Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea 9780231545365

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
A Note on Names, Terminology, and Translations
Introduction
1. NATIONAL LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE
2. “LET ME IN!”: IMPERIALIZATION IN METROPOLITAN JAPAN
3. ENVISIONING A LITERATURE OF THE IMPERIAL NATION
4. COMING TO TERMS WITH THE TERMS OF THE PAST
5. COLONIAL LEGACIES AND THE DIVIDED “I” IN OCCUPATION-PERIOD JAPAN
6. COLLABORATION, WARTIME RESPONSIBILITY, AND COLONIAL MEMORY
EPILOGUE
Appendix: Korean Authors and Literary Critics
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

CO LO N IZIN G L AN GUAG E

A CENTER FOR KOREAN RESEARCH BOOK

CHRISTINA YI

COLONIZING LANGUAGE

Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea

Columbia University Press / New York

This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of the Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2016-OLU-2250006). Columbia University Press also wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by Waseda University toward the cost of publishing this book.

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Yi, Christina, author. Title: Colonizing language : cultural production and language politics in modern Japan and Korea / Christina Yi. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017029656 | ISBN 9780231184205 (cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780231545365 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Language policy—East Asia. | Language and culture— East Asia. Classification: LCC P119.32.E18 Y4 2018 | DDC 306.44/95—dc23 LC record available at https: //lccn.loc.gov/2017029656

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Noah Arlow

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii A Note on Names, Terminology, and Translations xi Introduction xv

1 . N AT I O N A L L A N G U A G E I D E O L O G Y IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE 1 2 . “ L E T M E I N ! ” : I M P E R I A L I Z AT I O N I N M E T R O P O L I TA N J A PA N 24 3 . E N V I S I O N I N G A L I T E R AT U R E O F T H E I M P E R I A L N AT I O N 47 4. COMING TO TERMS WITH THE TERMS O F T H E PA S T 72

CONTENTS

5. COLONIAL LEGACIES AND THE DIVIDED “ I ” I N O C C U PAT I O N - P E R I O D J A PA N 95 6 . C O L L A B O R AT I O N , WA RT I M E R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y, A N D C O L O N I A L M E M O RY 118 EPILOGUE 141

Appendix: Korean Authors and Literary Critics 153 Notes 155 Selected Bibliography 189 Index 199

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A

F TER W HAT FE E L S like innumerable years toiling over the writing of this book, I have finally arrived at the most humbling—but also the most pleasurable—of tasks: acknowledging the many individuals who made this book possible, although there is a risk I may run out of superlatives in doing so. I count myself fortunate for the community I found at Columbia University, beginning first and foremost with Tomi Suzuki and Theodore Hughes. Their tireless dedication, mentorship, and generosity easily outstrip any and all qualitative adjectives I could write here, and I confess I continue to rely upon their guidance. The same can be said of Haruo Shirane, whose always-practical advice has helped me reach the finish line and beyond. Paul Anderer pushed my research interests in exciting new directions and constantly challenged me to rethink the boundaries of my own assumptions. Special thanks, too, to Serk-Bae Suh, who continues to be a great source of support. I spent two years conducting research at Waseda University as a graduate student and returned to Waseda some years later (this time as an assistant professor) to write this book manuscript. Both stays were made possible through the sponsorship of Professor Toeda Hirokazu, who has always been unstinting with his time, knowledge, and encouragement. I am also deeply grateful to him for inviting me to join his Japanese Literary

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

and Cultural Reinvention Project and facilitating the publication of this book through a subvention from Waseda University. If there is anyone who deserves to be thought of as an onshi, with all that word’s most positive connotations, it is he! I have been fortunate to learn from many other scholars from Japan and Korea, including Lee Sungsi, Lee Yeounsuk, Ko Youngran, Mori Rie, Munakata Kazushige, Sakakibara Richi, Suh Kyungsik, Tanaka Yukari, Toba Koji, Tsuboi Hideto, Unoda Shoya, and Watanabe Naoki. Kwak HyoungDuck, Shiono Kaori, and Tokinoya Yuri were three friends and colleagues who helped make my time in Japan not only productive but fun. I would like to extend an additional thank-you to Yuri as well as to Seung-Min Lee, Hiroaki Matsusaka, and Mariko Takano for their invaluable research assistance during my time at Waseda. I have been doubly fortunate to work for a strong and supportive department at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Sharalyn Orbaugh has been a mentor to me since day one, in every possible way: with research, career development, teaching, student advising, and more. She also generously read portions of this manuscript in its various iterations, even in its roughest and most embarrassing state. Ross King and Christina Laffin likewise read portions of the manuscript and offered invaluable advice on the publishing process. I would like to particularly thank my other Japanese and Korean studies colleagues for their encouragement, including Don Baker, Stefania Burk, Rebecca Chau, Bruce Fulton, Nam-lin Hur, Jessica Main, Joshua Mostow, and Peter Nosco. I have also benefited from many rich discussions with students at UBC, at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Akiko Hirao, Shota Iwasaki, and Cyrus Qiu all worked as my research assistants at various times over the past three years; this book could not have been completed without their help. I have had the great pleasure of presenting portions of my research at the University of Chicago, Hitotsubashi University, the University of Hong Kong, Lehigh University, Osaka University, Queens College, SUNY New Paltz, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Virginia, the University of Washington, and Waseda University; a sincere thank-you to the colleagues and students at these institutions for the feed-

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back. I am also grateful to Michael Bourdaghs, Hyaeweol Choi, Hirata Yumi, Hirose Yoichi, Ted Mack, Mariko Tamanoi, and Bob Tierney for their insightful discussant comments, all of which have enriched my work. Michiko Wilson, who was one of the first professors to invite me to give a talk, actually taught me Japanese literature when I was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia; she and Stefania Burk were the ones who first suggested I consider graduate school, and so in a way I owe them more than anyone. Jim Fujita, meanwhile, is the one who first set me on what has turned out to be a lifelong path of language learning. Many, many thanks to other friends and colleagues who also provided support, whether it was agreeing to read portions of a chapter or answering one of my thousands of questions regarding research and publication or providing me with delicious food (the best kind of support there is) or so on. This includes SeHyoun Ahn, Deokhyo Choi, Eun Jeong Choi, Nathen Clerici, Pau Pitarch Fernández, Jon Glade, Andre Haag, Eric Han, Nan Ma Hartmann, Nathaniel Heneghan, Reto Hofmann, Claire Hope, Brendan Jinnohara, Yumi Kim, Selma and Shih-wei Kraft, Léopold Lambert, Alex Lee, Nancy Li, John Lie, Daniel Poch, Catherine Ryu, Ginny Schneider, Mi-Ryong Shim, Satoko Shimazaki, Ji Young Shin, Nate Shockey, Ariel Stilerman, Shiho Takai, Cindi Textor, Nobuko Yamasaki, Hitomi Yoshio, and Jin Yu. Early stages of this project were made possible through generous research funding and administrative assistance from the Japan Foundation; the Social Science Research Council; the Waseda University 125th Anniversary Commemorative Junior Visiting Researcher Fellowship; the Weatherhead East Asian Institute; and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University. More recently, grants from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association of Asian Studies, the Peter Wall Institute at the University of British Columbia, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council allowed me to conduct further research and writing. Small portions of the historical context provided in the introduction and first chapter of this book appeared in a different version in “National Language, Imperialization, and the Gendered Aporia of Empire,” positions

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24, no. 4 (2016): 813–37. An earlier version of chapter 6 was originally published under the title “Decadence, Double Agents, and a Drunken Boat: Colonial Legacies in Tanaka Hidemitsu’s Yoidorebune” in the Proceedings for the Association of Japanese Literary Studies 17 (Summer 2016): 101–9. I am grateful to Jennifer Crewe, Christine Dunbar, and the staff at Columbia University Press for their great expertise, professionalism, and commitment to the humanities. I would also like to express my thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback, and to Stephen Ullstrom, who prepared the index. Finally, I would like to thank my family, who never once doubted my future, even when I did, and who never questioned the paths I took to get there, even if those paths were not the ones they would have chosen for themselves. I know my father would have been this book’s first and most enthusiastic reader had he been able to see it in print. This book is dedicated to him.

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confronts scholars who write in English about colonial-period and postwar Japanese-language literature by ethnically Korean writers is the romanization of names. The majority of Korean writers who wrote in Japanese between the 1930s and the 1950s, the period covered in this monograph, published under Korean names rendered in sinographs but without any glosses, leaving the question of pronunciation open. A few authors I discuss, including Yi Kwangsu, published under their “Japanese” names, created through sĎshi kaimei (establishing family names and changing given names), starting in the early 1940s but reverted back to their Korean names after 1945. Other authors, such as Chang Hy̡kchu, wrote under a number of different pen names; still others used the sinographs of their Korean names but preferred them to be read with the Sino-Japanese pronunciations, such as Ri Kaisei. When romanizing the names of ethnically Korean individuals, I follow the precedent set by other scholars in using their Korean names, following the McCune-Reischauer method of romanization. However, I make an exception when it is clear that the individual had his or her stated preference of pronunciation or when that individual has become known to an English-language audience under a different romanization. In such cases, I write the individual’s preferred or widely known romanization, followed P ER P ETU AL I S S U E TH AT

N O T E O N N A M E S , T E R M I N O L O G Y, A N D T R A N S L A T I O N S

by alternative romanizations of names in parentheses or endnotes. One example is Syngman Rhee (Yi S̿ngman). Additionally, I have included an appendix listing the sinographs, Sino-Korean reading, and Sino-Japanese reading of the names of major authors discussed in this book. Hyphens are avoided except in cases when clarification of spelling is necessary. The transliteration of names from Japanese-language fiction presents another set of complexities. Because the majority of the texts I discuss were published in journals based in Tokyo, as a general rule I have transliterated character names according to the Sino-Japanese readings expected by the journal’s target readership, which would have been primarily Japanese speakers from mainland Japan. However, in order to acknowledge the possibility of a multiplicity of readers and reading practices, I have included the Sino-Korean readings of names in parentheses whenever relevant. In the instances when the reading of a name is made deliberately ambiguous, as in Kim Talsu’s 1942 short story “Trash” (Gomi, discussed in chapter 5), I explain my rationale for romanization in a note. Japanese names and terms have been romanized according to the modified Hepburn system. Macrons have been dropped from names familiar to English-language readers, such as Tokyo, Osaka, and the like. Korean place-names have been romanized using the McCune-Reischauer method, except for Seoul (instead of S̡ul) and Pyongyang (P’y̡ngyang). No other issue captures the hybridity of postcolonial subjectivities than this issue of names, both of the self and other. Therefore, while the treatment of character names and places (especially in the case of self-identified zainichi literature) may seem inconsistent across English-language scholarship, I believe it is less important to determine some kind of standard model than to understand and interrogate the circumstances that have led to these differences. The same can be said of my use of Japanese and Korean terminology. Although many words in Japanese and Korean share the same sinographs and have intertwined histories, this is not to say that they are equivalent in meaning or function. Rather than provide a Japanese word followed by its Korean “equivalent,” then, I have chosen to present terminology according to its context. In other words, when quoting words that appear in a Japanese-

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language text, I use the Japanese reading, and I use the Korean reading in Korean-language texts. However, I do provide both readings in cases where I believe the author is using a term in a transcultural context or gesturing toward the simultaneity of a historical phenomenon—for example, with the “pro-Japanese” (in Korean, ch’inilp’a; in Japanese, shinnichiha) discourse exemplified in the writings of Kim S̡kp̡m, discussed in chapter 6. Because of the extensive quoting I do in my close readings of texts, I use notes when introducing bibliographic information and when clarifying the source text; in all other instances, I indicate the page number of the quotation in parentheses in the body of the text. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Japanese and Korean are my own.

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I

less than one year after the end of Japan’s long FifteenYear War (1931–1945), the prominent Japanese writer Shiga Naoya (1883–1971) published a controversial essay in which he advocated changing Japan’s national language from Japanese to French.1 The essay, “National Language Issues” (Kokugo mondai), blamed the Japanese language for stunting the country’s cultural growth and hindering the process of postwar reconstruction: “Although we may not fully realize it because we have been habituated to our national language since childhood, there is no language more incomplete and inconvenient than Japan’s national language. When one thinks of how badly the development of our culture has been hindered as a result, one realizes that we must use this opportunity to solve this problem at all costs. If we do not, it is no exaggeration to say that there is no hope that Japan will ever become a truly cultured nation.”2 While admitting that his belief in the inadequacy of the Japanese language was based more on his writer’s intuition than on any concrete linguistic evidence, Shiga also expressed confidence that his radical proposal could and should be adopted. Koreans had been able to “switch” (kirikaeta) to Japanese under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), he noted—so why couldn’t the Japanese people switch to speaking French, the most beautiful and cultured language in the world? N AP R I L 1 94 6,

INTRODUCTION

In the end, Shiga’s arguments were met largely by silence, and the essay had little impact on the language-reform policies that were enacted during the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952). What is striking about the essay, however, is not necessarily its message but the very fact of its existence. What were the historical and social conditions that could prompt one of Japan’s most well-known novelists to publish such a suggestion, in other words? How and why does language mediate the vertical relationship Shiga draws between Korea (formerly colonized by Japan), Japan (defeated and occupied by the Allied powers), and France (“liberated” and still a colonial power)? And who is included in his references to “we”? This book seeks to address such questions by examining how Japaneselanguage literature by Korean writers both emerged out of and stood in opposition to discourses of national language, literature, and identity. I begin with a study of the rise of Japanese-language writings by Korean colonial subjects in the 1930s and early 1940s, reassessing the sociopolitical factors involved in the production and consumption of these texts. I then trace how postwar reconstructions of ethnolinguistic nationality contributed to the creation of new literary canons in Japan and Korea, which were now configured along national, instead of imperial, borders. Although many of the Japanese-language works discussed in this book were condemned or suppressed in both countries after the war, these texts continued to be constitutive of the newly reconfigured literary canons precisely through their excision, as a structural aporia that both erased and appropriated the memory of the Japanese language as a language of imperialism. In this sense, this book presents a discursive history of modern Japaneselanguage literature from Korea and Japan. “Japanese-language literature” (Nihongo bungaku) is a contemporary term, used most often by scholars wishing to move beyond the national literature paradigm. Its origin can be traced back to the self-identified zainichi (resident) Korean author Kim S̡kp̡m (b. 1925).3 An outspoken critic of Japan’s colonial amnesia, Kim has argued that the Japanese that he and other zainichi writers employ necessarily differs from that of “native” Japanese speakers because of their acute awareness of Japanese as such and the fraught history that forced that language upon them. Another influential conceptualization has come

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from the comparative literature scholar Nishi Masahiko, who defines the term in relation to the gaichi (“outer territories,” or colonial peripheries) as “literature created by users of Japanese who come into sustained contact with, or adjacency to, languages other than Japanese.” 4 This definition is not limited to nonnative speakers but includes any and all writers who employ Japanese with a conscious awareness of its invented borders or who use it in an environment that makes those borders explicit. As an example Nishi cites Mori Ægai’s “The Dancing Girl” (Maihime, 1890), a linguistically hybrid text very much preoccupied with national and ethnic hierarchies. My own use of the term follows largely that of Nishi Masahiko: instead of treating Korea and Japan as separate units of analysis, I employ a more flexible framework centered on language in order to fully explore the ways key texts were produced, received, and circulated during the rise and fall of the Japanese empire. The writers featured in this book represent a range of backgrounds, subject positions, and political orientations—from the proletarian-writer-turned-“collaborator” Chang Hy̡kchu (1905–1997), who was born and raised in Korea as a colonial subject but who died in Japan as a naturalized Japanese citizen; to the Japanese settler Obi JĝzĎ (1909–1979), who professed a sincere love for his Korean peers even as his status as colonizer gave him privileges over them; to the zainichi writer Kim Talsu (1919–1997), who vociferously criticized the legacies of Japanese imperialism but could do so only in the language of his former colonizers. However, even in their competing narratives of identity and belonging we can still locate a common anxiety regarding the limits of language itself. Studying such texts illuminates how the assumed confluence of nation, ethnicity, and literature embedded in the term “Japanese (national) literature” (Nihon bungaku or kokubungaku) was never innocent nor inevitable but rather linked from the beginning to the problematics of imperial control. In exploring the Japanese language and its effects, then, I am concerned not with linguistic data and analysis as such but with language ideology. Judith Irvine’s succinct definition of language ideology as “the cultural (or subcultural) system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” provides a useful starting point for this book.5 Language ideology is of course by no means

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restricted to colonial contexts—but it can become particularly visible in them, as the seemingly self-evident relationship between language and national identity can no longer be taken for granted. All the writers I consider here—Korean and Japanese—shared a preoccupation with delineating the borders of a Japanese (language) literary canon, in part because the sociopolitical conditions in which they wrote put those borders in question. In their fiction we can see how language use itself was a site of contestation and negotiation, with urgent political ramifications. Examining Japanese-language texts from the 1930s through the early 1950s thus allows us to explicate in full the interrelated issues of cultural production, nation/empire building, and the formation of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities. As Raymond Williams stresses in Marxism and Literature, literary form is “inevitably a relationship” embedded in and constitutive of processes that are at once social, historical, and material.6 The ideology of the “national language” (kokugo) bound metropole and colony together through a complex system of textbooks and signages, government laws and educational practices, publishing markets and propaganda. The question of who was allowed to lay claim to the national language did not simply reflect but in fact constituted the Japanese empire and all its contradictions, and the answers given for that question would change even as the borders of Japan did. This does not mean that writers were slotted into some preexisting, self-evident category called Japanese literature. Rather, literary canonization in modern Japan was itself the process through which ideologies of (national, imperial, linguistic) identity came to signify, a point I detail in the section below.

A N AT I O N A N D E M P I R E B U I L T THROUGH LANGUAGE In the essay “National Language Issues,” Shiga Naoya cites the linguistic theories of Mori Arinori (1847–1889), who in 1873 proposed that Japan adopt English as a medium of communication. Mori, who served as Japan’s

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first envoy to the United States and later as Japan’s first minister of education for the fledging Meiji government (1868–1912), was concerned primarily with Japan’s precarious position vis-à-vis a dominant West. Mori stressed that his advocation of English was one made out of necessity, rather than desire. Japan’s rapidly expanding role in world affairs had forced “the absolute necessity of mastering the English language,” he argued, and only once Japan yielded to the linguistic “domination” of English would its political independence be secured.7 Mori’s suggestion would later come to be popularly known as the “Proposal to Abolish Japanese” (Nihongo Haishi Ron, or Kokugo Haishi Ron), and Shiga’s essay largely follows the same easy conflation of kokugo with Japanese. It must be pointed out, however, that this is an anachronistic and retrospective reading of Mori, one that could be made only after the intertwined relationship between national polity and language had become thoroughly naturalized. When Mori published his writings, there was as yet no set, unified notion of kokugo—nor any consensus on how to define the contours and borders of the Japanese language. Mori’s proposal was not a total rejection of the Japanese language so much as a declaration that “Japanese” was far from standardized or unified and therefore ill-suited to efficiently respond to the demands of the Western world. By the 1890s, however, the political and linguistic landscape had changed considerably: Japan had a national army, national education system, and imperial ambitions, all of which necessitated new debate on the role of language in producing and maintaining a strong nation-state. In 1894, linguistic nationalism found its most influential advocate in Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937, also known as Ueda Mannen), a linguist who became the leading architect of national language policy during the Meiji period. In a public lecture called “The National Language and the NationState” (Kokugo to kokka to) given in October 1894, Ueda laid out a number of basic kokugo tenets that would have an immense impact on later Japanese language policy makers. Using a metaphor of blood and the body, Ueda emphasized the organic link between language and the nation and their indispensible relationship to the kokutai (national polity). The Japanese language, Ueda declared, “is the spiritual blood of the Japanese people.

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Japan’s national polity is maintained by this spiritual blood, and the Japanese race is united because of this most strong and long-preserved chain.” 8 Ueda’s lecture both promoted and responded to a growing branch of Western (particularly German) linguistics that viewed a unified national language as not a result but the very condition of a unified nation. The diachronic mode of language united its speakers through the continuity of history; the synchronic mode of language united them through the coherence of space.9 Ueda had previously spent three years studying at Berlin University and Leipzig University, during a time when issues surrounding the classification and “purification” of the German language were at the forefront of intellectual debate. Members of the influential German Language Association (Allgemeine Deutsche Sprachverein) in particular argued that the lingering presence of foreign words in the German language constituted a dangerous obstacle in maintaining the integrity of the newly united German Empire. National language was necessarily a condition of national consciousness and the thread that bound all the disparate parts of the empire together.10 The timing of Ueda’s lecture takes on particular significance when considered against the global system of the nation-state and empire in the nineteenth century. Given two months after the start of the First SinoJapanese War and subsequently printed as part of the essay collection For the National Language (Kokugo no tame) two months after the war’s end, the lecture and its publication bracketed a key moment in history where Japanese nationalism and Japanese imperialism intersected. Japan acquired Taiwan as its first formal colony in 1895 through its victory over China; annexation of Korea followed in 1910. The colonial policies it pursued in both places thereafter would spell out the unspoken corollary to Ueda’s insistence that a strong national language ensured an independent nation— namely, that only independent nations would be given the right to determine and protect a national language. From the beginning, Japanese policy makers in colonial Korea and Taiwan consistently used the term kokugo (national language) and not Nihongo (Japanese language) to refer to Japanese in official documents and ordinances. Koreans and Taiwanese speaking Japanese, in other words, were said to be speaking the “national language.” The distinction between kokugo

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and Nihongo is an important one, because it reveals one of the ideological lynchpins behind Japan’s colonial strategies. One of the justifications put forth for colonization was the claim that Japan was combating the threat of Western imperialism. In order to set itself apart from Europe and the United States, then, the colonies had to be made both part of and one with Japan, at least at the level of discourse.11 Despite this rhetoric of inclusion, kokugo ideology was in reality more often wielded to maintain the distinction between colonizer and colonized. After the proindependence March First Movement in Korea in 1919, for example, efforts were made by the Government-General of Korea (GGK) to create at least a semblance of social equality in the legal structure on the peninsula. At the time, the public school education system had been divided along ethnic lines. Koreans were forbidden from attending the better-funded and more prestigious primary schools ( jinjĎ shĎgakkĎ) of their Japanese peers; instead, they attended a four-year regular school (futsĝ gakkĎ). A February 1922 ordinance attempted to address this inequality by raising the amount of primary school education to six years for Koreans and revising the age of admission from eight to six years old, the same as Japanese nationals. The ordinance also struck out all obvious references to ethnic segregation—while still keeping segregation in place, by adopting the phrase kokugo o jĎyĎ suru mono (those who habitually use the national language). Now only “those who habitually use the national language” were allowed to attend primary schools; those who did not were relegated to the regular schools.12 The start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 saw the full-scale launch of kĎminka (imperialization, Kr. hwangminhwa) policies in the colonies in an attempt to escalate assimilation efforts. Examples include sĎshi kaimei (literally, “establishing family names and changing given names”), enforced visits to Shinto shrines, and educational reforms. By the 1930s, Korea had been a colony of Japan for almost three decades, producing a young generation of Koreans who had been educated entirely or almost entirely through the colonial education system. Many of the intellectuals mentioned in this book completed their higher education in Tokyo and read and wrote fluently in Japanese. During the kĎminka period, the GGK

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encouraged Japanese-language publications by Koreans through sponsored contests, journals, and literary organizations. This push toward the Japanese language was accompanied by a concomitant suppression of Korean, through educational measures restricting and then finally abolishing the teaching of the Korean language in public schools in 1938 and 1941, respectively, and the forced shutdown of a number of Korean-language presses starting in the late 1930s. The existence of a Japanese-language canon in Korea was essential to maintaining the logic of Japanese imperialism, which positioned Korea as part of “Japan” in spirit if not in civic equality. Promoting the Japanese language became increasingly important to the GGK not only for advancing practical goals, such as effectively incorporating Korean volunteer soldiers into the Japanese military, but also for maintaining the ideology of inclusion and imperial benevolence. And yet this ideology could inadvertently turn on itself through the very terms of its logic. Colonial subjects who wielded the Japanese language could claim the same right to belong as a “native” Japanese citizen—though whether or not they would be heeded is another question entirely, one I explore in full in the first three chapters of this book. The latter half of the book moves to the immediate postwar period in Japan in order to consider how urgent new issues of time (remembering and historicizing Japanese imperialism) and space (redefining national borders in response to the nascent Cold War) affected Japanese literary production. The announcement of Japan’s surrender to the Allied powers in August 1945 signaled not only the end of the Pacific War but also the end of the Japanese empire, as one of the conditions of surrender was the redrawing of borders: according to the Allies, Japan was now to be a nationstate consisting only of “the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine.”13 Meanwhile, Korea, too, found new national borders being imposed on the peninsula, as the intervention of foreign powers led to the creation of the thirty-eighth parallel in August 1945 and the establishment of two competing governments on the Korean peninsula by 1948. Japan was occupied by the Allied powers from 1945 to 1952, a period that has come to be known as the Occupation period (senryĎki). Under the direc-

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tion of General Headquarters/Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, led by General Douglas MacArthur, a new Constitution of Japan was drafted and a series of changes were implemented in the areas of land reform, labor reform, women’s rights, and education. Most relevant to this book are the changes in definitions of citizenship that also occurred during this time. Even as late as 1947, colonial subjects were still technically counted as Japanese nationals, as they had been during the colonial period. With the Alien Registration Law of 1947, the Koreans who remained in Japan were forced to register as aliens. In 1952, they were stripped of Japanese citizenship and thereby effectively rendered stateless, as Japan did not have diplomatic relations with either North Korea or South Korea at that time. The term zainichi (literally, “residing in Japan”) came to be applied to this Korean diasporic community in Japan, and zainichi Korean literature roughly defined as those texts written in Japanese by ethnically Korean writers living in Japan. Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allied powers quickly became articulated as a break between a “prewar” and “wartime” history (senzen, senchĝ) and the “postwar” present (sengo). In Korea, meanwhile, the period between 1945 and 1948—that is, between the formal end of Japanese colonization and the creation of two competing governments on the peninsula— has been referred to as the “liberation space” (haebang konggan). Although Japan’s defeat was celebrated by many in Korea and elsewhere as the end of empire, the swift appearance of Soviet forces in the north and the U.S. military in the south soon belied expectations of full independence. With the partitioning of the peninsula, the very terms used to indicate “national literature” also underwent fragmentation, as Korean-language writings were reconfigured into North Korean literature (Chosʵn munhak) and South Korean literature (Han’guk munhak). In recent years, a growing number of scholars have questioned the aforementioned national histories and literary canons that were constructed in the postwar/postliberation periods. The past decade has seen a boom in English-language scholarship on colonial-period literature and the transcultural activities of Japanese and Korean writers in the context of empire.14 New research by Korean scholars has likewise shifted to consider hitherto overlooked texts from the late colonial period, including those that were

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previously dismissed as “collaborationist” in nature.15 Meanwhile, several important studies from North America have examined zainichi texts in relation to one another, situating these texts in the literary milieu of postwar Japan.16 However, there has been little attempt to provide a sustained analysis of the continuities and disruptions of Japanese-language literary production across the 1945 divide. This study addresses this lacuna by focusing on the 1930s through the 1950s, a crucial period in which writers in Korea and Japan were forced to directly confront or rearticulate the relationship between language, literature, and national/imperial belonging. In doing so, it shows how contemporary divisions between Korean and Japanese literatures, colonial and postcolonial history, and resistance and collaboration cannot be understood apart from the ideologies of language that were generated out of the trajectories of Japanese imperialism.

T H E I R O N I E S O F “ R E S I D E N T ” K O R E A N S TAT U S In order to illustrate the central role language ideology plays in formations of colonial and postcolonial literatures, here I wish to briefly introduce Yuhi (1988), a novella written by the zainichi Korean writer Yi Yangji (1955–1992).17 Since winning the Akutagawa Prize in 1989, Yuhi has been regularly held up by critics as a notable example of Japanese-language fiction because of its attention to the role of language in identity politics. Through the course of a single evening in Seoul, the unnamed Korean narrator delves into six months’ worth of memories of her friendship with the eponymous Yuhi, the zainichi Korean woman at the heart of the novel. Like a “small, restless knot,” Yuhi exists in the narrator’s recollections as someone who is paradoxically both inscrutable and transparent; present in memory although physically absent; impossibly childish, and impossibly mature.18 The dichotomies of her personality, in turn, reflect the dichotomy of her split nationality. Although Yuhi struggles to find a balance between the two words that make up her identity—zainichi and Korean—

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she ultimately fails. She flees back to Japan, unable to carve a niche for herself in Seoul, and the bereft narrator is left to wonder why. In one flashback, the narrator recalls how she and Yuhi fell into a discussion about the merits of the colonial-period writer Yi Sang (born Kim Haegy̡ng, 1910–1937). Yuhi confesses that although she admires Yi Sang, she is much more drawn to Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950?): “Students are biased against [Yi Kwangsu] because they say he was a puppet of the Japanese empire, but my feelings on the subject are more complicated.” Yuhi’s voice dropped. She had probably never told her classmates that she admired Yi Kwangsu. I said, “Yi Sang and Yi Kwangsu are completely different, aren’t they?” “Yes, but I just can’t stop thinking about Yi Kwangsu,” Yuhi replied, her eyes boring into mine again. (412)

Although widely considered to be a pioneer of modern Korean literature, Yi Kwangsu’s writings from the kĎminka period led to his later denigration as a pro-Japanese collaborator. In contrast, Yi Sang has been hailed for his “resistance” against colonialism, as perhaps most emblemized in his choosing a pen name that satirically appropriated a Japanese coworker’s mistaken address to “Ri-san” (Mr. Yi).19 The narrator makes no comment on the reputations of these authors at the time, but the significance of Yuhi’s reading preferences becomes increasingly clear as the story progresses. To the unnamed narrator, Yuhi’s inability to adapt to life in Seoul and her lack of progress in learning the Korean language are taken as proof that “in the end, zainichi Koreans are all Japanese.”20 Instead of “making this language and this country her own, she did the exact opposite: she turned back to the Japanese language. She revealed her true self through the Japanese she wrote” (427). In the end, what separates the narrator from Yuhi is not the physical distance between Japan and Korea but the linguistic gap opened up by the Japanese language itself.

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The narrator’s comment that zainichi Koreans “are all Japanese” ironically echoes the kĎminka essays of Yi Kwangsu, whose self-declared desire to “become Japanese” later came under attack in postliberation Korea.21 In Yuhi, however, the dividing lines between the colonial and the postcolonial, collaboration and resistance, and even Korea and Japan fall apart the moment they are brought into contact with the character of Yuhi, who is embodied by the Japanese writing she leaves behind. It is suggestive that neither the narrator nor Yuhi directly addresses the fact that both Yi Sang and Yi Kwangsu wrote in Japanese as well as in Korean. Only once the memory of their Japanese writings has been suppressed can Yi Sang and Yi Kwangsu stand as polar opposites in the collaboration-resistance binary. Introducing the Japanese language back into this binary exposes it as a false dichotomy. The language of the novella—which is narrated in Japanese by a Korean narrator who supposedly knows no Japanese—ironically underscores this point: it is the Japanese language that makes up the narration, but this fact can never be gestured to by the narrator herself; instead, the Japanese language is meant to act as a transparent translation through which the reader can access the Korean narrator’s thoughts. However, the fiction of transparency is constantly undercut by the Korean words, alphabet, and phrases that litter the text. These material signs of difference work to remind the reader of the artificiality of the novel’s linguistic structure and call attention to how language constitutes subjectivity, through complex and sometimes self-contradictory narratives irreducible to national borders. The reference to Yi Sang and Yi Kwangsu also raises another issue that is crucial to this book—namely, the historical reordering of time and space following the end of the Fifteen-Year War. Because Yi Sang died in 1937, he could be regarded by post-1945 Korean literary critics as someone untainted by the controversies left behind by kĎminka, whereas the later condemnation of Yi Kwangsu has been defined through nothing but his activities and writings from 1937 to 1945. The acceptance of August 1945 (the date when Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan to the Allied powers) as the end of the Japanese empire also had profound consequences for the reconfiguration of the Japanese literary canon as a national,

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instead of imperial, one. KĎminka was seen as something that had happened “elsewhere,” and the Japanese-language texts produced by colonial writers were similarly purged. But as texts such as Yuhi reveal, the continued marginalization of former colonial subjects in Japan ensured that no easy divide could be made between the postcolonial outside Japan and the postcolonial within it.22

O R G A N I Z AT I O N O F T H E B O O K Colonizing Language contains six chapters presented in roughly chronological order, with each chapter centered on key debates that arose around the functions and forms of national/imperial literature. This organization is a strategy of expedience, as it allows me to contextualize the texts within historical contingencies that may not be familiar to all readers, and should not be taken as an exhaustive survey or an assumption of teleology. The histories on view and at stake in this book do not exist a priori to the texts that (re-)present them and should be understood as deeply mediated by the narrative codes of the present. By shifting regularly between close readings and broader intertextual considerations, I hope to maintain the possibilities of plurality—to “stay with heterogeneities,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty has written, “without seeking to reduce them to any overarching principle that speaks for an already given whole.”23 Chapter 1 explores the impact the Manchurian Incident and subsequent war against China had on Japanese-language literary production in the Japanese empire. Renewed metropolitan interest in the colonies led to publishing opportunities for Koreans who aspired to write in Japanese, even as Korean-language venues were being restricted and shut down. The careers of Chang Hy̡kchu and Kim S̡ngmin (1915–1969), two Korean writers who garnered fame for their Japanese-language publications, are important examples. After discussing Chang and Kim, I move on to consider how kĎminka influenced both the quantity and tenor of Japanese cultural production on the peninsula through a comparison of Kim S̡ngmin’s

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1936 popular novella The Artists of the Peninsula (HantĎ no geijutsuka-tachi) and its 1941 film adaptation. In doing so, I also show how the linguistic choices and plot changes made in the film adaptation reveal the central importance kokugo ideology played in kĎminka. Chapter 2 considers kĎminka’s impact in metropolitan Japan. I begin the chapter by examining how the Japanese publishing industry capitalized on the rhetoric of imperial inclusion, focusing on the commercial activities of the influential novelist and publisher Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948). Throughout his career Kikuchi evinced a strong interest in Korea and helped launch the careers of several Korean writers by featuring their Japanese-language writings in his magazines and nominating their works for various literary prizes. One such writer was Kim Saryang (1914–1950), who was famously nominated for the Akutagawa Prize in 1940. In the second half of the chapter I provide a close reading of Kim’s “Pegasus” (Tenma, 1940), a parodic story that criticizes the metropolitan publishing trends spearheaded by Kikuchi Kan and others—even as it also acknowledges the dilemma of the colonial writer, who sometimes had no choice but to use the language of his colonizers in order to speak against them. In chapter 3, I examine the role kokugo ideology played in the repositioning of Korean literature within the category of kokumin bungaku (national literature) during the latter years of the colonial period. Proponents of kokumin bungaku claimed that all writers from all parts of the empire could speak as one—but only if they spoke in Japanese. The chapter centers around three texts that were categorized as kokumin bungaku in their initial publication: Yi Kwangsu’s “Record of My Impression of Three Capitals” (SankyĎ inshĎ ki, 1943), Yi Ch̡ngnae’s “Patriotic Children’s Squad” (Aikoku kodomo tai, 1941), and Obi JĝzĎ’s “Ascent” (TĎhan, 1944). Yi Kwangsu, Yi Ch̡ngnae (1925?–?), and Obi JĝzĎ all published texts in metropolitan Japan but lived outside it, and all three attempted to destabilize the centrality of the metropole by centering the spiritual heart of “Japan” in the peripheries. Whereas chapter 1 focuses on the discursive formation of the imperial subject, my analyses of the texts in chapters 2 and 3 prove that being an imperial subject could mean different things to different people depending on class, gender, ethnicity, and place.

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In the remaining chapters, I move to the immediate postwar period of Japan and the Allied Occupation of 1945–1952. While Koreans celebrated Japan’s defeat as a day of liberation from colonial rule, the political status of Koreans remained far from independent under U.S. Allied policy. The tensions between liberation and occupation are teased out in chapter 4. Leftist writers such as Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951) celebrated their newfound freedom—literal and figurative—from the constraints of the prewar system, but overcoming the legacies of Japanese imperialism proved to be a herculean task. I illustrate this point by reading The Banshĝ Plain (Banshĝ heiya, 1946), Miyamoto’s cautiously hopeful tale of postwar Japanese reconstruction, against two less-optimistic texts, Chang Hy̡kchu’s “Intimidation” (KyĎhaku, 1953) and Yuzurihara Masako’s “Korean Lynching” (ChĎsen yaki, 1949). Chang and Yuzurihara (1911–1949) had direct experience living under colonial rule, the former as a Korean colonial subject and the latter as a Japanese settler in Karafuto. Both found that the terms of the present ironically precluded them from coming to terms with the terms of the past. That is, while the ending of the war created new opportunities for many individuals who had hitherto been silenced, it also rendered other subjectivities and stories unrepresentable within the paradigm of the nation-state. The continuities and discontinuities of the past are explored in further detail in chapter 5. There, I look at the early writings of Kim Talsu, a writer who is often seen as the “father” of zainichi Korean literature. Kim was also an active member of the Japan Communist Party and the leftist literary organization Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai (Society for New Japanese Literature), demonstrating how a study of zainichi Korean writers must also always consider the larger literary landscape in Japan and vice versa. For Korean writers like Kim, issues of democratic revolution and postcolonial subjectivity were made doubly complicated by the fact that they had to write about them in Japanese, itself the embodiment of colonialism writ large. Through a comparison of Kim’s 1942 short story “Trash” (Gomi) with its significantly revised republication in 1947, I trace the ways resident Korean writers were made foreign to the Japanese national language (kokugo) and literature (kokubungaku).

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The insistence on nationhood as the defining context for evaluating the legacy of Japanese imperialism also had a major impact on the controversial “collaboration” debates occurring in Korea and Japan at this time, an issue I discuss in chapter 6. In Korea, public efforts were made to identify and punish anyone deemed to have aided the Japanese colonial regime, while in Japan attention was more often given to those who had supported the Fifteen-Year War. I begin the chapter with a discursive analysis of the national boundaries encoded in the terms ch’inilp’a (“pro-Japanese,” referring to Korean collaborators) and sensĎ sekinin (“war responsibility,” referring to Japanese wartime aggression). I then proceed to look at two different colonial apologias, Yi Kwangsu’s essay “My Confession” (Na ̿i kobaek, 1948) and Tanaka Hidemitsu’s novel The Drunken Boat (Yoidorebune, 1949). I argue that the postwar writings of these individuals reveal how Korean collaboration and Japanese war responsibility emerged as mutually constitutive discourses that embodied—rather than healed—the traumas of colonialism and empire. The epilogue offers some final thoughts on the Shiga Naoya essay that began this introduction. I review how the borders of “Japan” were historically overdetermined during the colonial period, simultaneously standing in for empire (when defined in relation to the rest of Asia) and nation (when defined against the third term of the West). The memory of a time when Koreans were also “Japanese” in theory could be banished in the postwar period because those divisions had always been preserved, if in terms that varied throughout Japan’s imperial past. However, the unequal relationship between metropole and colony persisted even after the Japanese empire was dissolved in 1945, most notably in the formation of the zainichi Korean diasporic community in Japan. This book argues that while Japan’s transformation from empire to nation-state may have covered up the contradictions of Japanese language ideology on the surface, the continued presence of Koreans in Japan proved that postwar articulations of national language and literature could never be completely severed from their imperial pasts, nor could their constructed boundaries ever be completely maintained.

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1 NATIONAL LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE

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1931, explosives were detonated near railroad lines owned by the South Manchuria Railway. Although the Manchurian Incident, as the attack came to be called, had been staged by members of the Japanese Kwantung Army, army officials accused Chinese dissidents of the deed and initiated a series of aggressive campaigns that eventually culminated in the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. The Manchurian Incident transformed the direction of Japanese imperialism in East Asia and pushed Korea back into the ancillary spotlight as a military and economic cornerstone of the Japanese empire. Korea’s communications and transportation networks were to be integrated into the development of Manchuria, excess labor to be shunted into new manufacturing industries, and the immigrant Korean population in Manchuria to be wielded as a tool for political control over the region.1 The outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 further increased concerns over Korea’s strategic position vis-à-vis China. Japanese military strategists saw the peninsula as a vital bridge to the continent that had to be secured at all costs, lest it be used as a weapon against them. A number of different campaigns and policies, collectively known as kĎminka (imperialization, Kr. hwangminhwa), were adopted to transform colonial subjects N S EP T E M BE R 1 8 ,

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into loyal imperial subjects who would commit their entire lives—and deaths—to the Japanese empire. Kokugo (national language; here, Japanese) education was seen as crucial to this transformation process. Borrowing and adapting the linguistic nationalism earlier popularized by Ueda Kazutoshi, kĎminka proponents argued that fostering love for Japanese among the colonial population would naturally lead to love for the empire it represented.2 This chapter details how these two moments in history profoundly influenced both the quantity and tenor of Japanese-language writing by Korean colonial subjects. The Manchurian Incident renewed metropolitan interest in Korea, but among those who opposed empire as well as those who supported it. Japanese proletarian writers in particular called for alliances across ethnic and national borders, emphasizing the shared experience imposed by capitalist systems and the diverse forms of proletarian struggle. However, the number of colonial writers who responded in turn remained small and mostly confined to metropolitan publishing avenues. All of this would change with the launch of kĎminka in 1937. The subsequent suppression of Korean-language publications and crackdown on anticolonial activity throughout the empire were unarguably brutal, but they were also productive in a certain sense—as the new publishing avenues created by the push for kokugo generated, for the first time, a substantial body of Japanese-language fiction by Korean writers.3 Much of this fiction was ostensibly proempire in nature, either by necessity or by contingency, and all of it written under serious material and political constraints. But it would be wrong to simply dismiss their ideological dimensions as false or superficial. On the surface at least, kokugo promised to transcend the hierarchies of ethnicity, tempting colonial subjects with access to an essentialized spirit and language-bound community. In doing so, of course, it shifted all responsibility of imperial assimilation to the colonial subjects while denying the entrenched barriers, both legal and social, that stood in their way. And yet it was exactly this inclusion that threatened to disrupt the seemingly inviolable link between ethnic identity and national polity. The contradictions kokugo presented when spoken in a colonial context could open up alternative avenues of identification, avenues that had been elided in their initial conception but never

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entirely erased. In this chapter, I examine how discourses of sameness and difference were produced in a plurality of overlapping spaces, and how these discourses could be alternatively mobilized, rejected, or prioritized depending on one’s subject position and place.

