
鳥羽耕史 Koji Toba
満州国と称された中国東北部で幼少期を過ごし、反米愛国の民族主義を掲げた日本共産党でも活躍した安部公房にとって、民族の問題は重要なものであった。初めて東ヨーロッパを旅行した際の紀行文『東欧を行く』には、ジプシーなどに関わる民族問題への直接的な言及が見られる。また、小説・戯曲などの作品の上でも、デビュー作の『終りし道の標べに』にはじまり、「飢えた皮膚」、「制服」、「どれい狩り」、『けものたちは故郷をめざす』、『砂の女』、『他人の顔』などの作品において、民族問題に関わる考察が伺える。本発表では、こうしたエッセイや小説・戯曲から、在日問題にとどまらない民族問題に関わる安部公房の視点について考察したい。
The problem of ethnicity was very important for Abe Kōbō, who was raised in northeastern China, formerly known as Manchuria, and who was an active member of Japanese Communist Party that raised the flag of nationalism against the US Occupation. In his travel writing "Going across Eastern Europe" (Tōō o iku), which depicted his first trip there, Abe Kōbō directly refers to the issue of ethnicity through references to “gypsies” and others. Furthermore, he investigates the subject of ethnicity in various other novels and plays, such as his debut novel "At The Guidepost at the End of The Road" (Owarishimichi no shirube ni), “Starving Skin” (Ueta hifu), “Uniform” (Seifuku), “Slave Hunting” (Dorei-gari), "Beasts Head for Home" (Kemono-tachi wa kokyō o mezasu), “The Woman in the Dunes” (Suna no onna), and "The Face of Another" (Tanin no kao). In this presentation, I intend to consider Abe Kōbō's viewpoint regarding issues of ethnicity not limited to the topic of Zainichi, from his essays, novels, and plays.
Passing in “Postwar” Japan: On Yi Yangji’s “I Am a Korean”
Christina Yi
Among the many resident Korean writers who made names for themselves in the 1970s and 1980s, Yi Yang-ji (1955-92) was arguably one of the most prominent. Her Japanese-language novella Yuhi was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1989, making her only the second resident Korean to win the prize; the novella’s subsequent translation into Korean that same year also ensured her recognition in South Korea as well. In “I am a Korean” (Watashi wa Chōsenjin), a college essay written before her rise to literary acclaim, a young Yi reminisces about her experiences growing up as one of the only ethnically Korean residents of a rural town in Yamanashi Prefecture. My paper considers the issue of passing as Japanese in “I am a Korean” through Rey Chow’s theory of coercive mimeticism. While Chow defines coercive mimeticism as that process where “the ethnic person is expected to come to resemble what is recognizably ethnic,” how might we understand the dynamics of ethnicity in settings where successful assimilation is meant to be achieved only upon the erasure of ethnic as a condition? In considering the politics of passing in postwar Japan, the paper will elucidate the historical, social, and legal processes of identity formation in terms of performances that fuse the visual and the verbal together, moving across space and through time.
To Pass or to Come Out: On the Identity Politics of Zainichi Koreans in the Late 1960s
Shoya Unoda
From the viewpoint of existing zainichi literature studies in Japan, passing is a difficult topic to discuss, because its research interests have focused on zainichi writers who clearly have Korean ethnic identity. The works of zainichi literature written by these zainichi writers have often been analyzed by examining how Korean ethnic identity is constructed in their works. It can be said, therefore, that researchers of zainichi literature in Japan have passed by the problem of passing. However, from the viewpoint of social reality, passing is definitely an important topic. The majority of zainichi Koreans live their daily lives using their Japanese-style names and without expressing their ethnic background. The portion of young zainichi Koreans who attend Korean ethnic schools is fairly small. 45 years have passed since the widely-read book Invisible People: Zainichi Koreans was published in 1973. But, in a sense, zainichi Koreans are invisible even today in Japanese society. It was in the late 1960s that to pass or to come out became an existential question for young zainichi Koreans. The rising tide of various social movements after 1965 triggered their identity crisis. The suicide committed in 1970 by Masaaki Yamamura (Ryang Jeongmyeong), a 25-year-old Korean-Japanese who graduated from Waseda University, can be regarded as the most symbolic case of the identity crisis of this generation. In this paper, which analyzes cases from the Hanshin (Osaka-Kobe) area, the relations between the identity politics of young zainichi Koreans and the rise of social movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s will be explored.