Between Jeju and Hanshin: Intimate Migration

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Great Hanshin Earthquake, which struck western Japan on 17 January 1995, ushered in a year of social, economic, and political upheaval. In his prize-winning short story ‘“Aboji” o fumu’, Oda Makoto employs the earthquake to explore this broader upheaval and the unresolved postwar tensions that it revealed, in particular the legacy of Japan’s colonization of Korea. This article offers a close reading of Oda’s story, contextualizing it within his other writings, the events of 1995, and broader postwar history, particularly the migrant flow between the Korean island of Jeju and the Hanshin (Osaka-Kobe) region. It examines how Oda uses images of land and water, fixity and flow, to undermine the coherence of the nation and substitutes an understanding of the colonial legacy grounded in the local. This reading offers an example of how to recognize the significance of this year of upheaval, as it is represented in Japanese cultural production in and around 1995, as marking the start of a rupture with the postwar order that would be confirmed two decades later by another, greater catastrophe at Fukushima.