S E T T I N G T H E T R A N S C U L T U R A L S TA G E As discussed in the introduction, Ueda Kazutoshi’s theories on national language and its constitutive role in nation-state formation fundamentally shaped kokugo discourse in modern Japan. Even before Ueda, Meiji leaders and educators had recognized that national consciousness did not precede institutions such as national education systems but was produced through them. The highly influential 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education had put education in service of the state, linking civic morality to imperial loyalty through the concept of the kokutai (national polity or body).4 While the Imperial Rescript on Education did not make any references to language in its precepts, following the publication of Ueda’s essay collection For the National Language educators could no longer ignore the ideological function of the Japanese language, both as the medium through which national education was taught and the very thing that expressed the nation itself. Because of the simultaneity of Japan’s nation-building and empirebuilding process, the inculcation of national/imperial loyalty through kokugo was treated as a central priority in the colonial peripheries (gaichi; literally, “outer lands”) as well as in the Japanese mainland (naichi; literally, “inner lands”).5 In August 1911, one year after the formal annexation of Korea, the Government-General of Korea (GGK) issued an educational ordinance that set out the bureaucratic systems and ideological framework for colonial education on the peninsula.6 The ordinance unequivocally declared that the ultimate goal of regular schools (futsĝ gakkĎ)—schools meant specifically for Koreans—was to cultivate loyal citizens, and it identified the dissemination of the national language as a cornerstone of this

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goal. Elsewhere, educators and bureaucrats also extolled the virtues of kokugo as a language of modernity and progress. The scholar Shidehara Taira (1870–1953), for example, wrote in his influential Treatise on Education in Korea (ChĎsen kyĎiku ron) that “through the Japanese language, one can easily absorb the civilization that Japan has built.” 7 As we shall see in this and the following chapters, both sets of sentiments—kokugo as a repository for the Japanese spirit; kokugo as the banner of progress—persisted until the very end of Japanese rule. In reality, the practice of Japanese language education exposed rather than concealed the contradictions of kokugo ideology. Japanese language textbooks employed by teachers in the colonies disseminated the “standard language” (hyĎjungo), which had been based on the speech of educated Tokyo middle-class males, but the teachers themselves often came from rural areas in mainland Japan and spoke in heavy dialects far from the (imagined) norm.8 The glaring difference between the local dialects spoken by Japanese settlers and the “standard” Japanese spoken by colonized subjects could engender immense anxiety in the former, as Yuasa Katsue’s 1935 novel Kannani demonstrates.9 When the eponymous Korean character Kannani first meets Ryĝji, the young Japanese protagonist, she can’t help but laugh at his “strange” Shikoku dialect; Ryĝji, in his turn, is so shocked by Kannani’s Japanese fluency that he initially responds to her questions as if “announcing himself on the battlefield.” 10 Kannani is enormously proud of the standardized Japanese she has been taught at her regular school, even as she wistfully notes how she cannot attend the superior primary school ( jinjĎ shĎgakkĎ) like Ryĝji because she is Korean. Up until the late 1930s, then, the assimilation of colonial subjects was largely conceived as a “problematic of the colonizer,” as Leo Ching has shown in his groundbreaking book Becoming “Japanese.” 11 While the word kokugo was consistently employed in official documents to refer to the Japanese language, kokugo and Nihongo (Kr. Ilbon-ʵ or Irʵ, the Japanese language) continued to be used interchangeably in Korea in newspaper articles, fiction, essays, and other print media without penalty. A number of writers even argued that because Japanese was not the native language for the majority of Koreans, it was in the children’s best interests that Japa-

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nese be taught specifically as a foreign language in schools.12 In mainland Japan, where kokugo was assumed to have always coincided (if imperfectly) with the borders of Nihongo, the ethnic dividing line between Koreans and Japanese was even more rigid. Koreans who spoke or wrote in Japanese were often praised for their efforts—but precisely because the Japanese language was conceptualized as a second language for them, as I elaborate later in this chapter. This is not to say that the choice between Korean and Japanese was free and unfettered; indeed, the modernist “crisis of representation” that unsettled so many Korean writers in the early 1930s had everything to do with the increasingly hegemonic presence of Japanese, even if that language left no visible mark on their Korean-language writings.13 Rather, I wish to point out that assimilation policies during this time still left some room for negotiation and ambivalence between colonizer and colonized. Language barriers, limited publishing avenues in Korea, and low metropolitan interest in Korea’s cultural sphere ensured that Japanese-language publishing by Korean authors remained few and far between in the first two decades of colonial rule.14 This began to change as the first generation of children who had entered the colonial educational system came of age in the late 1920s, right as the proletarian arts movement was sweeping across East Asia. Young proletarian authors such as Kim Kijin (1903–1985), Im Hwa (1908–1953), and Han Sik (1907–?) wrote against the collusion of empire and capital in both Korean and Japanese, using the latter to speak directly to and with their Japanese peers. In Japan, organizations such as the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) called for cross-border alliances, urging activists to unite in international class struggle. But tensions quickly emerged between the anticolonial independence movements espoused by colonial writers and the goals of Japanese organizations such as the JCP, which demanded that international proletarian revolution take precedence over Korean national independence.15 These tensions grew more pronounced in the wake of the Manchurian Incident, which led to a police crackdown of proletarian arts and activism across Japan. Meanwhile, the colonies saw a renewed emphasis on assimilation policies, particularly when it came to raising Japanese language

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comprehension rates. The government’s desire to showcase examples of successful assimilation, combined with the different laws and practices imposed on Japanese materials versus Korean materials, meant that it was to some extent easier for colonial writers to circumvent the censorship apparatus if they wrote in Japanese and published in the metropole.16 Japanese proletarian writers, therefore, eagerly looked to their Korean counterparts for new and powerful critiques of capitalism and imperialism. But Koreans themselves protested their marginalization as only colonial writers, producing texts that acknowledged the irreducibility of their lived experiences even while insisting on a dialogic universality not necessarily centered on metropolitan Japan. The career of Chang Hy̡kchu serves as an emblematic example. Chang shot to literary fame in 1932 when he won second place in a literary contest for his story “Hell of Hungry Spirits” (GakidĎ). The contest was a yearly event sponsored by KaizĎ, an influential and left-leaning general interest journal that had previously published a number of celebrated literary works, including Shiga Naoya’s A Dark Night’s Passing (An’ya kĎro, 1921– 1937) and Miyamoto Yuriko’s Nobuko (1924–1926). “Hell of Hungry Spirits” portrays the ravages of capitalism on a small farming village in Korea. In an effort to mitigate the devastating effects of drought, the government commissions the construction of a dam in North Ky̡ngsang, enlisting the financial aid of the local landlords who stand to benefit most from the project. Each day, one director and four Korean foremen oversee the hundreds of impoverished farmers who have been hired to work on the dam on a contingent basis. (The ethnicity of the director and the landlords is never indicated—an omission that would have obliquely allowed for a reading of the text as a criticism against Japanese forms of capital while still skirting the eye of the censor.) Class conflict erupts after the farmers unite to protest the brutal exploitation of their labor. It is there—just at the point where the farmers have ambushed the director—that “Hell of Hungry Spirits” ends. That the KaizĎ judges chose to honor a writer from the colonies on the heels of the establishment of Manchukuo was no coincidence. Chang’s “Hell of Hungry Spirits” was printed in an issue that also showcased a

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range of reactions to the new Manchurian state, from outright celebration to cautiously worded criticism. Several article writers from both sides of the debate took care to highlight Korea’s position within the global configurations of Japanese capital, in language that was then echoed in the judges’ comments on the “international” significance of Chang’s literary debut. A lavish photo montage placed at the very beginning of the issue, for example, had a section that noted the influx of Korean immigrants to Manchuria and the contributions of Korean farmers in cultivating the land there.17 While Manchukuo was not explicitly mentioned in Chang’s text, its placement in the journal would encourage readers to connect the story’s rural Korean setting to larger political concerns. Chang was not the first Korean writer to publish in Japanese, nor was he the first to address proletarian issues of labor and capitalist exploitation in his fiction.18 What is notable instead about “Hell of Hungry Spirits” is the extent the text is marked by polyphonic tensions at the level of text. Korean words are constantly introduced in katakana gloss alongside the Japanese-language narration—for example, a sentence like “The men ate their lunch” might feature the Korean word for lunch (chʵmsim) written in katakana over the Japanese word for lunch (hirumeshi). In dialogue, phrases and sometimes entire sentences are glossed with a Korean “translation,” again rendered through katakana.19 I have put the word “translation” in scare quotes because it is Chang’s literary Japanese that is presented as the translation for the Korean. At the same time, the fact that the Korean language is itself translated into Japanese phonetic sound through katakana transcription highlights the very inaccessibility of an originary Korean voice, at least as conceived in the elite space of the metropole. Considering this foregrounding of sound and polyphony, it is not surprising that Japanese critics drew upon vocal metaphors to describe both the story and Chang upon the story’s initial publication. The judges who awarded Chang second place in the KaizĎ literary contest praised him as someone who could “powerfully assert the existence of Korean writers to the world.”20 The influential editor Yasutaka TokuzĎ (1889–1971), who in his youth had spent several years in Korea, agreed: the “voice of the Korean people” seemed to speak directly to him when he read Chang’s stories. To

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the proletarian writer Tokunaga Sunao (1899–1958), meanwhile, Chang was “a writer who represented Korea” and therefore had a duty to do it justice in fiction.21 The linking of narrator, writer, and ethnic group (minzoku) through “Hell of Hungry Spirits” was neither accidental nor casual. For these critics, conflating singular voices with and into a collective voice was a politically motivated act, a way to locate a Korean collective that could then be incorporated into a new stage of historical consciousness and revolution. As Chang himself often pointed out, however, the burden of representation was all too often one-way and inequitable. Indeed, the very ability to (mis-)hear the language of “Hell of Hungry Spirits” as a transparent translation, rather than the problematic that constitutes the text itself, can be understood as one manifestation of colonial power—that is, the ability to produce colonial subjects as an object of knowledge. In a 1935 essay addressed directly to Tokunaga Sunao, Chang strenuously objected to his reputation as a representative Korean writer and asked instead to be thought of simply as “Chang Hy̡kchu, the individual.”22 He also faulted Japanese proletarian writers for always seeing him as a “person of the colonies” (shokuminchijin) first and a writer second; Japanese proletarian writers enjoyed the luxury of being judged on their literary merits and not their ethnicity, after all, so it was hardly fair that a different standard be applied to him. Despite Chang’s protestations, such comments persisted in the pages of KaizĎ and helped fuel accusations in Korea that Chang’s fame was due to his pandering to Japanese audiences and their preconceptions.23 Conversely, Chang’s financial success and visible status as the first colonial writer to gain official recognition from the Japanese literary world also led to emulation. The Taiwanese writer Lu Heruo (1914–1951) was so inspired by Chang that he modeled part of his pen name after him.24 Another writer from Taiwan, Lai Minghong (1915–1958), submitted a letter to the leftist literary journal Bungaku hyĎron in 1934 encouraging its editors to feature more colonial writers in their pages. Japanese proletarian writers, he wrote, had the means and ability to “foster and guide colonial literature [shokuminchi bungaku] with a welcoming and brotherly hand.”25 Both sets of reactions demonstrate the dilemma faced by colonial writers of Japa-

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nese, who necessarily inscribe the metropole as a transcendental measure of comparison into (and through) language. That is, even if they did not explicitly address a Japanese audience, their texts still had to acknowledge the function of the metropole in making such texts comprehensible. By the mid-1920s, the Tokyo publishing industry had firmly solidified its hold on print capital and an “alternate economy of value” that privileged the idea of literature as culturally autonomous.26 Literary contests and prizes emerged within this alternative economy of value as a mechanism through which differences between pure and popular, Japanese and foreign, wellwritten and poorly written texts were both produced and perpetuated. Rather than ask why a Korean writer like Chang Hy̡kchu was nominated for the KaizĎ literary prize, then, it may be more productive to ask why it is only through such circuits that he was recognized by the metropolitan literary world, and what kinds of symbolic capital were generated from his inclusion. The answers to such questions can be found by considering the case of Kim S̡ngmin, a young writer from Pyongyang who set out to accomplish with the popular arts what Chang Hy̡kchu had done with proletarian fiction. Kim succeeded with a novella-length story titled Artists of the Peninsula (HantĎ no geijutsuka-tachi), which won the inaugural Chiba Prize for Popular Art in August 1936. The contest was sponsored by the Osakabased weekly magazine Sandò mainichi, with a judging panel comprising Kikuchi Kan, Yoshikawa Eiji (1892–1962), and Osaragi JirĎ (1897–1973). As with Chang Hy̡kchu, the judges framed Kim’s accomplishments vis-à-vis a conceptualization of the Japanese language as Nihongo, not kokugo. Kikuchi Kan admitted in his comments that “because the author is Korean and writing in Japanese, which is to him a foreign language, there is still much room for improvement.” He then explicitly acknowledged the mediating role of the metropolitan readership in Kim’s work: “A Korean who writes popular art must grasp the feelings of the Japanese masses [Nihon taishĝ], a task that is much easier in pure literature. Despite this the author succeeded admirably.”27 Artists of the Peninsula takes full advantage of the implicit context of the metropole, but by orienting itself outward, toward the Manchurian

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border—and, in doing so, eliding the internal ethnic borders between Korea and Japan. The novella centers around a character named ChĎ Eiichi (Kr. Chang Y̡ng-il), a writer who has penned the script for Korea’s first talkie. 28 On one level, the plot follows a love triangle—or rather, love rectangle—that develops between Eiichi; Eiichi’s friend Renshuku (Kr. Y̡nsuk), an aspiring actress; Eiichi’s boss, a man named Sai (Kr. Ch’oe), who is also the primary investor for the film; and the investor’s mistress, an actress named Eiki (Kr. Y̡ngh̿i). Eiki has fallen in love with Eiichi; but Eiichi, who is attracted to the more demure Renshuku, rejects her advances. His boss, Mr. Sai, meanwhile, has also fallen for Renshuku. He uses his status as Eiichi’s boss and financer to replace Eiki with Renshuku as the leading actress in the film, all the while plotting to pressure Renshuku into becoming his new mistress. On another level, the novella offers an intimate look into the state of the film industry in Korea, which is depicted as underdeveloped and sorely in need of sustained capital investment. In an effort to alleviate some of the financial pressures of the production crew, Eiichi lends the film director some money that he’s secretly borrowed from his company. Although he had fully intended to pay back the full amount later, he is detained by the police for embezzlement. Hearing of his predicament, Renshuku begs Sai for money to save Eiichi from going to jail; Sai tells her he will help, but only if Renshuku agrees to marry him. In this way, romantic entanglements, machinations, and tragic misunderstandings constantly work to keep Eiichi and Renshuku apart. The commercial success of the film results in a successful resolution of the love rectangle: Eiichi and Renshuku declare their love for each other, and the two decide to take up a promising job offer in Manchuria. The film crew comes to see them off at the train station, and the director enviously observes, “The film studios there are much larger in scale, and one can actually receive a fixed salary. It makes the work worthwhile.”29 The director also mentions that the money Eiichi and Renshuku have received for their part in the film should be enough “for setting up a house” (311) together in Manchuria. The sense of new beginnings is emphasized when Renshuku decides not to get off at Pyongyang to visit her parents but

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instead to “go straight forward . . . with you [Eiichi]” (312). Considering Japanese authorities’ efforts to promote Korean immigration to Manchuria during this time, the happy conclusion of Artists of the Peninsula can easily be read as a trope for colonial expansion and a harmonious Japanese empire. But even as late as 1936 one can still find some room for negotiation in that ambiguous space between empire and nation. Renshuku and Eiichi are able to cast off their ties to the Korean peninsula, but without repudiating their Korean ethnicity—leaving not as representatives of “Japan” but, as the director tells them, as representatives of the Korean film industry. While the judges for the Chiba Prize noted in passing the importance of the work in promoting cultural exchange between Japan and Korea, far more attention was given to the “colorful” (hanayaka) details and brisk storytelling techniques that made it eminently suitable as popular literature.30 The judges also praised Kim S̡ngmin’s ability to make the readers feel as if they were “taking a stroll” through the streets of KeijĎ (present-day Seoul). Kim, for his part, wrote that he wanted to convey an image of Korea to Japanese readers that they wouldn’t be able to find in the writings of Chang Hy̡kchu.31 Kim’s deliberate self-comparison to Chang helps elucidate the former’s appeal to the mass readership of Sandò mainichi, even as it also proves the continued influence of the latter. In Artists of the Peninsula, Japanese hegemony (in the form of capital and culture) is recognized but not problematized. Facility with the Japanese language is marked as a positive trait for both the heroes and the villains of the novella, who themselves inhabit a familiar cityscape of modern department stores, sophisticated bars, and cafés in which the latest Japanese hit tunes are played. E. Taylor Atkins has observed that by the 1930s Korea’s growing cultural industry was predominantly urban and cosmopolitan in nature, linking “metropole and colony together through consumption” (if unequally).32 Rise in readership, capitalist investment in the publishing industry, and the explosive popularity of cinema and other forms of new media led to dramatic transformations in KeijĎ and other urban centers. Statistics compiled by the GGK on the granting of magazine publications in Korea give a sense of the scale: while only a handful of full permits were issued to

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Koreans in the 1920s, this number jumped to 574 in 1929 and to 1,073 in 1937.33 The Korean production of popular culture went hand in hand with enthusiastic Korean consumption of Japanese materials, from the detective fiction of Edogawa Ranpo to Japanese commercial magazines such as Kingu, which proved so popular that a Korean reporter was led to dramatically lament in 1939 that “not only [Korean] students in Tokyo but now even secondary-school students in Korea have stopped reading Korean books.”34 This consumption remained notably lopsided through the end of the colonial period: many more Koreans bought Japanese cultural works than vice versa, and access to those cultural works within Korea varied wildly according to location, class, and gender. Like Chang Hy̡kchu, Kim S̡ngmin never made claims of representation or authority. Similarly, Japanese critics did not uniformly treat the writings of either author as comprehensive portraits of Korea (though they may have called the writers “representative,” in the sense of speaking on behalf of Koreans who could not speak for themselves in Japanese). Critics such as Kikuchi Kan lauded Chang and Kim as noteworthy authors not because (or not only because) their use of the Japanese language seemed to offer new access to a Korea hitherto unencountered in fiction. Rather, they were noteworthy because of their use of Japanese literary language, which translated “Korea” and made it immediately knowable to Japanese readers through genre conventions of form, style, and content. The early careers of Chang Hy̡kchu and Kim S̡ngmin demonstrate how the majority of Japanese-language works by Korean writers in the 1920s and 1930s were written for metropolitan publication and with a metropolitan audience in mind. Their choice of the Japanese language, while remarked upon, was rarely itself the subject of debate; instead, it was usually connected to larger debates on Japan-Korea relations and the politics of representation. In this context, their value as writers was their particularity as producers of Japanese-language (but not “Japanese”) literature. The mechanism of the literary prize was crucial to this generative process, as the transparency of the selection process in fact generated the cultural relevance the prize was purported to reflect. With the launch of

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the kĎminka movement in Korea in 1937, however, Japanese would no longer be allowed to exist as a “foreign” language for colonial subjects: the absolute incorporation of Koreans into the empire also meant their absolute incorporation within and through kokugo.

F R O M A S S I M I L AT I O N T O I M P E R I A L I Z AT I O N : SPRING ON THE PENINSULA The start of the Second Sino-Japanese War was a watershed moment that introduced the new paradigm of the imperial subject, radically transforming the function and form of Japanese-language literature in the process. As part of its efforts to make Korean colonial subjects into loyal imperial subjects willing to live (and die) for the Japanese empire, the GGK actively sought to raise Japanese language proficiency levels among the Korean populace through sponsored contests, revamped school curricula, public lectures, and radio programs. For example, the Korean-language newspaper Maeil sinbo, an organ of the GGK, published a short article in 1938 titled “The Fruition of Mainland Japan and Korea as One Body Begins with National Language Comprehension” (Naes̡n ilch’e ̿i ky̡lsil ̿n kug̡ ̿i haed̿k es̡).35 After reminding readers that total Japanese-Korean unity could be achieved only through the permeation of the “national language” into all parts of Korean society, the article highlighted the efforts of Kangw̡n Province officials to encourage the daily use of Japanese among students both inside and outside school and among all government bureaucrats on the job.36 Articles promoting the promulgation of Japanese as the national language appeared with increasing frequency in GGK-sponsored media outlets as war with China progressed.37 References to Japanese as a “foreign language” for Koreans in mainland Japanese publications also all but disappeared by the late 1930s. The message in these bulletins and policies was clear: a unified empire depended upon one unified national language— and that language was to be Japanese. This does not mean that the Korean

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language was completely eradicated from the public sphere in Korea, as is often assumed; it may have been highly regulated and closely censored, but it was featured in select journals, newspapers, and other media through the end of the colonial period. It is more accurate to say that during this time Korean was increasingly subordinated within colonial hierarchies that privileged Japanese as the language of authority and learning.38 With its emphasis on the links between national language, national polity, and spiritual blood, kokugo ideology neatly fitted in with colonial policy makers’ attempts to rearticulate ethnic assimilation as imperialization. As Leo Ching has contended, kĎminka must be distinguished from earlier dĎka (assimilation) attempts in its functional and ontological valences. While dĎka can be understood as “a colonial project, a fundamental strategy of colonial integration,” kĎminka in contrast “constituted a colonial objectification by forcefully turning a project into practice, by rendering the ideal into the material.”39 In this sense, kĎminka can be seen as encapsulating a certain tension between race and ethnicity: conceived of within a pan-Asian rhetoric that pitted itself against the racial discrimination of the West, kĎminka presented a vision of the Japanese empire in which ethnic difference could potentially be mobilized for, and overcome by, the material practice of imperialization. In reality, kĎminka deferred—not answered—the question of how to define Japanese identity and belonging. One has only to look at the proliferation of terms that could signify “Japanese”—Nihonjin (person of Japan), naichijin (literally, “person of the inner lands”; mainland Japanese), waga kokumin (we the people), Nihon minzoku (the Japanese people or ethnos), kokunai no hito (person inside the country—i.e., Japan), kokugo o jĎyĎ suru mono (those who habitually use the national language)—to understand that the discursive borders of Japan could be readily shifted or reinterpreted according to the subject positions of both speaker and audience. These tools were not limited to the colonizer alone; some Korean intellectuals vociferously insisted on equating kĎmin with Nihonjin. If the two were one and the same, the argument went, then Koreans were entitled to the same rights as Japanese in the metropole.

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The promise of equality would prove to be seductive for both Chang Hy̡kchu and Kim S̡ngmin, who publically championed kĎminka in both the colonies and metropolitan Japan during the latter years of Japanese colonial rule. In one essay called “An Appeal to Korean Intellectuals” (ChĎsen no chishikijin ni utau), for example, Chang declared that the kĎminka propaganda slogan “Naisen ittai” (Mainland Japan and Korea as one body) should be understood as a crucial step toward completely eradicating discrimination between Koreans and Japanese.40 He went on to observe that while Koreans would benefit by becoming “mainland Japanese” (naichijin-ka), historically the individuals who had most resisted this call for equality were Japanese settlers in Korea wishing to maintain their privileged positions vis-à-vis Koreans. The implication was that Japanese had an equal if not greater responsibility in achieving naisen ittai and that “true unity” (238) had to go above and beyond the demands of the current situation. Chang’s comments sparked a flurry of heated responses in both Korean and Japanese from the “Korean intellectuals” to whom his essay was addressed, many of whom objected to Chang’s assertion that Korea’s various woes could be solved if Koreans became “mainland Japanese.” The fierce disagreements over what exactly constituted kĎminka, and how Koreans fitted into Japan’s wartime ambitions, reveal how definitions of imperial and Japanese belonging were never completely consistent or coherent—not only that, but that some colonial subjects tried to take advantage of this conceptual indeterminacy for their own ends. As I will delve into this topic in detail in the next two chapters, here I wish to focus on a comparison of The Artists of the Peninsula and its 1941 film adaptation, Spring on the Peninsula (HantĎ no haru, directed by Yi Py̡ng-il), in order to illustrate the magnitude of the discursive shifts introduced by the kĎminka movement in Korea.41 Although a different medium from the literary works that form the focus of this book, Spring on the Peninsula demonstrates a deeply troubled preoccupation with text and its effects, making it a particularly appropriate work to study some of the different ways Koreans negotiated the intersections of kĎminka and kokugo ideology in the late colonial period.

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The Korean film industry was not exempt from the pressures of war. In 1940, the colonial government passed a Korean Film Ordinance that strictly regulated the types of films that could be produced on the peninsula; by 1942, all film companies were forcibly subsumed into the GGK-controlled Korean Film Corporation (ChĎsen Eiga Kabushiki-Gaisha). Spring on the Peninsula was produced by the My̡ngbo Film Production Company and screened in Korea in November 1941, in the middle of this transitional time in Korean film history. Several key themes and plot points were changed to reflect these new conditions on the peninsula in adapting Kim S̡ngmin’s 1936 novella to the silver screen.42 In a scene toward the end of the film, for example, the various film financing woes of the characters are solved in one stroke with the creation of the Peninsula Film Company (HantĎ Eiga Kabushiki-Gaisha, foreshadowing the consolidation that actually did take place in Korea in 1942). The scene culminates with a long speech in Japanese by the president of the newly established company. The president, a successful Korean businessman, begins by championing naisen ittai. He then concludes his speech by exhorting the audience both inside and outside the film to fulfill their duties as conscientious imperial subjects. KĎminka makes its mark at every level of Spring on the Peninsula, but it is in language that its effects are most fully felt. What is remarkable about the film is the extent to which it visualizes a textual landscape composed almost entirely of Japanese. The opening credits of the film, presented in Japanese with no Korean translation, immediately establish an extradiegetic textual hierarchy centered on Japanese literacy that is then maintained through the last scene and beyond, particularly in the use of Japanese subtitles for Korean dialogue (but not vice versa). Within the diegetic frame, characters constantly negotiate a dense material world of writing: telegrams, posters, newspapers, train platform signs, books, commodity labels, building names (figure 1.1). Thus, while the characters themselves often speak in a bilingual mix of Japanese and Korean, the film’s soundscape is constantly juxtaposed against Japanese textual hegemony. In contrast to the contextdriven, localized Korean dialogue produced between specific characters, the Japanese language is omnipresent even while Japanese people are not.

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F I G U R E 1.1

A Japanese-language telegram received by the protagonist in Spring on the Peninsula.

That Spring on the Peninsula, a film about film production, put so much (meta-)diegetic emphasis on the Japanese language is not surprising when one considers how the Korean film industry was being mobilized for the purposes of kĎminka during this time. Despite concerted efforts to promote Japanese in Korea, government surveys revealed that in 1941 less than 17 percent of the Korean population could comfortably read and speak the language, with fluency levels varying according to location, class, and gender.43 As a popular form of mass media, films had the potential to reach a wider audience than academic books or lectures. The manager for Meiji-za, the KeijĎ theater that later screened Spring on the Peninsula, remarked in a July 1941 roundtable discussion that he realized how influential cinema could be after he spotted a number of Koreans wearing yukata in the summer

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because they had seen Japanese people do so in the movies.44 In another roundtable discussion held in 1943 by various members of the Korean film industry and the GGK, it was acknowledged that the Korean language was still necessary as a supplement in “special circumstances—namely, in regional areas where people don’t usually watch films, having not yet enjoyed the benefits of culture.” 45 However, the participants agreed that films should feature kokugo as much as possible in order to raise the “cultural level” (mindo) of their viewers. In the context of mass mobilization, GGK officials expected narrative cinema not necessarily to educate so much as to inculcate an intimate, affective tie to the Japanese language and the empire it represented. It can be said that Spring on the Peninsula, the first title to successfully pass the rigorous censorship screening process introduced by the Korean Film Ordinance, amply fulfilled this purpose. At the same time, the physical absence of Japanese authority figures in the film (not a single character can be positively identified as Japanese) allows for a different interpretation of kĎminka. As the director Yi Py̡ng-il himself wrote in a 1941 article introducing his work, the choice to adapt Artists of the Peninsula was neither haphazard nor capricious. It was the characters’ dedication and sincerity toward their craft that drew Yi to the text, as well as “the new start as Korean filmmakers” it promised—but a new start, notably, that would begin and end in Korea, not in mainland Japan.46 Spring on the Peninsula begins with a shot of a woman sitting behind a transparent screen, dressed in traditional Korean clothing and playing the kayagˏm, or Korean zither. From the action and Korean-language dialogue that follows, the audience is clued in that this is a scene from The Tale of Ch’unhyang, a popular Korean folktale that would have most likely been familiar to both Korean and Japanese viewers.47 Very soon, the camera cuts to a long shot that reveals that this is a film within a film. As soon as the director yells “Cut!” the characters switch to speaking Japanese, and once again to Korean; this bilingual code-switching is then maintained for the rest of the film. From the very opening scenes, then, we are presented with a deliberately self-referential staging of ethnicity by the Korean colonial subjects

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themselves. It is not the commodification and particularization of “Korea” that Spring on the Peninsula exposes so much as the mechanics of that process—a process that begins and ends in Korea, rather than in the metropole. The language of the film also offers a different interpretation of naisen ittai, one in which Japan (Japanese) is materialized in and through the Korean characters. Mainland Japan and Korea in one body, in other words, rather than as one body. This is not to downplay the deeply unjust systems of imperial control that structured life in colonial Korea during this time. I wish rather to point out that the authoethnographic mode presented in Spring on the Peninsula argues for a kind of agency, albeit within (rather than without) the strictures of empire. In this light, the naisen ittai speech made toward the end of the film reveals itself to be more complicated than a superficial parroting of GGK propaganda. While the novella Artists of the Peninsula depicted the Korean film industry as largely dependent on metropolitan technology and financial circuits, in Spring on the Peninsula salvation comes in the form of a massive injection of capital provided by the Korean businessman HĎ ShĎshoku (Kr. Pang Ch’angsik), described in a newspaper article as a young industrialist whose long interest and experience in the film industry have finally been materialized through the establishment of the Peninsula Film Company. In his speech, delivered entirely in Japanese, HĎ touches upon the various difficulties currently facing “our country” (waga kuni, 1:04:33) in general and Korean cinema in particular. As he does so, the camera slowly pans past the faces of several men gathered at the table to listen to HĎ’s speech. These men are marked by neither name nor nationality, making the tableau impossible to interpret as the metaphorical unification of Japan and Korea. The indeterminacy of their identities serves instead to emphasize the importance of Korea as both the geographical and material locus of a “national culture” (kokumin bunka, 1:05:25) that is meant to belong to the entirety of the Japanese empire. Of course, many Koreans were well aware that attempts to assert any kind of cultural or economic autonomy were paradoxically undercut by the workings of colonialism itself, a system of exploitation meant to serve the interests of the colonial state. Although it is a Korean industrialist who

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saves the filmmakers from financial ruin in Spring on the Peninsula, his inclusion also means that the filmmakers can no longer afford (figuratively and quite literally) to operate apart from the state-sanctioned goals of kĎminka. As Travis Workman and Ch̡n Uhy̡ng have both pointed out, it is telling in this context that the key producers of Ch’unhyang are either entirely silent or absent throughout this scene, introducing a note of ambivalence in the “spectacle of mobilization.” 48 The last scene of Spring on the Peninsula works to emphasize the tensions between stricture and self-determination for a final time. As in the novella, Eiichi and Teiki (Kr. Ch̡ngh̿i; name changed from Renshuku to Teiki in the film) fall in love with each other and, despite the machinations of various rivals, are eventually happily reunited. Following the wild success of their film the two set off on a journey together, as representatives of the Korean film industry—but unlike in the novella, here they depart for Tokyo, not Manchuria. They have been dispatched to “visit every studio in Tokyo” (1:23:03) and exchange opinions with the Japanese filmmakers there, under the expectation that they’ll eventually return to KeijĎ with newfound insights that will strengthen relations between the film industries in those respective cities. As the train to Tokyo finally departs, we get a long shot of the entire film crew on the platform waving good-bye. The camera slowly zooms in as one by one the well-wishers turn away, presumably headed back home or to work. The camera continues to zoom in on the director, whose eyes remain fixed on the disappearing train (figure 1.2); finally, a fade to black, and end credits. Why this unexpected close-up on the director, a man who played only a peripheral role in the plot? I would suggest that the scene can potentially be read as an attempt to de-center the metropole, orienting the audience to a different interpretation of the metropole-periphery relationship. With its emphasis on return, the film locates Korea—and not Japan—as the point of reference. The act of leaving the peninsula has rendered Eiichi and Teiki invisible, outside the boundaries of narrative; it is therefore the director who is given the final unifying gaze. In this sense, the director can also be seen as standing in for the self-referentiality of the film itself—and, in doing so, acting as a reminder (or a plea) to the audi-

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F I G U R E 1.2

The director watches the protagonists leave in Spring on the Peninsula.

ence to acknowledge the agency and importance of Korean cultural producers even in a time of war.

*** In the days following the Manchurian Incident of 1931, opinions and predictions on the future of the Japanese empire were by no means unified. As the Japanese public turned its attention to the events unfolding in China, it took a renewed interest in the colony that was situated so crucially between the mainland islands and the continent. Korean colonial subjects, of course, had never once forgotten their own position vis-à-vis Japan. Some seized the opportunity to respond to the metropolitan gaze in and through the primary mechanism of that gaze—namely, through the

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Japanese language. But as conflict with China erupted into full-scale war, Japanese language use became more and more of a demand in the colonies, even in contexts where no “native” Japanese speakers were present. Strict censorship regulations and police surveillance also ensured that the things one was allowed to say were by no means unconstrained, even when one said them in Japanese. Film was of course not exempt from tightening colonial controls, particularly following the promulgation of the Korean Film Ordinance in 1940. With these facts in mind, it is possible to read a darker message in the director’s enigmatic expression and silent immobility as he watches the train depart in the final scene of Spring on the Peninsula. As Theodore Hughes has noted, the call of kĎminka exhorted the colonized to constantly “be on the move to a space that always approaches only to recede” while still binding them to the particularity of their colonial origins.49 Those who refused to move—or were unable to because of other restrictions of class or gender—faced bleak futures that could be signaled only by silence, whether on the screen or in print. The fate of Teiki’s rival is a final case in point. In the novella she is given the Korean name Eiki (Kr. Y̡ngh̿i), but this name was changed to Anna for the adaptation. Like her name, Anna’s identity is made ethnically ambiguous. We first encounter her speaking Korean dialogue for The Tale of Ch’unhyang, but thereafter she speaks only in Japanese. Her fluency with the language is less a mark of ethnicity (as at no point is her ethnicity or nationality revealed) and more a sign of her cosmopolitanism, giving her the ability to inhabit and traverse multiple city spaces: the movie set, the trendy café, the police station, and so on. Clad in Western-style clothes and sporting a chic perm, Anna presents a stark contrast to the modest, shy Teiki. It is in part through this contrast, in fact, that Anna’s cosmopolitanism is negatively inflected and rendered suspect. That, combined with Anna’s unrepentant sexuality as the mistress of Eiichi’s boss, would no doubt have made it clear to the audience from the beginning that it would be Teiki, not Anna, who would eventually marry Eiichi in the end; no other ending could have satisfied both the genre expectations of the melodrama and the requirements of colonial propaganda. Unlike Eiichi

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and Teiki, who happily exit the screen of their own volition at the end of the film, Anna’s exit is shot so that it seems more like an expulsion. 50 Anna’s portrayal in the film reminds us of the gendered refractions of kĎminka, as well as the ways in which gender is encoded in language ideologies. By 1941, the year Spring on the Peninsula was made, almost 70 percent of the eligible male child population was enrolled in public elementary school, versus only 30 percent of the female population.51 Public schooling was a prime apparatus of the GGK for cultivating loyal citizens, but the ability to attend school was limited to children whose families could afford the school fees, who could be spared from the duties of the house or work, and who lived within walking proximity of a school. When women were encouraged to learn Japanese, it was often not for their own sakes but for the sakes of their future children. In other words, motherhood sanctioned Korean women’s participation in the public sphere of the state (as it did in mainland Japan and elsewhere in the world) but also cast any activities that challenged it beyond the pale. Who is allowed to cross colonial borders, who is allowed to come back? For what purpose do they travel, and how are the products of their travel packaged and sold? If we can learn anything from the works examined in this chapter, it is that border crossings can take place in a number of places and by a wide variety of actors, but not equally and not with the same benefits. Perhaps the ambiguity of that final scene in Spring on the Peninsula was inevitable after all, given the complex and competing subject positions in an audience that would have been a mix of Japanese and Korean residents when the film was first screened in KeijĎ in 1941. Kokugo ideology did not subsume their diverse and divergent voices so much as expel the very idea of divergence, leaving those with alternative visions of belonging to paradoxically voice their views through silence. 52 The next chapter explores in more detail how the cost (both financial and otherwise) of gaining access to social and political mobility through kokugo proved to be prohibitively high for many colonial subjects—but not for the Tokyo publishers who mobilized their words for profit.

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2 “LET ME IN!” Imperialization in Metropolitan Japan

I

N F EBR U ARY 1 9 3 8 , a young man named Hino Ashihei (1907–1960) was given the sixth Akutagawa Prize for “A Tale of Excrement and Urine” (FunnyĎtan, November 1937), a story about a Kyushu farmer who tries to earn a living by collecting human waste, with the aid of a Korean worker. Hino had published the story in the Fukuoka coterie journal Bungaku kaigi while serving as a soldier with the imperial army in Hangzhou, China. The judges for the Akutagawa Prize praised the many merits of the unconventional story, but they also took pains to highlight the text’s “local” (chihĎ) origins and the author’s current status as a soldier on the China front.1 Because Hino could not travel to Tokyo to accept the prize, the literary critic Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983) traveled to Hangzhou to personally hand the award to Hino, and the military hosted a ceremony in Hino’s honor. Although the text itself contained no explicit mention of the war, its powerful juxtaposition of the poignant with the crude seemed to dovetail neatly, almost inevitably, into a beguiling image of the ordinary soldier as humble, sensitive, and authentic. In that same month, the Government-General of Korea (GGK) officially passed an ordinance that would allow Korean colonial subjects to fight on behalf of the Japanese empire through a new military voluntary program (shiganhei seido). The program was limited in scope in its incep-

“LET ME IN!”

tion, intended as a tentative first step toward extending military conscription to the colonies in the far-off future, but that did not stop military and colonial authorities from trumpeting it as “a vital institution for realizing the ideals and goals” of kĎminka, or imperialization.2 On the peninsula, prominent Korean intellectuals such as Yi Kwangsu were enlisted to help promote the cause of war through the GGK-controlled Korean Literary Arts Society (ChĎsen Bungei Kai), but in metropolitan Japan it was the media spectacle of the cheering crowd—nameless Koreans gathering “spontaneously” to celebrate their inclusion in the empire’s cause—that was given the most attention in the newspapers. Some Koreans in Tokyo were so overjoyed at the prospect of enlisting, one Tokyo Asahi journalist claimed, that they had shouted “Banzai to the military volunteer program!” in the streets.3 Meanwhile, another text involving soldiers was receiving quite a different reception. Ishikawa TatsuzĎ (1905–1985), who had been the inaugural winner of the Akutagawa Prize three years before, had been dispatched to China in December 1937 by the long-running general interest journal ChĝĎ kĎron for the purpose of gathering eyewitness material that might serve as the foundation for a new novel. The text that Ishikawa produced from that experience was Living Soldiers (Ikite iru heitai), an ostensibly fictional work that details the activities of a Japanese military platoon before and during the now infamous capture of Nanjing. Even as Hino Ashihei was being awarded the Akutagawa Prize in Hangzhou, Ishikawa and his ChĝĎ kĎron editors were desperately attempting to get Living Soldiers published in Tokyo. The novel did not condemn the war itself, but its graphic depictions of violence by Japanese soldiers ensured that negotiation with the censors would be an uphill battle. In the end, it was a battle that they lost: the text was suppressed entirely, and both author and publisher were indicted on the charge of violating the Press Law.4 Despite this serious charge, Ishikawa was allowed to return to China in September 1938 (again, as a special correspondent for ChĝĎ kĎron), and the texts he published thereafter were notably more conciliatory in their depictions of the Japanese military. Hino Ashihei, meanwhile, went on to achieve phenomenal success with the publication of his purportedly autobiographical work Wheat and Soldiers (Mugi to heitai, 1938) and its two

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sequels. Today, Hino and Ishikawa are commonly presented in literary history as belonging on opposite poles of a prowar-antiwar dichotomy, but the pivotal events surrounding the publications of “A Tale of Excrement and Urine” and Living Soldiers can be more productively understood as two sides of the same coin. As Gomibuchi Noritsugu has shown, both texts newly reminded wartime authorities that “people’s views and perception of the war could be directed in a certain way by controlling how the war was talked about.”5 It was not that literature suddenly took on political valences but that those valences (which had always been there, whether latently or not) were actively sought out and appropriated by the state, through the twin mechanisms of censorship and propaganda. The “publisher’s forum” (shuppan konwakai) formed by fifty-four Tokyo publishers in October 1937 is an emblematic example of how these twin mechanisms worked together in wartime Japan. Representatives of the forum met every month with censorship authorities in the Home Ministry, who not only had the power to issue censorship bans but also had control over paper allocations.6 Faced with the threat of government fines, prohibitions on publication and sale, paper restrictions, and even imprisonment, publishers used a number of different tactics and measures to accommodate both the mounting pressures of war and the demands of the reading public. The topos of Manchuria, with its exotic appeal and immediate wartime relevance, amply fulfilled both conditions and was targeted most often in journals and popular magazines during this time; but Korea emerged as a concomitant (if subordinate) topic of interest for metropolitan readers, too. Korea was to join the metropole in the war against China, and yet what did the Japanese really know about the colony? Publishers discovered that devoting journal issues to answering this question not only helped bolster imperial authority—it was also, quite simply, good business.

KIKUCHI KAN AND THE COLONIES One of the most influential businessmen to take advantage of the metropole’s interest in Korea was Kikuchi Kan, mentioned briefly in chapter 1.

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A novelist and a playwright as well as an entrepreneur, Kikuchi firmly believed that literary production should and must be fostered through commercial support. The numerous journals, contests, and organizations he founded were intended to elevate writing into a profession as well as strengthen its social force. He was the primary founder of Bungei shunjĝ (and, through that journal, the Akutagawa Prize); a financial supporter of a number of other journals, including Sandò mainichi, Bungakukai, and Modan Nihon; the first president of the Daiei Film Company; and the founding chairman of the Japan Writers’ Association (Nihon Bungeika KyĎkai), among others. Kikuchi was aware of the tremendous potential of a Japanese-reading Korean readership as early as September 1924, when he published a short piece in Bungei shunjĝ titled “Hopes for Korean Literature” (ChĎsen bungaku no kibĎ). In the piece, Kikuchi wrote how he had recently been given an opportunity to get to know some Korean youths in his capacity as an editor and how those youths had surprised him with their great enthusiasm for literature. He reflected that their interest in Japanese literature (Nihon bungaku) was entirely natural given that “the Korean youths are taught Japanese [Nihongo], whether by choice or not,” and that “only the literary world [bundan] has no national biases or racial discrimination.” 7 Kikuchi then urged Koreans to fully take advantage of the Japanese language and its literature in order to create a new kind of Korean literature, just as the Irish used the language of the English for their own ends. “Surely,” he concluded, “I am not alone in this dream” (114). “Hopes for Korean Literature” is notable in the ways the explicit particularity of Korean ethnicity is brought into tension against the implicit floating signifier of Japan (whose overdetermined borders both exclude and exceed the former). Kikuchi attempted to conceptualize Japanese literature as part of a universal, apolitical cultural sphere untouched by “national biases or racial discrimination,” even as his positioning of Koreans within that sphere necessarily presumed their coloniality. The fact that he was able to do so without apparent contradiction speaks to the workings of hegemony as described by Judith Butler, where “the exclusion of certain contents from any given version of universality is itself responsible for the production of universality in its empty and formal vein.” 8 In other words,

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Japan(ese) was able to seem self-evidently coherent through the generative difference of colonial Korean alterity, and not despite it. By presenting Japanese as a neutral tool through which a “new Korean literature” could be forged, Kikuchi was not only able to defer the question of the Japanese language’s relationship to Japanese literature but also make the question itself irrelevant. It is unclear in the essay if the Korean youths who subscribed to Kikuchi’s journals did so from colonial Korea or from metropolitan Japan, but perhaps that question, too, is irrelevant. The value of Koreans in this context was their universalization as consumers of Japanese literature as well as their simultaneous particularization (and commodification) as producers of Japanese language literature. Kikuchi was not alone in his awareness of the consumer potential of Japanese-language readers. Tokyo publishers treated colonial Korea and Taiwan as lucrative markets, particularly when it came to selling off unsold inventory of enpon (one-yen books) and other mass-market products.9 It is also no coincidence that almost all the metropolitan journals that featured works by Koreans in the 1930s and 1940s were helmed by editors who had direct experience living in or traveling to Korea. Kikuchi himself visited Korea in 1930 and again in 1940; Yasutaka TokuzĎ, the editor who helped launch Chang Hy̡kchu’s writing career, lived in Korea as a child from 1906 to 1910; Yamamoto Sanehiko, the founder of KaizĎ, traveled to Korea and Manchuria in 1932 and published a travelogue about his experiences soon after. What we can learn from these individual trajectories is not that personal interest in the colonies preceded publication patterns but that these two things emerged together, in and by empire. For the many Japanese writers who traveled to the rapidly expanding territories of Japan in the years leading up to the Fifteen-Year War, the colonies offered the promise of creative inspiration—if not necessarily interaction.10 Tanizaki Jun’ichirĎ (1886–1965), for example, wrote several essays and stories based on a trip he took to Korea and China in 1918. In the short essay “Miscellaneous Impressions of Korea” (ChĎsen zakkan), Tanizaki recorded his impressions of the peninsula as witnessed on the train, comparing the vivid Korean landscape unfurling before his eyes to a premod-

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ern picture scroll (emakimono).11 In the essay his gaze alights on the scenery first and then narrows upon the men and women walking along the streets. The gaze is sympathetic, even admiring, but firmly one-way: the distance between watcher and watched may shrink, but it never collapses. The Korea of Tanizaki’s text is subordinated both temporally and aesthetically in Japan’s past, its value determined solely by its ability to stimulate the gazer.12 While the particularization of Korea by Japanese cultural producers did not disappear with the outbreak of war, it did morph in function and form. As mentioned in chapter 1, the kĎminka movement led to an increase in the amount of Japanese-language fiction by Korean writers. It also led to an increase in the number of readers of Japanese-language fiction, as statistics compiled by the GGK reveal: the metropolitan newspaper Æsaka mainichi shinbun, for example, started out with 1,881 Korean subscribers in 1926, saw that number grow to 8,930 by 1937, and then to 23,143 by 1940.13 More important, the kĎminka movement was incorporated into larger debates across the empire on what the proper function of literature should be in a time of total war. As the cases of Hino Ashihei and Ishikawa TatsuzĎ reveal, literary producers could no longer afford not to acknowledge the “current situation” ( jikyoku), whether explicitly in content or implicitly through paratextual framing. Texts about and by Koreans, in the Japanese language, not only bridged the explicit-implicit context of empire but also changed the ways metropolitan publishers and critics conceptualized empire itself. By way of example, let me turn to a consideration of the popular magazine Modan Nihon. Modan Nihon was founded by Kikuchi Kan in October 1930, soon after his return from his first trip to Korea and Manchuria. The opening pages of Modan Nihon’s inaugural issue featured a declaration by Kikuchi that the journal would be devoted to “lifestyles, practical science, entertainment, and hobbies,” although he added as a caveat that since “ journals are living creatures,” it was anyone’s guess how Modan Nihon would change in the years to come.14 In fact, the journal came to embody Kikuchi Kan’s keen business sense, which balanced the symbolic power of literature against the commercial power of popular interest. While early issues did not explicitly engage with the colonies, the magazine’s assemblage

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of articles, images, and advertisements both depended upon and presumed the (national/imperial) centrality of Tokyo in dictating the latest “modern” lifestyle practices and consumer products.15 In January 1932, the magazine came under the leadership of Ma Haesong (1905–1966), a writer of children’s books in Korea and one of Kikuchi’s protégés. Born in Kaes̡ng in 1905, Ma completed his higher education in Tokyo, at Nihon University’s College of Art. It was in Tokyo where he met and was eventually employed by Kikuchi Kan, first as the advertising manager for Bungei shunjĝ and then as the chief editor of Modan Nihon. Like other magazines at the time, following the Manchurian Incident Modan Nihon devoted many of its pages to visualizing and narrativizing the violent developments on the continent for its readers, but it was not until the formal outbreak of war with China in 1937 that it began to unequivocally align itself with the propaganda efforts of the Japanese government.16 The journal’s publication of a special issue devoted entirely to Korean culture and arts in November 1939 and again in August 1940 was therefore not an unexpected aberration but part of the political mobilization of culture in the metropole. Modan Nihon’s 1939 special issue on Korea featured a broad array of articles: photo montages of popular Korean actresses and dancers; various essays introducing the state of Korea’s industries and arts; an article on the recent Korean-language translation of Hino Ashihei’s Wheat and Soldiers; Japanese-language translations of stories by Yi Hyos̡k (1907–1942), Yi T’aejun (1904–?), and Yi Kwangsu; and more. Contributors to the journal included Japanese notables living in Korea (Minami JirĎ, Shiobara TokisaburĎ, Mitarai Tatsuo); Korean authors and artists, writing in Japanese at the request of the magazine but from an unspecified location (Kim Saryang, Han Sik, Chang Hy̡kchu); Japanese authors and artists, writing about their memories of Korea (Murayama Tomoyoshi, Kikuchi Kan, Yasutaka TokuzĎ); and a group of Pyongyang kisaeng (professional female entertainers). As even this brief outline shows, the special edition assembled its sources from all corners of the colonial empire in order to introduce a composite picture of “Korea,” carefully edited and censored, to the curious masses.

