Seoul Journal of Korean Studies最新文献

Abstract:

A growing body of research, writing, and new spaces for exhibitions, film-showings, dialogue, and exchange elucidate rich and diverse forms of cultural production by Zainichi Koreans across generations. The first section of this paper introduces selected collaborative research and curatorial projects conducted from 2000 to the present that have engaged artists, scholars, and activists concerned with Korean diaspora and postcolonial studies, intergenerational memory and contemporary art in Japan. Over the last two decades, a younger generation of artists and curators and new possibilities to hold exhibitions have helped make contemporary art works by Zainichi Koreans more visible in Japan. At the same time, in a context where the history and political struggles faced by Zainichi Koreans are still not well-understood and as tensions in the East Asian region and polarizing right-wing media generating hate speech are again on the rise, many of these artists are finding ways to make personal family histories that are entangled with colonial history visible; these histories have often been invisible in official historical and mainstream media narratives. The second section focuses on Soni Kum's Morning Dew: The Stigma of Being "Brainwashed" (2020), a collaborative project supported by the Kawamura Arts and Cultural Foundation, Socially Engaged Art Support Center, that has opened up a space for dialogue about Zainichi Koreans impacted by the North Korean Repatriation Project (1959–1984). Through their works, Soni Kum and other participating Japanese artists engage with "ex-returnees" deeply affected by their cross-border migrations and present-day struggles, as they explore themes of visibility and invisibility, voices and silence.

Abstract:

This study analyzes implicit racist rhetoric in Japan after the Hate Speech Elimination Act was enacted in 2016. While the law brought about the deradicalization and decline of hate groups, it has been ineffective in regulating covert hate speech. Zainichi Koreans, the primary victims of such speech, have struggled to have the illegality of racial discrimination recognized in litigation. By analyzing the case of Shin Sugok versus DHC TV, this article addresses the question of how racists use hateful rhetoric against Zainichi Koreans in the post-HSEA era. Shin filed a lawsuit in 2018 claiming defamation by DHC TV and won substantial compensation; however, the initial court decision in 2021 did not find racial discrimination against her, and the discrimination was only recognized by the Appeals Court in 2022. This blurring of judicial decisions was due to the expressions of racial discourse being subtle, which is referred to as strategic racism. The TV program did not use discriminatory language but stimulated the interest of racist viewers by persistently referring to the ethnic origin of the plaintiff. In this sense, Japan has entered an era in which it is necessary to analyze implicit racial codes, similarly to the situation with racist discourse in the United States.

Abstract:

Since her debut in 2012, Fukazawa Ushio has become a critical voice in the Japanese literary scene, writing about social issues including hate speech against Zainichi Koreans, abuse of migrant workers, gender inequality, and misogyny. One of the significant aesthetic features of her work is the use of food and foodways to explore these issues. This article examines the short story collection The Matchmaker and the five-part food essay "When Yi Tongae Eats," focusing on their sensorial elaboration of Zainichi Koreans' experiences of discrimination and desire to belong, sitting both at the intersection of gender and ethnicity. Fukazawa's sensorial contemplation of the affective values associated with cooking, eating, and drinking, I argue, generates a sense of intimacy among characters and between text and reader that ultimately enables us to expand our understanding of the complexities of Zainichi Korean identity and their place in contemporary Japan.

Abstract:

This article examines the making of "refugees" in post-liberation South Korea (1945–1950). It shows that refugees were produced as a recognized social group through various institutions that coordinated their movement and engaged in care work, including the U.S. military, grassroots relief societies, and organs of the nascent South Korean government. After August 1945, millions of repatriates from Japan, Manchuria, and other parts of the Japanese empire "returned" to Korea. They were joined by migrants from the Soviet-occupied North. These sudden and simultaneous movements had profound demographic and social consequences for the South. The influx of refugees resulted in a near twenty-percent increase in the South's population and captivated the attention of the public and U.S. occupation forces, which came to see refugees as a critical foreign policy question. Problems wrought by colonial-era war mobilization, postwar shortages, division, and occupation were visibly reflected in the refugee population, especially in Seoul, where they formed communities. The neediest subset of refugees became the new indigent class of the South. Through a focus on refugees and institutions of care, this article places South Korea in broader post-WWII history and eschews the ideological binaries of the Cold War that has guided much of historical scholarship on the period.

