Zainichi Koreans in History and Memory (2009)

CAS Review, 2013

This paper assesses the migration pattern of Koreans into Japan from the early twentieth century to the height of the Cold-War-mitigated Korean War in the early 1950s. Arriving as colonials forcibly drafted as labourers into Japanese military industries, Koreans gradually settled down in Japan along with their families, with many of them inter-marrying into “mainstream” Japanese society. As Korea was divided into north and south, so were the ethnic Koreans’ loyalties and activities while in Japan. From this juncture, this paper tries to re-visit the conflicting loyalties of the Koreans: to a divided fatherland and to an adopted homeland that seemed to be antagonistic to their continued presence. Numerous secondary sources are available on the topic as this paper seeks to filter through the problem of “dual loyalty” complicated by political and economic conditions surrounding their ‘naturalisation’ in Japan. This paper looks at the question of identity and/or integration into “mainstream” Japanese society. This of course touches on the frame of culture and identity among Koreans’ view of themselves in Japan vis-à-vis their Japanese neighbourhood. All in all, this survey seeks to assess the historically-mitigated permanence of a minoritised status that ethnic Koreans suffered in Japan up until the late twentieth century. Recent economic changes have however contributed to positive developments between ethnic Koreans and mainstream Japanese in Japan in recent times.

Gaia Books, 2008

This book traces the origins and transformations of a people-the Zainichi, migrants from the Korean peninsula to Japan and their descendants. Using a wide range of arguments and evidence-historical and comparative, political and social, literary and pop-cultural-John Lie reveals the social and historical conditions that gave rise to Zainichi identity, while simultaneously demonstrating its complex, fractured, even ephemeral nature. Key to understanding Zainichi ideology are, for Lie, the nationalist yearnings it expressed from a Frontispiece: Y. David Chung, Satisfaction (detail), 1993, graphite and watercolor. The Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA) is an initiative of International and Area Studies, University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with the University of California Press, the California Digital Library, and international research programs across the UC system. GAIA volumes, which are published in both print and openaccess digital editions, represent the best traditions of regional studies, reconfigured through fresh global, transnational, and thematic perspectives. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

2012

214 the presence of positions of maneuvering. Further, recent scholarship has contributed much more nuanced and complex studies on the socalled "dark era" than Atkins acknowledges. While critiquing the lack of nuance in a postcolonial nationalist predilection for "sticking it to the Big Man" (Japanese imperialists, in this case) and rightly calling for a consideration of the complex perspectives of the colonizers, Atkins at times is in danger of reducing the complexities of perspectives from the colony and the postcolony to that of undifferentiated "nationalism" or postcolonial ressentiment. Nonetheless, Primitive Selves makes an important contribution to global empire studies, the disciplines of history, ethnography and anthropology, as well as to transnational Japanese and Korean studies and should be widely consulted by scholars and students of these areas and beyond.

European Journal of Korean Studies, 2018

Kim Saryang (real name: Kim Sich’ang, 1914–1950) was among the Korean authors of the 1930s and 1940s who wrote frequently on the issues related to the Korean ethnonational identity, both in Korean and in Japanese. In May 1945, when dispatched on a lecture tour to the Japanese army units stationed in North China, he used this opportunity to escape and join the Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army guerrillas in the Taihang Mountains. His China diary, Ten Thousand Li of a Dull-Witted Horse (Nomamalli, serialized in Seoul-based journal Minsŏng in 1946–47 and published in book form in Pyongyang in 1947), was written in his new status as a North Korean writer; the book is the main object of analysis in this article. The diary was an attempt to systemize the memories of the joint Sino-Korean anti-Japanese struggle, with the continuous process of building new, Socialist subjectivities in Communist-controlled parts of China and Korea. The article deals with the ways in which the new, postcolo...

International Journal of Korean History, 2022

This paper takes Imamura Eiji (1911–?) as a case study in developing a theory of minor literary style and pedagogical poetics in Japaneselanguage Manshū literature. At the same time, it grapples with reading Japanese-language Manshū literature with postcolonial reflexivity. Imamura Eiji was an ethnic Korean who was an active participant in the Japanese language literary community of Japan-occupied Manchuria. While he is best known for his short story “Travel Companions,” this paper contends that his work and position within the Manchukuoan state can be better understood through the juxtaposition of multiple of his diverse works, including another short story entitled “New Womb.” Borrowing from Elleke Boehmer’s “postcolonial poetics,” I approach these texts from the perspective of not merely what politics they attempt, but also how they do so aesthetically and technologically. I conclude that Imamura produced a form of minor style observable in other contemporary literary production ...

This paper examines how the Japanese popular imaginings of Korea were constructed in conjunction with the imperial transformation of the Meiji state. How did the Meiji Japanese try to resolve what Benedict Anderson (1983: 93) has termed "the inner incompatibility of empire and nation" as they won wars against China (1894-1895) and Russia (1904Russia ( -1905 and expanded spheres of influence over neighboring Asian countries? How were the cultural boundaries of the Japanese nation re-drawn, and how in the process were the Japanese self and Asian Others re-figured in new relationship to each other? Or, more concretely, how and what sorts of perceptions of Korea and the Korean people were produced and consumed during the late Meiji period when the "new lands" (shinryodo) were placed under firm control?

Although life for Japan's zainichi Korean population has been influenced by many factors, the development of discourse and debate internal to the zainichi population from the early 1970s onwards reflects enormous change in perspectives of the location of zainichi identity. In this paper I trace the internal discourse produced by zainichi intellectuals and public commentators from the early 1970s until the early 2000s and argue that the genesis of this discourse can be represented by a temporal and spatial shift in power and politics from older to younger generations. This shift in power allowed for the creation of a hybrid identity away from the hegemonic control of zainichi political organisations and anti-Japanese nationalism. In particular, I focus on Kim Iong Myung's articulation of the third way and its progressive, but at the same time excusatory, characteristics and how this and subsequent debate have been concerned primarily with the location of zainichi identity.

Korean Studies, 1997