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Ma Haesong acknowledged the linking of Korea with military mobilization in a roundtable discussion published in the 1939 special edition: “This is the tenth anniversary of Modan Nihon’s founding, and as a commemoration we decided to publish a special extra issue, the ‘Korea edition’—I was born in Korea, after all, and I thought it’d be appropriate given the current situation [ jikyoku].” 17 The editor’s postscript at the end of the issue also took care to emphasize again the “current situation” and the “instruction and approval given by the distinguished men of the Korean Government General and others” (354), calling attention to the prominent role played by the colonial government in the creation of the special issue. It is of course undeniable that the sudden renewed visibility of Korea in the pages of Modan Nihon and elsewhere had everything to do with the coercive policies of kĎminka, which demanded the full loyalty of the colonies but did not guarantee parity in legal or social status. Rather than end the discussion there, however, I wish to push our understanding of kĎminka one step further and ask why, at this particular juncture, colonial authorities and authors came together for a “Korea edition” published in Tokyo. To whom is the injunction to “become an imperial subject” oriented in such a case? And to what effect? One refrain to emerge from the 1939 special issue was that it was the equal responsibility of metropolitan readers to know and think of Korea and to become themselves the kind of imperial subject Koreans could emulate. In articles with titles such as “Perceptions of Korea” (ChĎsen no ninshiki), “How to View Korea” (ChĎsen o dĎ miru ka), and “Difference and Understanding” (Sai to rikai), both Korean and Japanese contributors bemoaned the lack of interest that had up to this point characterized metropolitan attitudes toward its geographically closest colony.18 Suzuki Takeo (1901–1975), at the time a professor at KeijĎ Imperial University, went so far as to criticize those who still thought of Korea as a colony (shokuminchi), warning readers that “with the construction of a new order in East Asia, we must now, more than ever, throw away European ideologies and ideas about the old order of things.” 19 If Japan was to triumph over its rivals, it had to be completely unified; but it could not become so if Japanese citizens persisted in viewing Korea as an unconnected corner of the

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empire. And as another commentator pointed out, it was Tokyo—as the undisputed center of that empire—that had to take the first step in bridging the gap.20 Kikuchi Kan agreed, and the steps that he took were entirely in line with his philosophy for literature: in that same issue of Modan Nihon an advertisement boldly proclaimed that Kikuchi had provided funds to establish a “Korean Arts Prize” (ChĎsen Geijutsu ShĎ), to be administered by Modan Nihon. The goal of the prize was “to recognize artistic activities in all quarters within Korea, for the sake of our culture.”21 The reference to “our culture” (wagakuni bunka, or more literally, “the culture of our country”) is notable: the ambiguity of the phrase when presented in an imperial context allows it to refer simultaneously to Japan the nation and Japan the empire, thereby situating Korean cultural production as belonging to both. At the same time, it is also significant that the prize (like the special issue on Korea) was conceived primarily as a vehicle to introduce Korean literary, musical, and film production to a metropolitan audience, which was “generally familiar only with Mount K̿mgang and kisaeng.”22 The affective power of the arts could be used as one way to bring metropole and periphery together, without fundamentally challenging the hierarchy between them. The prize was also a useful tool in boosting sales. The inaugural winner of the Korean Arts Prize was Yi Kwangsu, whose novella The Unenlightened (Mumyʵng) had appeared in Japanese translation in the 1939 Korean edition of Modan Nihon. When Kikuchi wrote, upon the conferral of the prize, that he hoped “readers in the mainland will use this opportunity to become familiar with the works of Yi Kwangsu,” he meant it in a practical as well as an idealistic sense: Modan Nihon would go on to publish several volumes of Yi’s works in Japanese translation in 1940 and 1941, while other Kikuchi-founded journals continued to print his essays and short stories in their pages.23 Publishing trends suggest that readers did respond to such business strategies to some extent. The 1939 Korea edition proved so popular that Modan Nihon soon published a second special issue on Korea in August 1940, some nine months after the first one. Competing journals also followed suit. Bungei featured a special on Korean literature in 1940;

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Nihon no fĝzoku offered one in 1941; and Eiga hyĎron did a highlight on Korean film, also in 1941.24 The reactions of Korean consumers, in contrast, were mixed. While some welcomed the renewed spotlight on Korea, hoping it might lead to positive legal and social change, others decried it as superficial. In the Eiga hyĎron special feature on Korea, for example, the Korean director Hinatsu EitarĎ (1908–1952, also known as H̡ Y̡ng) took metropolitan readers to task for their persistent indifference toward Korean culture and their tendency to “forget” Korea every time there was a new development in China or the South Seas.25 Even Yi Kwangsu expressed dissatisfaction with his reception in the naichi, stating in a 1940 roundtable discussion held in Korea that the real problem was a lack of competent translators.26 A fellow participant, the literary critic and translator Ch̡ng Ins̡p (1905–1983), acknowledged that quality literary translations were necessary for “Tokyo critical circles” (Tonggyʵng p’yʵngdan) to accurately evaluate the merits of Korean literature, since only a minority of Korean writers had the ability to write directly in Japanese. He then proposed that a translation bureau be established in Tokyo to that end. In the May 1940 issue of ShinchĎ, one anonymous Korean reader questioned whether the efforts of “one or two Korea-born writers” would be enough to spark genuine interest among Japanese readers in Korean literature.27 Japanese appreciation of Korean literature had remained almost nonexistent until very recently because the majority of stories had been written in Korean. After all, the author commented with sardonic bluntness, “you can’t have interest in something if you don’t even know it exists” (9). The problem with fiction written in Japanese by Korean writers was that, while it did help raise awareness among Japanese readers, it also simultaneously threatened the existence of an explicitly Korean (language) literature. The literature of a nation or people was by definition predicated on its difference from other national and ethnic literatures. Such being the case, the essay concluded, wouldn’t the very idea of integration become untenable if Korean literature ceased to be Korean? The anonymous writer’s professed inability to “resolve” (11) this paradox should remind us again that kĎminka did not necessarily mean “becoming

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Japanese.” For while Korea—or rather, a carefully packaged media image of it—was being marketed as part and parcel of the Japanese empire, its consumer appeal was in its difference from Japan the nation. This discourse of particularity was nothing new, as we have seen. What was new was the way Korean particularity was made contingent to Japanese imperial ambitions, rather than apart from them. This was not in spite of kĎminka policy but precisely through and because of it. KĎminka policies did not aim to make Koreans into “Japanese” but rather to make them into useful “imperial subjects,” a category itself defined by war. But because the Japanese, too, were considered imperial subjects, the construction of ethnic difference became crucial in ensuring that the boundaries (and thereby the hierarchies) between mainland and colony were maintained. That Korean particularity was mobilized for Japanese commercial profit was not a coincidence but the very consequence of kĎminka.

REPETITION WITH A DIFFERENCE: O N K I M S A R YA N G ’ S “ P E G A S U S ” Mary Louise Pratt and other postcolonial scholars have written extensively about how the drive to know, to code, to narrate the colonies is intimately linked with the desire to control or contain them. If considered from this perspective, the ubiquitous kĎminka slogan “Naisen ittai” (Mainland Japan and Korea as one body) may perhaps be more aptly translated as “Mainland Japan consuming Korea into one body,” where a packaged knowledge of Korea is offered up for easy consumption by the general (Japanese) populace. Colonial writers and artists often played an ambivalent role in this media production of “Korea.” While it is true that metropolitan interest created new spaces for colonial subjects to speak and be heard, the things they were allowed to say (and the reception their words received) were severely constrained because of the wartime climate, as outlined in the introduction to this chapter. The writer Kim Saryang is perhaps one of the most well-known examples of a Korean colonial subject who attempted to use the language of his

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colonizers against them. Born in Pyongyang in 1914 to a well-to-do Christian family, Kim was part of the early generation of Korean children who received their education entirely under the colonial system. In 1936, he enrolled in Tokyo Imperial University as a student of the German Literature Departure but had already begun to experiment with prose writing in Japanese. His literary connections in Tokyo eventually led to an invitation by the editors of Modan Nihon to write a column on Korean literature and translate some literary works for inclusion in their 1939 special issue on Korea. (Yi Kwangsu’s The Unenlightened, the work that would later win the Korean Arts Prize, was in fact translated by Kim.) In October 1939, Kim caught the larger attention of the Japanese literary world with the publication of the short story “Into the Light” (Hikari no naka ni) in the prestigious coterie journal Bungei shuto. Yasutaka TokuzĎ, the editor of Bungei shuto at the time, commented that “Mr. Kim Saryang is a writer from the peninsula, but the story expresses something magnificent—something that could only come from a writer from the peninsula.”28 Kim’s ethnicity was again emphasized when “Into the Light” was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize in February of the following year. Although the judges for the prize declined to award Kim first place, many of them praised the story for both its timeliness and its “Koreanness.” Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972), for example, noted positively that the story dealt with major issues involving “the feelings of the Korean people.”29 SatĎ Haruo (1892–1964) agreed, writing that Kim had “fully woven the tragic fate of a people into his I-novel, making his I-novel into a kind of social novel” (352). Like others before him, Kim professed to being uneasy with the way metropolitan readers so readily interpreted his stories through their own preconceived notions of “the Korean people.” Some four months after receiving the nomination for the prize, Kim published “Pegasus” (Tenma) in Kikuchi Kan’s Bungei shunjĝ. The title refers to the story’s protagonist, a Korean man named Genryĝ whose attempts to gain status through association with his Japanese colonizers eventually lead to his doom.30 The more Genryĝ tries to become mainland Japanese (naichijin), the more parodic his actions seem. In this way, “Pegasus” thematizes the different ontological contradictions of kĎminka, which insisted that Koreans become

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Japanese imperial subjects but not Japanese necessarily. It thus feels appropriate to end this chapter with an extended analysis of the text, which offers a critical counterpoint to the metropolitan publishing trends examined in previous sections. “Pegasus” begins with a close scrutiny of the self-deluded Genryĝ as he blusters and brags his way through the urban streets of KeijĎ, asserting himself as a renowned writer to everyone he meets. The reader learns in a flashback that while Genryĝ did build up something of a name for himself in the years he lived in Tokyo, his so-called literary career started out as just that—a name, and only a name. Denied lodgings again and again “first for his Korean face, and then for the tattered trousers he came in,” Genryĝ suddenly hits upon the idea of lying about his origins.31 He begins calling himself not only the son of a noble family but also a first-class writer well known in Korean literary circles; over the next decade, the illusion grows so powerful that by the time Genryĝ returns to KeijĎ, he has thoroughly convinced himself of its veracity. It is in Korea that Genryĝ begins writing compositions and publishing them in lowbrow magazines, thus materializing fantasy into a semblance of reality. At first glance, the fact that Genryĝ finds himself able to write in Korea and not Japan seems to vindicate the logic of kĎminka, wherein categories of identity (loyal imperial subject, dutiful member of the empire) are articulated by the colonizing country and produced in the colonized territory. In this context, the construction of identity is paradoxically enabled by the forcible deconstruction of national borders. The vocabulary used by the Japanese government to describe the asymmetrical relationship between metropole and colony further emphasizes the process of identity formation: theoretically, the qualities of the metropole radiate outward toward the periphery, in perhaps the same way the human mind dictates the actions of the body.32 The trope of the body finds further expression in the words naisen ittai, mentioned in the text on page 377. The catchphrase locates Japan and Korea in an unequal but unifying relationship not unlike “a man holding out his hand in marriage to a female Korea” (377). On the other hand, Genryĝ’s mental instability, his anguish and terror, confirm that any identity achieved through this violent unification is in

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constant threat of breaking down. The incommensurable difference between colonizer and colonized are physically inscribed onto the body in “Pegasus”: Genryĝ is unable to hide the truth of his ethnicity because “his body build and physiognomy declared him to be unmistakably Korean” (364). Although the passage may seem like a simple declaration of racial disparity on the surface, contextualizing it against kĎminka discourse helps uncover an oblique criticism of Japan’s imperial policies. The rhetoric of naisen ittai collapses into meaninglessness when brought up against the insuperable barrier of the distinct body; the metropole’s attempt to imprint itself onto the colony meets with failure at every turn. The text’s description of how Genryĝ once pursued Akiko, the sister of an acquaintance named Tanaka, further demonstrates the terrible contradictions of colonial reality. The narrator remarks, Earlier that evening, Tanaka had told Tsunoi about all the trouble Genryĝ had given Akiko—such as how Genryĝ liked to time it so he visited her when Tanaka wasn’t there, even changing into Tanaka’s padded kimono and stationing himself at his desk as if he owned the place. When the man in question returned, Genryĝ would say things like, “Now, isn’t this a surprise,” with the air of someone greeting a guest. There was also one evening when Tanaka bumped into Genryĝ on the street and was completely extorted out of all the cash he had on him because “something serious had come up.” Later that evening, however, Tanaka returned home to find that Genryĝ had bought a heap of apples and cream puffs and was forcing Akiko to eat them, laughing delightedly with a kikiki as he did so. (373–74)

Genryĝ puts on Tanaka’s clothes in the same way he “puts on” the act of writer and noble son, attempting to become master of the house through a performance that is both material (the wearing of clothes) and linguistic (“Now, isn’t this a surprise”). The Japanese phrase used for “as if he owned the place” is shujingao de, which can be transliterated as “with the face of the household head” or “with the face of the master.” The use of the word

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is significant because it echoes the vocabulary of the body seen in previous passages and emphasizes the mimetic quality of Genryĝ’s performances. But just as the human body repels projections of sameness, the human face also resists reproduction with its physical individuality. The more Genryĝ tries to portray himself as a Japanese man, the more he slides into grotesque parody; the more he tries to act as an assimilated Japanese subject, the more his actions become threatening to the metropolitan colonizer. The  absurdity of Genryĝ’s performance reaches its climactic moment in his encounter with Tanaka at the Japanese man’s home; there, the difference between real and imitation manifests itself through a literal face-toface confrontation. It is important to remember, however, that this particular story of Genryĝ’s pursuit of Akiko is told through the perspective of Tsunoi, a Japanese scholar who delights in disparaging Koreans. When reconsidered through the eyes of the colonial subject, it becomes possible to interpret the face-to-face encounter between Genryĝ and Tanaka as a critical moment of contestation. Boundaries of metropole and periphery collapse: the periphery is no longer outside but within the metropole, the displacing colonizer himself displaced by the product of his imperial project. Although this moment of reverse displacement is fleeting, terminated with Genryĝ’s deportation back to Korea, perhaps the significance of the act lies not in its duration but in the way it shifts power to the dispossessed body through the very means of its dispossession. A returned gaze does not reflect the image of the colonizer, it distorts it; the reiteration of imperialistic discourse by the colonized subject does not reinforce its legitimacy, it calls it into question. The exchanges that take place between Genryĝ and the visiting Japanese men are illuminating in this regard. In a bar in KeijĎ, Tsunoi decries that Koreans “were all cowardly and warped from birth, and were furthermore members of a shameless, factious race” (374). Genryĝ later faithfully repeats Tsunoi’s statement, stating that Koreans are “sneaky and cowardly, so they break up into factions and try to tear down anyone who’s better than them” (375). The delicate irony of the situation is that while the Japanese men take this reiteration as validation of their opinion that Koreans

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are only too quick to slander one another, Genryĝ’s words stem not from any observation of reality but from a desire for equality: he believes that it is only by insulting his fellow Koreans that he can talk on equal footing with his metropolitan Japanese peers. Like a house of mirrors, the institution of imperialism bases its discourse on an endless maze of self-referential images and recursive distortions. The case of the writer Tanaka stands out as another prime example: finding himself in a writing slump, Tanaka travels from mainland Japan to KeijĎ and begins writing magazine articles about contemporary intellectual society there. Genryĝ’s misery and base condition become perfect fodder for his writing, and he decides to treat Genryĝ as a “representative” Korean in order to substantiate his claims about Korean intelligentsia. Pleased with his discoveries, Tanaka exults to himself, “Those people who say they don’t understand the Chinese are utter fools. If it took me only two days to understand the Koreans, I bet I could figure out China in four!” (375). Readers, of course, are privileged with the knowledge that Genryĝ is anything but a representative intellectual—in fact, he is all but banned from literary circles in KeijĎ and treated contemptuously as a madman by all his Korean peers. All his peers, except one—Genryĝ’s female counterpart, Bun Sogyoku (Kr. Mun So-ok). Bun Sogyoku is introduced early in the text as a woman who, like Genryĝ, parrots imperial slogans as she plays at being a writer, although her meager output consists of only “a handful of derivative poems heavily borrowing from Rimbaud” (359). Bun Sogyoku is both Genryĝ’s lover and coconspirator in the story, but her life in KeijĎ is even more constrained than Genryĝ’s. Whereas Genryĝ has immediate, if problematic, access to Japanese literary circles through Tanaka, Bun Sogyoku’s status as a writer is defined through Genryĝ, whose praise of her poems is what enables her to think of herself as a “poetess” ( joryĝ shijin). And while Genryĝ’s parodic “repetition with a difference” contains a strong critical edge, one directed at and by the parody, the ridicule of Bun Sogyoku is always monologic and one-way. 33 She is the target of criticism, in other words—but never the agent who wields it.

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The different narrative functions of Genryĝ and Bun Sogyoku help illustrate how the seemingly gender-neutral conceptualization of the “Korean people” was gendered from the start.34 Ultimately it is Genryĝ, not Bun Sogyoku, who is afforded some space (however limited) for protest, precisely through his Janus-like nature. Genryĝ is two-faced in all senses of the word. He shifts his rhetoric according to the listener, for one; consider how he brags about his reputation in Japanese literary circles to his Korean peers and about his reputation in Korean literary circles to his Japanese acquaintances. For another, his gaze alights on the discriminatory attitude of Japanese colonists as well as on the disheartening state of Korean society. The instances where Genryĝ looks back at his ridiculers often become powerful examples of how confrontation can generate silence and guilt. When Genryĝ accosts a group of cooks who had previously been sneering at him, for example, they are flustered into silence (355); when he meets the eyes of the other customers in the seedy bar, each one “would nervously clamp his mouth shut and look the other way” (369). Genryĝ’s prominent use of laughter also works to achieve the same effect, often startling his critics into silence. In his seminal work on Dostoyevsky, Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) uses the concepts of dialogism and polyphony to describe the multivoiced nature of Dostoyevsky’s novels. According to Bakhtin, linguistic tools such as stylization, irony (including the use of humor), and dialogue work to infuse a text with a dialogic discourse that is twofold in direction, “directed both toward the referential object of speech . . . and toward another’s discourse, toward someone else’s speech.”35 Crucially, dialogic discourse can be found not simply in dialogue—upon which the concept of dialogism rests—but also in a single utterance, or a seemingly single style of narration. In the introduction to their notable biography of Bakhtin, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist describe this theory as “not a dialectical either/or, but a dialogic both/and.”36 They view Bakhtin’s rejection of the either-or binary of difference in favor of a more unifying both-and logic as a positive impulse. The constant negotiation, contestation, and resignification of utterances can create narratives that, in Bakhtin’s own words, have an “extraordinary multi-sided and multi-leveled

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quality” that is itself the very condition of human experience.37 What happens, however, when dialogic structures are glossed in the context of colonial contestation? Does Genryĝ’s laughter indicate an attempt to achieve a both-and synthesis of language, or does it signal a collapse into the “neither-nor” anarchy of failed communication? Laughter in “Pegasus” erupts among Korean and Japanese characters alike. The Korean poetess titters with an ohoho (362); Tsunoi gives out a loud hahaha (373); the crowds of Genryĝ’s imagination jeer wahaha (381); and Genryĝ goes through an entire spectrum of laughs. By transcribing the actual sounds, the text imbues a phonic slipperiness into the characters’ speech. For example, wahaha written in hiragana marks the sound as Japanese; but the same sound spoken leaves open the question of its linguistic affiliation, since the syllables could easily be marked as Korean as well.38 Genryĝ’s constant laughter may thus be seen as an effort to bridge the gap between Korean and Japanese, a way for him to retain the possibility of both identities without necessarily having to choose one. On the other hand, the fact that the laughter in “Pegasus” is often full of hostility suggests that the sounds may more accurately indicate the loss of language, not its retention. Genryĝ is a figure whose laughs are laughed at; his humor is that of farce. It must be noted here that much of Genryĝ’s chortles proceed from his blustering performances: he says hehehe to the bellboy at Tanaka’s hotel (357); he sniggers at the writers advocating Korean as a literary language (360); he giggles with delight when feeding food to Akiko (374). At one point the narrator comments that, like a madman, Genryĝ “did not stop his sullen laughter” even while lying prone on the floor (355–56) and how “the sound of his own strangled, oddly shrill laughter startled him” (370). Genryĝ’s increasing inability to control his laughter can be linked to a commentary on the growing impossibility of reconciliation between colonial identities. The rhetoric of kĎminka is monologic, in the end; it insists on the totality of imperial rule by orienting words like “national language” and “patriotism” to point to the metropole. For Genryĝ, the only escape is in alienating exile. The reader learns at the beginning of “Pegasus” that Genryĝ is under suspicion by the Japanese government of being a spy and that he would have been detained in prison

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had Æmura, the chief of the patriotic current affairs periodical U. Magazine and Genryĝ’s erstwhile benefactor, not intervened on his behalf. When Æmura suggests that Genryĝ retreat to a Buddhist temple in order to show penance for his actions, Genryĝ reacts with deep alarm. One reason for Genryĝ’s fear may lie in the fact that the Buddhist temple emblemizes a decisive sundering from society in its physical distance and functional difference from the urban space. Retreating into the temple walls means losing the ability to interact with anyone but the monks; it means losing the freedom of mobility. A second consequence of exile is linguistic: dialogic discourse forcibly replaced by monologic chanting. That is to say, while laughter exists between languages, the words of the Buddhist sutras exist outside them—neither Korean nor Japanese, merely empty sounds stripped of meaning. Like Genryĝ, Bun Sogyoku also has a certain freedom of movement: we find her in the smoky cafés of Koreatown, in Genryĝ’s dingy apartment, and on the broad streets of the prosperous Japanese section of the city. It is Bun Sogyoku’s active espousal of kĎminka and the Japanese language that allows her the mobility to traverse borders. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, kĎminka measures would have had different consequences for colonial men and women because of the different gendered positions they occupied in society. For example, in the final scene of “Pegasus” we see Bun Sogyoku actively urging Genryĝ to join her in shrine worship along with the rest of the city.39 Participation in mass parades and shrine worship could have given a broad range of women access to the public sphere in ways that transcended divisions of class and region. KĎminka policies were publicly endorsed by prominent public figures such as Kim Hwallan (Helen Kim), then president of Ewha Woman’s Professional School. She and other women reformers worked closely with the Korean League for the National Spirit Mobilization Movement (Kokumin Seishin SĎdĎin ChĎsenren) for the specific purpose of improving the living conditions of women in poor farming communities and promoting women’s rights in general.40 In the end, it is Bun Sogyoku who directs Genryĝ to his doom. In the ultimate scene of “Pegasus” she leads him to a long procession of shrine

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worshippers, but the sight frightens Genryĝ so much that he flees in the opposite direction, even as Bun Sogyoku merges into the crowd. Wandering aimlessly down nameless streets, Genryĝ tries to fight against the hallucinations springing from his unsettled mind. In his fevered imagination, the repeated intonation of “Hail Lotus Sutra” rises up like an ocean around him. The end of the story has him roaming through KeijĎ, desperately trying to outrun the chanting of the monks—only to find himself lost in the same tangle of narrow back alleys he began in, as if the text itself were a linguistic maze. No escape presents itself to him; no house takes him in. Does this inability to move beyond the in-between of space signal the final collapse of both-and into neither-nor? It strikes me as significant that the last page of the story has the narrator identifying Genryĝ with only the ambiguous pronoun marker “he”—with even this “he” disappearing by the last four lines: “Open up, let this mainland Japanese [naichijin] in!” Breaks into a run again. Bangs on the front gate. “I’m not a Korean [yobo] anymore! I’m Ryĝnosuke, Gennoue Ryĝnosuke! Let Ryĝnosuke in!” Somewhere the thunder was growling. (384)

Stripped by the text of all external names, Genryĝ tries desperately to name himself as the “Japanese” Ryĝnosuke, but his voice is instead replaced by the ominous rumble of thunder. The story ends here, without resolution—bleakly suggesting that the interplay of various colonial identities may have been more trap than maze, and more tragedy than farce.

*** Throughout his career, both during and after the colonial period, Kim would justify his decision to write in Japanese as a way to convey the “lifestyles and emotions and realities of the Korean people” to Japanese mainland readers, particularly during a time when to write in or about Korea

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was to increasingly come under the scrutiny of the censors.41 In “Pegasus,” Kim powerfully highlights the contradictions of late Japanese imperialist discourse by appropriating it and resignifying it with ironic meaning. Like the figure of Pygmalion from Greek mythology, the Japanese writers and scholars in the story build up an image of the other in their mind; and although Genryĝ is only too eager to bring this image to life, his ultimate failure to do so casts a dark, distorting shadow over the entire imperial project. At the same time, there is another shadowing at work—that of Genryĝ by Bun Sogyoku. While the text makes clear that Genryĝ’s collaborations originated from a desire to achieve parity with his Japanese (male) peers, Bun Sogyoku’s motives are unstated. Here, though, I do not want to speculate on her intentions so much as point out that they are not made to matter in the text. Bun Sogyoku is in the end delegated to the siren who helps lure Genryĝ into the dangerous anonymity of the masses, and who herself disappears into them. Considering these gendered differences, what does it mean to draw a battlefield line between collaboration and resistance when the two sides they represent—“Japan” vs. “Korea”—have no coherent unity within themselves? In order to answer this question, I wish now to return briefly to the events outlined in the introduction of this chapter. While the 1938 military volunteer program was small in scale in its beginning stages, it was considered by Japanese authorities as an essential part of the “cultivation of human resources” on the Korean peninsula, resources that were eventually to be conscripted for the purposes of war.42 Men were made central to this conscription process, both as soldiers and as authority figures who could voice and legitimize Japanese propaganda. A Yomiuri shinbun article from January 1938 illustrates the role Korean women were to play in relation to such men: titled “Women’s Army from the Peninsula on the March” (HantĎ no jogun kĎshin), it detailed how a long procession of Korean women “dressed in a variety of Korean-style and Japanese-style clothing” made their way through the streets of Tokyo cheering for the military volunteer program, finally ending their demonstration at Yasukuni

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Shrine.43 Accompanying the article was a photo of the prominent Korean politician Pak Ch’un-g̿m (1891–1973) conspicuously positioned at the front of a crowd of nameless women, their smiling faces simultaneously a supplement to and substitution of the “masculinist logic” of nation and empire.44 While the paradigm of the imperial subject depended upon a vision of empire constructed around sameness and inclusion, it was necessarily manifested in different ways depending on one’s class, gender, and ethnicity. Even the colonial male elites of Korea, however, found that the promise of equality was a false one. It is worth noting here that Kim Saryang was ultimately passed over for the Akutagawa Prize in favor of Samukawa KĎtarĎ (1908–1977), a Hokkaido-born writer whom Kikuchi Kan praised as “someone whose ample talents are like those of Ishikawa and Hino.”45 Ishikawa and Hino, of course, refer to Ishikawa TatsuzĎ and Hino Ashihei, two previous winners of the prize who went on to earn a reputation as writers of “war literature” (sensĎ bungaku). All three writers were themselves from regional areas historically marginalized within the naichi (Samukawa was born in Hokkaido; Hino, in Fukuoka; Ishikawa, in Akita), and it is possible to see a connection between their literary successes and colonial authorities’ attempts to position Korea as a “region” (chihĎ) of Japan. Indeed, as Janet Poole has suggested, the “rhetorical disavowal of the colonial relation” was not separate from but intrinsic to the logic of Japanese fascism, which promised to erase the divisions of class, country, and empire produced by capitalism but without erasing capitalism itself.46 The crucial difference between someone like Samukawa KĎtarĎ and someone like Kim Saryang was that the latter was never allowed to forget the ultimate metanarrative that made Koreans separate from, and subordinate to, Japanese. As we have seen, Japanese publishers profited by representing Korea as part of Japan and yet also apart from it—a commodity to be consumed by the metropole but never to be made equal to it. While some individuals saw new if limited opportunities opened up by the Japanese language and kĎminka, the injunction to become (never to be)

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ensured that political and ideological parity between colonizer and colonized would always remain just beyond the horizon, glimpsed but never reached. The next chapter explores how kokugo ideology and kĎminka evolved in the twilight years of the colonial period, after the attack on Pearl Harbor necessitated yet another reenvisioning of empire and Korea’s place in it.

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shown how national language (kokugo) ideology was both a crucial cornerstone of Japan’s imperial project and the site where the paradoxes of that project were most exposed. Colonial subjects were exhorted to become one with their metropolitan peers for the sake of the Japanese emperor, even as they were particularized and marginalized in their efforts to do so. This “double bind” of colonialism can be traced as far back as Ueda Kazutoshi’s foundational lecture, “The National Language and the Nation-State,” which defined kokugo as potentially inclusive (language as synchronic, open, and mutable) and practically exclusive (language as diachronic, organic, and blood bound). The structural contradictions of kokugo ideology were never reconciled but instead contained and partially obfuscated by the hegemony of Japanese imperial rule. As we have seen, however, they were also productive in a certain sense, as writers in Korea and elsewhere attempted to come to terms with—or write back against—new possibilities of belonging and identity. This chapter expands on the role kokugo ideology played in the repositioning of Korean literature within a larger Japanese-language canon during the latter years of colonial rule. As war against China morphed into an all-out attempt to create a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” government officials and intellectual supporters called for a new kind of R EVI OU S C H A PTE R S H AV E

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national literature (kokumin bungaku) that treated state, nation, and empire as a unified whole working toward one unified goal. Like kokugo, which emerged precisely as the national borders of Japan were expanding and facing radical redefinition vis-à-vis its colonies, kokumin bungaku was seen as an imperial/national literature that was simultaneously a world literature. In its challenge to the West, kokumin bungaku depended upon the inclusion of colonial writers, but in doing so it also denied them an autonomy outside the domain of the Japanese language. The term kokumin bungaku had begun appearing in Japanese journals as early as the 1880s, but its explosive reemergence as a topic of debate would coincide with the kick start of the New Order Movement (Shintaisei UndĎ) in July 1940, led by then prime minister Konoe Fumimaro. Konoe’s domestic “new order” was at the same time an international engagement with the new order movements in Italy and Germany, as perhaps best emblemized by the Tripartite Pact signed by the three countries that same year.1 October 1940 saw the creation of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA, Taisei Yokusankai), a political structure that brought together government officials, party leaders, military officers, and civilian volunteers in an effort to mobilize public support. In Korea, a similar organization was launched under the name Korean League for Concerted National Power (Kokumin SĎryoku ChĎsen Renmei).2 The Korean League shared the goal of fostering a patriotic, participatory spirit among the public, but with a greater sense of urgency: the number of radio sets and newspaper agencies was far less in Korea than in mainland Japan, a condition that sparked concern about the efficacy and applicability of dissemination methods across the peninsula.3 With this issue in mind, the GGK enlisted a number of Korean intellectuals—with Yi Kwangsu as perhaps the most famous and active member—to promote pro-Japanese sentiments. The New Order Movement centered around a call for a political order in keeping with Japan’s self-appointed position as the leader of East Asia. Literature, too, fell within its scope. In August 1940, the Yomiuri shinbun ran a series called “My New Daily Life Order” (Watakushi no shin seikatsu taisei) in which notable writers ruminated on the new political function of literature. Hayashi Fusao (1903–1975), for example, advocated

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patience in the creation of the New Order, comparing the nurturing of sound national subjects (kokumin) to the nurturing of trees.4 Hino Ashihei called for both mental and physical fortitude.5 Sakakiyama Jun (1900– 1980), in contrast, thought writers should guide the national policies of the New Order toward ever-more “heroic” forms.6 “We have a duty,” he declared, “to raise high the culture of Japan [Nihon] and the Japanese [Nihonjin].” Korea gained a new visibility within this discourse, as both Korean and Japanese writers stressed the constitutive role of the peripheries in the making of a new East Asian order. Paradoxically, however, it was only in the peripheries that the identity of the imperial subject was able to supersede established colonial hierarchies. In order to demonstrate this point, in the pages that follow I examine several different kinds of texts: an essay by Yi Kwangsu on the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere; Obi JĝzĎ’s Akutagawa Prize–winning story “Ascent” (TĎhan), first published in the KeijĎ-based journal Kokumin bungaku in 1944; and the short story “Patriotic Children’s Squad” (Aikoku kodomo tai, 1941) by Yi Ch̡ngnae. All three were written in Japanese and labeled as kokumin bungaku. All three were published in Tokyo by individuals who lived outside it. All three exemplify a strand of literary border crossing that centered the spiritual heart of “Japan” in the peripheries. At the same time, the material circulation of the texts themselves shows that border crossing was a constant negotiation in which the value and meaning assigned to a work were encoded within larger political, ethnic, and gendered structures that sought to keep the colonial subject in his (and her) place.

“ W H AT I S K O K U M I N B U N G A K U ? ” The discursive coupling of the term kokumin (national people, the nation) to wartime mobilization was intended to incorporate all aspects of daily life into the purview of the imperial nation-state. While definitions of kokumin bungaku in the 1940s were never entirely unified, the staunchest

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proponents of the war agreed that it was to be a literature in which state, nation, and people were combined into one organic whole. For example, ShinchĎ’s 1940 special issue on kokumin bungaku boldly began with the statement, “The New Order has taken over the entire country. On this occasion and at this time, literature is allowed to exist only as one branch of culture. The idea of the supremacy of art, or literature for the sake of literature—these will remain as old tales only.” 7 In the same special issue, Asano Akira (1901–1990) lamented that “the literature up to now has been citizen’s literature [shimin bungaku], not national literature [kokumin bungaku]. . . . We must reproach ourselves for the fact that we were indifferent to the fate of the nation, that we pursued life while indifferent to the fate of the nation.” 8 Bungei published a special issue on kokumin bungaku one month after ShinchĎ. In “What Is National Literature?” (Kokumin bungaku to wa nani ka), the novelist Sakakiyama Jun acknowledged the need for writers to cooperate with the government, but also stressed that “to write is simultaneously to be political.”9 True national literature was not a literature of the petite bourgeoisie, or of the masses, or rather not simply that; it had to be a literature that transforms the sentiments of the reader from that of a member of civil society (shimin) to that of a nationalized member of Japan (kokumin). How and why this happens were questions picked up in the next essay, written by the novelist, literary critic, and translator ItĎ Sei (1905–1969).10 In his essay, ItĎ stressed the importance of language in preventing literature from becoming mere propaganda. Only through the precise, deliberate, and deeply thought-out use of language was it possible for Japan to achieve true greatness. “Kokumin bungaku has many objectives,” ItĎ concluded, “but I cannot stress enough how important it is to build a foundation of correct kokugo” (149). Common in both essays was the assumption that kokumin bungaku had not yet been established; it was a literature of the future, a goal and not yet a reality. The authors also agreed that it was not enough to write about Japan, or in Japanese; it was the effects of language that held the key. Every individual in the empire was expected to contribute to the war efforts in some form. While colonial subjects were still differentiated as

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imperial-subjects-to-be, their theoretical inclusion as kokumin (a category of belonging articulated through, if not irreducible to, political and legal structures) necessitated a reconfiguration of the metropole-periphery relationship. In Korea, education became one of the primary targets of this reconfiguration. In 1941, the GGK announced a new education ordinance that would rename all schools kokumin gakkĎ (national schools), in keeping with the changes that were being made in metropolitan Japan.11 The teaching of Korean was forbidden (as opposed to a previous ordinance, which made Korean an “optional” subject), and martial education was incorporated into the curriculum. With this ordinance, Koreans were now theoretically made equal not only to the Japanese in Korea but also to the Japanese in the metropole under the all-encompassing umbrella of kokumin. (In reality, and unsurprisingly, discrimination against Koreans lasted to the very end of colonial rule.) The buildup to the Pacific War (called the Greater East Asia War in Japan) had ushered out Konoe and ushered in TĎjĎ Hideki as prime minister by October 1941, spelling the end of the renovationist reforms of the New Order. In Korea, Governor-General Minami JirĎ was replaced by Koiso Kuniaki, who ramped up efforts to mobilize the entire peninsula for war.12 As officials called for more Japanese-language education and spiritual training, colonial literature, too, became linked to the fate of the imperial nation. It was during this time that sporadic attempts were made by Japanese intellectuals to situate Korean literature vis-à-vis kokumin bungaku. Consideration of Korea in kokumin bungaku discussions previously held in metropolitan Japan had been mostly absent; as discussed in chapter 2, if Korea was mentioned at all it was most often in terms of its particularity or difference. But as the Pacific War progressed the question of where to place Korea became increasingly more urgent—and the answer increasingly less clear. In February 1944, the poet and literary scholar Jinbo KĎtarĎ (1905–1990) predicted in an issue of Bungakukai that the current push toward kokumin bungaku in Japan would serve as a model for other literary movements in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.13 Kokumin bungaku was a chance for East Asia to cast off the pernicious influence of European literature;

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it was a chance to “return to our native home of Asia, which for a long time had seemed almost cut off; and to the fatherland [sokoku] of Japan” (6). In the essay, Jinbo also noted that Tokyo literary circles had long dismissed Korean and Taiwanese literature as an inferior kind of “colonial [gaichi] literature,” through the same misguided attachment to Europe. Kokumin bungaku had the ability to explode onto the world stage as world literature precisely because of its challenge to the authority of Europe. Without purifying one’s vision with “the blood and soil of Japan,” Jinbo concluded, “there can be no Greater East Asian literature of tomorrow, no Japanese literature of today” (7). In this essay, we see an attempt to theorize the position of Japanese literature as part of but not necessarily equal to kokumin bungaku. Japan was at last in a position not only to enter into world history but also to act as its subject, and it required a literature that could likewise enter into the world without being assimilated by it. Jinbo’s double vision of a national and world literature illustrates some of the ways in which all national literatures (or their conceptualizations) are “ultimately a by-product of the transnational creation, and continual re-creation, of the concept of literature as a universally applicable category—of the concept, in a certain sense at least, of world literature.” 14 Here, however, Jinbo’s call for a national literature that is also a “Greater East Asian literature” introduces the same discursive contradictions found elsewhere. Who is included in Jinbo’s references to Japanese authors? Were readers to understand Korean literature as part of Japan, or Greater East Asia, or both? These questions remain unanswered in the essay—perhaps because they did not have to be answered. It was “Japan” and “Asia” that would stand together against the monolithic third term of the West. The ambiguities of genre and national borders would allow Jinbo and the other aforementioned Japanese critics to elide the “Korea issue,” sweep it aside whenever it could not fit into the theoretical model at hand. But the question of Korea’s position within the Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere was one that could not be ignored or forgotten for those denied the sacrosanct bonds of “blood and soil.” In November 1941, the literary journal Kokumin bungaku (Kr. Kungmin munhak) was launched in

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Korea by the Korean intellectual Ch’oe Chaes̡ (1908–1964), exactly one year after the special issue on kokumin bungaku appeared in ShinchĎ. The founding issue’s declaration, written in Japanese, would borrow much of the same vocabulary, declaring that it was time to “serve imperial Japan [mikuni] with a pure heart and passionate devotion.” 15 Yet the declaration would also contain one critical difference—namely, the deliberate and consistent inclusion of Korea within the parameters of this new literature. One finds, for example, the following sentence: “The significance of the historical turn, the fate of the world, the mission of the empire, and, by extension, the future of Korean literature—all these have surely already been determined” (2; emphasis added). Korean literature was not simply to contribute to kokumin bungaku but to become it, on par with the metropole and the forerunner of the empire. There was, of course, a clear linguistic and ethnic hierarchy embedded in the seemingly open zone of kokumin bungaku, as the fate of the eponymous journal itself makes clear: although the original plan was to publish four issues in Japanese per year and the rest in Korean, starting in May 1942 the monthly journal was published entirely in Japanese. In this context, it is telling how often Korean writers invoked the idea of Japanese as a more effective vehicle than Korean for circulating texts around the world as the war against China and the Allied powers progressed. In a 1942 survey sent to writers “who write literature in kokugo,” for example, Yi Hyos̡k (1907–1942) responded that kokugo had achieved the level of a “world language” (sekaigo); using kokugo meant therefore that one could contribute to both Japanese literature and world literature.16 Like Goethe, Korean colonial writers like Yi privileged translation as the primary vehicle through which their works might enter into a new world order.17 But the price of admission was doubled, for them: before their words could be translated into other words, the authors had to first translate themselves. This is not to argue that colonial writers were able to access the world only through the Japanese language; my point, rather, is that any “world” that was accessible to them as world was inexorably bounded by the political, discursive, and material horizons of the Japanese empire.18

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It can be said that the existence of writers in Korea who wrote in Japanese was essential to maintaining the logic of late imperial discourse, which positioned Korea as part of “Japan” in spirit if not in civic equality. All writers from all parts of the empire could theoretically speak as one—if they spoke in Japanese. Even in the wartime period Korean-language articles did continue to circulate, and one can still find Korean-language stories published here and there in Korea, proving that official government control was never as uniform nor as total as it is often assumed to be. Debates on kokugo versus Korean language usage would also continue, with no resolution ever reached. But for people like Ch’oe Chaes̡, to write in Japanese was to irrefutably prove one’s right to be a historical actor on the world stage; to write kokumin bungaku, the irrefutable sign of one’s inclusion in an imperial brotherhood. And this was to be a brotherhood, bound just as tightly by gender as it was by “blood and soil,” as my literary analyses in the following sections will show.

C O N F E S S I O N S O N D I S P L AY: Y I K WA N G S U ’ S “ R E C O R D ” Japanese critics such as Jinbo KĎtarĎ stressed the need to create a unified Greater East Asian literature free of the pernicious influences of the West. The most prominent manifestation of this pan-Asian vision was the Greater East Asian Writers’ Conference (DaitĎa Bungakusha Taikai), which convened for the first time in November 1942.19 Fifty-seven delegates from Japan (defined in this case as metropolitan Japan, Korea, and Taiwan) met with twenty-one delegates from China, Manchuria, and Mongolia over a one-week period to give speeches, develop strategies to aid war efforts, and tour Japanese landmarks such as major Shinto shrines and museums. Bungakukai published a series of reports and essays on the first Greater East Asian Writers’ Conference in its January 1943 issue. Yi Kwangsu had been one of the Korean writers in attendance, and he wrote about the ex-

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perience in a number of outlets in both Korea and Japan. In the Bungakukai piece titled “Record of My Impression of Three Capitals” (SankyĎ inshĎ ki), Yi writes not of the conference itself but of the sightseeing activities that occurred before and after it, as he and other delegates were escorted to major historical sites in Tokyo, Ujiyamada (Ise), and Nara.20 Yi begins with his experiences in Tokyo. Because in his youth he had lived in Tokyo as a student at Meiji Gakuin and then at Waseda, he fondly thinks of the city as a “second home” (daini no furusato). But with this trip, it is as if he is seeing Tokyo—“now not just the capital of Japan but the capital of the Asian [sic] Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere” (68)—for the first time. It is a changed city, and he is a changed person: it is not his Korean name he uses when making offerings at the shrines but his sĎshi kaimei name, Kayama MitsurĎ. In Nara, Yi visits HĎryĝji, a Buddhist temple said to have been commissioned by Prince ShĎtoku. “As a Korean,” Yi notes, “there is a reason why I feel so fondly [o-natsukashiku] worshipful toward Prince ShĎtoku” (77). The reason is that it was a Korean, the Kogury̡ monk Hyeja, who imparted the teachings of the Lotus Sutra to the young regent. Yi uses honorific language toward Prince ShĎtoku and humble language when talking about Hyeja, thus aligning himself with the latter and cementing a clear vertical relationship between the two. The mixed-racial origins of “Japan” alluded to by Yi would not have been seen as radical, as similar arguments were often employed by Japanese imperialists to justify colonizing Korea. But I find it suggestive that Yi locates these shared origins in language: in this case, in a Buddhist scripture that would not have been written in “Japanese” at all. Similarly, Yi does a linguistic analysis of key Korean words in an attempt to prove that the gods Izanagi, Izanami, and Susano-o were also worshipped in ancient Korea. The essay ends with a reflection that “the Japanese and Korean people are one and the same, through history and ethnicity and especially language, by blood and by creed” (84; emphasis added). By pointing to an era of “shared roots” where Japanese and Koreans were worshippers of the same gods and speakers of the same language, Yi fuses together what had previously been treated as an irreconcilable split: the lineage of blood

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married to the lineage of spirit. It was history that achieved this, but language that carried its proof. Likewise, Yi frequently caps his observations by composing a waka in classical Japanese diction, as if in an attempt to access the shared past. But in this context, what would it mean for a Korean colonial subject to compose waka in an archaic, literary language so often hailed during this time as uniquely “Japanese”? 21 To whom are the words addressed, and for what function? This question of audience is a crucial one, because it is this question that most insistently highlights the politics of writing through contextualization and intertextualization. Along with visits to historical sites, Yi Kwangsu was invited to meetings and casual dinners with noted Japanese writers and intellectuals. He writes of meeting Akita Ujaku at a matinee performance at the Imperial Garden Theater; drinking with Hayashi Fusao, Kobayashi Hideo, and others; attending a lecture by Tanizaki Jun’ichirĎ in Nara; and drinking with the writers Kawakami TetsutarĎ and Kume Masao. These names would have been familiar ones with the readers of Bungakukai, as almost all the Japanese authors mentioned by Yi were regular contributors to the coterie journal. Yi himself was a contributor, if not a frequent one, and his seemingly casual references to someone like Kawakami TetsutarĎ (one of the editors of Bungakukai at the time) would have reminded the reader of this fact. As previously mentioned, Yi was invited to go drinking with Hayashi Fusao and others in Tokyo and then again with Kawakami in Nara. In Tokyo, Hayashi Fusao urges Yi to drink: “Drink yourself into a stupor! Show me Yi Kwangsu drunk!” (73). Yi obliges, but not before sharing the following words with the reader: “The meaning of Mr. Hayashi’s words were quite clear to me.” What is puzzling about this passage is not only this cryptic remark, which never gets explicated (what was the meaning of his words?), but also the fact that Hayashi is quoted as calling Yi by his Korean name, and not his sĎshi kaimei one.22 The moment captures a small instance of tension between self-identification and social interpellation, with both unable to escape their historicity: the one reveals the origins of the other. No matter how strenuously Yi may insist on his new kĎmin identity as Kayama MitsurĎ, the memory of the colonial past is never fully

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banished; it continues to inscribe and circumscribe the present, through the social process of language. Later in the trip, Yi is again urged to drink, this time by Kawakami TetsutarĎ. The narration slides into an internal monologue: It seems that Mr. Kawakami also wants to get me drunk. That’s Mr. Hayashi Fusao’s trick. Probably thinking, That Kayama, let’s get him to show his true colors. Or else it may be that in a past life Mr. Kawakami and I were old acquaintances from the Nara period, friends who drank themselves into oblivion in a barren field. . . . Okay. I’ll drink. I won’t just show my true colors, I’ll come clean about everything. I have nothing at all to hide from the world.23

In the same Bungakukai issue, one is able to read Kawakami TetsutarĎ’s version of events in his article “Before and After the Greater East Asian Writers’ Conference” (DaitĎa Bungakusha Taikai zengo).24 The article is listed immediately before “Record” in the table of contents and is a much shorter account of the sightseeing activities Kawakami participated in. According to Kawakami, he and Yi—introduced in the text as “Mr. Kayama MitsurĎ (old name Yi Kwangsu)” (59)—went out to a bar with Kusano Shinpei. “Kayama usually refrains from drinking alcohol when in the presence of other people,” Kawakami remarks, “but [after drinking] he became extremely talkative, probably from the excitement of the day” (60). He adds, “I was constantly struck by his sincerity. When I didn’t know a certain historical fact, I was truly very pleased to be told by Kayama, ‘You are not yet Japanese [Nihonjin].’ ” It is impossible to know if the two authors intended the accounts to be read together or if they wrote about the incident separately; as it is, the juxtaposition of the two texts cannot help but raise a number of questions.25 In Yi’s version, we are told that Yi’s seemingly spontaneous drinking was coerced, pushed upon him by Kawakami. We drank, according to Kawakami; I was urged to drink, according to Yi. Yi’s confession in “Record” that he will “come clean about everything” is also left strangely incomplete, as the reader never hears the actual confession. The details of

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dialogue and action are stripped away, leaving only one transcendent moment of resolution. This is a moment, furthermore, that does not get conveyed to Kawakami through direct speech but through indirect prose, through the medium of the text and reader. My aim here is not to declare one account over the other as “true.” Neither is it to refute or support the postliberation condemnation of Yi Kwangsu’s Japanese-language texts as collaborationist writing. Instead, I wish to ask on what terms the works were written and received and how the format of the journal itself could encourage some meanings and discourage others. In the context of early 1940s Tokyo, it is true that a colonial writer could speak back to the colonizer by using his language. But while he might have been granted a textual space to speak, this textual space was already structured by the forces of politics and commercialism and shaped by the demands of the readership. In the case of Bungakukai, Kawakami TetsutarĎ would have the last word—literally, in the form of the editorial postscript commonly found in Japanese journals to this day. In the postscript, Kawakami writes, “Yi Kwangsu-kun was very grateful when I showed him around TĎshĎdaiji.26 So I told him, Show me your thanks by giving me a manuscript! . . . What may seem like clumsy indignation to the mainland literary world [naichi no bundan jĎshiki] is really his sincerity and merit” (152). Here, Yi’s writing is at one stroke set apart from the metropole and from literature as represented by the bundan; it is to be judged not on its literary worth but on the “sincerity and merit” of its confessions. Kawakami’s use of Yi’s Korean name also reminds us that the paratextual limits created by the format of the journal—the editing and presentation of a text, the juxtaposition of texts with other texts or with advertisements, calls to an imagined but specific community of readers, and so forth— made it difficult, if not impossible, for Yi to speak and be heard as an imperial (national) subject first and as a Korean second. It is worth noting that while the participants from Korea and Taiwan were officially treated as “Japanese,” in the Kawakami article they are referred to as gaichi representatives. Even more significant is the fact that although there were five representatives from Korea—Yi Kwangsu, Pak Y̡ngh̿i (1901–?), Yu Chin-o (1906–1987), Terada Akira (1893–?), and Karashima Takeshi (1903–1967)—

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the three Korean writers were consistently differentiated from the Japanese intellectuals by their ethnicity. The transcendent moments of stillness and resolution imagined by Yi could not hold, in the end; and despite his protestations otherwise, the distinction between “metropolitan Japanese” and “imperial subject” would remain firmly in place.