Abstract:

Zainichi Korean literature, which addresses questions concerning the Zainichi Korean minority, can be considered as one among many postcolonial literatures. By examining works of Sagisawa Megumu, Kaneshiro Kazuki, and Kim Masumi as case studies, I position contemporary Zainichi Korean literature within the broader context of postcolonial global history. Sagisawa's novel Saihate no futari (Two persons at the margins, 1999) narrates the relationship between a Japanese woman, whose father is an American GI, and a Zainichi Korean man. After the man succumbs to leukemia, the woman discovers that his mother was a survivor of the atomic bomb. The silencing of his mother's voice can be analyzed using Spivak's concept of the subaltern. Kaneshiro's novel GO (2000) addresses Korea's division as a consequence of imperialism and the Cold War. Furthermore, it draws connections between African Americans in the United States and the Zainichi Korean minority, which can be interpreted as an allusion to Bhabha's concept of mimicry. In Kim Masumi's novel Nason no sora (The sky of Nason, 2001), a Zainichi Korean woman residing in the United States engages with both the Japanese expatriate community and Asian Americans, contending with essentialist concepts of ethnicity. I argue that in the selected novels both the literary negotiations of Zainichi Korean postcoloniality and its entanglement with global history as well as the references to other diasporas, namely, the Asian and African diasporas in the United States, contribute to a subversive reframing of some prevailing narratives concerning the Zainichi Korean minority in Japan.

Abstract:

This article explores how the fates of Japan's "foreign" communities—both "oldcomer" Zainichi Korean residents and "newcomer" foreign residents—have, especially since the 1990s, become tethered to one another. The authors argue that the postwar Zainichi Korean campaigns for legal, social, economic, educational, ethnic, constitutional, and welfare benefits have laid a foundation of "residency provisions" that the contemporary newcomer foreign community have also come to heavily rely on. However, access to such residency provisions by non-Japanese has increasingly come under attack from nativist and xenophobic groups such as the Zaitokukai and political parties such as the Japan First Party. More recently, waves of COVID-19 pandemic border closures and "states of emergency" incited a cultural and political environment in which "foreigners" became inextricably linked to the virus as a threat. Political and public support for border closures and stricter immigration controls coalesced with divisive and xenophobic movements that had primarily targeted Zainichi Koreans. The authors maintain this resulted in a shift towards exclusionary discourses directed at Japan's "foreigner" communities more generally. As social outgroups in contemporary Japan, Zainichi Koreans and newcomer foreigners are semantically, socially, and—most importantly—politically excluded through the Japanese/foreigner divide that continues to permeate Japanese self-consciousness. In conclusion, the case study of "IKUNO Tabunka Flat" is introduced as a model of Zainichi Korean grass-roots multiculturalism that attempts to overcome social division and isolation in Ikuno's "foreign" communities and assist in the creation of a more substantive and meaningful multicultural community in contemporary Japan.

Reviewed by:

• Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics, and Art to Come ed. by Lee Chonghwa
• Christine L. Marran

The essays, artwork, and moving images that comprise Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics and Art to Come express the legacies and shadows of colonial violence in East Asia through aesthetics, bodily images, and a decolonial vision depicting "an Asia yet to come." The "wound" in the title stands for the trans-generational ruptures experienced by women, laborers, and islanders under the Japanese empire. These wounds have yet to heal in the wake of colonial violence and a postwar discursive history that seeks to erase these transgressions and relations formed as a result of these wounds. As one of the editors of the volume, renowned scholar of Asian studies Brett de Bary puts it, the wound expresses past violences, but it also expresses a form of bodily experience and vulnerability. In this volume, the wound is portrayed through a range of material including prose, poetry, photographs, and moving images (attached to the inside cover is a DVD). The essays and artist interviews in particular illustrate how art forms, with their manifold images of bodily experience, can disrupt discursive histories produced by the nation-state. The volume's contributors confront Japan's "fraught contestation over its twentieth-century [End Page 587] national history" (xxxii). At the same time, they express new forms of connection and solidarity outside of the frame of the nation-state.

The curious structure of this volume brings together four prefaces and seven chapters. Most of the contributions were originally published in a Japanese volume. They have been expertly translated, with the help of multiple collaborators, by scholars Rebecca Jennison and Brett de Bary, who each wrote an informative preface describing how this volume came to be. The prefaces are essential to understanding the extent of community-building and artist-driven activism that preceded this volume. Prior to the book project, participants had formed an active working group, referred to throughout the book as the "Asia, Politics, Art" project, to address the "pedagogical narratives deployed by the Japanese nation-state, whose assimilative ideology produces and reproduces the unity of the nation by erasing difference" (xxxviii). Meetings in Okinawa and Tokyo, along with other dialogues, led to the Japanese book, Zanshō no oto: 'Ajia, seiji, āto' no mirai e, edited by philosopher and poet Lee Chonghwa. She gathered together Zainichi Korean, Oki