CLIMBING EVER UP: OBI JŪZŌ’S “ASCENT” As mentioned, the category of kokumin bungaku also allowed Japanese settlers in Korea to make their own literary voices known. The writer Tanaka Hidemitsu (1913–1949), for example, lived in colonial Korea between 1935 and 1942 and published in both the naichi and Korea during those years. A member of the GGK-affiliated Korean Writers’ Association headed by Yi Kwangsu, Tanaka was able to use his literary connections to speak from a position of authority on the subject of kokumin bungaku in such essays as “Thoughts on National Literature” (Kokumin bungaku e no kansĎ) and “The Position of Rising Novelists” (Shinshin sakka no tachiba).27 Obi JĝzĎ is another example of a Japanese writer who rose to acclaim in the colonies; a resident of Korea from 1939 to 1942, his experiences and memories found voice in Kokumin bungaku and the Manchuria-based literary journal Geibun before attracting attention in metropolitan Japan. As a young man Obi JĝzĎ found work in the colonies as a teacher, first in northern Korea and later in ShinkyĎ (present-day Changchun), then the capital of Manchukuo. It was in Manchuria that Obi began writing “Ascent.” The Japanese-language text was first published in Kokumin bungaku in February 1944 and republished ten months later in Bungei shunjĝ as the nineteenth Akutagawa Prize winner.28 Modeled in part on Obi’s own life, the story depicts the relationship between the Japanese teacher Kitahara Kunio (⊿⍇恎⣓) and his Korean student An Juzen (⬱⢥┬, Kr. An Sus̡n). In the narrative present, Kitahara is a teacher at a school in ShinkyĎ. He has received a desperate note from Juzen, a former student from his previous school in Korea; Juzen is under suspicion by the police

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and needs Kitahara to vouch for his good character. The note triggers a long flashback sequence where the reader learns how Juzen had gradually blossomed into a loyal subject of Japan under Kitahara’s constant care and supervision. Troubled by Juzen’s note, Kitahara writes to the head teacher and principal at his former school and urges them to help Juzen. At the end of the story, he receives two letters from his former pupil. The first asks Kitahara to “cast him aside” because “the polluted and corrupted blood” (139) of his Korean mother runs through him. The second reverses position; Juzen declares that, despite his tainted ethnic blood, he has found the resolution to live and fight as a “Japanese” (Nihonjin). The opening sentence of “Ascent” begins with a short, evocative description of the “green glossy” (78) leaves of poplar trees being battered by snow and wind—imagery that readers will later learn is charged with significance. Strangely, with only a line break to mark the change, the next sentence then shifts to a different kind of narration entirely, one that begins with a call to “my teacher” (sensei) from “me” (watakushi). From the diction and the content, we are made to understand that this is a letter written by someone who calls himself “a Korean—no, a single human being” (79). When the letter ends we are finally introduced to the man reading it: Kitahara Kunio. After finishing the letter, Kitahara gazes out the window and notices the landscape earlier described. Suddenly he realizes that he has seen the same sight before: “A single picture rapidly unfolded beyond the cloudy window glass. In that picture as well, snow was piled on glossy green leaves. And Kitahara and Juzen were gazing at the scene in deep contemplation” (79). The long flashback then unfolds. On the page, these shifts in narrative point of view and time are marked only by dashes and line breaks. The deliberately dialogic voices introduced at the beginning are finally unified by Kitahara’s all-encompassing gaze: the landscape, the letter, the rift between past and present can all exist on the same textual plane because it is Kitahara’s interiority that provides the locus for contextualization. Juzen—or rather his textual presence, as represented by the letter—is not set apart from Kitahara but made intimately part of him. Interestingly, it is only as a static picture that the two can be

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seen together as distinct and equal beings. The text seems torn between these two modes of media, representing two different strands of discourse: Korea as part of Japan textually; Korea as equal to but apart from Japan visually. This tense relationship between the visual and the verbal can be productively linked to the workings of commodity consumption explicated in chapter 2, but it also suggests how the “unity/disunity” of empire could operate as a fundamental aporia for the colonizer as well as the colonized.29 The verbal-visual disjunction in “Ascent” is replicated in the issue of names. The sinographs for Kitahara’s given name, Kunio (恎⣓), are “country” and “man”—a highly suggestive pairing indeed. Juzen’s family name, on the other hand, is eventually changed to Yasuhara (⬱⍇), the sĎshi name his uncle chose for the entire family. At one point, Juzen asks Kitahara what he should do about his given name: “I think I’ve made up my mind. I want to change it to a Japanesesounding name . . .” “Japanese sounding? But Koreans are perfectly respectable Japanese people, too, you know.” (92)

In the end, Kitahara convinces Juzen to keep the original sinographs but simply read them in the native Japanese way, as Hisayoshi. In the text, the two are consistently referred to as ⊿⍇ and ⢥┬, as if in an attempt to avoid the political minefields entangled in the names 恎⣓ and ⬱⍇. Furthermore, by using the name ⢥┬ (which is never glossed, aside from this one passage), the text is able to preserve the simultaneous possibility of Korean and Japanese identity (Sus̡n/Juzen/Hisayoshi), as suggested in Kitahara’s comment above—but only when perceived as text. The act of speaking must necessarily prompt a choice of either one or the other. Tellingly, Juzen’s name is never glossed in dialogue, and never spoken by Juzen himself. The profound potential of a hybrid identity is made possible by the ambiguity of text but can never be realized in any medium other than text.

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Rather than dwell on the ethnic difference that separates himself from Juzen, however, Kitahara attempts to cultivate a relationship with his student through the bonds of homosocial sameness. The two are bound by “spiritual blood,” Kitahara feels (123). When Kitahara learns of Juzen’s troubled home life (caused by the selfish behavior of Juzen’s mother, as interpreted by Kitahara), he does everything in his power to aid his pupil, going so far as to find student lodging and tutoring work that allows Juzen to become semi-independent. Meanwhile, Kitahara’s own family situation deteriorates after he discovers his wife’s affair with another man. He decides to go hiking up Mount K̿mgang in order to find catharsis for his problems, and he invites Juzen to go along with him. The hike is more arduous than expected, and Juzen almost gives up—until Kitahara reaches down for Juzen’s hand, “frozen cold and slightly trembling” (120), and leads the young man to safety. The two crawl into a calm space protected by a hanging crag, where they are greeted by “the strange beauty of white snow piled on leaves that were still dark green and glossy” (121). There, Juzen confesses to Kitahara: “Up until now, I had always blamed my own immorality and laziness on my environment. But today has really shown me that you can do anything if you put your mind to it. . . . I think today has had much more of an impact than all those hours of moral training over the years.” This moment of confession takes place in a space that is deeply private and distinctly homosocial, one that has been enabled only after other gendered relationships (Juzen’s relationship to his mother, Kitahara’s to his wife) have been severed. There is no mention of the current political situation, no call for imperialization. But because the text had already conditioned the reader to see the metaphoric significance of this scene, through the deliberate language of the opening pages to revelations of Kitahara’s own dedication to naisen ittai (mainland Japan and Korea as one body) to even the title of the story itself, it becomes all too easy to make the leap from the personal to the political. In a time when “even a single piece of paper is a bullet,” the personal must be political.30 Juzen’s epiphany is all the more powerful in its seeming universality, first because it hides the actual mech-

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anisms of force at play (Juzen’s reformation interpreted as spontaneous, rather than engendered by state laws and social pressure) and second because it suggests that subjectivity does not stand apart from the “current situation” ( jikyoku) but emerges from it (subjectivity as unnarratable outside the hegemonic structure of jikyoku). Is this the true manifestation of naisen ittai—a transcendent moment of unity and self-transformation? If so, it is a fleeting one, and incomplete. The passage ends with a reversal: now it is not Juzen but Kitahara who is speechless. Although Kitahara tells himself that he understands the powerful sentiments driving Juzen’s confession, rather than respond in kind he chooses instead to “gaze intently at the thick, deeply green rhododendron leaves, which almost seemed to be trembling from the falling snow” (121). Part of the reason for Kitahara’s silence may be that to speak would be to acknowledge the potentially subversive message behind Juzen’s words. Having led Juzen to this moment of self-determination, Kitahara is now no longer needed, either as an educator or as a spiritual model. Thus rather than listening to Juzen’s words, Kitahara tries to listen to the emotions behind them. But this leads to another stalemate, as Kitahara finds himself unable to respond in kind. Instead, he projects a memory onto the landscape: the rhododendron leaves appear to tremble in the snow, just as Juzen’s hand did in the moment before Kitahara grasped it. By returning to this earlier time—just before Juzen’s revelation, just after Kitahara’s gesture of assistance—Kitahara is able to recuperate, in a way, a position of authority. It is his gaze that provides context and meaning to the entire scene, and it is his gaze that returns the narration back to the diegetic present in the sentence that immediately follows: “The landscape that unfolded within Kitahara’s breast as he gazed out the window at the snow falling on the poplar leaves was the snow on the rhododendron and Juzen’s words at that time” (121). The question of naisen ittai and Kitahara’s own responsibilities in it has been safely deferred. Juzen has also once again been removed from the picture, so to speak; at this critical juncture, when everything has been thrown into doubt, what remains is not the sight of Juzen and Kitahara together (the snapshot that began the

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story, one may recall) but the empty landscape of snow and leaves overlaid with Juzen’s words. On the one hand, the story as a whole can be taken as a straightforward celebratory message on the power of imperial discourse: the colonized man has successfully transformed himself through the help of the benevolent colonizer. With his inclusion in the empire via military participation, the colonized man is no longer an incomplete or inferior subject but an equal brother to his Japanese peer. The frequent use of the word “love” (ai) throughout the text only serves to emphasize and endorse this new homosocial bond. Takashi Fujitani has described this bond as “enabled by the absolute and hierarchized boundary that is formed between men and women. All men, Mainlander or Korean, must first reject all women, Mainlander or Korean, in order for the diverse men to realize their sameness.”31 Fujitani goes on to argue that in this masculinized military space, the presence of any women, Korean or Japanese, comes to be seen as a threat “to warfare, the masculine bond, and hence the nation” (149). In his article, Fujitani discusses the discourse of sameness mainly from the position of the colonial subject. In “Ascent,” a story narrated from the point of view of the colonizer, ambivalences mark the text at every turn. To return to the last pages of the story, Juzen’s final letter to Kitahara— another confession—serves only to make Kitahara speechless a final time and bring the text itself to an end. If it is true that Juzen could achieve his transformation only through the rejection of his mother and the ethnicity she represented, it is also true that his transformation renders the Japanese man useless. While it may appear that Obi JĝzĎ gives the final word to Juzen by ending the story with his letter, we must remember that the words themselves can be accessed only through Kitahara. Juzen has once again been removed from the picture, unseen and out of the frame. The contradictions of naisen ittai—where Koreans are Japanese in spirit (conveyed in memory and through correspondence) but also apart in reality (literally, in terms of place; historically, in terms of bloodlines and political status)—can find unification only in silence, in the space beyond the page. Some critics at the time read this silence positively, as a space of possibility. Chang Hy̡kchu, for example, interpreted the story as a call to

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Japanese writers of “Korean” literature. In “The New Direction of Korean Literature” (ChĎsen bungaku no shinhĎkĎ), Chang first redefined Korean literature as “a unique kind of local literature [chihĎ bungaku] within Japanese literature” made possible through the use of kokugo.32 Because Korean literature was no longer defined solely through Korean language and ethnicity, Japanese writers like Obi JĝzĎ who wrote about and in Korea could be considered part of “Korean” literature, too. Obi, Chang wrote, was a positive example of someone who was able to truly “enter the blood of the Korean people” (2). Here we see one instance, at least, where the discourse of blood could be reversed with radical possibilities. It was not only possible but desirable for a Japanese person to become Korean, through literature written in Japanese. Kokugo could work both ways: it could incorporate Korea into Japan, but it could also do the reverse. In the Bungei shunjĝ issue with the republished “Ascent,” in contrast, Obi JĝzĎ’s affiliations with Korea are not mentioned in the editor’s comments. The journal’s editor in chief, Fujisawa Kanji (1908–1989), instead places the story’s significance in the larger context of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: “The problem of our Korean brethren is, in a way, a deeply fundamental one that connects to issues regarding the Manchurian and Chinese people [minzoku] and, consequently, to all the various people in Greater East Asia. At this time, when broad tolerance and proper love are being urgently demanded from the Japanese themselves, the significance of this work is large.”33 Here again, as late as December 1944, we see the same kind of positioning of Korea we saw in 1937, where the peninsula is made into a gateway to and stronghold against the continent. The target audience is identified as mainland Japanese, but instead of mutual communication or change, what is called for is a one-directional “tolerance and love.” The Akutagawa Prize judge comments, meanwhile, would mention the work’s timeliness and relation to the political situation but stop short of discussing Korea’s place in the Japanese empire. It should be noted that the original Kokumin bungaku publication was edited upon its republication in Bungei shunjĝ, with the largest changes being a significant reduction in references to the infidelity of Kitahara’s

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wife and the deletion of heavily propagandistic passages related to naisen ittai. Im Ch̡nhye has posited that the former was most likely cut by the censors out of a desire to avoid “detailed depictions of private married life,” while the latter was most likely cut by the author himself in consideration of the Japanese audience.34 In one deleted passage, for example, Kitahara and an unnamed Korean teacher argue about how to achieve naisen ittai. The Korean teacher’s argument is as follows: “ ‘The fastest way is for Koreans to see the beauty of being Nihonjin [Japanese] by looking at the naichijin [mainland Japanese] nearest them and using them as models for developing their own selves, don’t you think? In this light, I think it [naisen ittai] is a much more serious issue for naichijin than for Koreans, broadly speaking. If each and every naichijin were a beautiful Nihonjin worthy of emulation, I think that naisen ittai would become a reality before we knew it’ ” (98). The Korean teacher’s words spur Kitahara to silently reflect on his own behavior. He is forced to admit that “trying to live as a model Nihonjin himself ” (99) would be much more helpful to Juzen than lectures would. While not every single reference to naisen ittai was omitted in the Bungei shunjĝ version, the cuts that were made serve to deemphasize the mutual responsibilities and roles of the Korea-Japan relationship. Consider all this, in contrast, to the way “Ascent” is framed in Kokumin bungaku. The editor for that issue quotes Obi JĝzĎ as saying he wrote the story for the Korean youth “he loved deeply.”35 Here, the target audience is given as the generation closest to Juzen in spirit and age. Whether one reads the story as a celebration or a warning, an homage or an apology, may then depend on the relationship imagined between the author and the Korean youth being hailed. The silences and gaps of the story could very well become an invitation to speak, or a pause in a dialogue that has already begun. As the previous comments suggest, however, it may be more accurate to conclude that such possibilities of dialogue were always already constituted (and thereby delimited) by empire: silence not as an absence but as an aporia.

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CHILDREN OF THE EMPIRE: YI CHŎNGNAE’S “SQUAD” As a final foray into the troubled waters of colonial history, gender politics, and language, I would like to briefly introduce a third short story for comparison. In its January 1942 issue, Bungei published a short story called “Patriotic Children’s Squad” (Aikoku kodomo tai) written by a young Korean woman named Yi Ch̡ngnae.36 The story centers on the daily activities of young Akiko and her school friends as they go around their village collecting war funds, doing chores for the families of war veterans, planting and harvesting vegetables, writing letters to soldiers in the field, and so forth.37 Although Akiko’s mother is hardworking and honest, their household has suffered because of Akiko’s constantly inebriated, debt-laden father. The father’s shameful misconduct has even driven Akiko’s brother to run away from home. One day on her way home from school, Akiko walks past “a father and mother with their two children diligently working a wheat field” (60). The sight fills her with sadness as she can’t help but be reminded of her own family situation, and she thinks to herself, “All of us kokumin have to be like them. No, everyone else is like them. But only my family . . .” (60; ellipsis in original). Thinking that if they work hard they will be able to spur others to do the same, Akiko and her female friends throw themselves into the war effort. They are finally acknowledged by the school with a special award and written up in the newspaper under the article title “A Heartwarming Story about Military Girls” (Gunkoku shĎjo no bidan). After the article is published, Akiko’s brother finally returns home and signs up for the voluntary soldier program. Her father also reforms himself, inspired by his daughter’s efforts, and becomes a hardworking worker again. The well-ordered harmony of the family—and, by extension, the empire—has been restored all because of Akiko. Unlike the suspicion and hostility seen in stories like “Ascent,” then, “Patriotic Children’s Squad” argues that women and children do not pose a threat to “warfare, the masculine bond, and hence the nation” but are essential to them, albeit in subordinate and secondary roles defined primarily through the home front.38

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Written in simple, sometimes stilted, and nonconventional diction (for example, using the desu/masu forms instead of de aru), the text seems incongruous with the rest of Bungei’s contents when taken on its own. Furthermore, it gives almost no hints on the setting of the story: Akiko and her friends all have “Japanese” names, they speak in Japanese, and they live in an unnamed village in “Japan” (Nihon). The relative frequency of family names with characters of possible Korean origin and a glancing reference to “Chinese children who come to steal eggs and yams and sugar” (64) could be interpreted to suggest a Korean or Manchurian locale, but this is by no means verifiable. The only concrete clue the reader gets, when opening the journal to the first page of the story, is paratextual: the foreign characters of the author’s name, printed alongside the title. On its own, then, and unmoored from its media context, “Patriotic Children’s Squad” presents the same remarkable possibilities previously glimpsed in the other texts discussed in this book. Here is a portrait of an empire that has indeed become homogenized, one part unrecognizable from the others. The use of Japanese, the patriotic actions of the characters, and their dedication to the emperor are all things that have no ethnic base and no specific origin. And yet, paradoxically, it is this very quality that makes the story’s inclusion in Bungei seem incongruous. If the text was absent of the so-called literary qualities (such as aesthetic achievement or narrative sophistication) that would have been sought by the editors and readers of Bungei, a prominent literary journal published by one of the most formidable publishing houses in Japan, then what would have justified its inclusion? The answer comes down to the tension between particularity and universality as represented by “Koreanness” and “literariness,” as well as by the complicated intersecting vector of gender. In a note attached to the end of the story, the editors of Bungei explain that “Patriotic Children’s Squad” was originally a submission to a literary contest sponsored by the Korean League for Concerted National Power. The author, the editors write, is a sixteen-year-old girl who had attended a kokumin gakkĎ in South Ch̡lla Province and who now “lives with her farmer parents, helping out with the household” (65). This brief biography is accompanied by a picture of Yi in white Korean clothing, her hair pinned back in a style common among

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Korean women. While the Korean League was unable to “treat this work as serious fiction,” they were so impressed by the work and by the author’s youth that they created a special prize just for her. The editing staff also notes that while the original manuscript was written in pencil in “cramped” characters that filled the page, without any punctuation marks or line breaks, the editors of Bungei chose to insert punctuation and line breaks and fix obvious grammatical errors. On the one hand, the publication of Yi’s work in Bungei supports the rhetoric of inclusion: Korean subjects (even women) could also be the faces and voices of the Japanese empire. On the other hand, this point could be made only by paradoxically marking them as Korean—through their names, their clothes, and the explicit editing of their words. In the case of Yi, the editors are careful to emphasize both her gender and her age, captured through the powerful medium of the photograph. A young, unmarried Korean woman from the countryside would have historically been part of one of the most disenfranchised groups in colonial Korea; her manuscript submission would therefore have been seen as rare and valuable “proof ” of Japan’s imperial reach. One can contrast this treatment in Bungei to the text’s earlier serial publication in the KeijĎ-based, Japaneselanguage newspaper ChĎsen shinbun in October 1941. There, the author’s name is listed in sinographs as ⊿㱊屆㜍, with the surname most likely Japanese in origin and the given name most likely Korean.39 Here again we see colonial tensions at play: the desire on the part of colonial authorities to place Korea on par with the metropole, through a model (and very material) manifestation of naisen ittai, versus the need to keep Korea distinct and separate in the metropole. In February 1942, Bungei published a dialogue between Chang Hy̡kchu and Yu Chin-o, where the two were asked by an unnamed reporter to discuss the current state and future of Korean literature.40 Speaking of the journal Kokumin bungaku, Yu pointed out in the interview that “naichi authors living in Korea” such as Tanaka Hidemitsu were also featured in the journal’s pages. Thus “one cannot consider the kokugo volumes of Kokumin bungaku as separate from the naichi literary world . . . in the end, it’s rather the same thing as Kyushu literature” (75). In contrast, Chang superseded

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questions of language and ethnicity by defining kokumin bungaku as works that “conscientiously depict the lives of the kokumin” (76). Once again we see in both instances a conscious attempt to view both Korean and Japanese literature as not necessarily defined through the lens of ethnicity. And yet these terms were already circumscribed by the format of the printed conversation—titled “The Future of Korean Literature,” after all, and presented as a dialogue between two (particularized) Korean individuals moderated by a (universalized) Japanese reporter. This discursive paradox is further emphasized when the reporter brings up “Patriotic Children’s Squad.” Instead of considering it a kind of national literature, as Chang’s comment encourages one to do, the reporter instead marvels that a new generation of Koreans as represented by Yi Ch̡ngnae were being taught to express themselves directly in Japanese. This, finally, is where all the dialogue participants find an answer to the question of Korean literature’s future—in the transformation of the younger generation into fluent speakers of kokugo. What this might mean for the future of “Japanese” literature is a question that does not get spoken, let alone discussed. In contrast, Maki Hiroshi (Yi S̡khun, 1907–1950?) lamented in the KeijĎ-based Japanese-language journal Ryokki two months later that debates in mainland Japan on national literature were too narrowly fixated on ethnic differentiation (minzoku) and Japaneseness, leaving the question of Korea’s position unaddressed.41 Authors in Korea, he declared, “want to make it so that national literature debates overcome this thing called minzoku in favor of the more encompassing ideology of kokumin” (62). Significantly, in this essay the terms Japanese person and Korean person are avoided. Identity is instead defined through place: people from the metropole are distinguished from people from the peninsula, but all are the same “Japanese nationals” (Nihon kokumin). But despite Maki’s strident call to metropolitan authors, in the end it was paradoxically only in the exclusive and excluded domain of “Korean literature” that an inclusive definition of “Japanese literature” could be imagined at all. What is notable about “Patriotic Children’s Squad” is that the transformation from the personal (in the form of the handwritten manuscript) to the public (in the form of the published text) was made a double-edged

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process of inclusion and exclusion both. In other words, Yi’s public inclusion in Bungei was predicated on her ethnic and literary exclusion as a Korean woman from the countryside with limited education and even more limited financial independence. What was valued by the editors of Bungei and the judges of the Korean League was not the style or content of the work but the fact that she could write in kokugo at all.

*** In these three chapters, I have sought to show that at no point during Japan’s imperial history did the line between “Japanese” and “Korean” get erased completely. But what does all this mean for the relationship between metropole and periphery? For example, when Hayashi Fusao called for the literature of Japan (Nihon no bungaku) to “recover [its] true nature” during the now-infamous Overcoming Modernity (Kindai no ChĎkoku) symposium in 1942, it is unlikely he was thinking of the colonial writers who also lived in the amorphous space of “Japan.” 42 When contextualized historically, however, his comments cannot help but expose a logical trap, a catch-22: colonial writers must be included in the “literature of Japan” for the sake of an imperial expansion justified as imperial benevolence, and yet their inclusion inevitably belies the existence of any single, essential, or “true” Japanese nature. Hayashi’s Overcoming Modernity comments also yields an intimation of why those potential consequences were never realized: the logical trap of kĎminka was not opposed to or set apart from the colonial order but constitutive of it. Although Hayashi never used the word kĎminka in his essay, he employed the same vocabulary of personal moral cultivation and imperial loyalty that was the very warp and woof of imperialization in the colonies. The difference, of course, is that the epistemic gap between naichi and Nihon could be elided in that essay because the indeterminacy of those terms was itself the means in which differentiation from the peripheries was justified and maintained. The idea of an essentialized, indivisible “Japan” may have been a fiction, but—to borrow a phrase from Timothy Mitchell—it proved to be a nondisposable one.43

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4 COMING TO TERMS WITH THE TERMS OF THE PAST

T

H E U N C O NDI TI O NA L S U R R E NDE R of Japan on August 15, 1945, introduced a decisive discursive break for what had been an empire spanning Asia. Changes do not, of course, occur overnight, and many of the prewar institutions would carry over, in only slightly modified form, into the postwar period.1 On the one hand, lasting changes were implemented during the Occupation period (1945–1952) in the areas of land reform, labor reform, and women’s rights. On the other hand, the power of the old guard, as represented by political parties, zaibatsu (financial clique) monopolies, and the bureaucratic system, would remain entrenched well into the next several decades. Still, it is undeniable that for many people— in Japan and outside it—the end of the war signaled the start of a new and uncertain era. In other words, according to Carol Gluck, “although many Japanese lived their days in continuity, what they felt was change.”2 One of the earliest works of fiction to chronicle the postwar confusion of a Japan still reeling from the aftermath of defeat was Miyamoto Yuriko’s The Banshĝ Plain (Banshĝ heiya), which was originally serialized in the pro-Communist journal Shin Nihon bungaku in 1946.3 The Banshĝ Plain opens with a snapshot of daily life during wartime in a small village in Fukushima, where the protagonist, Hiroko, has come to live in order to be closer to the prison that holds her husband, Jĝkichi. News of the war’s end

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reaches her just as it reached thousands of others in reality, all at the same moment: through the radio broadcast made by the emperor at noon on August 15, 1945. For Hiroko, shock soon transforms into hope—and more specifically, hope for the possible release of Jĝkichi, who has been a political prisoner for the past twelve years. But for the island nation of “Japan,” defeat is a much more ambiguous, intangible thing: “August 15, from noon until one o’clock in the afternoon. History turned that enormous page without a sound.” 4 A very different account of the emperor’s historic broadcast can be found in the writings of Kim Talsu, a leftist Korean writer who has come to be known as the father of zainichi (resident) Korean literature. In the 1964 essay “Before and After 8/15” (8/15 zengo), Kim recalls that he woke up on the morning of August 15 in his home in Kanagawa only to hear on his old, battered radio that an important announcement would be made at noon that day. A premonition struck him: “This is it! I thought, and it goes without saying I sprang out of bed as if I had wings.”5 Buoyed by hope, he dressed himself in formal Korean clothes and hurried to his brother’s house. Like the protagonist in Miyamoto’s The Banshĝ Plain, Kim listened to the broadcast while huddled around the radio with his family and friends. Like Hiroko as well, the listeners were at first shocked into silence by the announcement. But in Kim’s version, that silence was broken by one triumphant shout: “Our Korea will now be free!” (25). The contrast in images is stark. In the former, a silence that tapers into confusion (if also some hope); in the latter, jubilation and a flurry of communal activity. There was yet another set of reactions among those who had self-identified as Japanese kĎmin, or imperial subjects. The zainichi poet Kim Sijong (b. 1929), for example, confessed in a 2001 interview that he could hardly bring himself to eat for more than a week after he had heard the emperor’s broadcast, in his home in Cheju.6 Sixteen years old at the time of Japan’s surrender, Kim could barely write a word of his “native” Korean. As others celebrated in the streets with Korean songs and cheers of liberation, Kim stood paralyzed “like a stray dog left behind by its master” (19–20), the Japanese songs of his youth like a stone in his mouth and his intimate knowledge of Japan(ese) abruptly transformed from a marker of identity to a millstone of it. It was

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only by calling up the memory of his father singing to him in Korean that Kim began to gain a new, embodied sense of ethnicity. “A Korean-language song rose spontaneously to my lips, when before I had been able to sing only songs from Japan,” Kim reminisced. “That was the catalyst that allowed me to once again recover my Korean self ” (20). Although these three recollections were set in three different locations and published at different points in time, what binds them together is not simply the fact of the emperor’s announcement but also the simultaneity of empire it presumed, even in the moment of its dissolution. That this simultaneity was grounded upon and bounded by the Japanese language is borne out by the experiences of the speakers themselves, all of whom were able to participate in this disjunctive moment of history through their own ability to understand (even if only partially or vaguely) the archaic diction of the emperor or the explanatory message that followed. The three recollections also share another, more complicated intersection of function and form that is the concern of this chapter. Following the Cold War geopolitical reconfigurations of East Asia that took place with Japan’s defeat, writers in both Korea and Japan were confronted with the task of constructing national histories and literatures through new discursive practices. Kim Sijong’s interview is particularly illustrative in this regard: looking back from his vantage point as a zainichi Korean (a legal category that did not exist before 1945), Kim speaks of “once again” recovering a Korean self that was paradoxically constructed after the events of 1945 and then retrospectively projected back in time. It was not only a question of coming to terms with the past, in other words, but also one of coming to terms with the terms of the past, which continued to haunt and trouble the borders of the “postwar”/“postliberation” present. In this chapter, I explore the workings of memory and history in post-1945 Korea and Japan in writings that manifested the continuities of colonialism through forms of disjunction—narratives marked by fractures, ambivalences, double exposures, or silences. In doing so, I rely upon Prasenjit Duara’s insights on bifurcated histories, where bifurcation is defined as “the process whereby, in transmitting the past, Historical narratives and language appropriate dispersed histories according to present needs, thus

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revealing how the present shapes the past.” 7 While the dismantling of the Japanese empire generated new opportunities for many individuals who had hitherto been silenced, it also cast other subjectivities and stories beyond the pale of national history. The detailed mapping I do of that history in this chapter will also provide a framework for the literary analyses I conduct in later chapters.

T U R N I N G T H E PA G E S O F H I S T O R Y I N THE BANSHŪ PLAIN In accepting the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, Japan began a momentous transformation from a repressive empire into a democratic nationstate—or so General Headquarters/Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP) insisted. Nowhere were the possibilities of this time more passionately debated than in the pages of Japan’s newspapers and literary journals. While outright evaluations of Allied policy would have to wait until 1949, when the media regulations imposed by GHQ/ SCAP were finally lifted, this did not stop writers from meditating on the legacies of history or articulating visions of a better future. Miyamoto Yuriko was one of the writers who hailed the new possibilities promised by the term “postwar.” Born ChĝjĎ Yuri, the eldest daughter of the prominent architect ChĝjĎ SeiichirĎ (1868–1936), she published her first novel, A Flock of Poor People (Mazushiki hitobito no mure), in 1916, to great critical acclaim. In 1930, following a prolonged stay in Soviet Russia, Miyamoto joined the All-Japan Federation of Proletarian Arts (Zen Nihon Musansha Geijutsu Renmei, also known by its Esperanto acronym, NAPF); in 1931, she joined the Japan Communist Party and there met the literary critic and activist Miyamoto Kenji, whom she married in 1932.8 Following the end of the war, Miyamoto joined fellow writers Nakano Shigeharu (1902–1979), Tokunaga Sunao, Kurahara Korehito (1902–1991), and others in the creation of the new pro-Communist literary organization Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai (Society for New Japanese Literature).

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In the aftermath of the war, both Korean and Japanese intellectuals were faced with the task of not only censuring the fact of Japanese imperialism but also eradicating its influence. For the members of Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai, this meant shifting from a literature of the state to a literature of the “people”: an unfettered democratic revolution rooted in the concrete anchor of the everyday. In the inaugural preparatory issue of their journal, Miyamoto Yuriko described the organization’s linking of politics with literature as an attempt to express the “poetry and reason” inherent in lived experience.9 The title of her declaration, “Singing Voices, Arise!” (Utagoe yo, okore), evoked the metaphor of a free and harmonious chorus of people whose voices rise high from below. This goal of a united front was not a new one; its roots can be found in the proletarian literature movement of the 1920s and 1930s, and many members of Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai had been connected to the proletarian movements of prewar Japan. In the immediate postwar period, however, Japan had to contend with not only its colonizing past but also its colonized present, as represented by the presence of the Allied forces. Faced with these new political realities, Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai touted the ability of Marxism to stand against the imperialism and militarism that (it was argued) had led Japan down the wrong path and called for an international alliance with “the people of the world, and in particular the people of China and Korea.” 10 The political and literary inclusion of former colonized subjects was considered essential, because it would prove that the organization was able to “cross all national borders and fight with [non-Japanese] to eradicate feudalism and fascism once and for all.” 11 In the members’ desire to form an international united front, we can find an important example of continuity between the prewar proletarian movement discussed in chapter 1 and the revival of Marxism in the immediate postwar period. Miyamoto’s depictions of a liberated Korean people in The Banshĝ Plain can also be understood in this context. But at the time when Miyamoto was writing The Banshĝ Plain, the political status of Koreans remained far from independent. Even before August 15, the thirty-eighth parallel had already been chosen by U.S. officials eager to establish spheres of influence on the peninsula. The presence of

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the Soviet and U.S. forces only complicated efforts by Korean political leaders to construct new forms of government and actively hindered, rather than aided, the process of decolonization. Meanwhile, Koreans in occupied Japan were officially still counted as Japanese nationals, albeit without certain key citizenship rights (such as suffrage) given to “Japanese proper,” or those who had once been called naichijin. With the Alien Registration Law of 1947, Koreans in Japan were forced to register as aliens. In 1952, they were stripped of Japanese citizenship. The impact of these major developments was presaged in a small but telling change made to The Banshĝ Plain text upon republication. In the book version released by Kawade ShobĎ in April 1947, the sentence “History turned that enormous page without a sound” was revised as follows: “From noon until one o’clock in the afternoon of August 15, as all Japan [Nihon] was stunned into speechlessness, history turned an enormous page without a sound.” 12 One can argue that Nihon before August 1945 was a word that was oriented outward, encompassing and eclipsing its outer peripheries; as argued in previous chapters, it often promised—but failed to materialize—a vision of an inclusive, multiethnic community. By 1947, however, there was no question that Nihon had been reoriented inward and spatially reconfigured. It is because of this new reconfiguration of borders (physical and ethnic) that Miyamoto is able to conjure up a multitude of silent listeners, united in their shock and uncertainty. Examining the structural role played by Koreans in The Banshĝ Plain reveals the ways in which the idea of an ethnically homogeneous Japan was constructed vis-à-vis its former colonial subjects. Only a few days after Japan’s defeat, Hiroko receives word that her brother-in-law Naoji was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb fell, and that no word has been heard from him since. Concerned about her in-laws’ welfare and recalling her husband’s injunction to look after his mother, Hiroko sets out by train from Fukushima to her mother-in-law’s home in Yamaguchi Prefecture, located at the western tip of Honshu. The journey is a long and arduous one, full of unexpected stops, schedule delays, crowded cars, and food shortages. At one point, she finds herself on a train with a boisterous group of Koreans intending “to repatriate to their homeland [kokyĎ], Korea,

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which was now striving for independence.” 13 Although Hiroko cannot understand a word of their Korean conversation, their lively, cheerful attitudes hearten and attract her. Suddenly a nameless girl begins to sing “Arirang” (rendered in the text in katakana as “Ariran”), arguably Korea’s most famous folk song.14 The contrast between the joyous singing girl and the “dark, fetid train car” deeply moves Hiroko, and she listens to the song with silent concentration.15 “All Japan was stunned into speechlessness”: the sentence revision takes on particular weight and importance in this light. Slipping into the gaps between narrative interiority and external motion, between pauses of silence and moments of stillness, the Koreans in the novel serve as a powerful foil to the Japanese who surround them. As a liberated people, the Koreans are able to “raise their voices” in joy in a way that their defeated Japanese peers cannot, at least not yet.16 Far from viewing them as a menacing presence, Hiroko is inclined to regard them with sympathy and a keen class consciousness. Her sense of camaraderie is further shaped by her acute awareness of her own position as a woman trapped in gendered expectations that bind her metaphorically to the train lines and to the country those train lines traverse. Tellingly, the people she encounters in her travels are individuals who, in the masculinized, military time and space of an empire at war, would no doubt have been marked as peripheral, supplementary, abject, or other: women, injured men, beggars, Koreans. With the discursive shift to a “postwar” time and space, though, the peripheral has suddenly become central. Although Miyamoto does not comment directly on this redefinition of periphery and center, it is the stark visibility of these moving, speaking, recovering individuals that shows most powerfully how the new spatial configurations were also social ones. At the same time, what is particularly noteworthy about this passage is the mechanics of translation at work in the text. When the Korean girl begins singing, the lyrics are not quoted but instead set apart from the rest of the text: At that moment, the train gave a sudden shudder and began to move a little. Several voices hurriedly shouted something in Korean—probably

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something like Get on quick. As the man climbed aboard, the train jolted and then ground to a halt once again. The people around him laughed. It was then that a girl’s clear, sweet voice rose up from the raucous crowd packed into the shadowy train compartment next door and began to sing the song of Ariran. Ariraan Ariraan Ariraan

Crossing over. . . . The girl sang languidly, hypnotically,

as if giving up her whole body to the sway of the melody. The clamor of conversation continued unabated, mixed in among bursts of laughter and what sounded like the coughs of the elderly. The girl sang Ariran as if her heart were soaring up and away from the dark, fetid compartment, with a joy that could be expressed only through music. Hiroko listened to the song with her full concentration. (68; ellipsis and breaks in original)

Although the passage begins with the narrator noting that the crowd of Koreans are speaking in Korean, a language the narrator does not know, the lyrics to “Arirang” are given not in Korean but in Japanese. Sung as music, the words are somehow translated and transformed from the particularities of national language into universally understood emotion, through the medium of Japanese. It is translation that then allows the narration to slip from a description of the (othered) Koreans to the interiority of Hiroko who watches them. This translation is unspoken and unnoted, with no clear translator at its source. Is the Korean girl singing in Japanese? Is Hiroko replacing the Korean lyrics with Japanese ones she knows? My point in raising such hypothetical questions is not to speculate on hypothetical answers but to show how in effacing the mechanics of translation from the page, Hiroko also effaces the specific history of Japanese imperialism and her own position in it. As Hiroko listens to the song, she gazes at the pines growing along the tracks from her seat in the unmoving train. Pines and Koreans are linked again at the very end of the novel. Having learned that Jĝkichi will be freed from prison because of the abolishment of the Peace Preservation

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Law, Hiroko sets off on a journey again—this time from west to east, to Tokyo. Once again she faces train delays, weather disasters, and uncertain roads. On the Banshĝ Plain, located in HyĎgo Prefecture, she encounters two young Korean men walking along the highway while whistling a jaunty tune. Hiroko observes, “All the Koreans she had seen on her journey had been moving ever west—toward the Strait, always toward the Strait. But these youths were headed east.” 17 The two men begin to sing, their voices blending smoothly and naturally into the passing landscape. The novel concludes with the following sentences: “All Japan [Nihon] was on the move. Hiroko felt that keenly” (171). Unlike her journey west, Hiroko’s return east—to Tokyo, to the center, to where a freed Jĝkichi awaits—is marked by the restoration of sound and action. All along, the voices of the Koreans had been threaded through the disparate elements of the plot. It is here that they find their final synthesis: through Hiroko, whose vision is able to encompass a “Japan” moving in sync with her at last. In this way, Koreans in the narrative work as both counterpoint and harmony; they stand in contrast to the Japanese but also lead them forward to a future better than the past. And yet here I am reminded of another image, from a mere two years before: that of Kitahara and Juzen huddled together on a mountain in the snow, as discussed in chapter 3. Just as Juzen’s body disappears into Kitahara’s interiority in “Ascent,” here, too, do the Koreans’ bodies disappear into a Japan that has no place for them. In previous chapters, I argued that Korea was always differentiated from “Japan proper” through discourses of blood-based affiliation and language as well as state institutions such as the family register. These methods of differentiation remained in place even after the war and could be easily mobilized for a range of purposes, whether arguing for Korean autonomy or the unity of Japan as a peaceful island nation. Thus it was possible for writers such as Miyamoto Yuriko— progressive, keenly sympathetic, and politically active—to replicate the same unequal structures of representation even as they tried to decisively break from the past. The Koreans in The Banshĝ Plain are made into positive symbols of hope and independence, but by othering them as separate from Japan the nation. While this othering may seem diametrically op-

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posite to the naisen ittai discourse of the colonial period, both work on similar processes of differentiation: only by marking the Koreans as apart ethnically can they be effectively mobilized to join the Japanese spiritually, in this case for the cause of democratic revolution. In an essay on The Banshĝ Plain, the scholar Haya Mizuki has argued that the unusual scene featuring Koreans traveling from west to east, away from Korea, shows that already during this early postwar period there were Koreans who had no choice but to stay in Japan because of complicated economic, political, and social factors.18 While Miyamoto does not pursue the implications of the Koreans’ travel direction in the novel (and does not make those implications important, in terms of the narrative structure), Haya’s article reminds us again that there were individuals who could not move so easily in sync with the forward march of the ethnic nation. In the following section, I highlight two examples of writers whose bifurcated histories complicated the divisions of time and space that were so celebrated by others, and whose textual depictions of the past stood in uneasy relation to the terms of the present.

SHIFTING LANGUAGES: CHANG HYŎKCHU AND YUZURIHARA MASAKO As in Japan, leftist writers and critics rapidly reemerged in the “liberated” space of (an already-divided) Korea to celebrate the end of empire, as well as criticize its lingering legacies. Nothing encapsulated these dual preoccupations more than the debates that arose around the “national language”—a term that employed the same sinographs as kokugo but was now meant to be read in Korean as kugʵ and understood to refer to the Korean language. Aligning what was meant with what was practiced proved to be a more difficult task than anticipated, however, particularly for those writers who had received their formal education in Japanese. This was certainly the case for Kim Saryang, who found himself having to publically defend his Japanese-language writings during a roundtable

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talk held in Seoul in 1946.19 The roundtable, which was later published under the title “The Self-Reflection of Writers” (Munhakcha ̿i chagi pip’an) in the October 1946 issue of Inmin yesul, also included fellow leftist writers Yi T’aejun (1904–?), Yi W̡njo (1909–1955?), and Im Hwa (1908– 1953), among others.20 When confronted with the question of self-criticism and regret, Kim admitted that at the time he thought writing in Japanese would give him more freedom than writing in Korean (urimal). Yi W̡njo proved sympathetic to this line of thinking, but Yi T’aejun objected strenuously: “Before August 15, our culture faced a greater threat than literature did; and language faced an even greater threat than that” (169). Although Yi concedes that one has to make a distinction between those who ideologically identified with the Japanese and those who simply made use of Japanese terminology, his final analysis is that those who “wrote even a single word more of Korean” were to be admired over those who refused to write at all (170). What most troubled Yi T’aejun and others like him was not the fact that Koreans had used Japanese in the past but that they continued to feel an intimacy toward their colonizer’s language over their own “native” tongue. The linguist and poet Yi H̿is̿ng (1896–1989), for example, lambasted the persistence of Japanese in Korean daily conversations and life in the essay “Japanese Vestiges in Daily Speech” (Ilsang yong-̡ e iss̡s̡ ̿i Ilbonj̡k chanjae, 1947).21 Yi argued that the public’s persistent predilection for Japanese terms, songs, speech patterns, and forms of address was breaching the natural relationship between Korean and the “national language” and preventing a true national language from taking root among the Korean people. Numerous newspaper articles and editorials backed up Yi’s claims, with one reporter going as far as to publish photographic evidence of a business that was still using Japanese-language signage.22 Others declared that it was not enough to eject the Japanese language from Korea; one had to erase every trace of it from the Korean language itself.23 Serk-Bae Suh has shown how the discourse of purification “presupposed an authentic Korean language to which present-day Koreans should return to establish a national language,” even as the actual process of standardizing and codifying Korean paradoxically proved that no “one” Korean

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language had ever existed.24 The question of authenticity became even more complicated as the division of the peninsula calcified and produced two different “national languages” in the North and the South.25 Drawing upon the logic of ethnic nationalism, in which ethnic belonging to the nation is privileged over all other identities, each side argued that only it was the sole legitimate representative of the Korean people and its culture. The predominance of ethnic nationalism also had consequences for the Korean population in Japan, as both the North and South tried to claim overseas Koreans as their own. The political and ideological split of the peninsula reproduced itself in Japan in the form of two competing organizations, the pro-Communist ChĎren (League of Koreans in Japan, established in 1945) and the anti-Communist Mindan (Korean Residents Union in Japan, established in 1946).26 Chang Hy̡kchu’s “Intimidation” (KyĎhaku, 1953), published roughly a year after the formal end of the Occupation, offers a retrospective and highly subjective look at how both groups operated in postwar Japan.27 In the years immediately following Japan’s defeat, Chang was condemned by Korean nationalists for his “collaborationist” activities during the colonial period. Some went so far as to send vitriolic letters to his home and to Japanese publishers, threatening violence and even murder.28 “Intimidation” is at once a loosely fictionalized account of Chang’s harassment at the hands of both ChĎren and Mindan activists, an apologia for his past literary activities, and a heartfelt (if also anguished) declaration of his commitment to the Japanese language. The story begins in the contemporary present in Japan. The narrator “I,” recently naturalized as a Japanese citizen, has received an anonymous death threat from someone who believes him to be “a traitor to our people [minzoku]” (123). As he rereads the letter, he is “suddenly reminded of the year the war ended.” Flashback after flashback then unfolds, each one exploring in ever greater depth the reasons behind the narrator’s decision to naturalize. The first flashback centers around the narrator’s first encounter with ChĎren, soon after the end of the war. “I” finds himself at the offices of the newly established organization, having been drawn there almost despite himself by the sight of the Korean flag proudly hanging from the building.

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He introduces himself with the intent of offering his help but inadvertently does so in Japanese—swiftly drawing the ire of the Korean staff: “You didn’t use the national language with the ChĎren chairman just now, did you?” “The national language?” I immediately repeated, bewildered. He pounced. “See that? See that? Bastards like you still think of the national language as Japanese.” (126)

While the above dialogue is purportedly conducted in Korean, its textual rendering in Japanese forces the reader to confront the double orientation of ⚥婆 (never once glossed) as kokugo/kugʵ. In the narrator’s inability to choose between one and the other, we can glimpse some of the more tragic consequences of the chronotopic split between postwar and postliberation—something similar to the “neither-nor” dilemma in Kim Saryang’s “Pegasus,” only from the opposite end. The ChĎren staff has already begun to reconceptualize the past through the lens of the present, but the narrator of “Intimidation” can forget neither the colonial language that made him who he is nor the Korean ethnicity that prevents him from fully claiming that language as his own. Rather than try to meet him on his own terms (literally and figuratively), the ChĎren staff member instead berates the narrator into silence. It is at that point that the text slips into interior monologue, the only narrative mode left available to the beleaguered “I.” In the pages that follow, the reader is made privy to a tense interplay of silence and speaking that is mediated by—but also a product of—the Japanese language employed by the self-conflicted narrator. Japanese, the narrator reflects to himself and thereby the reader, was attractive to him precisely because it was a language unmoored from place, in contrast to the Korean dialects that constantly competed with one another for legitimacy. Born and raised in Ky̡ngsangdo, a province located on the southeastern part of the peninsula, “I” grew up speaking the local dialect. He

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believes that the main reason why he had little success with his Koreanlanguage writings is that Korean literary circles strongly favored “the language of KeijĎ” (KeijĎgo, the Seoul dialect) and looked down upon writers who did not accept it as the standard (127). Only Japanese seemed to have the ability to transcend the prejudices of the local toward something more universal and free. That this concept of the “free” could be achieved only through colonialism, a system fundamentally based upon the loss of freedom, is an irony that does not escape the narrator. But he comes to find that the choice between Korea(n) and Japan(ese) is a false one—not only because his entire sense of self was formed within the fait accompli of Japanese colonialism but also because there is no Korea(n) for him to return to. “Fluent in neither Japanese nor Korean, I did not have that thing called a ‘native land’ ” (132), the narrator tells us. In another flashback, we learn that he finally decided to fully embrace Japanese after being commissioned by a Japanese children’s literature editor for some stories. “I felt a nostalgic sense of home [kyĎshĝ] in diving back into the Japanese language and becoming completely one with the characters in my story” (133), he confesses. Semantically joining place and pathos together, the word kyĎshĝ can be understood as a belated love that emerges out of loss. Looking back from his vantage point of present-day Japan, the narrator believes that it is not the nation he lost in 1945 but the national language—or, more specifically, a Japanese language that had once included him in its domain, even when his Japanese colonizers had not. In this context, it is not surprising that “I” would come to see naturalization as the only logical solution to his linguistic conundrums. In other words, he does not choose Japanese because he identifies with Japan but quite the opposite: he subjugates himself to the purview of the Japanese nation-state only in order to reclaim his right to its language. “Intimidation” ends in the diegetic present, with an attempt by the narrator to transcend the divisive alliances of ethnicity and nation through the universalistic category of “human being” (ningen, 139). Yet what does it mean that he can do so only after having first naturalized as a Japanese national subject? This is a question that cannot be answered within

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“Intimidation,” a narrative that presents itself as a conversation between “I” and other Koreans through the textual medium of Japanese. But when considered against the paratextual frame of authorial identity, the narrator’s humanistic worldview takes on an urgent political dimension. As with the narrator, Chang’s decision to naturalize was taken by some Koreans as further “proof ” of his pro-Japanese collaborationist nature. To his Japanese peers, however, his Japanese citizenship was always still framed in terms of his Korean origins and otherness. The October 12, 1952, issue of the Yomiuri shinbun, for example, featured a sizable article detailing Chang’s decision to naturalize. Described as a “Korean writer with a singular foothold in Japan’s literary circles,” Chang was quoted as wanting to “find a new homeland in Japan.”29 Aside from one mention of Korean independence, the newspaper article glossed over the historical conditions specific to the resident Korean population in 1952. As previously mentioned, all former colonial subjects were uniformly stripped of Japanese nationality when the San Francisco Peace Treaty went into effect on April 28, 1952. Rather than acting as a vehicle for “Japanization,” then, the naturalization process in fact aided in the opposite. Because only foreigners could become naturalized citizens, the new visibility of the Korean population in Japan as potential targets of naturalization was part and parcel with their transformation from imperial subjects to alien residents. This transformation was not as radical as it may seem, because the particularity of Korea had always been constitutive of kĎminka policy on the peninsula. Indeed, the article’s marking of Chang as a Korean writer separate from (although participating in) the Japanese literary sphere is strikingly similar to the wartime discourse we saw on the position of Korean writers of Japanese. Only those who could proclaim a complete confluence of Japanese ethnicity and Japanese citizenship would be counted as “Japanese proper”; those who could not were doomed to always be defined by their difference.30 The same could be said about Japan’s postwar reconfiguration of kokugo as the language of the nation-state. In their efforts to democratize Japan, the U.S. Allied powers initiated major changes to the Japanese educational system, including the teaching of the Japanese language. It was widely

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believed that the Japanese language was so overly complicated that it had hindered the development of a national culture that might have been able to prevent Japan’s dark slide into military aggression. In February 1946, for example, the Yomiuri shinbun ran an editorial titled “The Democratization of the National Language” (Kokugo no minshuka) that called for an overhaul of the Japanese writing system.31 The Yomiuri editors further pledged to work with other newspapers and journals in disseminating a more democratized orthography throughout the nation, “so that the common people may be able to take back the precious weapons of culture that are our writing and speech, which until now had been wielded only by the privileged.” The Yomiuri editorial was only one of many linking the future of the Japanese language to the future of the Japanese nation. Starting in early 1946, and under SCAP’s encouragement, Japanese authorities and scholars began setting up a number of different councils, research institutes, agencies, and academic societies dedicated to “democratizing” the national language for the sake of the Japanese people.32 That Koreans were once also considered Japanese (Nihonjin) and speakers of kokugo was a fact rarely acknowledged by these institutions, let alone reflected in their policies. This historical amnesia is not surprising, however, given how kokugo ideology had always been internally fissured, synchronically inclusive but diachronically exclusive. Despite the rhetoric of reform and rupture, prewar kokugo ideology was not discarded so much as reoriented to fit the new parameters of the postwar state.33 We can see this even in the Yomiuri editorial just cited, where weapons of war have been neatly swapped out for weapons of culture. As Shiga Naoya himself put it, it was not the vagaries of history or the specifics of place that defined Japan’s national language but the immutable bonds of “Japanese blood.”34 Reading “Intimidation” against the paratextual context of “Chang Hy̡kchu, the Korean writer” helps reveal how the ability to speak as a human being first and as an ethnic or gendered body second depended all too much on the subject position of the speaker himself or herself. This was true not only for Koreans in Japan but also for former colonizers who found themselves returned to a homeland they barely knew. As Seiji Lippit

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has detailed, the huge influx of Japanese returnees (hikiagesha) ensured that the postwar in Japan entailed as much rupture as it did continuation. These returnees included both soldiers returning from the battlefield and Japanese settlers returning from the colonies. In his study of the early postwar fiction of Hotta Yoshie (1918–1998), Lippit points out that Hotta’s writings “can be seen to narrate a postwar return to the nation that is perpetually deferred, disturbed by the spectral memory of empire that continues to permeate the space of the reconstituting state.”35 Just like the continued existence of Koreans in Japan, the life trajectories of returning Japanese bodies were a constant reminder (and remainder) of an imperial history that had to be suppressed if the idea of Japan as a postwar nationstate was to be viable. While the discursive category of hikiagesha has come to refer to Japanese citizens repatriated to Japan following the end of the war, there were many other people with ties to empire that did not fit this definition, including Japanese settlers who grew up in the colonies but moved to mainland Japan before 1945 and colonized subjects who were repatriated as “Japanese” from places like Karafuto (current-day south Sakhalin) or Manchuria. In the rest of this chapter I explore an example of the former through the Japanese-language writings of Yuzurihara Masako, a woman who spent her formative years in Hokkaido and Karafuto before moving to Tokyo in 1941. (The case of Ri Kaisei, a famous example of the latter, is discussed in the conclusion of this book.) Originally trained as a teacher, Yuzurihara first gained the attention of both Karafuto and metropolitan literary circles with the publication of her Akutagawa Prize–nominated story “Northern Conflict” (Sakuhoku no tatakai). In 1949 she submitted a short story called “Korean Lynching” (ChĎsen yaki) to Shin Nihon bungaku but died before the manuscript was published. Miyamoto Yuriko, who had been a personal acquaintance of Yuzurihara’s, wrote a moving tribute to Yuzurihara upon hearing of her death, noting that her final story demonstrated “her increasing desire for liberation and her yearning for life.” 36 Based in part upon Yuzurihara’s own experiences, “Korean Lynching” looks back on the latter years of colonial rule in Karafuto from the perspective of “I,” a former elementary-school teacher. As such, its narrative

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structure bears important similarities to Chang’s “Intimidation.” At the same time, it offers a very different perspective on the role of education in creating and enforcing imperial hierarchies. The first sentence of Yuzurihara’s text immediately establishes a temporal frame: “About three years before the start of the Pacific War, I was transferred to a certain elementary school in a mining town located on the west coast of Karafuto.” 37 Even in this single sentence, several different layers of discursive memory are already competing with one another. We have, for instance, the literal invocation of memory, represented by two sets of time, “three years” and “Pacific War.” The term “Pacific War” itself functions as its own temporal mode: although referring to the past, it was a contemporary term urged upon the Japanese public by Occupation officials anxious to expunge “Greater East Asian War” (DaitĎa SensĎ), which had been used by the Japanese government in the early 1940s to propagate prowar, proempire sentiments. Therefore, while Yuzurihara never directly mentions the U.S. occupying presence in “Korean Lynching,” her story is incomprehensible apart from it. The term “Pacific War” tends to emphasize the U.S.–Japan conflict over Japan’s larger (and longer) military aggressions in Asia, but in Yuzurihara’s story the latter both brackets and runs alongside the former. The narrator “I” recounts to the reader her experiences teaching a young Korean student named Ri Ryĝson (Kr. Yi Yongson) in Karafuto. Ryĝson has a split personality: bright and talkative in class but gloomy and silent at home. “I” eventually learns that one of the reasons for Ryĝson’s doubled nature has to do with his older brother Genshun (Kr. W̡nch’un), a Korean nationalist who hides his anticolonial activities by posing as a Japanese doctor. One day, Genshun is ratted out by a Korean miner during a savage round of “lynching” by the mine’s yakuza overseers. Genshun is thrown into prison, where he commits suicide; Ryĝson and his family go into hiding; and the narrator returns to Tokyo. The story then leaps temporally forward, to a point soon after the end of the war. While going for a stroll along Tokyo Bay, the narrator is passed by a truck filled with jubilant singing Koreans. She is reminded of a somber Korean folk performance she had once witnessed in Karafuto and marvels that “in time such sorrowful songs, just

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like the full history of humiliation after Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910, will surely become nothing more than a distant tale for Koreans” (68). In “Korean Lynching,” knowledge is always something grasped belatedly, in retrospect, and never in full. Ruptures constantly mark the narrator’s attempts to reconstruct the past into a coherent narrative: memories trail away into dashes and ellipses, epiphanies are qualified with phrases such as “so I thought” and “it seemed,” speculations are raised in the form of questions with no concrete answers. The Japanese narrator’s hesitations and uncertainties stand in stark contrast to the epistemic certainty of the Korean characters, who know their selves as their colonizers cannot. Indeed, the text takes pains to show how the Koreans’ dilemma is not one of uncovering knowledge but of hiding it, simply in order to survive the brutal realities of colonial rule. It is only when the mechanics of that hiding are finally exposed that the narrator begins to understand the indeterminacy of her own position as colonizer. Language plays a key role in this process. When “I” first visits Ryĝson’s neighborhood, she is surprised to hear Korean and not Japanese being spoken by the children in the streets. Confronted with the opacity of the Korean language, the narrator comes to realize that her ability to know her Korean student—and her own self-identity as his teacher—had been predicated on her ability to know him through Japanese. Upon visiting him at home, the narrator reflects that “the Ryĝson I saw at school, the one who was forced to speak Japanese [naichigo] among people who were almost entirely mainland Japanese [naichijin], was an unnaturally warped version” of the real Ryĝson, who could express his true self only with his Korean family and in the Korean language (61). Note the use of the words naichijin and naichigo, which set up a contingent relationship between metropole and colony. At this juncture the narrator seems torn between a need to recognize the coercive nature of empire and a desire to maintain a connection to Ryĝson within it. On her way home from her visit to Ryĝson’s family, the narrator runs into a local Japanese doctor named Iwasa. “I” is startled to find the Japanese man in the predominantly Korean neighborhood, but Iwasa tells her that he, like her, was visiting one of his students and is now on his way

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home. As the two part ways, “I” looks back at Iwasa’s retreating form and finds herself thinking that the doctor bears a strange similarity to Ryĝson. Later the narrator discovers that the two are actually brothers, but that Iwasa (actually Genshun) had hidden his Korean origins in order to spy on behalf of the Korean laborers. Significantly, “I” never has a chance to confront the man directly about his true identity. The news of his unmasking and death come to her secondhand, after the fact, leaving her forever unable to make sense of the epistemological gap between “Iwasa” and “Genshun.” Once she discovers the full truth about Ryĝson and his brother, the narrator’s affection for her student turns to fear. “I am compelled to confess I felt a cheap, cowardly relief that I wouldn’t be able to see Ryĝson and his family anymore” (66), the narrator tells the reader. From that moment on, all references to naichi vanish. Disgusted with her own reaction, the narrator comes to the following realization: I had tried to teach that all human beings must be loved without discrimination. But what had Ryĝson witnessed? He had seen not the easy love that I taught but violent hatred; he had seen the bloody conflict of rulers and the ruled, forever unassimilable. . . . And, finally, he had learned that every moral preached from the school pulpit was nothing but a massive lie—that “love” and “justice” and “humanity” and other such glittering things were really sugarcoated pills filled with drugs meant to completely numb the minds of those bound in chains. That was the moment I finally began to see the lies for what they were. . . . I never felt so unhappy to be Japanese [Nihonjin] as in that moment. (66)

In this powerful scene, the narrator looks back from the diegetic present to a moment in time in which the fragile contingency of naichijin has been replaced by Nihonjin, a word that presumes no inevitable position vis-à-vis Koreans or any other ethnic group. But the story does not end there; instead, it moves to the narrator’s memories of the immediate postwar past. The Japan we see there is similar to the one found in Miyamoto Yuriko’s The Banshĝ Plain in many ways, particularly in its depictions of a

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liberated Korean people traveling up and away. Tellingly, these Korean masses are also depicted as joined together in song. But while The Banshĝ Plain has the sympathetic protagonist eventually responding to their example of forward motion, Yuzurihara’s narrator feels as if she has been “left behind” (67). Her memories of being an imperial subject constantly intrude into the lived realities of being a citizen of a defeated nation, rendering her immobile. Whatever happened to Ryĝson? the narrator finally wonders, and as she does, an image of his “Japanese” brother’s retreating back flashes before her eyes. While the word naichi no longer has any place in the text by this point, the scene demonstrates how memory itself cannot be so easily banished, lingering instead like a ghostly superimposition over the postwar landscape.38 The story then jumps forward one last time to the contemporary present, concluding with the following line: “Provided that Ryĝson had managed to grow up healthy and sound somewhere, he’ll have turned into a young man of twenty-one or twenty-two this year” (68). Complicated temporalities mark the story to the very end, as the sentence overlays speculation about the present with the conditional modalities of the past. Because Korea remains inaccessible to the narrator, confined as she is to the nation-state borders of Japan, the possibilities of the present can only ever exist as speculation. The ambiguities of this ending point to a reality in which the war’s end promised liberation for some, while for others it simply recast the same set of chains into other names: returnees, residents, or other remainders of empire. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki has pointed out, in the colonies these individuals had been tasked with the challenge of “living life amidst conflicting narratives of homeland, nation, and progress, which pulled in divergent directions at their sense of truth itself.” 39 The paradigm of the “postwar” did not reconcile these conflicting narratives so much as sever them from one another, as it obscured and eclipsed the contextual frame of empire. “Korean Lynching,” therefore, is not just a story about how defeat cut Japan off from its former colonies; it is also a story about how it cut Japan off from itself.

***

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Previous chapters analyzed in detail the inherent contradiction of kĎminka, which promised the transcendence of colonial hierarchies through racial and imperial sameness even as ethnic difference was mobilized to maintain those same hierarchies. Chang Hy̡kchu’s “Intimidation” and Yuzurihara Masako’s “Korean Lynching” reveal how that constitutive contradiction would continue to haunt former colonizers and colonized alike even after the Japanese empire’s collapse. Fiction that looked back to the colonial past and its aftermath in fact abounded during the Occupation period and in the years thereafter, particularly among Koreans in Japan and former Japanese settlers.40 Many of those authors took advantage of loosened censorship restrictions to write scenes and dialogue that would invariably have been censored before 1945; Yuzurihara’s depictions of virulent Japanese violence against innocent Koreans in “Korean Lynching,” for example, would have been all but impossible to print during the war. This does not mean that literary production during the Occupation period was unrestricted. Looming in the shadow of these writers’ representational strategies was GHQ/SCAP, which censored all publications in Japan from September 1945 through October 1949. SCAP’s main priority was not to safeguard the rights of minorities in Japan but to create a democratic, pro-U.S., and (after the infamous “reverse course” starting in late 1947) anti-Communist Japan.41 Its reach was hegemonic but ostensibly invisible, as even the mention of censorship itself was vigorously censored. EtĎ Jun has famously called Occupation-period Japan a “closed linguistic space” (tozasareta gengo kĝkan), arguing that Occupation censorship fundamentally altered the very contours of perception and thought in Japan.42 While inspired by the insights provided by EtĎ, my own understanding of this closed linguistic space is less concerned with the practice of censorship (the striking out or replacing of certain words, for instance, or the crafting of specific policies) than with the ways discourse itself was reoriented by and around the very idea of “occupation” and the “postwar.” Even before any words were put to the page, writers who wanted to narrativize the end of empire had little choice but to use the terms of the present, even as the act of doing so ironically precluded them from coming to terms with the terms of the past.

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However, the sheer number of retrospective narratives published during the Occupation and thereafter suggests a common desire to make sense of the past precisely because it did not easily fit into the discursive contexts of the here and now. Individuals returned again and again to the “rupture” of 1945, not only in fiction but also in essays and interviews, as the three examples from the beginning of this chapter demonstrated. As I argued in earlier chapters, a number of different definitions of Japan existed long before Japan’s defeat to the Allied powers. These multiple competing histories refused to disappear completely, even after the “myth of the homogeneous nation” took root.43 The question that then inevitably emerged was not just how to remember empire but also how to exorcise it once and for all. In the next chapter, I explore efforts by Koreans to create a body of Japanese-language literature that was (it was declared) free from the dregs of colonialism—despite the fact that it was written in Japanese, the very means in which colonialism had been perpetuated.

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5 COLONIAL LEGACIES AND THE DIVIDED “I” IN OCCUPATION-PERIOD JAPAN

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Y T H E END of the Fifteen-Year War, there were more than two million Koreans living in Japan. For some of these Koreans, the end of the war led to calls for celebration, and a return home for those who had been forced into working for Japan’s war engine. For others, the future was a more uncertain thing. The unstable political climate on the peninsula meant that individuals and families could not be sure of what awaited them, should they return.1 Furthermore, the strict restrictions on how much money and goods one could take—a maximum of one thousand yen and two hundred and fifty pounds of luggage—was a high disincentive to those who had amassed property or even a modicum of savings in Japan. On the other end of the spectrum, the most disenfranchised communities often lacked the financial means to secure the train fares that would take them to the departure ports and access to accurate information on repatriation measures. Some had no families or friends in Korea who might help them relocate; others thought of Japan as home and spoke Japanese as their first language. Kim Talsu was twenty-five years old when Japan surrendered to the Allied powers. Born in southern Korea in 1919, he came to Japan at the age of ten with virtually no knowledge of Japanese. By 1945, however, he had gained entrance into Nihon University, secured a job as a newspaper reporter,

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published several short stories in Japanese, and established a small circulating journal called Keirin with a handful of other Korean writers in Tokyo. By the time of his death in 1997, he had earned a reputation by his peers as the first and foremost zainichi (resident) Korean author of the postwar period, and his work in translating, editing, critiquing, and compiling Japanese-language works by other Korean writers helped contribute to the codification of “zainichi literature.” Partially for these reasons, the majority of scholarship on Kim has tended to look at his postwar fiction, particularly starting from the 1950s. In actuality, Kim began to publish Japanese-language fiction before 1945, before the word zainichi had even emerged as a discursive term, and his career thus serves as a pertinent example of continuity amid change. Kim was also an active member of the Japan Communist Party and Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai, demonstrating how Koreans in Japan actively sought out partnerships with their Japanese peers and vice versa. At the same time, Koreans like Kim were also keenly aware of the marginalized status they held as ethnic minorities in a country that refused to offer them legal protection as such. Echoing their predecessors from the prewar proletarian movement (discussed in chapter 1), they argued that their political goals of national independence and democratic revolution were not identical to, nor should be subordinated under, Japanese leftists’ concerns. This chapter focuses on the complicated factors that led to the creation of a stateless Korean diaspora in Japan and highlights the responses of Korean writers who saw these political conditions as a sign of an imperialist system still insidiously intact. I begin by looking at how Koreans were politicized in Minshu ChĎsen, an important Japanese-language journal produced by Koreans in Japan in the immediate postwar period. Kim Talsu was a founding member and leading editor of Minshu ChĎsen, which ran from 1946 to 1950. The journal was quick to align itself with North Korea and the progressive left in Japan, and it insistently called for the complete autonomy of “we the Korean people.” In doing so, it reversed the former relationship of metropole and periphery: Koreans in Japan were peripheral but constitutive members of a minzoku (people, ethnos) whose “legitimate” place was on the Korean peninsula.2 At the same time,

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the Japanese language of the journal constrained the reading audience to Japan and complicated the position of Korean writers, to whom Japanese was no longer kokugo but Nihongo. Only after this reconfiguration of the Japanese language had been naturalized was it then possible to categorize zainichi fiction as literature written in Japanese but not “Japanese literature.”

M I N S H U C H Ō S E N A N D K O R E A N S I N J A PA N The first wave of Korean migration in the early years of the colonial period consisted largely of male laborers brought over to work at factories or on construction sites. The men often lived close together in hastily constructed barracks—Koreans were consistently denied housing by Japanese landlords even after the war—and considered their sojourn a temporary one. By the early 1930s, the number of long-term residents had almost doubled. Men who had established themselves in Japan later sent for their wives and children, and many of these families helped friends and extended family move to mainland Japan as well. As a result, communities sprang up that were defined as much by regional affiliations as they were by larger connections of ethnicity. In Aichi Prefecture, for example, 47.1 percent of the resident Korean population in 1940 came from South Ky̡ngsang alone, while residents from South Ch̡lla (which included Cheju Island at the time) made up 36.5 percent of the Korean population in Osaka.3 Close ties were maintained with home villages in Korea, as travel routes between Korea and Japan facilitated the transportation not only of people but also of information, goods, and money throughout the colonial period. As the Second Sino-Japanese War progressed, demand for labor rose and with it a new influx of Korean workers. The conscription of Koreans for labor—including women forced into military prostitution as so-called comfort women—has been discussed at length by a number of prominent scholars, including Pak Ky̡ngsik and Ueno Chizuko.4 However, it is important to remember that a stable resident population continued to exist throughout the war, consisting of not only first-generation but also now

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second-generation individuals who would form the core of the postwar zainichi community. The multiplicity of terms used pre-1945 to describe the Korean population in Japan suggests that while a recognizable Korean population did exist in Japan from the 1920s onward, it must be distinguished discursively from what would be known as the zainichi population post-1945.5 Even in 1945 and 1946, the terms used to talk about Koreans in Japan were far from stable, changing according to the speaker and audience. But by 1947, when the system of alien registration was initiated for all non-Japanese residents, the number of Koreans in Japan had dropped precipitously, from two million to just under six hundred thousand. Repatriation to Korea continued steadily, and only some five hundred forty thousand Koreans remained by the time of the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1951. The peace treaty had grave consequences for the resident population: all former colonial subjects of Japan were stripped of Japanese nationality and denied the services and rights that came with it. This was true even for those Koreans whose family register had been located in the naichi, or mainland Japan.6 (The earlier 1950 Japanese Nationality Law had excluded anyone whose family register was located outside the naichi. This meant that Japanese whose family register had been moved to the colonies—through, for example, marriage with a Korean—also found themselves denied Japanese nationality after the war.) Because neither South nor North Korea was recognized by Japan at that time, Koreans in Japan were rendered stateless. As Sonia Ryang writes in her introduction to the essay collection Diaspora without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan, we can locate the origins of the zainichi community here, when “with the partitioning of the Korean peninsula into two mutually antagonistic and noncommunicating regimes amid the intensifying tension of the Cold War, a major portion of the Korean diaspora was effectively incarcerated inside the Japanese archipelago.”7 This situation engendered two seemingly contradictory results. The first is the strengthening of a distinct sense of zainichi community in response to the legal and social changes described in the preceding, and especially to the reimagining of Japan (and Korea) as ethnically homogeneous. The second is the simultaneous assimilation of Koreans into Japanese society ow-

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ing to factors such as the disruption of goods and information across the border and a rising number of Koreans born or largely raised in Japan.8 In the years immediately following the war, however, both Japanese and Koreans assumed or hoped that the division of the peninsula was a temporary situation. As they waited for political reunification, Korean activists in Japan established Korean schools, political organizations, and local newsletters and journals—often with the double goal of “preparing” the Korean population in Japan for reintegration into Korean society and calling out their Japanese peers on their collective responsibility as former colonizers.9 Minshu ChĎsen is an example of a journal that was launched with these two goals in mind. Funding for the launch was provided by members of the Kanagawa Prefecture branch of ChĎren (League of Koreans in Japan), the same pro-Communist organization that was depicted— though less charitably—in Chang Hy̡kchu’s “Intimidation” (analyzed in chapter 4). Not surprisingly, the journal consistently showcased its allegiance to progressive politics in general and the North Korean government in particular. Minshu ChĎsen was launched during a time of great activity in the Japanese publishing industry. The major literary journals Bungei shunjĝ and ShinchĎ, which had been forced to go on hiatus in the last months of the war, resumed publishing in November 1945. They were soon joined by a flurry of new ventures that included Shinsei in November 1945, Ningen in January 1946, Kindai bungaku in January 1946, and Shin Nihon bungaku in March 1946. Koreans in Japan, too, were no less involved in this postwar publishing boom, most notably when it came to newspapers. Examples of periodicals written by and for Koreans in Japan include Chosʵn minju sinmun (established October 1945), published in Korean; the Korean-language Uri sinmun (established July 1946), later renamed Kaebang sinmun and published in both Korean and Japanese; and Chosʵn sinbo (established June 1946), published at first in Japanese and then in Korean starting in July.10 The inaugural issue of Minshu ChĎsen opens with the following statement: In the course of progressive democratic revolution, where have Koreans positioned themselves in historical reality, and how are they attempting

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to execute its historic mission? In other words, what are Koreans thinking, what are they saying, what are they trying to do? The objective circumstances and subjective movements regarding the issue of trusteeship [shintaku tĎchi] in particular have become the focus of world attention. Here and now, through this booklet, we will declare to the world the proper path we should pursue; correct Japanese people’s perceptions of Korean history, culture, and tradition, which have been distorted by the past thirty-six years; and present our vision of future developments in politics, the economy, and society to those wise readers of the world wishing to understand the Korean people.11

In this statement, two broad aims are spelled out. The first looks back at the correction of past injustices, by having Korean writers (“we”) address Japanese readers. The second looks forward to the construction of a politically progressive, democratic future, one that stands in opposition to the Western powers reflected in the euphemistic term “trusteeship.” In this regard, it can be said that the Minshu ChĎsen founders were operating under a Marxist understanding of historical development.12 Koreans in Japan could participate in Japan’s bourgeois-democratic revolution, despite the nationalist framework in which this revolution had to take place, because it was understood to be an anti-imperial, antifascist movement necessary for the emergence of a new historical stage of socialist liberation and subjectivity. At the time of Minshu ChĎsen’s launch, a number of Japanese Marxists had already begun to address the question of how to properly define and locate subjectivity (shutaisei) in history.13 While the question was not a new one, it gained an urgent new dimension in the immediate postwar era among those seeking to understand the sins of Japan’s past and find a corrective for them. Fractious debates subsequently took place in the major Japanese journals of the day, but even the most notorious disagreements on subjectivity, war responsibility, and modernity were still predicated on a shared assumption of Japanese ethnonationality. In declaring Koreans as agents of their own history, the Minshu ChĎsen founders drew upon a similar conceptualization of subjectivity as simultaneously nationalized and

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politicized. What was radical about the declaration, therefore, was not necessarily its particular attention to Korea but the way it brought the nationalized, politicized subjectivity of Japanese readers into a contingent relationship with that of “the Korean people” and thereby the rest of the world.14 Within this framework, the Japanese language of the journal was meant to be understood as a communicative tool, used only for the purposes of making that contingent relationship known. In this context, Japanese was Nihongo; Korean, kokugo (national language). The editor’s remarks at the end of the first issue touch upon this issue of language. While the editor acknowledges that several Korean-language publications have already been launched in Tokyo, “we believe that freely using Japanese—despite the fact that it was acquired under a cursed destiny—to create a journal or two like this one is absolutely necessary, for both us Koreans [wareware ChĎsenjin] and Japanese” (50). The term wareware ChĎsenjin is powerfully inclusive in this context: it not only encompasses all Koreans living in Japan but also connects them to Koreans on the peninsula. In this way, the Minshu ChĎsen writers used the language of a “cursed destiny” to refashion kokugo into Nihongo within Japan, rather than outside it. In the December 1946 issue of Minshu ChĎsen, the word kokugo is explicitly used by Kim Talsu in his editor’s remarks. He began the piece by reiterating that the journal was created by Koreans but not necessarily only for Koreans. While admitting that “Koreans want to forget the Japanese [Nihongo] that was forced upon them in order to fully revitalize the national language [kokugo—here, Korean] that was restored to them,” he also highlighted the importance of Japanese-language writing as an aid in repairing the relationship between the two countries.15 This sentiment was echoed by Odagiri Hideo (1916–2000) in an article in the same issue. In that article, “For the Sake of the Flowering of Korean Literature” (ChĎsen bungaku no kaika no tame ni), Odagiri called for “a partnership between Japan’s progressive literary movements and Korea’s literary movements” (59). Perhaps because of its dual target audience of Koreans and Japanese, Minshu ChĎsen (and by extension its Korean writers) was identified by Odagiri as a perfect mediator between Korean and Japanese literature.

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The Koreans who contributed to Minshu ChĎsen willingly undertook this task of representation, in part because participation in democratic revolution meant seizing the right to speak for and about themselves. But what did it mean to do this in Japanese, rather than in Korean? For many of these same writers, Kim Talsu included, Korean may have been the language of the family, but Japanese was the language of literature and academia, and the only language that could give them a sizable reading audience in Japan.16 Indeed, the very concept of modern literature was inseparable from the colonial experience; how, then, to establish a “legitimate” Korean literary canon that could stand against Japanese imperialism and exonerate the authors who had lived through it? Moreover, the task of defining Korean literature was made more complicated for those Koreans in Japan who spoke Japanese not out of choice but out of inevitability. In an essay called “How One Korean Became Conscious of Literature” (Ichi ChĎsenjin, watakushi no bungaku jikaku, 1954), we can see Kim Talsu attempting to come to terms with his own ambivalent sense of self as expressed through the Japanese language.17 In the essay, Kim reflects on his early childhood in Korea, his subsequent move to Japan to join his family there, and his youth spent working as a scrap collector or junkman (kuzuya) in the streets of Tokyo and Yokosuka. His first encounter with Japanese fiction was the children’s magazines he found in used bookstores and in the trash he picked up: ShĎnen kurabu, Kingu, KĎdan kurabu, and more. Kikuchi Kan, whose stories were often featured in these magazines, became a particular favorite of his at that time. But what irrevocably changed Kim’s life was the discovery, in the trash, of a volume of Shiga Naoya’s fiction and a Japanese translation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment some unknown Tokyo resident had thrown away. Kim came to greatly admire Shiga for his lucid writing style. It was also through him that he first learned of the I-novel, “where Japanese authors attempt to write about the self called ‘I’ and the events that occur around it” (10). The I-novel “was a good influence, but in some ways it remains as a bad influence, too.” He continues, “I decided I wanted to write about Koreans and their lives. And I wanted to inform others, I wanted to appeal to them. In particular, I wanted to inform—I thought I had to inform—

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the Japanese people who held various feelings or ideas (almost all of them mistaken) about Koreans and their lives” (10–11; emphasis in original). Hence the creation of Minshu ChĎsen and the publication of his own fiction. Tomi Suzuki has described the I-novel as a mode of reading, one where “it is ultimately the reader who assumes a ‘hidden contract’ in the text.” 18 Rather than reading the preceding passage as a wholesale rejection of the I-novel, I would argue that Kim powerfully problematizes—without dismantling—the relationship between reader and text that is the I-novel. In other words, Kim wishes to make the “hidden contract” visible by deliberately calling upon the reader to interpret the text against the extratextual narrative of Kim’s own life, which is at the same time the life of a Korean. And while the so-called I-novels of Shiga Naoya may have implicitly invited an evaluation of Japanese society at large (often contrasted, whether positively or negatively, to the West), Kim explicitly and insistently calls for such an evaluation in his fiction through the linking of Kim-Koreans and reader-Japanese.19 The fiction of Miyamoto Yuriko has also often been discussed in the I-novel vein, including The Banshĝ Plain, the novel introduced in the previous chapter. With its semiautobiographical details, The Banshĝ Plain invites readers to contextualize Hiroko’s life against that of Miyamoto Yuriko, whose well-publicized experiences as a political prisoner and whose wartime literary silence would have lent legitimacy to the protagonist Hiroko’s criticisms against the former empire. Furthermore, Hiroko’s selfidentification as a member of the Japanese nation conditions her reaction to the Koreans and her participation in a society no longer of the state but of the people. In Kim’s case, however, it is precisely the supposed transparency or naturalness of national self-identification that is questioned. What separated Kim Talsu from other Korean writers of Japanese-language fiction, meanwhile, was his acute awareness that the “Kim-Koreans” connection had already been paradoxically breached by the Japanese language. In order to fully explicate this point, I turn now to Kim’s “Trash” (Gomi), a work of fiction whose publication life spanned the 1945 divide. The very title of the short story richly connotes the ways the by-products of

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colonialism transform (and are transformed by, literally and figuratively) the abject colonial subjects who inherit them. Like Kim, the protagonist of “Trash” turns the Japanese trash he collects into capital to be used for the sake of Korea. But also like Kim, whose inheritance of the Japanese language can never be untangled from the colonial past, the would-be capitalist of “Trash” is unable to extricate himself completely from the restrictive systems of imperial control. Because “Trash” was rewritten and reprinted multiple times, I find it necessary to first establish the overarching plot lines of each manuscript before delving into a comparative analysis. When necessary, I distinguish between the different versions by their publication date. Thus, the story published as “Trash” in 1942 is indicated as “Trash” (1942). The revised 1947 version was published in two parts, under the titles “Trash” (Gomi) and “Trash Barge Postscript” (Jinkaisen kĎki), respectively. “Trash” (1947) therefore refers to the first half of the 1947 story and “Trash Barge Postscript” to the remaining half. Although the parts have different titles, it should be stressed that the two parts have to be read together and should be thought of as forming one complete text.

“TRASH” (1942)

Kim Talsu published the short story “Trash” under the pseudonym Kanemitsu Jun/Kim Kwangsun (Sino-Japanese reading Kin KĎjun)20 in the March 1942 issue of Bungei shuto. Running only ten pages long, the story can be described as a rough sketch of its central protagonist, a Korean junkman called 䌬ℓ⎱, and his life in wartime Japan. In the opening scene, the Korean junkman calls upon the help of a friend whose name is given as 㔔㲘. On the very first page we run into the issue of language once again, as none of the characters’ names are given glosses. 䌬ℓ⎱ is a hybrid name. The surname 䌬 is Korean, pronounced Gen in the SinoJapanese reading and Hy̡n in Korean; the characters ℓ⎱, in contrast, can be read as Yakichi in Japanese (among other possibilities) or P’algil in Korean.21 Meanwhile, the given name 㔔㲘 can be read as Takahiro or

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Takayasu in Japanese, as Ky̡ngt’ae in Korean, or as Keitai in Sino-Japanese. Because the surname of that character is never revealed, it is impossible to determine his ethnicity with any certainty. While P’algil’s familiarity with Takahiro/Ky̡ngt’ae seems to suggest that the latter is also Korean, the deliberate ambiguity opens up a space for doubled meanings and possible subversion of the kĎminka paradigm, as detailed in previous chapters. The pages that follow contain a rapid series of explanatory flashbacks that show how P’algil came to gain the sole rights to the waste produced by D. Factory. Having come from a place so poor “there was nothing left to steal, even if you tried,” P’algil is astonished at the wealth of the metropole, where people have the luxury of throwing things away. 22 At first he takes whatever choice items he finds in or near garbage cans, on the simple assumption that they are all free to take. But when he is detained by the police for stealing, he gives up trash picking and becomes a junkman, or a person who buys old or broken goods from individuals to sell to wholesale dealers. He is able to do this because he picks up a few words of Japanese (naichigo) that allow him to bargain with his Japanese customers. Soon P’algil boldly sets his sights on the industrial waste from D. Factory, which had seen a marked increase in activity with the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The rights to the factory’s waste officially lie with a man named Nojiri, who sifts through the waste for scrap iron and other things made valuable by the war.23 By custom the trash left over is dumped into the water, to be sifted through a second time by the fishermen who live nearby and eventually sold by the fishermen to junkmen. P’algil attempts to buy from the fishermen one day but is swiftly thrown out when he is caught trying to manipulate the weighing scales. Upset and desperate, P’algil escapes to a local Shinto shrine to nurse his wounds; there, he is suddenly hit with a feeling of homesickness. He looks toward the direction of Korea, but when he does, his gaze is caught by the sight of the D. Factory trash barge in the water. In a flash, he knows: he wants that barge. Immediately the next day, P’algil ambushes Nojiri at his home. He latches himself onto Nojiri’s leg and begs for a contract. Nojiri finally

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agrees to give P’algil access to the trash for a monthly fee of three hundred yen. Things go well for P’algil until the day he gets a visit from a Korean man named ⼸㮹╄. Again, the surname is in this case Korean, pronounced S̡ (Sino-Japanese reading Jo), but the given name can be read as Minh̿i in Korean, Tamiki in Japanese, or Minki in Sino-Japanese. Minh̿i, we learn, works as an insurance salesperson as well as an organizer for the local KyĎwakai chapter.24 He wants to persuade P’algil to transfer his trash barge rights, not to him but to a wholesaler interested in the D. Factory waste. (A few days earlier Minh̿i had been approached by this wholesaler, who used the promise of his business as bait to convince Minh̿i to work on his behalf.) But P’algil balks and brings in Takahiro/ Ky̡ngt’ae to intercede in the dispute. This is the point in the narrative where readers are brought back to the present day. In the end, Takahiro/ Ky̡ngt’ae manages to convince Minh̿i to let P’algil keep his trash. The following conversation then ensues: Takahiro/Ky̡ngt’ae clapped S̡ Minh̿i on the shoulder. Strangely, within the atmosphere of defeat he still felt an affinity between the two of them. Takahiro/Ky̡ngt’ae walked along the plank to P’algil and said, “There’s nothing to worry about. Work hard, buy lots of land back in your hometown [kyĎri], and return soon.” P’algil sprung to his feet and fell into the ocean with a great splash. He raised both hands and beat at the waves like a madman. Among the splashes came a shout: “Aigu (I’m happy), Aigu (I’m happy)!” (49)

In “Trash” (1942) we see a twisted capitalist logic at play: P’algil, a disenfranchised colonial subject, is able to generate capital in the metropole from the surplus or waste material from Japan’s war efforts, capital that can then be used to repossess the land that had been taken away from him by colonization. Many of the Japanese junkmen who would have presented serious competition had “had to switch to construction work or so forth [for the war effort],” leaving only “those who couldn’t bear to give up their

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professions.”25 At the same time, it must be emphasized that P’algil’s labor as a scrap collector does not undermine the colonial hierarchy so much as work strictly within its rules. His initial efforts to work outside the established system are branded as illegal and they land him in jail, forcing him to realize that the wealth of the metropole can be his only by distant association. Furthermore, the money he gains by working within “legal” channels is to be used to buy back land in Korea, but through the same colonial systems that had disenfranchised him in the first place. P’algil’s success is also predicated on the unpaid labor of his unnamed wife, who appears at the end of the story as a silent shadow, picking at the trash on the barge. The origins of P’algil’s Korean wife are completely unknown; her fate, likewise. The Japanese women, in contrast, are represented as the “vulgar” wives of rich families who come out to bargain ferociously with P’algil over their trash (43). Class and gender again are working here in complicated refractions. While the Japanese women he meets are socially above him in class, the only capital they can generate is supplementary and limited to the private realm of the household. Meanwhile, while P’algil is denied the role of the soldier because of his ethnicity, he still possesses the ability to move between the realms of the private (the Japanese home) and the public (the scrap market). But this ability also sets him in opposition to his Japanese peers, who are similarly marginalized because of their inability or unwillingness to serve as either soldiers or war construction workers. He can only best the itinerant fishermen by beating them at their own game—that is, by going directly to Nojiri and, by manipulating the existing legal system, acquiring the rights to the trash. Finally, the story concludes with a confrontation between three very different men: P’algil, Minh̿i, and Takahiro/Ky̡ngt’ae. Both Minh̿i and Takahiro/Ky̡ngt’ae appear to have some social and financial influence in the local Korean community, but while the former’s power depends upon his position in the KyĎwakai, the latter’s power is left unspecified. Depending on whether one thinks of Takahiro/Ky̡ngt’ae as Japanese or Korean, interpretations of the “atmosphere of defeat” mentioned on the last page may differ radically. A Japanese wartime censor reading literally, for example, might assume the character was Japanese and the scene an innocuous

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description of the Japanese man’s generosity in helping out a lower-class Korean man in need. Another reader, perhaps one with more leftist leanings, might interpret the final scene as a politically charged and symbolically laden image of Korean “resistance” against Japan’s eventual defeat. Because the wording “the two of them” in the original Japanese is ambiguous, it can be applied to any combination of the individuals present, depending on one’s interpretation: the two Koreans P’algil and Minh̿i standing together against the Japanese man Takahiro; the Japanese-speaking imperial subject (kĎmin) Ky̡ngt’ae and Minh̿i standing distinct from P’algil; and so on. In this battlefield of open meanings, what does “return” mean, and where is one supposed to return to? If P’algil and Ky̡ngt’ae are both Korean, then “return” becomes a hopeful word, and Korea the reference point around which everything is oriented. At the same time, it must be noted that this return is still predicated upon P’algil’s economic success in the metropole and cannot occur without it; only after having thoroughly integrated himself into Japan’s imposed system of land ownership and colonial capitalism can he find a place for himself back home. Takahiro/Ky̡ngt’ae’s final enjoinder to “work hard” is also ambiguous in this light. If one takes the character’s ethnicity to be Japanese, it only repeats the hierarchies of colonialism we have seen in other stories. But even if he is assumed to be Korean, the command remains unidirectional and bisected by class. Takahiro/Ky̡ngt’ae and Minh̿i, after all, appear to enjoy a certain measure of economic stability; that, plus their relatively privileged social positions, may give them a border-crossing mobility not afforded to a laborer like P’algil. One final puzzle left for the reader to decipher is the connotation of P’algil’s final words. The Korean word aigu (or sometimes aigo) is an interjection used to express a variety of emotions: surprise, frustration, hurt, welcome, despair. It may also be shouted or wailed to express intense grief, especially during periods of mourning—but it only rarely, if ever, is used to convey simple happiness. When P’algil falls into the water, his cry of Aigu is glossed in Japanese in the text as “I’m happy” (Ureshii), but the translation appears incongruous with the situation at hand. It is possible that a native Korean speaker, upon hearing those words, would interpret

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them as a lament or a cry for help, but the text flatly rejects this possibility for the Japanese-speaking reader by providing a set gloss. Just as the enigma of Takahiro/Ky̡ngt’ae is irreducible to the “either-or” of “Japanese or Korean,” the disjunct between P’algil’s Korean words and their Japanese translation can never be completely bridged. And yet, by introducing a note of discord in the final lines of the story, Kim Talsu transforms P’algil into a tragicomic character, rather than a farcical one. Like his predecessor Genryĝ from Kim Saryang’s “Pegasus,” P’algil is able to embody the irreconcilable contradictions of colonialism in a way that the other Korean characters cannot, precisely because of his attempts to take advantage of a system that had been devised to take advantage of him. In pointing out all the possibilities of referent-reference relations, I do not mean to endorse one reading over another. What I find significant about the story is that it can support these different readings because of the narrative structure, without ever reducing itself to a final, single answer. More important, it does this through—not despite—the kĎmin paradigm, wherein the identity of the “imperial subject” was made to supersede that of the ethnic or nationalized body. Even in the increasingly restrictive political climate of late wartime Japan, it was still possible to speak in a dialogic voice that echoed with the possibility of dissent—although, as this story proves, always only at the level of possibility. Whether or not P’algil ever returns to Korea is a question that remains beyond the scope of the written page. By the time Kim Talsu published “Trash” (1947), however, the contours of “Korea” had changed so much that the idea of return inevitably took on new and politically charged meanings.

“TRASH” AND “TRASH BARGE POSTSCRIPT”

Kim Talsu significantly expanded and revised “Trash” (1942) after the end of the war. He published the work in Minshu ChĎsen in two parts, the first (titled “Trash”) in the February 1947 special issue on fiction and the second (“Trash Barge Postscript”) in the following issue. The revised story begins not in Takahiro/Ky̡ngt’ae’s study but with an introduction to P’algil:

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“Before he gained the rights to the trash from U. Dock, Hy̡n P’algil was a constant source of trouble for the police. Like a cousin dropping in on the head of the family [honke], he showed up at police headquarters at a rate of around once every three days. If P’algil hadn’t returned home before it got dark, people in the neighborhood [buraku] would say, ‘Guess he’s gone off to “pay his respects” again.’ ”26 While the word buraku is today commonly associated with the burakumin, during the colonial and immediate postwar period it was also strongly associated with the immigrant Korean population in Japan, which often built communities near or in traditionally burakumin urban areas because of poverty and discrimination.27 In fact, the word buraku is sometimes translated into English by scholars as “Korean ghetto” when spoken of in the context of zainichi literature and history.28 In this opening scene, then, P’algil is presented both as a member of an established Korean community and as an oppositional figure contrasted with the Japanese authorities— something that would have no doubt been impossible to depict in the strict censorship climate of 1942 imperial Japan. The mention of the word honke—a deliberately ironic reiteration of imperialist discourse that used the metaphor of “head house” and “branch house” to justify colonial expansion—emphasizes the colonial hierarchy between Koreans and Japanese. Later details about P’algil’s life back in Korea and his family life in Japan further deepen the portrait of a Korean man tied by memory to a community back in the peninsula and by practical necessity to the Korean community in Japan. In this version, Kim Talsu also greatly expands upon the confrontation between P’algil and the fishermen. When P’algil tries to manipulate the weighing scales in his favor, the fishermen verbally abuse him as an “unruly bastard” (futei yarĎ) and physically beat him. The words they use echo the ethnic slur “unruly Korean” (futei senjin), dramatically overlaying the Japanese fishermen’s violence with the history of previous violent colonial encounters.29 In response, P’algil cries out Aigo—the first introduction we have of the word, here unglossed but strongly linked to his fear and anguish—and flees from the fishermen. The tide has come up, and he is forced to wade into the water; this sends him into a crying panic because

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he doesn’t know how to swim. It is only through a heroic effort that he manages to wade to safety. While there is a certain humor in the scene, the narrative slide into P’algil’s interiority as he thinks of everything he is working for and everything he’s given up adds a sympathetic note that also foreshadows the ending of the story. Kim Talsu concludes “Trash” (1947) with the scene between P’algil and Nojiri. Unlike “Trash” (1942), in this version Nojiri beats on P’algil’s head with his walking stick when P’algil refuses to let go of his legs. Despite this, P’algil is adamant: “P’algil gazed up at [Nojiri] with an imploring expression, his eyes brimming with tears. Blood gushed out of various wounds on his face” (28). Up to this point, the narrative had mostly retained the humor of the 1942 version, exaggerating the almost farcical contrast between the older, well-dressed, distinguished Japanese man and the poor, unkempt, cowering Korean man at his feet. Here, however, the tone of the narration shifts into darker territory with the introduction of blood, and P’algil’s continued pleas become impossible to dismiss as frivolous. Faced with the physical evidence of his own violence, Nojiri offers to help clean up P’algil’s wounds and invites P’algil into his home. It is here that “Trash” (1947) ends, capped with a note by the author stating that the story will be continued in “Trash Barge Postscript.” As in the 1942 version, in “Trash” (1947) Kim deftly manipulates the gap between P’algil’s perceptions of himself and the perspective given to the reader, infusing his characterization of P’algil with ironic humor. As in Kim Saryang’s “Pegasus,” the ironies of the narrative invite readings in which colonial reality is made into an extratextual referent. At the same time, the addition of details surrounding P’algil’s circumstances creates a text that is at once more resistant to simple allegorical interpretation and yet still wholly embedded in the metanarrative of empire. The violence that explodes onto the page in “Trash” (1947) is tangible and singular, enacted upon P’algil’s body by specific Japanese antagonists, but it is also the consequence of an imperial system that has embarked on a war where “it feels like everyone in the entire world has been made into a junkman” (21). At the end of Miyamoto Yuriko’s The Banshĝ Plain, Hiroko’s gaze was caught by the sight of two Korean men, who never looked back at her. Here, the

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first half of the story ends with Nojiri and P’algil staring at each other, albeit from (literally) different positions—the consequences of which are taken up in part two, “Trash Barge Postscript.” “Trash Barge Postscript” begins as “Trash” (1942) did, with P’algil visiting a man to ask for help. In this version, though, the third-person “Takahiro/Ky̡ngt’ae” has been changed to the first-person “I.” The narrative tense is also different: with the introduction of “I,” we are launched into a retrospective narration that frames the entire first part as a memory, reconstructed in the (unspecified) present. We learn that at the time of the story, “I” had been working as a reporter for a local newspaper. “As a condition for being hired I was using my Japanese name [Nihonmei],” the narrator says, “but because at my core I was one of those ‘inscrutable Koreans’ I wasn’t allowed to report on the local government or anything like that.”30 Instead, he is assigned to crime. In his role as a crime reporter he gradually gains the trust of the police, which then allows him to act as an intermediary for the local Koreans who come to him with their problems. All these people wanted to do is “save up money and return home as soon as possible” (94), the narrator tells us; his own desire, in turn, was to spend his life writing about them. Thus while the split between Takahiro/Ky̡ngt’ae is also preserved in a way in “Trash Barge Postscript,” it is sublimated by the first-person narration into an essentialist strategy of identity politics. The narrator’s privileging of his “core” Koreanness would suggest, for example, that Ky̡ngt’ae would be the “correct” reading of the name 㔔㲘. By using a Japanese name directed at a Japanese audience, the narrator is able to manipulate the colonial hierarchies in his favor; the social position and economic security enabled by his Japanese name are transformed into tools to help his Korean peers. Japanese identity for the narrator is situational, strategic, and temporary, while Korean identity is innate and unchanging. While this possibility had always been implicitly suggested by the ambiguity of unglossed names in “Trash” (1942), it is only in the new discursive space of the postwar that this possibility could be rendered as explicit reality. This also helps to explain why Kim might have chosen to transform “Takahiro/ Ky̡ngt’ae” into “I”: through the retrospective narration, the split subject is

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able to reclaim wholeness for himself, healing the trauma of colonial experience by narrativizing it as memory. While S̡ Minh̿i is still the set villain of the piece, the new details that are provided about his life and personality in “Trash Barge Postscript” transform him into a foil for the narrator. Always sharply dressed and with nearly flawless Japanese, Minh̿i is easily taken for a Japanese man by the casual observer. His wife is Japanese, and “I” speculates that this marriage may be one reason why he was hired by the prestigious A. Insurance Company. Unlike “I,” Minh̿i’s performance as a “Japanese” man is desperately sincere and fueled by self-loathing for his Korean origins—in other words, he is what, in the immediate postwar period, Korean nationalists would label a collaborator. Interestingly, in the 1947 version no mention of the KyĎwakai is made. Instead, it is revealed that P’algil fears Minh̿i not because of the latter’s Japanese connections but because “fellow Koreans . . . knew everything about one another. You couldn’t play dumb with them” (96). Minh̿i harbors a fear of his fellow Koreans for similar reasons; he avoids them because he is afraid his own Korean ethnicity might be exposed as a result. His anxiety only reinforces the idea that Koreanness may be hidden, but it can never be completely erased. P’algil worries that Minh̿i will be able to see past P’algil’s bluffs and intuit how profitable the trash barge really is. As in “Trash” (1942), the narrator agrees to meet P’algil at the docks to serve as mediator for the dispute. As he waits with P’algil for Minh̿i to arrive, he tries to smile but finds himself instead struck with an inexplicable sadness. Deleted in this version are allusions to a “sense of defeat.” Instead, when “I” asks Minh̿i to give up his bid for the trash barge, Minh̿i capitulates with good-humored resignation, saying simply, “I’ve lost” (99). With this change, the dividing line between loss and liberation is sharply redrawn from Japanese-Korean to Korean-Korean. The united front presented by P’algil and “I” has successfully defeated the manipulations of the collaborator Minh̿i (who, it turns out, had been manipulated in turn by a Japanese wholesaler named Nakamura). Having successfully protected P’algil’s interests, “I” walks across the plank to P’algil. And it is here that we become witness to a final division.

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In “Trash” (1942), Takahiro/Ky̡ngt’ae urged P’algil to “work hard, buy lots of land back in your hometown, and return soon.” In this version, the words that the narrator speaks to P’algil have been altered, with all references to buying land dropped. Instead, he exhorts P’algil to “work hard and return home” (99). Because of the wording of the Japanese, the sentence can also be translated as “work hard to return home.” The meaning of the word “return” is here clear and indisputable: return from Japan to Korea, from temporary residence to native permanence. As if to underline this point, the sinographs used for “home” are kokyĎ, but the word is glossed to read kuni (country, region, home), strongly linking together the nation with the individual and one’s country to one’s sense of home. The colonial setting of the story thus takes on an emphatically postcolonial significance and serves as a silent rebuke. In Occupation-period Japan, where the Allied forces were visible reminders of Japan’s neocolonial state and Korean residents were still denied the same rights as Japanese nationals, the idea of return as true liberation would have had a compelling force.31 Considering these changes, how is one to read the final lines of the story? Previously in this section, I argued that the change from thirdperson to first-person narration allowed Kim to transform the fractured kĎmin subject—what Leo Ching has called “a subjective struggle over, not between, colonial identities”—into the wholeness of the self-articulating, politicized ethnic national.32 But it is in the final lines of the story, with their contentious reintroduction of the word aigu, that we finally see how these fractures of the past remain preserved in language. In “Trash Barge Postscript” as in “Trash” (1942), the injunction to “return home” is still unidirectional and oddly isolating. P’algil stands distinctly apart from “I” and Minh̿i, who are linked together by their privileged positions as educated, Japanese-language speakers in the metropole. While the narrator’s facility with the Japanese language is what gives him the power to assist P’algil, it also marks him apart from P’algil at the same time. Only P’algil, it seems, has the ability to return home, because that word to him has always meant Korea. For the narrator, on the other hand, home and country cannot help but take on a plurality of meanings because they have to be spoken by him

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in Japanese. The home-country split is neatly demonstrated in the story textually, as previously mentioned: while kokyĎ and kuni can be wrenched together artificially, the one is irreducible to the other. Further complications of translation arise with the final lines, which are mostly unchanged in content from the 1942 story. Because the word aigo had already been introduced earlier in this version as an interjection signaling distress, before the introduction of “I” as a frame narrator, its reappearance at the end of the story only emphasizes the disjunct between the word and the provided translation. Unlike “Trash” (1942), this disjunct drives a wedge not only between the Korean subjects and the Japanese reading audience but also between the Koreans themselves. In this case the translation of aigu (a variant of aigo) as ureshii (“I’m happy”) emerges out of the first-person narration, which is retrospective in nature and told in a way that assumes or envisions a (Japanese) reading audience. Because it is “I” who is providing us with the translation, the significance of the word choices then depends on how one interprets the dynamics of this relationship between “I” and the audience, as well as between “I” and P’algil. Here one might recall the opening statement of Minshu ChĎsen and its goal of publishing texts that would allow the reader to “understand the Korean people”—a wish echoed by the narrator himself, in his role as news reporter and writer. Although a character within the story, “I” is also, in part, a fictional projection of Kim Talsu himself, as the added details about the character—his occupation, his status in the community, his facility with the Japanese language—encourage the reader to associate the narrator with the author. On the other hand, P’algil’s work as a junkman may also bring to mind the fact that Kim, too, collected scrap metal when he was a young man—labor that the older Kim no longer has to pursue thanks to the various benefits he has been able to gain through his writing career. By revising “Trash” (1942) into a two-part tale split between P’algil and “I,” Kim uses the reading mechanism of the I-novel against itself. The “I” that speaks is an “I” that simultaneously encompasses all his Korean compatriots. At the same time, the fact that this narrative structure was split points to internal, historical, and material divisions that could not be easily overcome.

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If there was any kind of active subjectivity to be found in such circumstances, it would have to be not within but at the interstices of home and homeland, national language and native tongue.

*** In “Labor and Writing” (RĎdĎ to sĎsaku), an essay first published in 1955, Kim Talsu admits that he felt attracted to the I-novel style of Shiga Naoya, which “narrowly follows a person’s fundamental way of life or what you might call his autonomy,” but chose in the end to follow the example of Russian literature, which actively explores the broader realm of society and human thought.33 It is no coincidence that Kim speaks about his literary awakening in relation to his childhood experiences in Japan, where his Japanese peers would jeer “Korean!” at him as an insult. Faced with a reality where the autonomy of the Korean individual could be effaced by the blanket generalization of “Korean people,” Kim would turn this translation from the individual to the social in his favor. The social, it is implied, is always dialectically contained in the individual, and it is the writer’s task to find a narrative method (hĎhĎ) able to express both. By reframing “Trash” (1942) as a retrospective narration in his 1947 revisions, Kim brings to the forefront the dilemma of the Korean writer of Japanese-language fiction, who must speak as a Korean in order to dispel negative stereotypes about the Koreans. This is something the narrator “I” does willingly and ably in the story. But in doing so in Japanese, he inevitably sets himself apart from P’algil (who speaks in a Korean that resists easy translation) as well as from his Japanese readers (who are shown that the Japanese that “I” speaks is translation). It is this unwanted and uncanny inheritance of the Japanese language that finally belies the narrator’s retrospective coupling of nation to home. Where exactly was “home” for the Koreans who remained in Japan? The word zainichi began to be used consistently over all other possible terms by the writers and editors of Minshu ChĎsen starting in 1948, following the initiation of the alien registration system in Japan and the creation of two separate governments on the Korean peninsula. The San Francisco

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Peace Treaty of September 1951, which went into effect in April 1952, marked the formal end of the Allied Occupation of Japan. But while Japanese newspapers celebrated the return to independence, zainichi Koreans were faced with an uncertain future. As mentioned before, the San Francisco Peace Treaty stripped Koreans of Japanese nationality, turning those Koreans remaining in Japan stateless. By the time Kim published “Labor and Writing,” the Korean War had already made its devastating mark on the peninsula and solidified the antagonism between the two Korean governments. The word zainichi was beginning to take on the import it holds today: living in Japan, but not of Japan; a resident, but not necessarily by choice. During the brief but intense changes of the Occupation period, Korean writers were able to explore the possibilities of their new status as “liberated” people. The discourse of particularity that had limited and defined Korean writers during the colonial period was embraced by these postwar writers as a way to challenge the ethnocentric assumptions of their Japanese readers. Like Miyamoto Yuriko, Kim found a compelling rebuke against Japanese imperialism in the everyday lives of common Koreans. But whether or not he intended his writing to be read against the grain of his own life, it is true that his status as an educated, politically active, Japanese-language writer had alienated him from his own laboring past.34 Although “Trash” (1947) and “Trash Barge Postscript” were written before the word zainichi had gained common currency in Japanese society, already in Kim’s fiction we see an acknowledgment that the experience of being Korean in Japan spanned the 1945 prewar-postwar divide and could not be contained in a single name, a single story, or a single “I.” That many Japanese readers would persist in reading Kim’s fiction as straightforward I-novels—despite his constant dismantling of the protagonist-narrator-author relationship—shows how entrenched the I-novel paradigm was and continues to be.35 More important, it illustrates how language itself can be a colonization of sorts. After 1945, kokugo was refashioned into kugʵ in Korea. But as we have seen in this chapter and the preceding one, denying the historicity of “national language” did not heal the trauma of colonialism; it embodied it.

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6 COLLABORATION, WARTIME RESPONSIBILITY, AND COLONIAL MEMORY

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prominent zainichi (resident) Korean writer and critic Kim S̡kp̡m was blocked from entering South Korea, his visa application denied on the grounds of his ChĎsenjin status, which indicates Korean ethnicity but stands separate from Kankokujin (South Korean) nationality.1 Kim soon channeled his indignation into a forceful 142-page essay in Japanese titled “On ‘Pro-Japanese Collaboration’ ” (“Shinnichi” ni tsuite) condemning the neocolonial conditions that continued to dictate political structures on the Korean peninsula.2 Criticizing politicians such as former South Korean president Syngman Rhee as well as “collaborationist” colonial intellectuals such as Yi Kwangsu, Kim’s message was unequivocally clear: by allowing former pro-Japanese collaborators to escape punishment after liberation, true justice had been thwarted. Only by purging these individuals from power once and for all would Korea—undivided, integrated, and autonomous—recuperate from the losses of the past. The polemical stance of Kim’s essay, which presents collaboration and resistance in absolute terms, both replicates and reciprocates a strand of South Korean academic discourse that was gaining steam in the early 1990s. Although efforts had been made during the immediate postliberation period to oust pro-Japanese collaborators from all spheres of government, the outbreak of the Korean War saw the peninsula newly polarize N AU G US T 19 9 1 ,

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along pro-Communist–anti-Communist lines. Many former “collaborators” were able to present themselves in the South as anti-Communist patriots; in the end, these individuals proved indispensable for bolstering Syngman Rhee’s fledging administration, and the question of collaboration was erased from South Korean public debate.3 My purpose here is not to detail the political and social developments that contributed to South Korea’s sense of neocolonial crisis but rather to put stress on the imagined boundaries assumed by the signs central to it: nation, collaborator, Japanese, Korean. These terms, which retrospectively remap onto history the configurations of contemporary political necessity, are put into sharp relief when spoken by someone outside their borders, beyond their scope of legitimacy: the words cannot help but double back on themselves. What happens, for example, when a first-generation Korean immigrant to Japan like Kim S̡kp̡m speaks the word “nation” in the tongue not of his birth but of his residence—in the tongue, that is, of his former colonizers? To whom is the word “collaboration” oriented? In speaking it, how does Kim maneuver past his own ambiguous status as a nationless outcast of a forgotten empire? In this chapter, I examine the ways in which the insistence on nationhood as the defining context for evaluating the legacy of Japanese imperialism produced (not simply shaped) the controversial collaboration arguments that occurred in Korea and Japan in the postwar/postliberation period. This chapter therefore serves as a complement to previous discussions on the cultural ascendency of Marxism in Japan and the formation of competing governments on the Korean peninsula. The issue of collaboration cannot be discussed apart from the geopolitical restructuring of East Asia that occurred in the midst of a nascent Cold War. It also cannot be discussed apart from the simultaneous reimagining of Japan’s imperial past as only that of military aggression. In the sections that follow, I show how and why “war responsibility” and “collaboration” emerged as distinct discourses with seemingly no overlap, in tandem with the supersedence of the imperial with the national. As in previous chapters, I begin by providing background on the various political alliances, tensions, policies, and organizations that informed

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the texts that are central to my analysis. These texts include Yi Kwangsu’s controversial work “My Confession” (Na ̿i kobaek, 1948) and the long novel Drunken Boat (Yoidorebune, 1949) by Tanaka Hidemitsu.4 Both writers were introduced in previous chapters as vocal advocates for kĎminka (imperialization) during the late colonial period, and an examination of their post-1945 writings—and post-1945 reputations—therefore helps show how kĎminka was subsequently remembered and reconceptualized in accordance with the new national configurations that emerged after Japan’s defeat. The different border crossings that can be found in the fiction of these writers also serve as a useful entry point in understanding both the continuities and discontinuities that occurred across the supposed August 1945 divide.

C O L L A B O R AT I O N A S C O N F E S S I O N In 1946, the Korean writer Hwang Sunw̡n (1915–2000) moved from the Soviet-occupied north down south to Seoul. A landlord’s son, Hwang had been educated at Waseda University during the late colonial period and had already published several volumes of poetry and short stories by the time the war ended in 1945. Hwang’s decision to move to the U.S.-occupied south in 1946 was partially motivated by the Soviet-backed North Korean Provisional People’s Committee’s land-reform policies that targeted the landowning class (both Korean and Japanese). Hwang used his experiences in the north as a basis for his 1954 novel Descendants of Cain (K’ain ˏi huye), which was an immediate success when it was first published in Seoul and which continues to enjoy a place in the South Korean literary canon. 5 Descendants of Cain chronicles the ostracism and eventual displacement of the protagonist, Hun, a landowner’s son and unwilling heir to all the privileges that position once entailed. While some former tenant farmers do not hesitate to immediately seize power through the various people’s committees that spring up with the arrival of the Communists, the novel also highlights other responses of confusion, ambivalence, and fear result-

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ing from the social turmoil brought about by the land reforms. In one key scene, a party official organizes a peasant assembly meant to judge and sentence all those who had “collaborated with the Japanese colonialists” (80), exploited the peasant workers, and blocked “the democratic development of our country.” While many of those gathered quickly realize that they have much to gain by condemning all former landholders, the proceedings are comically undercut by the confusion of an old man named Ko, who cannot follow the Communist rhetoric and does not understand what any of it means. The scene critically exposes the blind spots of such people’s assemblies, which purported to act on behalf of the people but made no attempt to listen to them, and it casts a sympathetic light on those swept up in the binaries of collaboration and resistance, colonialism and liberation, colonizer and colonized. Novels like Descendants of Cain reveal how Koreans on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel were urgently concerned with securing an independent Korean state, one that was also properly “postcolonial.” However, while accusations of collaboration were strong and strenuous in the early days following liberation, no wide consensus was reached on what defined a collaborator and who deserved to be punished as one, particularly since the challenge of determining who had the right and ability to construct a new order following the end of Japanese colonial rule was complicated by the unevenly developed and contested nature of coloniality itself.6 Meanwhile, the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) did not hesitate to rely on former Government-General of Korea (GGK) employees as advisers and bureaucrats during its fledging stages.7 Fearing a possible power vacuum, USAMGIK largely refused to prosecute Koreans accused as collaborators. It was only with the establishment of the South Korean Interim Legislative Council (Kwado Ipp̡p ;iw̡nhoe) in 1946 that the issue of collaboration resurfaced as a legal matter. A draft law introduced by the council defined national traitors (minjok panyʵkcha) as “those who opposed independence or otherwise caused harm to the people or the nation through collusion with Japan or other foreign powers,” and Korean collaborators (puil hyʵmnyʵkcha) as “those who during the Japanese occupation period had

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ingratiated themselves with the Japanese authorities or those who inflicted injury upon their compatriots through ‘evil deeds.’ ” 8 The Anti-Traitor Law (Panminjok Haengwi Ch’̡b̡lb̡p) was introduced in September 1948 by the Constitutional Assembly (Cheh̡n Kukhoe) and implemented by a ten-member investigation committee but was increasingly opposed by Syngman Rhee, who argued that the law created internal divisions when it was precisely national unity that was needed. After a number of highprofile political scandals, including the arrest of three assembly members on charges of collusion with the North, the special committee resigned en masse in July 1949 and was replaced with a new committee more amenable to government control. In the North, Kim Ilsung was quick to tout his credentials as an antiJapanese and anticolonial leader in contrast to the U.S.-led South. Land reform in North Korea was meant to eliminate the feudal vestiges of land relationships; the dual attempts to wrest power away from the landowning classes and purge all those identified as Japanese collaborators from public office actually served a single purpose, as these categories were often considered one and the same.9 The legacy of collaboration would come to haunt the families of the accused as a strict social hierarchy solidified, with workers and peasants at the top and descendants of collaborators and landlords at the bottom. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea’s legal system also drew upon Japanese colonial law as well as Soviet law and made use of much of the policing and surveillance superstructure put in place during the colonial period, illustrating the impossibility of drawing a clean line between “colonial” and “postcolonial” conditions.10 By the time of the Korean War, debates over collaboration in South Korea had begun to lose ground to an anti-Communist statism. One of the legacies of these debates was the condemnation of Yi Kwangsu as perhaps the emblematic pro-Japanese collaborator. This assessment of Yi Kwangsu endures into the present day; it can be amply witnessed, for example, in Kim S̡kp̡m’s essay introduced in the beginning of this chapter. Yi Kwangsu was arrested in February 1949 by a special committee of the South Korean National Assembly whose purpose was to investigate, arrest, and punish collaborators in accordance with the Anti-Traitor Law.

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Although the case was dropped some months later, he never again achieved the same popular and critical success of his earlier years, and the “collaborationist” literary works produced late in his career were excised from the literary canon in South Korea. Even before his imprisonment, Yi Kwangsu had already begun to write the long confessional essay “My Confession” in 1948. Part autobiography and part apologia, the essay details such pivotal moments as Yi’s childhood exposure to Chinese literature and Tonghak (Eastern learning), his involvement with the March First Movement, and—in one of the shortest sections of the essay—the events and pressures that led to his “collaboration” with Japanese authorities after the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Yi’s contention that he collaborated for the sake of “preserving the Korean people [minjok]” 11 is harshly dismissed in “On Pro-Japanese Collaboration” by Kim S̡kp̡m, who argues that Yi’s lack of remorse and shame is damning testimony of a collaboration that went beyond strategic performance into the territory of ideological indoctrination: “Just what is collaboration for the sake of preserving the people? Collaboration for Yi Kwangsu meant becoming Japanese [Nihonjin-ka], himself included; it meant becoming a child of the emperor. How can becoming Japanese lead to preserving the Korean people? ‘Preserving the people’ and ‘becoming Japanese’ are irreconcilable. . . . In ‘My Confession,’ Yi cleverly avoids the phrase ‘becoming Japanese’ and all the actions he did to achieve it by replacing the phrase with the empty word ‘collaboration’ [kyĎryoku].” 12 In this passage, Kim draws on the context of Yi’s colonial-era actions (of becoming Japanese) to judge the validity of his postwar confession. In doing so, Kim uses the word kyĎryoku to describe the act of collaboration but shinnichiha (pro-Japanese) to refer to Yi himself. Like the English word “collaboration,” kyĎryoku (Kr. hyʵmnyʵk) can be used in either a positive or pejorative sense, in a wide variety of contexts. In contrast, the term shinnichiha (Kr. ch’inilp’a) has come to overwhelmingly connote postwar ethnonational judgments of colonial collusion with imperial Japan and therefore betrayal of the Korean nation. This affective register is suggested by the very characters that make up shinnichiha/ch’inilp’a, which can be literally translated as “faction close to/intimate with Japan.” 13

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While I believe Kim S̡kp̡m is right to insist that the idea of becoming Japanese is not the same as collaborating with the Japanese and that Yi’s essay engages only superficially with questions of collaboration, it needs to be reiterated that “becoming Japanese” during the colonial period meant becoming an imperial subject above all else, and that a particularized Korean ethnicity was not necessarily antithetical to that process. As we have seen in previous chapters, the conflation of Japanese imperial identity with Japanese ethnic identity was primarily a post-1945 reinterpretation. The figure of the pro-Japanese collaborator both depended upon this post-1945 reinterpretation and naturalized it, by retroactively producing the ethnonation upon which accusations of collaboration were supposedly based.14 It may be said that by insisting on the binary of collaboration and resistance, Kim S̡kp̡m is attempting to recuperate some of the agency of resistance for the politicized, postcolonial subject. At the same time, it is the creation of this artificial division that produces the anxiety being overcome: one must first classify Yi as a collaborator in order to justify or banish him; and only once he is identified as a traitor does it then become necessary to exorcise the pain of his betrayal.15 Here, a careful distinction needs to be made between the perceived colonial responsibility of Koreans (as collaborators) and that of the Japanese (as colonizers). In Korea, the words ch’inilp’a (pro-Japanese), puil hyʵmnyʵkcha (collaborator with the Japanese), and minjok panyʵkcha (traitor to the people or nation) were used interchangeably to refer to a wide range of activities: collusion with Japanese officials to maintain or promote Japanese colonization, capitalist profiteering at the expense of fellow Koreans, active promotion of kĎminka, and so forth.16 In all cases, it was the Japanese colonization of Korea that became the base context for definition and ethnic Koreans who were the target of the terms. The word ch’inilp’a found its way to Japan soon after the promulgation of the Anti-Traitor Law and is still used when referring to Korean collaboration before and during the colonial period, as witnessed in Kim S̡kp̡m’s writings. When referring to Japanese involvement with the Japanese state, however, the term that was overwhelmingly used was sensĎ sekininsha (someone responsible for the

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war). Here, the context was the Fifteen-Year War and the military aggression waged against China and the Allied powers. That war culpability—and not culpability in the larger system of imperialism, in which of course the United States and other Allied powers were also a part—became the dominant discourse in immediate postwar Japan had much to do with U.S. Occupation policy. Anxious to reconstruct Japan into a demilitarized and democratized nation-state that could serve as an important ally in East Asia, the United States consistently framed its policies in terms of the war, from the infamous International Military Tribunal for the Far East (also known as the Tokyo Trials) to the heated disagreements over the emperor’s status and political role. As mentioned in chapter 5, SCAP avoided tackling the issue of colonization for fear the “restless, uprooted Korean minority in Japan” would destabilize reconstruction efforts.17 Categorized as a liberated people and as an enemy national by SCAP, Koreans in Japan found themselves hemmed in on both sides—often tragically, as was the case for the twenty-three Koreans who were arrested and executed in Japan as Japanese war criminals.18 It was not just SCAP that based conversations on Japanese imperialism on the “war of aggression”; Japanese intellectuals at all points of the political spectrum embraced the term sensĎ sekininsha as the primary locus of debate. The journal Shin Nihon bungaku was one of the first organs to publicly raise the issue of war responsibility through Odagiri Hideo’s essay “In Pursuit of the War Responsibility of Literature” (Bungaku ni okeru sensĎ sekinin no tsuikyĝ, June 1946). Other early postwar essays include Hasegawa Nyozekan’s “War and Writers’ Responsibility” (SensĎ to bungakusha no sekinin, April 1946, published in Ningen), which compares the political autonomy, or lack thereof, of Chinese literature, Japanese literature, and Western literature; Yanaihara Tadao’s essay “The Mission and Remorse of Japanese Citizens” (Nihon kokumin no shimei to hansei, August 1946, published in Sekai), which states that the three main priorities of Japan should be an unbroken imperial line, the integration of Eastern and Western civilization, and a peaceful nation; and Ækuma Nobuyuki’s “A People without Remorse” (Hansei naki minzoku, September 1947, published in

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Bungei shunjĝ), which argues that only collective remorse from the Japanese people will steer the country to a better future. All these articles use the words “Japan” (Nihon) and “Japanese people” (Nihonjin or Nihon kokumin). As we saw in previous chapters, during the colonial period the borders of “Japan” were historically overdetermined, simultaneously standing in for the empire and for the nation. The postwar imagining of Japan as a nation-state consisting primarily of the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku was therefore not a radical redefinition so much as the ascendency of a discourse that had always existed in some form. The predominance of the term sensĎ sekininsha relied on this latter understanding of Japan, defined against the monolithic third term of the West, and worked to perpetuate it. The question of the colonies was not suppressed so much as made irrelevant by the discourse on war responsibility, which privileged “Japan proper” as the object of investigation and retrospectively cast its history in the nation-state frame. This was the case even in postwar Japanese fiction that purported to speak up against the Japanese state. Beginning in 1946, a group of young writers including Sakaguchi Ango (1906–1955), Oda Sakunosuke (1913– 1947), and Dazai Osamu (1909–1948) became popular for their defiant insistence on the virtues of “decadence” (burai or daraku) and the material body. While these writers did not actively identify themselves as a coherent literary circle, their writings shared an emphasis on nihilistic recklessness, dissolution, and bodily excess that was not simply a response to the chaotic conditions of immediate postwar Japan but also an attempt to transcend or disrupt the prewar-postwar continuities of the authoritarian state. In 1947, for instance, Tamura TaijirĎ (1911–1983) published an influential essay called “Flesh Is Human” (Nikutai ga ningen de aru), in which he extolled the ability of the human body to resist or counteract the pernicious ideology of the state.19 The only true things in the world, Tamura declared, were human flesh and its desires. He went on to call for a “literature of depravity” (haitai bungaku) that would “graphically depict today’s realities . . . the realities of a defeated nation.”20 The 1949 long novel Drunken Boat by Tanaka Hidemitsu can be considered one example of this kind of literature. Set in colonial-period Korea and

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very loosely based on Tanaka’s own life, Drunken Boat details the wartime activities of the writer Sakamoto KĎkichi and the alluring poet-turned-spy Ro Tenshin (Kr. Ro Ch’̡nsim or No Ch’̡nsim). KĎkichi has been asked to help organize a welcome reception for visiting members of the Greater East Asian Writers’ Meeting (DaitĎa Bungakusha Kaigi) organized by the People’s League (Aohitokusa Renmei), a literary organization affiliated with the GGK.21 Over the course of four days, however, the reader sees KĎkichi burn through the money given to him for the welcome reception on alcohol while wallowing in a “mire of decadence” (taihai no doronuma).22 He also meets and falls in love with Ro Tenshin, gets embroiled in a spy drama involving secret papers and independence fighters, and becomes the target of violence by Ro’s other, jealous lovers. Because it is set in colonial Korea, Drunken Boat may seem upon first reading to challenge the Japanese ethnonational identity taken for granted in other so-called decadent fiction. However, Tanaka’s novel, too, can be situated within the larger discourses of war responsibility and collaboration. As we shall see in the sections that follow, the story’s tale of decadence, colonial literary production, and anticolonial resistance would depend upon a reenvisioning of the past that ultimately privileged the male, nationalized, and properly “post” (war/colonial) subject as the double agent of narrative and therefore of history.

DECADENCE, DOUBLE AGENTS, A N D A D R U N K E N B O AT Tanaka Hidemitsu was born in Tokyo in 1913. He was admitted into the Second Waseda Higher School (Dai-Ni Waseda KĎtĎ Gakuin) in 1930, where he joined the school’s rowing crew. Shortly after gaining entrance into Waseda University in 1932, he traveled to the Los Angeles Olympic Games as part of Japan’s Olympic rowing team. It was also while at Waseda that Tanaka became involved in various Communist organizations such as Akahata (Red Flag), but his association with them lasted

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for only a year. In 1935 he graduated from Waseda and found employment at Yokohama Rubber, which soon sent him to work at its branch company in KeijĎ. During a brief trip back to Tokyo that same year, he was introduced to Dazai Osamu through a mutual friend, and they started up a correspondence that would last until Dazai’s death in 1948.23 Tanaka remained in KeijĎ until 1942, and during that time he was actively involved in GGK-affiliated literary organizations such as Ryokki (Green Flag). Those experiences would later serve as material for Drunken Boat. In a postscript dated September 1949 but only printed when Drunken Boat was released in book form in December that year, Tanaka writes that he made the following notes when plotting out the story: “Want to write something where the interests of the reader and author completely coincide. Make sure to really highlight the conflicts surrounding the incident of the secret emissary to Chongqing threaded throughout the story. Also, be careful about choosing which anecdotes weave through that main thread. Write about fictional events that could have been possible but were in fact impossible; that might have been, but weren’t.”24 Perhaps because of the close alignment between Sakamoto KĎkichi and Tanaka Hidemitsu, in the rare occasions when Drunken Boat was mentioned by literary critics in the years following the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan, it was held up as a more or less faithful (if technically fictional) portrait of the political and literary environment of late colonial Korea. Kim Talsu, for example, wrote in 1961 that “if one wants to know about the Korean literary world at that time [late colonial period], one cannot overlook Tanaka Hidemitsu’s novel Drunken Boat.”25 Two decades later, in a series of English-language lectures delivered at McGill University, the historian and cultural critic Tsurumi Shunsuke would continue in this vein. Tsurumi also emphasized Tanaka’s real-life experiences, arguing that “Tanaka Hidemitsu’s unflinching understanding of his own ignominious experience of tenkĎ [ideological conversion] allowed him to understand the suffering of Korean writers on whom tenkĎ was imposed.”26 In comparison with the largely positive evaluations provided by the leftist intellectuals who dominated the literary scene during the first two decades after Japan’s defeat, more recent postcolonial scholars in Japan

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have criticized Tanaka for his inability or unwillingness to acknowledge his own role in Japan’s imperial project. In 1986, four years after Iwanami Shoten published Tsurumi Shunsuke’s intellectual history of wartime Japan, Kawamura Minato devoted 140 pages to lambasting Tanaka in his book The Youth of the “Drunken Boat”: An Alternative Wartime, Postwar (“Yoidorebune” no seishun: MĎ hitotsu no senchĝ, sengo).27 In the seminal essay that shares its title with the book, Kawamura views Drunken Boat as a postwar apologia meant to justify the author’s wartime activities as a soldier, colonizer, and active advocate of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Kawamura argues that even though the novel does reflect “the (conscientious!) self-hatred and self-condemnation of a Japanese intellectual living in Korea, it does not confront the politics and imperial logic that exceed and eclipse individual psychology” (39; parentheses in original). Scholars such as Nam Bujin and Nagumo Satoru have since followed Kawamura’s lead, providing analyses that compare Tanaka’s wartime writings with his postwar novels.28 Putting aside the details of these studies for now, what I wish to emphasize is the fact that all the previously mentioned scholars, from Kim Talsu to Kawamura Minato, share a preoccupation with what Tanaka identified as the side anecdotes of Drunken Boat—namely, those characters and incidents that can be traced back to “nonfictional” history, rather than the entirely “fictional” elements of the story’s overarching spy plot. While their conclusions may differ, their critical strategies all depend upon the unacknowledged assumption that history (reality) can and should be separated from its telling (fiction), and that one can be used to refute or support the other. This assumption, furthermore, both emerges out of and naturalizes the I-novel paradigm, discussed in detail in chapter 5. In other words, it is only after first linking Tanaka to the protagonist Sakamoto KĎkichi (and thereby separating out a neutral history that retrospectively provides the contextualization necessary for the I-novel) that the reader can argue for Drunken Boat as either a sincere, faithful reflection of Japan’s past sins or a distorted mirror of it. On the one hand, it may be said that Tanaka’s insistence that the “interests of the reader and author completely coincide” deliberately encourages

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one to read Drunken Boat in the I-novel mode. On the other hand, this argument does not fully account for why Tanaka decided to make “the incident of the secret emissary to Chongqing” the main plot of his novel, nor does it help us understand how meaning is generated from the narrative structures and strategies of the text. Therefore, rather than examine one plot strand or another, in the sections that follow I examine the ways in which these plot strands intersect with one another. Drunken Boat opens with a memory. “That evening,” the very first sentence declares, “KĎkichi recalled the drunken pranks he and Noritake used to wage in their university days.”29 With this nod toward memory, we are thrown into a narrative situated uneasily within the doubled lens of present and past. The reader soon learns that KĎkichi had run into his old friend Noritake by chance on the streets of KeijĎ earlier that evening: “They had gone out drinking together, just like the old days. After getting drunk at a restaurant in Asahi-chĎ, they had ended up at the plaza in front of the ChĎsen Bank. It was there that he suddenly remembered their old pranks.” Back then, KĎkichi and Noritake had vandalized local stores and police boxes out of a sense of nihilism, having “lost their faith in everything after undergoing ideological conversion [tenkĎ].” Spurred on by those memories, KĎkichi dares Noritake to defecate in the empty fountain located in the middle of the plaza, and Noritake accepts the challenge. As he defecates, he shouts out a defiant message to the empty night: “Hey, there’s a Japanese person here! Japanese people, eat my ass!” (230). Just as the materiality of Noritake’s bodily functions disrupts the functional order and purpose of the fountain, so, too, do his words disrupt the symbolic order of colonial rule: calling out not to Koreans but to his Japanese peers, Noritake turns the gaze of the colonizer back on itself, disrupting the unchallenged totality of that gaze with the abject excesses that mark and threaten its borders. However, what are we to make of the fact that it is Noritake—a minor character in the story and more often a target of ridicule rather than of admiration—who makes such a seemingly symbolic gesture, rather than the protagonist, KĎkichi? As KĎkichi watches on the sidelines, he is distracted by the scent of perfume and turns away from Noritake to find its source. In that moment, any response or

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introspective musings he may have had are instantly cancelled out, and the scene swiftly shifts its focus on to a new key player: Ro Tenshin, the Korean poet, actress, mistress, and spy. With the introduction of Ro, Tanaka is able to foreshadow the various interwoven plot elements that drive Drunken Boat. We quickly learn that KĎkichi had met Ro once before, at a literary roundtable. At the time, KĎkichi had noted how Ro’s “voluptuous” (nikkanteki) body stood in contrast to her demeanor, which was “like a lamb that had wandered into their midst” (230). That evening, “that lamb had worn a strangely tense expression” (the first clue the narrator gives the reader about Ro’s true political orientation). Running into her now, KĎkichi is reminded of the rumors that currently surround her: after enduring an unhappy marriage and several broken relationships, Ro is said to have become the mistress of Sai Ken’ei (Kr. Ch’oe K̡n-y̡ng), a prominent Korean intellectual and vocal supporter of the colonial government. As Ro, KĎkichi, and Noritake (having finished his business, so to speak) converse in the plaza together, KĎkichi finds himself thinking that “her unhappiness came from something KĎkichi and Noritake both shared—it came from an excess of dreaming” (232). KĎkichi’s conscious conflation of Ro’s position with his own is suggestive. His constant use of the words dekadan (decadent), taihai (depravity, degeneration), daraku (decadence, fall), and nikutai (flesh, the body) can be interpreted as an attempt to reframe his wartime activities against contemporary discourses of wartime guilt and collaboration.30 At several points in the narrative, for example, KĎkichi reflects on the hypocrisy of his own existence, which is dependent on the financial and political backing of the colonial government. Even while denouncing the efforts of the People’s League to “buy his talents” (242), KĎkichi—like Ro, he believes—does not hesitate to manipulate the system in his favor. He rejects the organization’s attempts to make him into a scapegoat by embracing his own decadence, thus turning his so-called collaboration into a self-serving performance. Like a double agent in some ways, KĎkichi thinks of himself as infiltrating the government only to destroy it from within. Unlike Ro, however, KĎkichi’s final loyalties are to himself. When he first learns about Ro’s possible spy connections, his immediate impulse is

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to willfully close his eyes to any and all political intrigue. Although he senses that Ro may have infiltrated the delegation for the Greater East Asian Meeting for her own secret reasons, he refuses to allow himself to  dwell on those reasons: “It was just like being in a cheap detective novel. . . . He hated detective novels” (242). KĎkichi’s disdain for detective novels punctuates key scenes and revelations throughout Drunken Boat, undercutting the sense of urgency usually given by a spy plot. When confronted with evidence of Ro’s involvement with the shady Professor Karashima, for example, KĎkichi begins to speculate on the meaning behind the involvement but soon reminds himself, “I’m sick of this detective business. I’ll just keep drinking alcohol” (254). When warned by Noritake that someone in the Greater East Asian Meeting group is a spy intent on smuggling important papers outlining Japan’s military weaknesses to China, KĎkichi refuses point-blank to “go around like Sherlock Holmes” (262) looking for the culprit. And when he finds himself in the thick of the intrigue because of his own affiliation with the Greater East Asian Writers’ Meeting, he reflects, “Just as he hated orthodox mystery novels, he was fed up with these inexplicably baffling events happening in real life. Time would probably solve everything, so until then he might as well cover up his irritation and pain with alcohol” (340). Why is KĎkichi so adamant about rejecting detective fiction, and what can its intersection with decadence tell us about the ideological position of the novel itself? Here, it may prove useful to make a distinction between detective fiction and its related (but distant) cousin the spy novel. The origins of the detective novel are commonly traced back to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, whose 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” laid the groundwork for what would become hallmark elements of the detective fiction genre: a detective who works with (but is not himself a member of) the police force; a rationalized analysis of facts and clues leading to the discovery of the criminal; and a city landscape of crime, alienation, and anonymity. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the burgeoning body of criticism on detective fiction, I wish to emphasize the ability of the private detective to obfuscate the operations of ideology and state power precisely because of the “private” appellation. As

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Satoru Saito has shown, the private detective “is an agent of the state, but, at the same time, he is made possible theoretically by the authority granted by the people to the state.”31 In other words, the detective story indirectly aligns the reader with the detective hero (who works with, but is not part of, the state), whose self-assured narrative restores the social order and finally banishes the criminal to the unutterable realm of nonnarrative—to the closed walls of the prison. The spy novel, on the other hand, features a protagonist who is an explicit agent of the state and who often must work outside the law in order to restore order. While the detective story works within the carefully policed borders of the nation, the spy novel works among them, transgressing the lines between the national and international, the domestic and the foreign. Indeed, with their cover identities, fluency with languages, and fake passports, spies embody the very indeterminacy of these lines and trigger anxieties over them. Allan Hepburn has written, “Ideology produces spies, but spies, like most people, temper ideology with private motives. Intrigue occurs when psychological and ideological commitments overlap and mask each other. The spy embodies ambiguous allegiances, some declared, some concealed. The spy therefore stands as a cipher for conflicts waged among national, international, familial, human, humanitarian, ethical, and romantic identities.”32 Hepburn further points out that unlike the detective novel, the spy novel works on codes and ciphers and not clues. While clues are material and indexical, codes are immaterial and symbolical, gesturing toward a system rather than a sign. The “rogue” spy fights against a corrupt system not to bring it down but to repair it—to restore it to its ideal, ideological function. As a spy, Ro Tenshin maneuvers against the colonial government, but at no point does she articulate this as an attack against “Japan.” Instead, she sees her mission as an attack against fascism; only once fascism has been destroyed, it is implied, will peace and proper relations between Korea and Japan (as equal nation-states) be achieved.33 With these thoughts in mind, we can begin to understand KĎkichi’s position in the novel. Confronted with the corrupt reality of colonial politics, KĎkichi discovers that “his conscience from the old days” disallows

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him from taking full advantage of the system. Instead, “that conscience was linked to a whole range of phantom emotions—desire for fame, patriotism, love for humanity, love for women—dragging him down in the end into a mire of decadence” (254). KĎkichi’s decadence is not so much a total rejection of ideology as an ameliorating force that can potentially restore “desire for fame, patriotism, love for humanity, love for women” to their correct operations. The significance of framing Drunken Boat as a retrospective narrative also becomes clear in this light. The colonial realities of the novel, coded as Japan’s past, can be decoded only through the postwar present. Rather than being a detective, then, KĎkichi is more like a rogue spy—someone whose actions can be judged only after the fact, in the larger context of international politics. At the same time, this coding/decoding belies the fact that the seemingly neutral categories of “Korea(n)” and “Japan(ese)” have already been gendered at the moment of their emergence. Indeed, the reason that they can appear neutral is because these gendered differences are naturalized and mobilized by the text, through the paradoxical reliance on women’s bodies as “the generator of signs and the signs themselves.”34 In Drunken Boat, Ro’s material body links together different communities of men through the workings of “carnal desire” (nikuyoku). In doing so, Ro illuminates the complicated political antagonisms among those different communities but is not herself an active member of them. Here, I would like to look at one scene from the middle section of Drunken Boat in order to clarify my argument. KĎkichi and Ro have by this point formed a tentative relationship. Despite a fervent wish to avoid any and all political intrigue, KĎkichi has been drawn into Ro’s spy activities despite himself. Having successfully collected the members of the Greater East Asian Writers’ Meeting at Pusan and guided them to KeijĎ, the two go out drinking together in Chongno. As they navigate the narrow streets, they run into a belligerent group of Japanese soldiers. The soldiers immediately set their sights on Ro, mistaking her for a Korean prostitute and KĎkichi for her Korean patron. KĎkichi starts shivering involuntarily at the sight of the soldiers, trapped in a sudden sensation that “he was Korean himself ” (298). As in the hailing of the policeman described by Louis

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Althusser, KĎkichi’s self-identification as a Korean is not separate from state authority as represented by the soldiers but is in fact produced through the face-to-face confrontation with it. The process of interpellation is, here literally, a bodily performance: the Japanese soldiers take KĎkichi’s reaction as proof of Korean ethnicity, and their derisive attitude in turn dictates KĎkichi’s own. The scene can also be read as both a chronicle and criticism of kĎminka, as reinterpreted through a postwar lens. In previous chapters, I argued that being an imperial subject and being “Japanese” were not necessarily one and the same during the kĎminka period. It was only in the postwar period that kĎminka and Japanese could be unproblematically conflated, the context of empire having given way to the context of the ethnonation. As a postwar text, Drunken Boat relies upon this conflation while also attempting to subvert it by showing how a Japanese man could “become” Korean in resisting the colonial state. When KĎkichi is insulted by the Japanese soldiers, he thinks to himself, “You bastards think that just because you’re Japanese soldiers, you can insult Koreans. You stupid, arrogant dogs” (298). His sense of repugnance is so strong that he inadvertently voices his thoughts aloud—in Korean. But it turns out that one of the soldiers can understand Korean, having been born and raised on the peninsula, and he goes into a frenzy because he thinks KĎkichi “is making fun of [him] for being a second-generation settler.” The slippages of identity among the Japanese men here aptly illustrate how “resistance” emerges as the belated twin of assimilation. Although KĎkichi, too, is a beneficiary of KeijĎ’s colonial modernity, he is able to repudiate his own complicity in it by reproducing the colonizer-colonized relationship in miniature, as it were. Meanwhile, the Japanese soldier’s obsession with his own colonial origins reveals the flip side of this relationship—namely, that it is a constructed one, and therefore constantly in need of maintenance and reinforcement. In the next moment, however, a curious thing happens. Recognizing the threat of violence, Ro Tenshin steps in and chides the men: “Is this how soldiers of Japan—the leader of Asia, and a civilized country—should behave?” (298–99). As soon as the soldiers’ attentions shift back to Ro, KĎkichi makes his escape. He solicits the help of two Korean policemen

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standing on the next street over, thinking that “they would surely save Ro Tenshin because they were Korean policemen” (299). The introduction of the Korean policemen restores the precarious boundary of Japanese and Korean that had been under threat in the previous scene. At the same time, it is another body—that of Ro Tenshin, absolutely female and absolutely Korean—that provides the key structure in engendering these slippages of identity, as well as their subsequent erasure. Drawing upon the theory of triangular desire first articulated by René Girard in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has characterized male homosocial desire as “the structure of men’s relations with other men,” one that is both asymmetrical and historical.35 She further argues that “the status of women and the whole question of arrangements between genders is deeply and inescapably inscribed in the structure even of relationships that seem to exclude women” (25). Sedgwick’s formulations help us begin to understand the structural function of Ro Tenshin in Drunken Boat. KĎkichi is able to articulate his opposition to the colonial state by drawing a parallel between himself and Ro: like Ro, who finds herself caught in a web of romantic entanglements, KĎkichi sees himself as an unwilling pawn in an increasingly corrupt game of politics. In order to draw such an analogy, though, KĎkichi must temporarily suppress Ro’s ethnic difference and his own gendered body. As the theories of Girard and Sedgwick might suggest, the confrontation with the Japanese soldiers again occurs through the catalyst of Ro’s body, as it is the object that structures the soldiers’ desire. In the moment that KĎkichi “becomes” Korean, though, Ro’s body curiously disappears from the text. It must disappear from the text, I would argue, in order for that moment of affinity to work: the switch between the seemingly neutral terms “Japanese” and “Korean” can occur only because “neutral” has been coded as male. It is therefore telling that when Ro speaks, reinserting herself into the picture, the moment collapses; the asymmetry between the characters inverts itself, with KĎkichi at its apex and Ro once again relegated to the role of the Korean other. Unassimilable and yet indispensible, Ro Tenshin’s body provides the structure around which the events of Drunken Boat can coalesce.

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Although Drunken Boat ends on a bleak note for its main protagonists— Ro is shot to death and KĎkichi is thrown into jail by the colonial government—the final two sentences, addressed directly to the reader by the narrator, suggest a thin silver lining: “I wish to add only that KĎkichi never sold out any of his friends. . . . This is the strange love story of Sakamoto KĎkichi and Ro Tenshin” (378). Like a classic detective story, Drunken Boat ends with an arrest and a confession—of sorts. But the arrest, we learn, is unwarranted, and the confession is less a revelation of guilt than a declaration of innocence, proof of KĎkichi’s unwavering moral rectitude in the face of unmitigated corruption. In a way, the arrest itself becomes evidence of KĎkichi’s antiwar and anticolonial credentials, as the jail cell bars him (literally) from joining either the military or the colonial government. At the same time, the characters’ preoccupation with war on the one hand and colonial politics on the other replicates discourse on (Japanese) war responsibility, in which individual culpability is interrogated over the systems of power that allow KĎkichi to be in Korea in the first place. Only because KĎkichi was arrested during the war could the narrative’s insistence on his innocence be retroactively accepted as the truth by its readers; and only because it is a postwar text can “wartime responsibility” be accepted as the measure of innocence in the first place. Once again, though, the ending of Drunken Boat may be more productively read not in terms of detection, but of spying. While the traditional detective novel usually ends with the uncovering of the criminal to the reader, the spy novel depends upon the spy’s ability to keep his or her true identity a secret to everyone but the reader (who is alerted to this information through the narrative form and the extratextual referent of the genre itself).36 The spy novel’s inversion of the confessional form here intersects with Tanaka Hidemitsu’s appropriation of the I-novel metanarrative. Indeed, as Satoru Saito has cogently argued, the predominance of the I-novel in the 1920s can be seen as a kind of collusion between the modern Japanese novel and the detective story.37 The I-novel form presents itself as a confession of the author, but it is not the content but the form that authenticates the narrative being told. In this context it is the reader who becomes the true detective of the tale. It is the reader’s task to suture

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the break between Sakamoto KĎkichi and Tanaka Hidemitsu, wartime history and postwar present, by positing the proper denouement, at reach just beyond the scope of the page: Korea’s liberation, KĎkichi’s release from prison, and his postwar restitution from Japanese colonizer to Japanese anti-imperialist.38 In its final pages, Drunken Boat powerfully demonstrates how confession and collaboration emerge in the same historical moment and work along the same lines. The novel attempts to recast KĎkichi’s wartime activities as a calculated performance, but in order to do so, it must first already assume the national lines embedded in the very word “collaboration.” The activities of both Ro Tenshin and KĎkichi are held up as examples of subversion from within, but subversion of what? Oriented against whom? The fact that Ro’s espionage and KĎkichi’s decadence cannot be understood apart from the nations they represent suggests that the discursive split between collaboration and war guilt depends upon the epistemic violence of colonialism: the terms attempt to recuperate national agency in the face of empire’s collapse, but in doing so they make unutterable and unmemorable (both in the sense of not worth remembering and unable to be narrativized as memory) any experiences or subjectivities that fall outside that paradigm. Similarly, the act of confession does not unveil so much as produce and naturalize an authentic “interior” self separate from “external” performance.39 Just as the narrating self crafts the narrated self in and through confession, the collaborationist act is not uncovered so much as belatedly created in the process of narrativizing the past as past. As previously mentioned, scholars such as Kawamura Minato have lambasted Drunken Boat as a colonialist apologia, one that dangerously erases the author’s own complicity from the text. Similar criticisms have been leveled at Chang Hy̡kchu’s postwar literature and essays, and against Yi Kwangsu and his confessional essay “My Confession.” My point is not to deny the validity of these criticisms but to stress how often they implicitly replicate the structures of collaboration, in which authenticity and nonauthenticity, colonizer and colonized stand in stark opposition to each other. That the mentioned texts cannot be untangled from these binaries and are still studied separately, within their respective postwar literary designations (Japanese

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literature, zainichi literature, Korean literature) is suggestive of how deeply the postwar episteme still mediates our understanding of the past.

*** In recent years, a number of scholars have pointed out the parallels between Drunken Boat and Kim Saryang’s “Pegasus,” discussed in chapter 2. As evidence, they cite the unusual confluence of shared characters—real-life figures such as Karashima Takeshi and Tsuda Katashi feature prominently in both texts under thinly veiled pseudonyms—and a shared preoccupation with the cultural politics at play in the writing of literature.40 Those who regard Tanaka Hidemitsu as the model for “Tanaka” in “Pegasus” have gone so far as to read Drunken Boat as a direct response to Kim Saryang, to whom it is said Tanaka felt a strong sense of rivalry.41 Others, meanwhile, have argued instead that Kim Saryang meant to parody Tamura TaijirĎ or else Hayashi Fusao in his depiction of “Tanaka,” and still others have rejected the “model” reading mode entirely.42 The intense speculation surrounding the real-life models and events of Drunken Boat is understandable given Tanaka’s own stated desire to create a novel of “fictional events that could have been possible but were in fact impossible; that might have been, but weren’t.” The character Ro Tenshin is a pertinent example of this point. Although the sinographs used for Ro’s name immediately bring to mind the real-life poet No Ch’̡nmy̡ng (SinoJapanese pronunciation Ro Tenmei) as do the details given about her literary career, there has been no documented evidence that No Ch’̡nmy̡ng worked as a spy, or that she was ever in a romantic relationship with Tanaka Hidemitsu. Additionally, little evidence can be found regarding her interactions with Kim Munjip, the writer whom many believe to be the real-life model for the character Genryĝ in Kim Saryang’s “Pegasus.” Both stories, however, are concerned less with this doubling of female identity (the character’s doubled identity outside the story as the real-life No) than with the treacheries this doubling creates for the stories’ protagonists (the character’s doubled identity within the story). In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), an unnamed narrator follows an unknown man through London on a whim. The man never

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leaves the anonymity of the busy streets, and the narrator is struck with the following revelation: “This old man . . . is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd.” 43 Here one may recall the climactic final scene of “Pegasus,” where Bun Sogyoku lures Genryĝ out into the city streets of KeijĎ, only to disappear among the swelling crowd of festivalgoers. Her crime, postwar detractors might say, is that she is of the crowd—one of the many who urged their fellow peers in a march toward war and imperialism. In the postwar narrative of Drunken Boat, she transforms into Ro Tenshin, the secret agent whose collaborationist activities are spun into a disguise of another sort. Unlike her male peers, however, in both texts her collaboration is marked in uniquely gendered terms, as it is inseparable from her sexuality and her romantic relationships vis-à-vis the male protagonists. Because pro-Japanese collaboration was seen as a national shame in both Koreas, a collective trauma that needed to be overcome, it was that privileged agent of the nation— the elite male intellectual—who emerged as both the subject and object of condemnation. That No Ch’̡nmy̡ng appears in fictional form in both “Pegasus” and Drunken Boat suggests less a concern with judging her complicity with the colonial government than the ease in which her sexualized body could be replicated (and thereafter erased) in narratives that were ultimately not about her at all.44 Rather than arguing for or against judgments of collaboration, I have sought instead to show how the wartime and postwar Japanese-language texts introduced in this book—both by those considered “Japanese proper” and those not—expose the complexly constructed, hybrid, and hyphenated identity of the contested imperial (not just colonial or postcolonial) subject.45 At the same time, dismantling the binary between collaboration and resistance must also entail a reexamination of the voices that have been excised from historical memory and relegated to the margins of nationhood. In other words, rather than try to detect the “true” criminal in a crowd of collaborationist suspects, I would ask instead who is allowed or not allowed to stand apart from the crowd, and why.

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EPILOGUE While I don’t know too much about the technicalities of switching national languages, I don’t think it will be that difficult. Once educators have been trained, they can switch to French language instruction starting with the first grade. I wonder how it was done when [Koreans] switched from Korean to Japanese. — S H I G A N A O YA , “ N AT I O N A L L A N G U A G E I S S U E S ”

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O M US ED S H I GA Naoya in “National Language Issues,” the essay mentioned in the introduction of this book. From the vantage point of the present day, Shiga’s 1946 proposal to change Japan’s national language to French is often treated as a puzzling anomaly in the oeuvre of a Japanese writer who was once eulogized as the “god of fiction” (shĎsetsu no kamisama). When contextualized in the discursive histories of Japaneselanguage literature I have offered here, however, Shiga’s comments can be understood as not a deviation from kokugo ideology but the product of it. It thus feels fitting to conclude Colonizing Language with a reconsideration of “National Language Issues” in relation to ongoing issues of linguistic nationalism, ethnonational belonging, and (post)coloniality in Japan.

T H R E E S K E T C H E S : S H I G A N A O YA , R I K A I S E I , MORISAKI KAZUE Although “National Language Issues” was dismissed by his peers at the time, that does not necessarily mean that they disagreed with the fundamental assumptions driving the essay.1 Shiga’s contention that the Japanese

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language was so overly complicated that it had impeded the development of a democratic, antifascist culture in Japan in fact echoed popular modernization theories that positioned Japan’s “incomplete” modernity vis-à-vis the West.2 Shiga followed others in believing that Japan stood at a precipitous place in world affairs. While acknowledging that it might be difficult for Japanese citizens to let go of their emotional and practical ties to the Japanese language, he urged his readers to “believe in our Japanese blood.”3 The implication was that there should be little danger of Japan’s losing its sense of self even if it changed its national language to French: in the end, blood will out. Shiga’s emphasis on the cultural superiority of France was also not new. Although France was nominally represented among the Allied forces in Japan, as an idealized locus of “liberty, equality, fraternity” it offered many Japanese intellectuals an appealing alternative to the U.S. model of democracy (which came to have less and less credibility as the Occupation persisted). Like Japan, France, too, had to grapple with a contentious doubled history of occupation and resistance, victimhood and war culpability. But unlike Japan, or so it was declared, France could draw upon a deep wellspring of high culture that preceded—and would endure long after— the “aberration” of Vichy. Thus, while Shiga’s turn to French literature and culture relied upon a distinctly postwar image of France rising from the ashes of its wartime past, it was also in some ways a continuation of prewar interests that complicated the idea of a prewar-postwar break.4 “National Language Issues” can therefore be placed within the larger debates on Japanese war responsibility, political reform, and linguistic nationalism that raged in Japan following its defeat to the Allied powers. The grammatical structure of the sentence “I wonder how it was done when [Koreans] switched from Korean to Japanese” (ChĎsengo o Nihongo ni kirikaeta toki wa dĎshita no darĎ) is telling in this regard. By using the transitive verb “switch” (kirikaeru), Shiga is able to elide the mechanics of power that had forced the Japanese language onto colonial subjects as the official language of education, administration, law, and more. The speculative “I wonder how it was done” (dĎshita no darĎ) is similarly ambiguous, as who or what is the agent of the doing is left unstated. Finally, we can consider

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the significance of Shiga’s use of the word Nihongo to refer to Koreans speaking Japanese, despite the fact that less than a year previously Koreans would have been theoretically included in the linguistic realm of kokugo. What Shiga’s comments reveal above all else is how Japan’s recent past as an imperial power was already being obfuscated by (and reconfigured into) its new identity as a defeated nation. The blood-based principles of exclusion and the language-based principles of inclusion at work in Japanese colonial policy were enabled by—not despite—the contradictions of kokugo ideology as articulated by Ueda Kazutoshi. 5 On the one hand, the inclusion of colonial Korean subjects as speakers of the national language emphasized the synchronic mode of language, its ability to unite people through space and bind them to place (that is, the Japanese empire). On the other hand, Koreans would always and inevitably be differentiated from “Japanese proper” by the diachronic mode of language, its purported function as a repository for an essentialized Japanese history and lineage. Japan’s postwar privileging of ethnonation and blood-based affiliation helped cover up the contradictions of Japanese (national) language ideology and excised them from the attentions of the nation-state. The principles of exclusion and inclusion were finally made to coincide in the new space of the postwar—with little room for consideration of the Koreans still very much alive and present within it. As we have seen, however, it is the Japanese-language writings of those Koreans that reveal most clearly how kokugo and Nihongo never once coincided completely in the whole history of empire and its aftermath. The case of Ri Kaisei (b. 1935, Kr. Yi Hoes̡ng) is another illustrative example.6 Ri is best known in Japanese literary history as the first zainichi (resident) Korean to be awarded the Akutagawa Prize, for his short story “The Woman Who Fulled Clothes” (Kinuta o utsu onna, 1971). He was born in Karafuto (present-day south Sakhalin) in 1935, which was then a settler colony of imperial Japan. Like other colonial subjects at the time, Ri was legally considered “Japanese” (Nihonjin), albeit in subordinated status to mainland Japanese (naichijin). After Karafuto came under Soviet control following the end of the war, Ri and his family were evacuated to Hokkaido on a boat for Japanese returnees (hikiagesha).7 Uncertain about what

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might be awaiting them in Korea, the family eventually settled in Sapporo and stayed there. In 1970, Ri published a Japanese-language text called “Scene without a Witness” (ShĎnin no inai kĎkei) that explicitly addressed the divergent narratives of Japan’s imperial past. Allusions to the past begin with the very first sentence: “No matter how hard he strained his memory, he couldn’t remember.” 8 The “he” here is Kim Munho, a zainichi Korean writer who has received a letter from an old childhood friend, a Japanese man named Yada Osamu. The two had grown up together in colonial Karafuto but fell out of touch after both were repatriated to Japan after the war. Yada has written to ask Kim if he remembers the time they stumbled across the rotting corpse of a Japanese soldier, roughly three weeks after the fateful August 15 surrender. The memory of that dead soldier continues to haunt Yada, but Kim, to his own bafflement, finds he cannot recall the incident at all. The narrative then switches between the perspectives of Yada and Kim, as each burrows deep into his recollections of the past. Eventually Kim and Yada meet again, for the first time in twenty-four years, but are unable to come to a consensus on what actually happened in Karafuto. The story ends with the two of them rushing to catch the last train, running “as if trying to shake off the black shadow that kept pursuing them” (117). In “Scene without a Witness,” the indeterminacy of memory is inextricably linked to names and language. When Kim Munho is introduced in the text, his name is given in sinographs as 慹㔯㴑 with a katakana gloss of Kimu Munho, explicitly encouraging the reader to privilege Kim’s Korean ethnicity. Whenever the narrative perspective shifts to Yada, however, the name that is always used is not Kim Munho but Kim’s “Japanese” name 慹Ⱉ㔯㴑, which can be read as Kaneyama Fumihiro or in a hybrid fashion as Kaneyama BunkĎ, among other possibilities (the name is never glossed, making the pronunciation ambiguous). Haunted by the memory of the dead soldier, Yada finds himself unable to move past the terms and times of the past. Kim, in his turn, tries his best to act as a witness for his friend out of a sense of “responsibility” (sekininkan) but finds that “he was unable to confirm that scene they had seen together or offer any appropriate advice to Yada, who continued to be shadowed by his fascist youth” (111). The

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only one who can and should take responsibility for that day, it is implied, is Yada himself. In his analysis of “Scene without a Witness,” the scholar Kawamura Minato suggests that Kim Munho has no memory of the dead soldier because the boy who witnessed it was not Kim Munho but Kaneyama BunkĎ, an “assimilated youth” (dĎka shĎnen).9 Kaneyama BunkĎ necessarily died with the death of the Japanese empire, but the originary Korean identity of Kim Munho was reborn in his stead. The Japanese Yada Osamu, in contrast, had no alternative or prior identity to fill the void left by the loss of empire; no way to cut himself off from the imperial history that had shaped him. The only way that Yada can make sense of the newly formed nation-state of Japan is to return again and again to that pivotal moment of disillusionment, and yet it is this very sense of disillusionment that prevents him from fully integrating into a society that has temporally defined itself as “postwar.” What are we to make of the fact that both Yada and Kim find themselves chased by the black shadow of the past, though? Kim fears that “even if he believed he could prove himself to be Korean, he couldn’t be sure that the shadow of the ‘assimilated youth’ was gone. It was as if he had created a vessel but had yet to infuse it with a soul.” 10 Because the severing of Kaneyama BunkĎ from Kim Munho was not the result of a natural reckoning with the past but the superficial erasure of it, Kim cannot know—is ontologically unable to know—the whole history of his divided self. In this way, “Scene without a Witness” does not celebrate zainichi identity so much as gesture to the ways the word zainichi both embodies and obscures its colonial antecedents. In other words, it shows how the very same mechanisms that made the discursive and historical formation of “zainichi Koreans” possible after 1945 also worked to elide the colonial continuities that were responsible for the Korean population in Japan in the first place. Kim Munho and Yada Osamu never come to any kind of agreement about what really happened that day in Karafuto. Still, both evince a kind of relief at simply being able to speak to each other again, bound together as they are by the postwar present of Japan even if trapped in separate memories of the past. As Lori Watt has documented, the reordering of

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borders in Asia spearheaded by the Allied powers following Japan’s defeat triggered a mass movement of bodies “back” to the national spaces they were now said to belong to.11 It is this same reordering of borders that led to the creation of the zainichi Korean population in Japan, as those who were unwilling or unable to repatriate to Korea found themselves stateless and relegated to alien resident status. In Ri’s text we can see how “the tensions of empire took on new life in different forms” (97) in the narratives of the former imperial subjects (Korean and Japanese) who were marked apart from “Japan” through the new appellations of zainichi and hikiagesha—and, more important, how those seemingly separate narratives were in fact intertwined from the very start. We also have to keep in mind that, once again, the very notion of communicability in “Scene without a Witness” is enabled and presumed by the medium of the Japanese language. While neither Kim Munho nor Yada Osamu directly comments on this fact in Ri’s story, we have seen in other texts how access to the Japanese language was determined by complicated intersections of gender, class, and ethnicity.12 The writings of Morisaki Kazue (b. 1927), a Japanese poet who grew up in colonial Korea, offer another, final perspective on the problematics of language explored in this book. Like Yuzurihara Masako and Tanaka Hidemitsu, Morisaki does not fit the conventional definition of a “returnee” because she was living in the naichi, or Japanese mainland, as a student at the Fukuoka Prefectural College for Women when the war ended. This does not mean that she ever considered the naichi her home(land), though. Instead, as Brett de Bary has argued, in her essays and fiction Morisaki has consistently called attention to “the historical specificity of any discourse in which the subject is produced,” against and beyond the totalizing ideologies of nationhood.13 In June 1970, one month after “Scene without a Witness” appeared in print, Morisaki published a Japanese-language essay titled “Two Languages, Two Hearts: Sketches of My Visit to South Korea” (Futatsu no kotoba, futatsu no kokoro: HĎkan suketchi ni yosete). Organized as a series of seemingly unconnected dialogue fragments between Morisaki and various individuals she met on her trip to South Korea in 1968, the essay highlights the issue of (in)communicability on both a topical and meta-

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textual level. In the first dialogue presented to us, an old Korean acquaintance named Kim Y̡ngsu asks Morisaki if she believes “it is possible for a person to obtain two national languages [kokugo] in the course of a lifetime.” 14 Rather than saying yes or no, Morisaki instead replies that the very notion of national language was made untenable for her by the instability of her status as a Japanese colonizer who was “cut off” (132) from the linguistic context of mainland Japan but raised to speak Japanese as her birthright. In response, Kim gently suggests that her ambivalence can itself be seen as a kind of privilege of the colonizer. His own subjectivity, in contrast, has been constituted not by ambivalence but by aporia: Japanese is the language that structures his entire sense of self and yet it can no longer be used by himself in the post-1945 state of South Korea.15 While Morisaki does not shy away from acknowledging the unequal and inequitable effects produced by the colonizer-colonized relationship, she also asks Kim to consider how those effects are skewed in different ways in the “histories of women on the borders between nations” (132). Notably, the category of “women” is here unmarked by ethnicity, leaving open the possibility of a plurality of different subject positions and positionings. One example is given in the last section of the essay, when Morisaki writes of her reunion with her omoni (“mother” in Korean), the Korean servant who nursed her when she was a child.16 Because her omoni can speak only Korean, it is not dialogue that marks the reunion but memory. Walking through the older woman’s home for the very first time, Morisaki is overcome with a strange feeling of nostalgia for something she had never known: In that murky light was the only place where I didn’t have to ask for forgiveness from Korea or make any effort to understand Japan but could simply sit as and in my own self. That is what I thought in that moment, as though I had come to a dead end. I sobbed at omoni’s side, as if trying to return to a space of salvation where I would be forgiven for the existence that had been made the way it was. But it was not as if I had ever lived there before. My distant memories originated in that gloom, nothing more than that. (138)

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Love and loss, forgiveness and shame, origins and the original sin of empire. Although the private space of her omoni’s home seems at first glance to promise a kind of salvation of the self, Morisaki comes to realize that this act of willful self-identification is a dead end, a false return. How are we to understand the silent presence of the omoni in this scene? In refusing to record the omoni’s reaction, Morisaki thwarts the reader’s (and thereby, perhaps, her own) desire for any kind of resolution or catharsis. The omoni is not a transparent window into the past, nor a repository for it, but her own being—stubbornly opaque and material. That her biological son and other relatives are also gathered at the house only emphasizes this fact, as their presence subtly reorients the word omoni to point to a different configuration of relationships and histories. The essay ends with a conversation between omoni’s relatives and Morisaki. Morisaki had learned some Korean from a zainichi Korean girl in her neighborhood before coming to South Korea, and she uses what Korean she remembers when speaking to the family. Since a few of the family members know some Japanese, the conversation unfolds through a jumbled mix of Korean and Japanese. The linguistic code-switching in the scene may superficially call to mind the words of Shiga Naoya, who blithely referenced Koreans when advocating for French as the new national language of Japan. If the works of Ri Kaisei and Morisaki Kazue can tell us anything, though, it is that the “switching” of languages was not a carefree nor a casual act for those individuals who could not forget (or were never allowed to forget) the context of empire, even when that empire had forgotten them.

THE FUTURE OF “ J A PA N E S E - L A N G U A G E ” L I T E R AT U R E ? Much had changed in the status of zainichi Koreans by 1970, the year Ri Kaisei and Morisaki Kazue published the texts discussed in the preceding. Oguma Eiji has identified the 1960s, a period of rapid economic growth,

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as the time when the “myth” of a homogeneous nation became thoroughly naturalized and embraced in Japan.17 The 1960s were also notable for Japan–South Korea relations, as the two countries signed a normalization treaty in 1965 that finally established diplomatic relations between them. This meant that zainichi Koreans who identified as South Korean were allowed to obtain permanent residency status in Japan, giving them access to diplomatic protection, Japanese medical and welfare benefits, and freedom to travel overseas. Those who identified as North Korean or as simply Korean (ChĎsenjin) were still barred from obtaining permanent residency status.18 As a consequence, by 1970 the number of zainichi Koreans who claimed affiliation with South Korea had surpassed those affiliated with North Korea for the first time, and they would only continue to rise.19 It was only after the 1965 normalization treaty had been signed that the word ChĎsen (Korea) came to be associated strongly with North Korea. However, some resident Koreans have chosen to keep the ChĎsenjin designation as a protest against the division of the peninsula (as there is no longer any country that is called ChĎsen)20 or as their way of underscoring their desire to choose ethnic affiliation over state-imposed identities. Others chose to naturalize as Japanese citizens; although there were fewer than twenty-five hundred individuals each year who became naturalized in the 1950s, by the 1970s this number had jumped to roughly forty-seven hundred per year.21 In June 1979, Japan ratified the two International Covenants on Human Rights, and it acceded to the UN Refugee Convention in October 1981; but it was not until 1991 that the government enacted decisive reforms on nationality requirements and the alien registration system, granting wider legal rights to citizens and noncitizens alike.22 We can see how these legal transformations impacted conceptions of literature and literary canonization in Japan by comparing the treatment of Ri Kaisei with that of Yi Yangji, the second zainichi Korean—and the first zainichi woman—to win the Akutagawa Prize. When Bungei shunjĝ reprinted Ri’s winning story “The Woman Who Fulled Clothes” in its March 1972 issue, it used the term zainichi ChĎsenjin to describe the author in the table of contents. In the judges’ comments published in that same issue, however, a multiplicity of terms can be found: Inoue Yasushi referred to

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Ri as zainichi Kankokujin (technically untrue, as Ri did not have South Korean nationality at the time); Æoka ShĎhei, as a zainichi ChĎsenjin who was contributing something new to Japanese literature (Nihon bungaku); and Funahashi Seiichi, as a gaikokujin (foreigner). Gaikokujin is also how Ri chose to describe himself in his acknowledgments to the committee— even as he suggested the historicity of that term by linking his writing to that of Kim Saryang, the colonial Korean writer who had been nominated for the prize more than thirty years earlier.23 In contrast, the comments about Yi Yangji when she won the Akutagawa Prize in 1989 were much more unified. The judges referred mostly to Yuhi as a story rooted in Japan–South Korea relations and Yi as a zainichi Kankokujin with a fine ear for (the Japanese) language and an acute sensitivity to its “linguistic ruptures.”24 Of course, this does not mean that some transcendent moment of postcolonial reconciliation had been reached. Takubo Hideo’s remark that the story dealt with the “differences of blood and culture between countries” (436), for example, relied upon the very same metaphors used by Ueda Kazutoshi, Shiga Naoya, and other Japanese writers in the past without fundamentally questioning the ethnonational unity of “Japan” presumed by them. Another judge, Kuroi Senji, admitted that he didn’t feel comfortable with the fact that the story was narrated in Japanese despite being set in South Korea and written from the perspective of a Korean woman. He added, “While struck by the universality of the topic, as a reader I was on shaky ground” (432). The various critical reactions to Ri Kaisei and Yi Yangji can on the one hand be taken as proof of the contingent nature of Japanese literature, a discursive category that shrinks or expands or contorts depending on the context. It was not only Japanese-language texts by Koreans that were expelled from the canon when the context of empire gave way to the context of the “homogeneous” nation-state; writers like Obi JĝzĎ (discussed in chapter 3), whose careers had been forged in direct relation to the colonies, also found their texts had lost an audience and a home. On the other hand, it must be reiterated that the effects (and affects) of empire and its end were not experienced equally. Obi JĝzĎ, after all, never lost his right to lay claim to the Japanese nation and its language, nor did the other Japanese writers

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examined in this book. Moreover, the conflicting terms employed by Japanese readers to refer to Ri and even Yi (who was technically a naturalized Japanese citizen and who preferred zainichi ChĎsenjin over zainichi Kankokujin to refer to herself) can be understood as indebted to what Charles Mills has called the “epistemology of ignorance,” or practices of knowing and not knowing that ironically allow those in power to “be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.”25 While Charles Mills was concerned primarily with the dynamics of race and racism in the West, this book has addressed what happens in cases where ethnic difference is not necessarily equated with racial difference, as with Koreans in Japan.26 What we have seen is precisely the problem of seeing itself—how the visibility or invisibility of difference is neither natural nor inevitable but is instead willed into being through specific discursive practices. If the act of speaking “means above all assuming a culture and bearing the weight of a civilization,” as Frantz Fanon put it, then perhaps it is language that we must ultimately ask to bear witness to the past.27 Studying Japanese-language texts does not mean only returning to a past rendered invisible by the terms of the present; it also means making restitution to it. Kim S̡kp̡m famously characterized the Japanese language as a “curse” ( jubaku) that is “the result [of colonialism], but one that still remains open and ongoing.”28 In that same essay, Kim compared his own feelings when writing in Japanese to “looking in a mirror in somebody else’s house” (78). He went on to argue that his Japanese necessarily differs from that of “native” speakers because he cannot help but always be consciously aware that it is Japanese that he is speaking and writing. One can link his observations back to the texts introduced in chapter 5, which revealed how the Japanese language is simultaneously a product of colonialism and a living reminder that the effects of colonialism are perpetuated even into the present. To reiterate, it is the history of the Japanese colonization of Korea that produced Kim S̡kp̡m, a Korean writer of Japanese; that he cannot write against Japan anywhere but in Japan (because of his visa status), in anything other than Japanese (because of his colonial-period education), serves as proof of the impossibility of demarcating a clear “post”-colonial space.

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The literature produced from this ambiguously (post)colonial space speaks a complicated, often contradictory language that cannot be contained in a single voice or single country, with different goals and desires and protests and homes. As mentioned in the introduction to this book, debates are still being waged on whether to categorize these texts as “Japanese-language literature,” “Japanophone literature,” “Japanese literature by non-Japanese writers,” and so on. While I have used the provisional term “Japanese-language literature” in order to underline the contested nature of Japanese as a language of imperialism, ultimately I believe it is not the appropriateness of labels that should be interrogated but the labels themselves. In other words, arguing for or against zainichi Koreans such as Yi Yangji as part of Japanese literature still puts the burden of representation on the minority writers themselves, whereas those deemed Japanese proper are assumed to already belong to a stable literary canon implicitly centered on the nation. It is therefore not enough to simply bring attention to marginalized voices. Examining the continuities of colonialism not only helps us reevaluate the position of Koreans in Japan; it also foregrounds the mutually constitutive relationship between Koreans and Japan—whatever and wherever “Japan” may be, and however it is defined.

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APPENDIX KOREAN AUTHORS AND LITERARY CRITICS

F

list of the major Korean and zainichi authors and literary critics discussed in this book, organized in English alphabetical order. Each entry begins with the romanized name used in the book, followed by the sinographs of the name, then alternative readings, if applicable. While some of the authors listed wrote under a large number of pen names throughout their careers (such as Kim Talsu and Chang Hy̡kchu, the latter itself a pen name), only those names relevant to the book are given here. OL L OWI N G I S A

Chang Hyŏkchu (⻝崓⭁, 1905–1997) Sino-Japanese reading: ChĎ Kakuchĝ Other names: Noguchi Minoru (慶⎋䦼, sĎshi kaimei name, naturalized name), Noguchi Kakuchĝ (after 1953), Chang Hy̡kju (alternative romanization) Ch’oe Chaesŏ (Ⲽ庱䐆, 1908–1964) Sino-Japanese reading: Sai Saizui Other names: Ishida KĎzĎ (䞛䓘侽忈, sĎshi kaimei name) Hwang Sunwŏn (湫枮⃫, 1915–2000) Sino-Japanese reading: KĎ Jungen Kim Saryang (慹⎚列, 1914–1950) Sino-Japanese reading: Kin ShiryĎ

APPENDIX

Kim Sŏkpŏm (慹䞛䭬, b. 1925) Sino-Japanese reading: Kin Sekihan Kim Sŏngmin (慹俾䍱, 1915–1969) Sino-Japanese reading: Kin Seimin Other names: Miyahara SĎichi (⭖⍇るᶨ, sĎshi kaimei name) Kim Talsu (慹忼⮧, 1919–1997) Sino-Japanese reading: Kin Tatsuju Other names: Kanemitsu Jun / Kim Kwangsun (慹⃱㶛, pen name), Kim Dalsu (alternative romanization) Ma Haesong (楔㴟㜦, 1905–1966) Sino-Japanese reading: Ma KaishĎ No Ch’ŏnmyŏng (䚏⣑␥, 1911–1957) Sino-Japanese reading: Ro Tenmei Ri Kaisei (㛶《ㆸ, b. 1935) Korean reading: Yi Hoes̡ng Other names: Lee Hoesung (alternative romanization), Li Kaisei (alternative romanization) Yi Chŏngnae (㛶屆Ἦ, dates unknown) Sino-Japanese reading: Ri Teirai Other names: Kitazawa Teirai (⊿㱊屆㜍, sĎshi kaimei name) Yi Kwangsu (㛶⃱㳁, 1892–1950?) Sino-Japanese reading: Ri KĎshu Other names: Kayama MitsurĎ (楁Ⱉ⃱恶, sĎshi kaimei name), Lee Kwang-su (alternative romanization) Yi Yangji (㛶列㝅, 1955–1992) Sino-Japanese reading: Ri Yoshie Other names: Tanaka Yoshie (naturalized name), Lee Yangji (alternative romanization)

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. In this book, I use the term “Fifteen-Year War” when I wish to stress the longer history of Japanese military aggression in Asia, beginning with the Manchurian Incident in September 1931. At times I also use different designations when deemed appropriate— “Second Sino-Japanese War” when referring to the war waged against China beginning in 1937, for instance, and “Pacific War” when considering Japan’s position vis-à-vis Allied forces beginning in 1941. For an extended discussion on the discursive limits of the terms used to reference the war, see Sharalyn Orbaugh, Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen-Year War (Leiden: Brill, 2015), particularly chapter 2. 2. Shiga Naoya, “Kokugo mondai,” KaizĎ 27, no. 4 (April 1946): 94–95. Although this particular KaizĎ volume was technically printed the month before, as was common for Japanese journals at the time, throughout this book I draw on the convention of using the journal issue date rather than the print date when referring to first publications. 3. For a discursive history of the term in Japanese, see the essays collected in Kim S̡kp̡m, Kotoba no jubaku: “Zainichi ChĎsenjin bungaku” to Nihongo (Tokyo: Chikuma ShobĎ, 1972), and Kim S̡kp̡m, IkyĎ no Nihongo, ed. Kim S̡kp̡m et al. (Tokyo: Shakai HyĎronsha, 2009). An alternative term sometimes used in North American scholarship is “Japanophone literature.” Travis Workman, Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), describes Japanophone literature as embedded in “a context in which a variety of languages, literatures, and intellectual traditions came into contact by way of Japanese as the major vehicular language” (192). While I am indebted to the insights provided by Workman, I have chosen to use the term “Japanese-language literature” because this book is first and foremost concerned with the discursive conceptualization of Nihongo in

INTRODUCTION

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

relation to kokugo, within mainland Japan as well as in the colonies. I wish also to emphasize the textual hegemony of the Japanese language for colonial and zainichi Korean writers, many of whom grew up speaking Korean in the home but were most comfortable writing literature and criticism in Japanese. For a diverse array of essays that critique and contextualize the use of “-phone” in the context of France, see Alec G. Hargreaves, Charles Forsdick, and David Murphy, eds., Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and Littérature-monde (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010). Nishi Masahiko, “Gaichi junrei: Gaichi Nihongo bungaku no shomondai,” in “Gaichi” Nihongo bungakuron, ed. Kamiya Tadataka and Kimura Kazuaki (Kyoto: Sekai ShisĎsha, 2007), 31. Judith Irvine, “When Talk Isn’t Cheap: Language and Political Economy,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 2 (May 1989): 255. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 187. Mori Arinori, Education in Japan, in Shinshĝ Mori Arinori zenshĝ, ed. Ækubo Toshiaki et al. (Tokyo: BunseidĎ Shoten, 1999), 5:186. In English. Mori made similar remarks in a now-famous letter to W. D. Whitney in 1872. For an in-depth discussion in English of Mori’s proposals, see Patrick Heinrich, The Making of Monolingual Japan: Language Ideology and Japanese Modernity (Bristol, U.K.: Multilingual Matters, 2012), chapter 2. Ueda Kazutoshi, “Kokugo to kokka to,” in Meiji bungaku zenshĝ 44: Ochiai Naobumi; Ueda Mannen; Haga Yaichi; Fujioka Sakutarō shū (Tokyo: Chikuma ShobĎ, 1968), 110. As Lee Yeounsuk, “Kokugo” to iu shisĎ: Kindai Nihon no gengo ninshiki (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996), points out, the national language of Japan was not constructed out of a preexisting, homogeneous language identified as “Japanese.” Rather, it was only within the emerging ideology of kokugo—which “cannot exist without the belief that everybody who lives within the political and social space called ‘Japan’ speaks ‘one Japanese’ ” (iv)—that the diachronic and synchronic identity of the Japanese language was codified. This was in spite of and even as specific debates about orthography standardization, syllabary use, pronunciation, and more continued to rage among linguists and policy makers well into the 1940s. In this sense, the ideology of national language can be said to have mediated the establishment and maintenance of the nation-state system itself, which Christopher L. Hill has meticulously detailed in National History and the World of Nations (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). Just as “every nation existed in what was assumed to be a world of nations that, through their association with states, were in some manner formally equivalent” (40), its national language was perceived to be uniquely constituted even as it was also part and parcel of a seemingly universal linguistic system. See Roger Chickering, “Language and the Social Foundations of Radical Nationalism in the Wilhelmine Era,” in 1870/71–1989/90: German Unifications and the Change of Literary Discourse, ed. Walter Pape (New York: de Gruyter, 1993). The 1910 treaty of annexation, for example, employed a rhetoric of sameness and proximity that would be echoed and adapted in a number of different contexts, perhaps most notably in the declaration of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” in 1940: Japan,

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it was declared, was liberating Asia from Western imperialism. As many scholars have shown, however, in reality Japan appropriated many of the same legal and discursive models used by its Western counterparts. See Masaki Tsuneo, Shokuminchi gensĎ (Tokyo: Misuzu ShobĎ, 1995); Oguma Eiji, “Nihonjin” no kyĎkai: Okinawa, Ainu, Taiwan, ChĎsen shokuminchi shihai kara fukki undĎ made (Tokyo: Shin’yĎsha, 1998); and Robert Thomas Tierney, Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 12. Article 2 of the ordinance states, “The regular education of those who habitually use the national language is as stipulated in the Primary School Ordinance [ShĎgakkĎ Rei], Secondary School Ordinance [ChĝgakkĎ Rei], and Women’s Higher Education Ordinance [KĎtĎ JogakkĎ Rei].” Article 3 of the ordinance states, “The regular education of those who habitually do not use the national language is to be regular school [futsĝ gakkĎ], higher regular school [kĎtĎ futsĝ gakkĎ], and women’s higher regular school [ joshi kĎtĎ futsĝ gakkĎ].” The full Japanese text can be found online at http: //www.geocities.jp /nakanolib/rei /rt11-19.htm. 13. As outlined in the 1945 Potsdam Declaration, available in full at http: //www.ndl.go.jp /constitution /e/etc /c06.html. 14. Examples include Karen Laura Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009); Theodore Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Tierney, Tropics of Savagery; Serk-Bae Suh, Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Korea and Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Nayoung Aimee

15.

16.

17.

18.

Kwon, Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015); and Workman, Imperial Genus. Examples include Kim Yerim, 1930 yʵndae huban kˏndae insik ˏi t’ˏl kwa miˏisik (Seoul: Somy̡ng Ch’ulp’an, 2004); Ch’a S̿nggi, Pan kˏndaejʵk sangsangnyʵk ˏi imgye tˏl (Seoul: P’ur̿n Y̡ksa, 2009); Cho Chin-gi, Ilche malgi kukch’aek kwa ch’eje sunˏng ˏi munhak (Seoul: Somy̡ng Ch’ulp’an, 2010); and Yun Taes̡k, Singminji munhak ˏl ikta (Seoul: Somy̡ng Ch’ulp’an, 2012). Examples include Melissa L. Wender, Lamentation as History: Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965–2000 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005); John Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and Sonia Ryang and John Lie, eds., Diaspora without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). First published in the literary journal GunzĎ in November 1988 and reprinted in Lee Yangji [Yi Yangji] zenshĝ (Tokyo: KĎdansha, 1993). Page numbers refer to the KĎdansha collected works volume. In the novella, the sinographs for the protagonist’s name are glossed in katakana as Yuhi, but those same characters in Korean would be romanized as Yuh̿i. Ibid., 416. Yi Yangji has also been romanized as Lee Yangji by KĎdansha, publisher of her collected works. In this book, I use the romanization Yi Yangji, which is more widely used in English-language scholarship.

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19. As the story goes, one day Kim Haegy̡ng was accidentally called “Ri-san” by his Japanese supervisor, Ri (Yi) being one of the most common surnames in Korea. The young Kim decided to transform that mistake into his pen name, choosing sinographs that played upon the pronunciation “Ri-san” (or Yi-san) as well as the Korean word for “strange” (isang). 20. Yi Yangji zenshĝ, 426. The phrase the unnamed narrator uses for “zainichi Korean” is chaeil tongp’o, which can be more literally translated as “compatriots residing in Japan.” Unlike the Japanese, the Korean term is oriented around an assumed ethnonational relationship between the Korean speaker and his or her “compatriot” abroad. 21. For example, in the essay “GyĎja” published in Bungakukai in March 1943, Yi Kwangsu describes his spiritual training in becoming “a true Japanese person” (honmono no Nihonjin). What is fascinating about this particular essay, however, is its form: written as a letter to “Kobayashi-sensei” (Kobayashi Hideo, a contributor to Bungakukai and an acquaintance of Yi Kwangsu’s), the text opens up complex ambiguities of audience and ethnic performativity that the simple label of “pro-Japanese collaborator” cannot adequately address. 22. In its strictest sense, “postcolonial” can refer to the state or conditions of newly independent nations. However, as countless scholars have pointed out, the implication of a move beyond or after colonialism as represented in the prefix “post” can dangerously elide the ways in which the political, economic, and cultural inequalities generated through colonialism live on to structure relations between the former metropole and periphery. Using the term “postimperial” to refer to the former metropole and “postcolonial” to refer to the former colonies can also be problematic, as it reinforces the notion that these areas exist as self-contained entities with clearly established borders. While I tend to use “colonial” in the context of pre-1945 East Asia and “postcolonial” for the post-1945 periods, this is less an attempt to demark time and geographical areas than a desire to recognize (while at the same time questioning) the ways the historical actors who are the subjects of my research conceived of their own position on the global stage. The same goes for my adoption of the “postwar” (sengo) appellation for Japan after 1945. 23. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 107.

1. NATIONAL L ANGUAGE IDEOLOGY IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE 1. See Barbara J. Brooks, “Peopling the Japanese Empire: The Koreans in Manchuria and the Rhetoric of Inclusion,” in Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900–1930, ed. Sharon Minichiello (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1998). Also of historical note is the Wanpaoshan Incident of July 1931, in which a conflict between Chinese and Korean farmers in Manchuria led to the further straining of relations between Japan and China. The conflict was highly publicized in Korean and Japanese newspapers and caused anti-Chinese rioting in Korea.

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2. Minami JirĎ, then governor-general of Korea, had begun championing kĎminka as early as 1936. The prominent linguist Tokieda Motoki published an article in 1942 acknowledging the ideological conflicts that arise from applying Ueda Kazutoshi’s linguistic nationalism to Koreans (whose mother tongue is not Japanese but Korean) and proposed the complete “nativization” of the national language among Korean mothers as a potential solution. See Tokieda Motoki, “ChĎsen ni okeru kokugo seisaku oyobi kokugo kyĎiku no shĎrai,” Nihongo 2, no. 8 (August 1942): 54–63. 3. According to archival surveys done by Im Ch̡nhye (Nin Tenkei), the number of works of fiction published in Japanese by Koreans doubled in the years 1931 to 1940. See Im Ch̡nhye, Nihon ni okeru ChĎsenjin no bungaku no rekishi: 1945 made (Tokyo: HĎsei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 1994). 4. Carol Gluck discusses the ideological significance of the Imperial Rescript on Education in Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985). 5. For a detailed examination of kokugo ideologies and policies developed in Meiji Japan, see Paul H. Clark, The Kokugo Revolution: Education, Identity, and Language Policy in Imperial Japan (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2009). Recent English-language studies on the Japanese “nation-empire” include Tomoko Akami, “The Nation-State/Empire as a Unit of Analysis in the History of International Relations: A Case Study in Northeast Asia, 1868–1933,” in The Nation State and Beyond: Governing Globalization Processes in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Isabella Löhr and Roland Wenzlhuemer (Berlin: Springer, 2013); Sayaka Chatani, “Nation-Empire: Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea, 1895–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2014). 6. Korean Educational Ordinance (ChĎsen KyĎiku Rei, August 23, 1911). The full Japanese text can be found at http: //www.geocities.jp/nakanolib/rei /rm44–229.htm. 7. Shidehara Taira, ChĎsen kyĎiku ron (Tokyo: Rokumeikan, 1919), 358. Shidehara published treatises on education in the naichi as well as in Korea and Taiwan, demonstrating once again the simultaneity of empire and nation. For more information on the different educational practices developed in the naichi, Korea, and Taiwan, see Yasuda Toshiaki, Teikoku Nihon no gengo hensei (Tokyo: Seori ShobĎ, 1997). 8. See Yasuda Toshiaki, “Kokugo” no kindaishi (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha, 2006), 17. For more information on the construction of a “standard language” in Meiji-period Japan, see Miyako Inoue, Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 9. Although set in the late 1910s, Kannani was first published by Yuasa Katsue (1910–1982) in the journal Bungaku hyĎron in April 1935. The text can thus be productively read through the tensions that marked and fragmented naichi-Tokyo, gaichi-rural peripheries and empire-nation in the 1930s following the government crackdown on the proletarian movement and start of the Fifteen-Year War. While I use Kannani here as an illustrative example of the linguistic discrepancies that frequently emerged from the teaching of the “standard” Japanese language amid the continuing prevalence of

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10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

regional dialects and identities, I do not mean to suggest that the text should be taken as a transparent historical document. For a detailed account of the internal divisions of class, region, and gender in the category of the “Japanese settler,” see Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011). Kannani, in Kannani: Yuasa Katsue shokuminchi shĎsetsushĝ, ed. Ikeda Hiroshi (Tokyo: Inpakuto Shuppankai, 1995), 15. The interaction foreshadows the violence that will erupt between the Japanese and Korean villagers at the end of the story. Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 91. See, for example, “Chos̡n-in ̿i kyoyuk yong-̡ r̿l Ilbon-̡ ro kangje ham ̿l p’eji hara,” Tong-a ilbo, April 11, 1920; “Konghak munje e taehaya,” Tong-a ilbo, October 25, 1921; and “Ilbon-in, Chos̡n-in konghak munje (sam),” Tong-a ilbo, October 31, 1933. In using the term “crisis of representation” I am drawing upon the insights provided in Christopher P. Hanscom, The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013). Hanscom argues that Korean modernist writers of the 1930s focused on language itself as “a response to the need to both exceed and fix narrative meaning in a context where an external authority determines the appropriate sense of linguistic utterances” (13). Daunting publishing conditions in colonial Korea ensured that the publication of Korean-language fiction also remained relatively limited in scale until the 1920s cultural “boom.” See, for comprehensive surveys and figures, Ch̡ng Chins̡k, Han’guk ʵllonsa yʵn’gu (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1983); Æmura Masuo and Hotei Toshihiro, eds., ChĎsen bungaku kankei Nihongo bunken mokuroku (Tokyo: Ryokuin ShobĎ, 1997). See Emiko Kida, “Japanese-Korean Exchanges within the Proletarian Visual Arts Movement,” trans. Brian Bergstrom, positions 14, no. 2 (fall 2006): 495–525; Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015). While this chapter focuses on the colonial hierarchies imposed by the Japanese language and the tensions that resulted as described by Kida, I wish to acknowledge the important counterpoint Samuel Perry offers in Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-Garde (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2014). Perry provides a nuanced analysis of the diversity of the proletarian arts and concludes that proletarianism allowed both Japanese and colonial writers to consider “the universality of proletarian culture in relation to the particular needs and demands of a full range of constituencies” (4). In chapter 4, I discuss the case of Kim Saryang, a Korean writer who wrote in Japanese during the colonial period and who justified his actions by citing this reason. More information on censorship systems and language policies in Japan and its colonies can be found in K̡my̡l Y̡n’guhoe, ed., Singminji kʵmyʵl: Chedo, t’eksˏt’ˏ, silch’ʵn (Seoul: Somy̡ng Ch’ulp’an, 2011); Tomi Suzuki et al., eds., Ken’etsu, media, bungaku: Edo kara sengo made (Tokyo: Shin’yĎsha, 2012); and KĎno Kensuke et al., eds., Ken’etsu no teikoku: Bunka no tĎsei to saiseisan (Tokyo: Shin’yĎsha, 2014).

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17. “Shin Manshĝkoku taikan,” KaizĎ 14, no. 4 (April 1932): 1–16. On the other end of the political spectrum, Yanaihara Tadao opens his critical essay “ManmĎ shinkokka ron” with a comparison of the current conflict with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 (in which control over Korea was a central objective). The judges’ comments on Chang’s “Hell of Hungry Spirits” were printed on page 274 in the April 1932 issue of KaizĎ, alongside the announcement of the winners. 18. The most comprehensive collection of early Japanese-language fiction by Korean writers is Æmura Masuo and Hotei Toshihiro, eds., Kindai ChĎsen bungaku Nihongo sakuhinshĝ, 1901–1938, 8 vols. (Tokyo: Ryokuin ShobĎ, 2004). 19. Ko Youngran goes into detail about the various transcription strategies Chang uses in “GakidĎ” in “Sengo” to iu ideorogü: Kioku, rekishi, bunka (Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten, 2010), chapter 4. 20. “Dai go kai kenshĎ sĎsaku tĎsen happyĎ,” KaizĎ 14, no. 4 (April 1932): 274. 21. The quotes can be found in, respectively, Yasutaka TokuzĎ, “KĎki,” Bungaku kuotarü 1, no. 2 (June 1932): 513; Tokunaga Sunao, “Puroretaria bundan no hitobito,” KĎdĎ 2, no. 12 (December 1934): 200. 22. Chang Hy̡kchu, “Watakushi ni taibĎ suru hitobito e: Tokunaga Sunao-shi ni okuru tegami,” KĎdĎ 3, no. 2 (February 1935): 189. 23. See Nam Bujin, Kindai Nihon to ChĎsenjinzĎ no keisei (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppansha, 2002), for more information on the acrimonious exchanges between Chang and various Korean literary critics on this topic. 24. For more information on Chang’s influence in Taiwan, see Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2003); Wang Huichen, “Shokuminchi sakka no hensĎ: Taiwanjin sakka kara mita ChĎsenjin sakka Chang Hy̡kchu,” in Nihon Taiwan gakkai dai 8-kai Kansai bukai kenkyĝkai (February 2010): 1–19. 25. Lai Minghong, letter to the editor, Bungaku hyĎron 1, no. 9 (November 1934): 37. 26. By an alternative economy of value I am drawing upon the insights provided by Edward Mack in Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). Mack discusses in detail how an alternative economy of value for “pure literature” was produced and maintained by the modern Japanese publishing industry by the 1920s through “differentiation (from, among other things, ‘popular literature’ and thus a market-driven value system) and association (with modernity, the nationstate, and existing literary prestige)” (5). Mack later uses the creation of the Akutagawa Prize to demonstrate his point. He quotes Kawamura Minato, noting that the prize judges often took a special interest in the gaichi, or colonial peripheries: “It would not be an overstatement to say those literary works were running a three-legged race with the period’s social trends and the ideology of national policy” (205). 27. Kikuchi Kan, “Gendaimono no nisaku,” Sandò mainichi 15, no. 38 (August 2, 1936): 9. 28. In the novella, the name of the talkie is given as Maihime to shĝshinka (The dancing girl and susimga). In reality, Korea’s first talkie was Yi My̡ng-u’s 1935 film Ch’unhyang jʵn.

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29. Kim S̡ngmin, HantĎ no geijutsuka-tachi, in Æmura and Hotei, Kindai ChĎsen bungaku, 4:311. The novella was first serialized in Sandò mainichi from August 2 to September 20, 1936. 30. The judges’ comments were printed on page 8 alongside the announcement of winners in the August 2, 1936, edition of Sandò mainichi. Kim S̡ngmin’s response to the judges is printed on the same page. 31. Kim S̡ngmin, “Sakusha shĎkai,” Sandò mainichi 15, no. 38 (August 2, 1936): 8. 32. E. Taylor Atkins, Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 149. 33. Ch̡ng Chins̡k, Han’guk ʵllonsa yʵn’gu, 152. 34. “Y̡s̡ng kwa toks̡,” Yʵsʵng 4, no. 11 (November 1939): 23. 35. Maeil sinbo, January 30, 1938. 36. This did not mean that Japanese language use was no longer problematized. The inconsistencies of Japanese language practice and education would become only more pronounced as Japan attempted to expand its influence to the “Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere” in the 1940s. In Ibuse Masuji’s 1942 novella Hana no machi, which is set in Japan-occupied Singapore, a Japanese educator tries to explain the rules of Japanese orthography to a local principal only to get embroiled in a humorous series of misunderstandings, due in no small part to the educator’s inability to effectively explain the logic behind the rules for marking voiced (dakuon) and semivoiced (handakuon) sounds. Hana no machi was serialized from August to October 1942 in the newspapers TĎkyĎ nichinichi shinbun and Æsaka mainichi shinbun. 37. See, for example, Isaka KeiichirĎ, “Naisen ittai to kokugo shĎrei,” ChĎsen, no. 268 (September 1937): 22–29, and the newspaper article “KĎmin no michi wa kokugo kara,” KeijĎ nippĎ, April 15, 1942. 38. For more analysis on these hierarchies, see Nayoung Aimee Kwon, “Collaboration, Coproduction, and Code-Switching: Colonial Cinema and Postcolonial Authority,” Cross-Currents 5 (December 2012): 9–38. An example of a journal that featured Koreanlanguage writings to the end of the colonial period is Sinsidae (Jp. Shinjidai). While its first issue in January 1941 was published all in Korean, starting in February it featured articles in both Korean and Japanese each month, up through its last issue in February 1945. 39. Ching, Becoming “Japanese,” 95, 96; emphasis in original. 40. Chang Hy̡kchu, “ChĎsen no chishikijin ni utau,” Bungei 7, no. 2 (February 1939): 238. The essay was reprinted in the Korean journal Samch’ʵlli in April 1939. 41. Spring on the Peninsula was recently made available again to the public by the Korea Film Archive (KOFA), which released a DVD of the film in 2005; the film can also be watched for free on KOFA’s official YouTube channel, https://youtu.be/T0MiZnCvb7s. 42. For an extended discussion on the metatextual elements of the film, see Nayoung Aimee Kwon, “Collaboration, Coproduction, and Code-Switching.” Yi Y̡ngjae provides a concise overview on the reorganization of the Korean film industry in the late colonial period in Cheguk Ilbon ˏi Chosʵn yʵnghwa (Seoul: Hy̡nsil Munhwa, 2008), also available in Japanese as Teikoku Nihon no ChĎsen eiga (Tokyo: Sangensha, 2013).

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43. It is difficult to give “average” rates of Japanese fluency in colonial Korea for this reason; the political motivations behind GGK statistical reports and the varying definitions of fluency also contribute to this difficulty. Nevertheless, those interested in a convenient compilation of statistical resources can consult Inoue Kaori, “Nihon tĎchika makki no ChĎsen ni okeru Nihongo fukyĝ, kyĎsei seisaku,” HokkaidĎ daigaku kyĎikugakubu kiyĎ 73 (June 1997): 105–53. 44. “ChĎsen eiga no zenbĎ o kataru,” Eiga hyĎron 1, no. 7 (July 1941): 57. 45. “ChĎsen eiga no tokushusei,” Eiga junpĎ 87 (July 11, 1943): 13. 46. Yi Py̡ng-il, “Y̡lch̡ng ̿i myosa,” Chogwang 7, no. 5 (May 1941): 243. 47. Multiple translations and text adaptations (in both Korean and Japanese) were published during the colonial period. The folktale was also the source for a 1923 silent film by the Japanese director Hayakawa Koshĝ, a 1935 talkie by the Korean director Yi My̡ng-u, and a popular 1938 Japanese-language play produced through a joint collaboration between Murayama Tomoyoshi and Chang Hy̡kchu. Sin Hagy̡ng, “Ilche malgi ‘Chos̡n pum’ kwa singminji y̡nghwain ̿i yokmang,” Asia munhwa yʵn’gu 23 (September 2011): 79–106, argues that Spring on the Peninsula’s film within a film, which is produced in Korea and in the Korean language, can be understood as a critical response to the Murayama-Chang theatrical production, which was poorly received by Korean intellectuals. 48. Travis Workman, “Stepping into the Newsreel: Melodrama and Mobilization in Colonial Korean Film,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 10 (March 2014): 74. Ch̡n Uhy̡ng, in “Singminji k̿ndae ̿i ijung kusok kwa y̡nghwaj̡k p’yosang,” Han’gugʵ munhwa 38 (April 2009): 69–100, makes a thematic link between the silence of the director in the banquet scene and the silence of the director at the end of the film. 49. Theodore Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 59. 50. In a dramatic scene toward the end of the film, Anna and Teiki have a heartfelt conversation in which Anna finally “gives up” her claim to Eiichi. She then exits the room in silence. The camera follows her as she walks down a long hallway, away from the audience. The scene then cuts to a shot of the director, who watches her but then looks down and away—in a way, foreshadowing the end scene in reverse fashion. 51. Kim Puja, Shokuminchiki ChĎsen no kyĎiku to jendæ: Shĝgaku fushĝgaku o meguru kenryoku kankei (Yokohama: Seori ShobĎ, 2005), 62. 52. It must be noted that the final scene of HantĎ no haru is not entirely silent; as the camera zooms in on the director, the background orchestral music swells to a crescendo, charging the entire scene with dramatic significance. (Many thanks to Michael Bourdaghs for this insight.) I “read” the use of the music in this last scene as another reminder of the metadiegetic presence of the author-director and of narrative as a generative form, even in its diegetic silences.

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2. “LET ME IN!”: IMPERIALIZ ATION IN METROPOLITAN JAPAN 1. Judges’ comments were printed on pages 355 to 360 in the March 1938 issue of Bungei shunjĝ. While the journal issue itself came out in March, Hino had already received notice of the results by February. 2. From Shisei sanjĝnenshi (KeijĎ: ChĎsen SĎtokufu, 1940), 803. As Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), points out, Japanese authorities had already begun the debate regarding the possible inclusion of Koreans in the Japanese military months before the official start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, so it is not accurate to call the war the deciding factor in the promulgation of the program. What is notable, however, is the way kĎminka discourse informed propaganda efforts once the decision was made to officially promote the program in both the colonies and the metropole. 3. “HantĎ dĎhĎ no yorokobi,” TĎkyĎ Asahi shinbun, January 16, 1938 (morning edition). It goes without saying that we must keep in mind the various ways such events were consciously staged as media spectacles, for propaganda and mobilization purposes. 4. Details about the legal controversies surrounding Ishikawa’s text can be found in Haruko Taya Cook, “Reporting the ‘Fall of Nankin’ and the Suppression of a Japanese Literary ‘Memory’ of the Nature of a War,” in Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing, ed. Fei Fei Li, Robert Sabella, and David Liu, 121–53 (New York: Routledge, 2002). 5. Gomibuchi Noritsugu, “Pen to heitai: Nicchĝ sensĎ ki senki tekusuto to jĎhĎsen,” in Ken’etsu no teikoku: Bunka no tĎsei to saiseisan, ed. KĎno Kensuke et al. (Tokyo: Shin’yĎsha, 2014), 307. 6. For more information on the role of publishers in censorship and propaganda during this time, see Suzuki Sadami, “Bungei shunjĝ” to Ajia taiheiyĎ sensĎ (Tokyo: Takeda Random House Japan, 2010); Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i, 2006). 7. Kikuchi Kan, “ChĎsen bungaku no kibĎ,” Bungei shunjĝ 2, no. 8 (September 1924): 113–14. 8. Judith Butler, “Competing Universalities,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Ýiĥek (New York: Verso, 2000), 137. 9. For more information on the impact of the enpon boom in the colonies, see Ko Youngran, “Cheguk Ilbon ̿i ch’ulp’ansijang chaep’y̡n kwa midi̡ ibent’̿,” Sai 6 (2009): 113–46. 10. For a comprehensive portrait of Japanese writers and critics who traveled to the colonies, see Karen Laura Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009). 11. Tanizaki Jun’ichirĎ, “ChĎsen zakkan,” in Tanizaki Jun’ichirĎ zenshĝ (Tokyo: ChĝĎ KĎronsha, 1983), 22:61–64. Original publication date unknown. 12. Tanizaki goes so far as to declare that visiting Korea is useful to “the writer or artist who wants to depict a story or historical picture set in the Heian imperial court” (62). For

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13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

more discussion on how Japanese travelers to the colonies framed their experiences through a sense of disconnected nostalgia or familiarity, see Mark Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), particularly chapter 3. From the Shinbunshi shuppanbutsu yĎkĎ (1928) and the ChĎsen shuppan keisatsu gaikan (1934–1940) published by the GGK. It is important to note that the increase in readership in the 1940s is also partially explained by the concomitant suppression of Koreanlanguage publications during this time. However, interpreting the statistics through only the lens of Korean-language suppression does not adequately address the diversification of the readership and the marked turn toward Japanese-language publications. Michael Kim, “From the Age of Heroic Production to the Birth of Korean Literature,” Sai 6 (March 2009): 9–35, argues that “what the wartime consolidation also achieved was the creation of a powerful platform for the industrialization of Korean literature and the formation of a dissemination system that linked the Korean peninsula with the rest of the Japanese Empire” (24). Kikuchi Kan, “Modan Nihon ni tsuite,” Modan Nihon 1, no. 1 (October 1930): 1. Louise Young analyzes the ideology of Tokyo centrism in the interwar period in Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). She points out that the ideology of the metropolis “legitimated and sanctified a set of unequal power relations and geographic disparities that concentrated resources in the capital” (81) at the expense of Japan’s national (and colonial) peripheries. Zan Yuri has written about the overall trajectory of Modan Nihon in “1930 nendai kĎhan ni okeru zasshi Modan Nihon no henshĝ taisei,” Nagoya daigaku kokugo kokubungaku 107 (November 2014): 49–62. “Atarashiki ChĎsen o kataru zadankai,” Modan Nihon 10, no. 12 (November 1939): 90. Highlighting Ma Haesong’s popularity with the Korean immigrant population in the metropole and the heavy use of furigana in the journal issue, Kajii Noboru, “Gendai ChĎsen bungaku e no Nihonjin no taiĎ (2),” Toyama daigaku jinbungakubu kiyĎ 5 (1981): 93–115, argues that Ma expected that the majority of readers would be fellow Koreans eager to read about their homeland. However, considering that other issues of Modan Nihon were also heavily marked with furigana and that the majority of advertisements seem aimed at an adult, married, female consumer, it seems unlikely that the Korean population in Japan would have been the journal’s only imagined readership. This kind of remark can be found in many other journals of the time, in both Korea and Japan. In a roundtable discussion published in the September 1939 issue of Bungakukai, for example, both Murayama Tomoyoshi and ItĎ Sei sheepishly comment that the only ones actually taking steps to realize naisen ittai are Koreans, while most Japanese people remain indifferent at best. In “Tonggy̡ng mundan kwa Ch̡son munhak,” Inmun p’yʵngnon 2, no. 6 (June 1940): 40–41, Im Hwa criticizes Tokyo critics’ superficial interest in Korean writers, identifying their recent attention as entirely a product of the “current situation” (40).

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19. Suzuki Takeo, “ChĎsen no ninshiki,” Modan Nihon 10, no. 12 (November 1939): 170. 20. Moritani Katsumi, “ChĎsen to watashi,” Modan Nihon 10, no. 12 (November 1939): 255. 21. Kikuchi Kan, “ChĎsen geijutsu shĎ settei,” Modan Nihon 10, no. 12 (November 1939): 340. Moriai Takashi, “Ma Haesong to Modan Nihon: Senzen Nihon ni okeru ChĎsen bunka no shĎkai,” TĎhoku daigaku kokusai bunka kenkyĝ 5 (1998): 109–22, argues that because Kikuchi Kan worked with Ma Haesong in conceiving of the prize, Ma’s own desire to provide financial assistance to Korean writers should not be discounted. 22. Kikuchi Kan, “ChĎsenban e no kotoba,” Modan Nihon 10, no. 12 (November 1939): 73. 23. Kikuchi Kan, “ChĎsen geijutsushĎ dai ikkai kettei happyĎ,” Modan Nihon 11, no. 4 (April 1940): 141. Yi Kwangsu works that were published in Modan Nihon include a collection of short stories under the title Kajitsu (1940) and the three-volume long novel Ai (1940–1941). Publication numbers for Modan Nihon from the 1930s and 1940s remain incomplete, in part because its publishing company dissolved in 1951 without publishing a comprehensive shashi (company history) and in part because publishing records from this time are scattered in general. Yearly circulation trends according to category can be found through resources such as the NaimushĎ tĎkei hĎkoku (Nihon Tosho Sentæ) and Zasshi nenkan (KyĎdĎ Shuppansha); partial statistics also exist in records of banned books such as the Zasshi shinbun hakkĎ busĝ jiten (Kanazawa Bunpokaku). 24. Bungei 8, no. 7 (July 1940); Nihon no fĝzoku 4, no. 10 (October 1941); Eiga hyĎron 1, no. 7 (July 1941). Many scholars have since called this publication phenomenon a “Korean boom,” although the term itself has a postwar origin. On the one hand, it is undeniable that the early 1940s witnessed an unprecedented amount of Japanese-language works by Korean writers published in the metropole, as well as a notable number of Korearelated articles written by Japanese writers. On the other hand, using the term can make the publishing phenomenon seem more pervasive than it was; articles on Manchuria, for example, were still more common than articles on Korea. I have therefore avoided using the term in this chapter. 25. Hinatsu EitarĎ, “Naisen ryĎeigakai no kĎryĝ ni tsuite,” Eiga hyĎron 1, no. 7 (July 1941): 49. 26. Yi Kwangsu, “Sinch’ejeha ̿i Chos̡n munhak ̿i chillo,” Samch’olli 12, no. 10 (December 1940): 200. 27. “ChĎsen bungaku ni tsuite no hitotsu no gimon,” ShinchĎ 37, no. 5 (May 1940): 9. 28. Yasutaka TokuzĎ, “Henshĝ kĎki,” Bungei shuto 7, no. 10 (October 1939): 186. 29. Kawabata Yasunari, “Akutagawa Ryĝnosuke shĎ keii,” Bungei shunjĝ 18, vol. 4 (March 1940): 351. Full judging comments run from page 348 to page 355. The judging committee consisted of SatĎ Haruo, Kikuchi Kan, Kume Masao, Yokomitsu Riichi, Uno KĎji, MurĎ Saisei, Kawabata Yasunari, Kojima MasajirĎ, Sasaki Mosaku, and Takii KĎsaku. 30. The Korean version of the name is Hy̡llyong. His name is ambiguous; it is possible that Gen (Hy̡n) is his surname, or that Genryĝ (Hy̡llyong) is his given name. Many scholars have pointed out the parallels between characters in the story and real-life figures; Kim Yunjik and Nam Bujin, for example, have identified Kim Munjip (1907–?) as the model for Genryĝ. It is commonly agreed that the character Æmura was based in

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31.

32.

33.

34.

part on the leading member of Ryokki, Tsuda Tsuyoshi, and that the character Tsunoi is based on Karashima Takeshi, who was the principal of a vocational school in KeijĎ. Bun Sogyoku is said to have been based on the real-life poetess Ro Tenmei (in Korean No Ch’̡nmy̡ng). Kim Saryang, “Tenma,” Bungei shunjĝ 18, no. 9 (June 1940): 364. All quotations are from the original in Bungei shunjĝ. A full English translation of “Tenma” by the author can be found in Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire, ed. Theodore Hughes et al. (Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2013), as well as online at https:// ceas.uchicago.edu /sites/ceas.uchicago.edu /files/uploads/Sibley/Tenma.pdf. For further analysis of the naichi-gaichi issue and an exploration of various racial stereotypes of Koreans by the Japanese, see Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). The binary of Japan-Korea was often expressed as naichi-ChĎsen, as in the phrase naisen ittai. This fact is significant, as it effectively symbolizes the paradox of kĎminka: because naichi has no distinct borders, existing only relationally to and apart from some posited other, the true “merging” of naichi with ChĎsen would have to mean the erasure of naichi as a discursive term entirely. I am indebted to Ted Hughes for this insight. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 7. Hutcheon points out that parody does not necessarily have to have a critical or ridiculing intent. In the case of “Tenma,” however, the critical function of parody comes to the fore when considered against the colonial context of its production and can in this regard be described as a parodic satire. Still, emphasizing the role of parody’s paradox—namely, that “its transgression is always authorized” (26)—may help explain why “Tenma” could be published so readily in Bungei shunjĝ: its transgressions could be safely contained within the genre ghetto of “colonial” literature, leaving the hegemony of “Japanese” literature ultimately untouched. One can see this, for example, in the largely positive reviews contemporary Japanese critics and writers gave “Tenma” when it was first published, including Kitaoka ShirĎ, “Rokugatsu no bundan (bungei jihyĎ),” Wakakusa 16, no. 7 (July 1940): 56, and Kubokawa Ineko, “Sakka no hyĎjĎ,” Bungei shunjĝ 18, no. 10 (July 1940): 361. This is a point that of course did not go unnoticed by Korean women themselves. In a roundtable discussion consisting of four well-known women writers and poets (including No Ch’̡nmy̡ng, the poet many scholars believe served as a loose model for the fictional Bun Sogyoku), the participants agreed that male writers’ portrayals of intellectual women were all too often “superficial” and disappointing, Kim Saryang’s included. See “Y̡ryu munsa ̿i ‘munhak, y̡nghwa’ chwadamhoe” Samch’olli 12, no. 9

(September 1940): 416. 35. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 185; emphasis in original. 36. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 7. 37. Bakhtin, Problems, 18.

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38. When spoken, that is, the syllables slip into the both-and space of ̰̰͐, 와하하. 39. The GGK started building Shinto shrines throughout the peninsula following annexation. In 1935 it began requiring student and government employee attendance at Shinto ceremonies. In KeijĎ in the 1940s, public festivals and parades often culminated in a mass procession to ChĎsen Jingĝ, the official imperial shrine in the city. As Todd A. Henry, Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea: 1910–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), chapters 2 and 5, notes, however, the spectacle of (coerced) mass mobilization was constantly undercut by internal tensions between Japanese expatriates (some of whom wished to endorse the older KeijĎ Jinja, and some of whom rejected affiliation to either shrine) as well as by other class, gender, and ethnic divisions. 40. It should be noted that Kim Hwallan was later branded as a pro-Japanese collaborator by Korean nationalists precisely because of these actions. See Insook Kwon, “Feminists Navigating the Shoals of Nationalism and Collaboration: The Post-Colonial Korean Debate over How to Remember Kim Hwallan,” Frontiers 27, no. 1 (2006): 39–66; Oguma Eiji, “Nihonjin” no kyĎkai: Okinawa, Ainu, Taiwan, ChĎsen shokuminchi shihai kara fukki undĎ made (Tokyo: Shin’yĎsha, 1998), 430–31. 41. Quotation taken from Kim Saryang, “Naichigo no bungaku” (literally, “Literature of the language of the mainland”—that is, Japanese literature), Yomiuri shinbun, February 14, 1941. Kim’s avoidance of the word kokugo in the article is suggestive. 42. Minami JirĎ, “Minami sĎtoku wa kataru,” Modan Nihon 11, no. 9 (August 1940): 51–52. 43. “HantĎ no jogun kĎshin,” Yomiuri shinbun, January 22, 1938 (morning edition). 44. Takashi Fujitani explores the articulations and political formations of this masculinist logic in Race for Empire and in “The Masculinist Bonds of Nation and Empire: The Discourse on Korean ‘Japanese’ Soldiers in the Asia Pacific War,” Senri Ethnological Studies 51 (2000): 133–61. 45. Kikuchi Kan, “Hanashi no kuzukago,” Bungei shunjĝ 18, no. 4 (March 1940): 314. 46. Janet Poole, When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 7. Nayoung Aimee Kwon has also written extensively about metropolitan attempts to categorize Korea as simply another “region” of Japan; see Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), chapter 8.

3. ENVISIONING A LITER ATURE OF THE IMPERIAL NATION 1. See Reto Hofmann, The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015), chapter 5. Kim Chul discusses the intertwining of state, literature, and fascism in colonial and postliberation Korea in “Kungmin” iranˏn noye (Seoul: Samin, 2005). 2. Previously called the Korean League for the National Spirit Mobilization Movement (Kokumin Seishin SĎdĎin ChĎsenren). The reason why a separate organization was

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

formed in Korea, rather than a branch office of the IRAA, is that the GovernmentGeneral of Korea (GGK) wanted to avoid any organization that sounded too “political” in nature. The GGK did not want to encourage political activities among Koreans, who might have taken the opportunity to lobby for change or independence. See Anzako Yuka, “ChĎsen ni okeru sensĎ dĎin seisaku no tenkai,” Kokusai kankeigaku kenkyĝ 21 (March 1995): 1–19 (bessatsu). Miyata Setsuko, ed., SĎdĎin: Bessatsu (Tokyo: Ryokuin Shobō, 1996), 6. Hayashi Fusao, “Kokumin bungaku no kessaku o,” Yomiuri shinbun, August 21, 1940 (evening edition). Hino Ashihei, “Sokoku e hĎshi suru kokoro,” Yomiuri shinbun, August 24, 1940 (evening edition). Sakakiyama Jun, “Kokusaku o michibikidasu bungaku o,” Yomiuri shinbun, August 27, 1940 (evening edition). “ShinchĎ hyĎron: Bungaku no shintaisei,” ShinchĎ 37, no. 11 (November 1940): 2. Asano Akira, “Kokumin bungaku e no michi,” ShinchĎ 37, no. 11 (November 1940): 30. Sakakiyama Jun, “Kokumin bungaku to wa nani ka,” Bungei 8, no. 12 (December 1940): 143. Several Marxists and former Marxists, including Ara Masahito and Odagiri Hideo, publically championed in the early 1940s kokumin bungaku as a politically charged literature, claiming that it offered the possibility of transcending the bourgeois “I” (watakushi) once and for all. For more information, see Sasanuma Toshiaki, “Kokubungaku” no shisĎ: Sono han’ei to shĝen (Tokyo: Gakujutsu Shuppankai, 2006), chapter 6. ItĎ Sei, “Kokumin bungaku no kiso,” Bungei 8, no. 12 (December 1940): 146–49. See Kim Puja, Shokuminchiki ChĎsen no kyĎiku to jendæ: Shĝgaku fushĝgaku o meguru kenryoku kankei (Yokohama: Seori ShobĎ, 2005), 41. Brandon Palmer discusses Koiso’s role in the military mobilization of Korea in detail in Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japan’s War, 1937–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), particularly chapters 2 and 3. Jinbo KĎtarĎ, “DaitĎa bungaku joron,” Bungakukai 11, no. 2 (February 1944): 2–7. Michael Emmerich, The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 232. “ChĎsen bundan no kakushin,” Kokumin bungaku 1, no. 1 (November 1941): 2–3.

16. Yi Hyos̡k, “Nihongo ga sekaigo ni,” in the survey “Watakushi ga kokugo de bungaku o kaku ni tsuite no shinnen,” Ryokki 73 (March 1942): 132. Kim S̡ngmin, the author of “HantĎ no geijutsuka-tachi,” echoed Yi’s sentiments in the same survey. (Kim responded to the survey using his sĎshi kaimei name, Miyahara SĎichi.) Other examples of Korean writers invoking the idea of Japanese(-language) literature as world literature can be found in “Kokugo mondai kaidan” in the January 1943 issue of Kokumin bungaku; “Sinch’ejeha ̿i Chos̡n munhak ̿i chillo” in the December 1940 issue of Samch’olli; and “Tonga kongy̡nggw̡n sinjang kwa kungmin ̿i kago” in the June 1941 issue of Chogwang, among many others. For a detailed analysis of Ch’oe’s conceptualization of kokumin bungaku, see Janet Poole, When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), chapter 5.

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17. Writers such as Han Sik explicitly invoked Goethe when conceptualizing world literature; see, for example, Han’s article “Kungmin munhak ̿i munje” in the January 1941 issue of Inmun p’yʵngnon, which was a journal edited by Ch’oe Chaes̡. These issues of self-translation are particularly relevant considering the role of (Japanese-mediated) translation in the creation of modern Korean literature. 18. For this concept of the world “as world” I am indebted to Deborah Jenson’s essay “Francophone World Literature (Littérature-monde), Cosmopolitanism and Decadence: ‘Citizen of the World’ without the Citizen?” in Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and Littérature-monde, ed. Alec G. Hargreaves, Charles Forsdick, and David Murphy, 15–35 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010). 19. For an extended analysis of the Greater East Asian Writers’ Conference and the production of a Greater East Asian literature, see Ozaki Hotsuki, Kindai bungaku no shĎkon: Kyĝshokuminchi bungakuron (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991), especially chapters 1 and 2. 20. Yi Kwangsu, “SankyĎ inshĎ ki,” Bungakukai 10, no. 1 (January 1943): 68–84. 21. For rigorous deconstructions of the myth of a single stable Japanese canon or uniquely Japanese language, see Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, eds., Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). 22. Although sĎshi kaimei has been described by many scholars as a law that “forced” Koreans to adopt Japanese names, this is a misleading claim. As Mizuno Naoki proves in his illuminating study SĎshi kaimei: Nihon no ChĎsen shihai no naka de (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 2008), the campaign was first and foremost an attempt to revamp the koseki (family registry) system in Korea, which had allowed family members to be listed by clan name. While Koreans were “encouraged” to choose surnames resembling Japanese ones, this was not necessarily the same as choosing a “Japanese” surname. The latter was in fact discouraged by the GGK and local police forces, who wanted to preserve a clear difference between colonizer and colonized. Anxiety over the blurring of categories also explains why sĎshi was mandatory but kaimei was not. 23. Yi Kwangsu, “SankyĎ inshĎ ki,” 76. The term he uses for “world” is the Buddhist word shujĎ, which refers to living things and people and, by extension, the world. 24. Kawakami TetsutarĎ, “DaitĎa Bungakusha Taikai zengo,” Bungakukai 10, no. 1 (January 1943): 56–61. 25. Yet another account of this incident can be found in Hamada Hayao, “Taikai no inshĎ,” published in the December 1944 issue of the Taiwan-based Japanese-language journal Bungei Taiwan. Hamada Hayao was a writer and educator based in Taiwan; he was invited to participate in the conference as part of the Taiwanese contingent. Hamada writes that Kawakami and Kusano spent the evening criticizing Yi so harshly that it brought the man to tears. 26. The use of the title kun connotes a casual, friendly relationship between Kawakami and Yi, but the hierarchy is ambiguous; the title can be used by a friend to another friend or

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27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

by a superior to a subordinate. TĎshĎdaiji is a temple in Nara. Interestingly, the temple is only briefly mentioned in Yi’s account. First publication unknown for both works. Reproduced in Tanaka Hidemitsu zenshĝ (Tokyo: Haga Shoten, 1964–1965), vol. 11. I return to Tanaka Hidemitsu in chapter 5. Kokumin bungaku 4, no. 2 (February 1944): 78–143; Bungei shunjĝ 22, no. 12 (December 1944): 23–63. Unless otherwise noted, page citations refer to the Kokumin bungaku publication. “TĎhan” was also anthologized in Akutagawa shĎ zenshĝ dai 6-kan (Tokyo: Oyama Shoten, 1949). In the author’s postscript, Obi JĝzĎ notes that the story was first published in Kokumin bungaku through the aid of Yamada SeizaburĎ, who at the time was living in Manchuria along with Obi, and Abe IchirĎ, also a friend of Ch’oe Chaes̡’s. Iwakura Masaji (who had previously published a story in Kokumin bungaku) was the one who recommended Obi’s story for the Akutagawa Prize. It is important to keep in mind these personal, elite connections in thinking about the “free” circulation of texts. As my use of the phrase “unity/disunity” suggests, I have benefited enormously from Theodore Hughes’s study on verbal-visual relations in colonial Korea and the insights he provides on war mobilization culture’s appropriation of the verbal-visual slogan. See in particular Theodore Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 52. Niwa Fumio, “Watakushi no kokumin bungaku,” Bungakukai 11, no. 2 (February 1944): 10. Takashi Fujitani, “The Masculinist Bonds of Nation and Empire: The Discourse on Korean ‘Japanese’ Soldiers in the Asia Pacific War,” Senri Ethnological Studies 51 (2000): 149. Chang Hy̡kchu, “ChĎsen bungaku no shinhĎkĎ,” Bungaku hĎkoku, November 10, 1944. Bungaku hĎkoku was the newsletter of the naichi-based Patriotic Association for Japanese Literature. Fujisawa Kanji, “Henshĝ kĎki,” Bungei shunjĝ 22, no. 12 (December 1944): 65. Im Ch̡nhye, “Akutagawa shĎ jushĎsaku ‘TĎhan’ no kaisan ni tsuite,” Kikan sanzenri 1, no. 1 (1975): 177.

35. “Henshĝ kĎki,” Kokumin bungaku 4, no. 2 (February 1944): 144. 36. Yi Ch̡ngnae, “Aikoku kodomo tai,” Bungei 10, no. 1 (January 1942): 50–64. 37. The main character is most often referred to as Akiko, but scattered use of “I” in place of “Akiko” suggests that the story be understood through the first-person point of view of a child who still refers to herself in the third person, as is common in Japan. The use of pronouns is not consistent, however; at times Akiko is referred to as Akiko-san, for example. The sinographs for Akiko could also in theory be read in the Sino-Korean pronunciation My̡ngja, lending further ambiguity to the ethnicity of the characters and locale of the story. 38. Kyeong-hee Choi explores this issue in “Another Layer of the Pro-Japanese Literature: Ch’oe Ch̡nghui’s ‘The Wild Chrysanthemum,’ ” Poetica 52 (1999): 61–87.

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39. The last name would most probably have been read as “Kitazawa.” The first name is more ambiguous; it could have been read either in its Sino-Japanese pronunciation (Teirai) or in its Sino-Korean pronunciation (Ch̡ngnae). 40. “ChĎsen bungaku no shĎrai,” Bungei 10, no. 11 (February 1942): 72–79. 41. Maki Hiroshi, “Kokumin bungaku no shomondai,” Ryokki 7, no. 4 (April 1942): 62–65. 42. Hayashi Fusao, “KinnĎ no kokoro,” Bungakukai 9, no. 10 (October 1942): 27; originally published in 1941 through DaitĎjuku. The symposium took place in July 1942 in Tokyo, and its proceedings were published in Bungakukai in its September and October 1942 issues. 43. Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 12. Mitchell raises the issue of “nondisposable fictions” vis-à-vis historiographies of modernity and colonialism: “It is a question of asking what other histories must be overlooked in order to fit the non-West into the historical time of the West” (11).

4. COMING TO TER MS WITH THE TER MS OF THE PAST 1. Examples of influential English-language monographs on the prewar-postwar continuities and breaks in Japan include John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton, 1999); Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Sharalyn Orbaugh, Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation: Vision, Embodiment, Identity (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 2. Carol Gluck, “The ‘Long Postwar’: Japan and Germany in Common and in Contrast,” in Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan, ed. Ernestine Schlant and J. Thomas Rimer (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1991), 67. 3. The original serialization of Banshĝ heiya is as follows: section 1 in the March 1946 issue of Shin Nihon bungaku; sections 2–5 in Shin Nihon bungaku, April 1946; sections 6–11 in Shin Nihon bungaku, October 1946; sections 16–17 in the January 1947 issue of ChĎryĝ under the name “KokudĎ.” Sections 12–15 would not be published until the complete novel was released in book form by Kawade ShobĎ in April 1947. Banshĝ heiya is included in volume 6 of Miyamoto Yuriko zenshĝ (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1979–1986). 4. Shin Nihon bungaku 1, no. 1 (March 1946): 69. 5. Kim Talsu, “8/15 zengo,” in Kim Talsu hyĎronshĝ (Tokyo: Chikuma ShobĎ, 1976), 2:24. Originally published in Eiga geijutsu 12, no. 9 (August 1964), under the title “ChĎsenjin no baai.” 6. Kim S̡kp̡m and Kim Sijong, Naze kakitsuzukete kita ka, naze chinmoku shite kita ka, ed. Mun Ky̡ngsu (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001), 17. Of course, we can also point to the many Korean-language recollections that were published in both South and North Korea following liberation. While they are too numerous to detail here, the interested reader can

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7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

consult the March 2005 issue of the Review of Korean Studies as a useful starting point, as it contains a number of articles that succinctly introduce issues of Korean historiography regarding August 15. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 5. In this chapter I retain Duara’s distinction between multiple and competing histories versus monolithic History, a purview of the nation-state. Their married life together was short-lived, however, as Miyamoto Kenji was arrested for his Communist activities in 1933 and imprisoned until the end of the war freed him in 1945. Miyamoto Yuriko herself was arrested repeatedly between the years 1932 and 1942, and it is thought that the deteriorating health caused by her incarcerations contributed to her early death in 1951. Miyamoto Yuriko, “Utagoe yo, okore: Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai no yurai,” Shin Nihon bungaku 1, no. 1 (January 1946): 9. “Senden,” Shin Nihon bungaku 1, no. 2 (March 1946): 63. For more information on the rise of leftist literature and politics in the postwar period, see Tomi Suzuki, “Henkaku to renzokusei e no hihyĎ seishin: Kaisetsu,” in SenryĎki zasshi shiryĎ taikei: Bungaku-hen, ed. Yamamoto Taketoshi et al., 2:181–200 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2010); Dower, Embracing Defeat, particularly chapter 7; and J. Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). “ChĎsen no sakka e no aisatsu,” Minshu ChĎsen 1, no. 6 (December 1946): 10. Miyamoto Yuriko, Banshĝ heiya (Tokyo: Kawade ShobĎ, 1947), 9. Miyamoto Yuriko, “Banshĝ heiya,” Shin Nihon bungaku 1, no. 5 (October 1946): 67. E. Taylor Atkins, “The Dual Career of ‘Arirang’: The Korean Resistance Anthem That Became a Japanese Pop Hit,” Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 3 (August 2007): 645–87, describes how “Arirang” was embraced by both Korean nationalists and Japanese colonizers during the colonial period, precisely as assimilation efforts increased. Atkins argues that its “persistent theme of loss spoke to Koreans of their lost sovereignty and to Japanese of the ravaging effects of modernity on traditional lifeways” (645). Atkins also notes that there were (and still are) many different “Arirangs” and that it may be more productive to talk of “Arirang” in terms of a skeletal framework rather than as an “original” song and its variants. Miyamoto Yuriko, “Banshĝ heiya,” Shin Nihon bungaku 1, no. 5 (October 1946): 68. Miyamoto Yuriko, “Utagoe yo, okore,” 2–3. Miyamoto Yuriko, “KokudĎ,” ChĎryĝ 2, no. 1 (January 1947): 171. Haya Mizuki, “Banshĝ heiya ron: HyĎshĎ to shite no ‘ChĎsenjin,’ ” Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kanshĎ 71, no. 4 (April 2006): 158–64. Yi Y̡ngch’̡l has criticized Haya on this issue of choice, emphasizing instead the subjectivity and active political role played by Koreans in Japan. See Yi Y̡ngch’̡l, “Miyamoto Yuriko Banshĝ heiya shiron,” ChĎsen

daigakkĎ gakuhĎ 8 (2008): 179. 19. Kim Saryang has since earned a posthumous reputation as an “anti-Japanese” writer in contemporary North and South Korea, due in large part to his now well-known escape

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20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

from Korea in early 1945 to join the North China Korean Independence League (Hwabuk Chos̡n Tongnip Tongmaeng). After liberation, he made his way back down to Korea from China and became the vice-chairperson for the North Korean literary organization Chos̡n Munhak Yesul Ch’ongdongmaeng (Korean Literature and Arts Federation). Reprinted in Song Kihan and Kim Oegon, eds., Haebang konggan ˏi pip’yʵng munhak (Seoul: T’aehaksa, 1991), 2:164–72. The page numbers cited in this chapter are for this 1991 reprint. For a detailed, incisive discussion of this roundtable talk and the larger suppression of the Japanese language in postliberation Korea, see Serk-Bae Suh, Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Korea and Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), particularly chapter 5. Yi H̿is̿ng, “Ilsang yong-̡ e iss̡s̡ ̿i Ilbonj̡k chanjae,” Sinchonji 2, no. 5 ( June 1947): 60–67. In that essay we can also see how Yi H̿is̿ng’s conceptualization of kugʵ was deeply informed by the kokugo ideology promoted and naturalized by Ueda Kazutoshi and other earlier thinkers, despite his call for a break from Nihongo. This would also be the case for many other treatises generated in the postliberation period, for example with Ch’oe Hy̡nbae’s 1953 work Urimal chonjung ˏi kˏnbon ttˏt. “Sarajiji ann̿n waesaek,” Kyʵnghyang sinmun, January 12, 1947. See, for example, “Urimal es̡ waesaek ̿l ch’̡ngso haja,” Tong-a ilbo, January 9, 1949. Suh, Treacherous Translation, 148. For a concise introduction to the differences in North and South Korean responses and policies toward language standardization and reform, see Ross King, “Language, Politics, and Ideology in the Postwar Koreas,” in Korea Briefing: Toward Reunification, ed. David R. McCann, 109–44 (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997). ChĎren is an abbreviation, in Japanese, of Zai-Nihon ChĎsenjin Renmei; its name in Korean is Chae-Ilbon Chos̡nin Y̡nmaeng. Mindan is the Japanese abbreviation of Zai-Nihon Daikan Minkoku Mindan; the name in Korean is Chae-Ilbon Taehan Min’guk Mindan. ChĎren was established in October 1945 for the primary purposes of aiding repatriation and protecting the political rights of Koreans. David Chapman, Zainichi Korean Identity and Ethnicity (New York: Routledge, 2008), 27, states that technically Mindan was itself the result of a merging of two previous groups, ChĎsen Kenkoku

Sokushin Seinen DĎmei (a splinter group of ChĎren) and Shin ChĎsen Kensetsu DĎmei. When it was first formed, Mindan was called Zai-Nihon ChĎsen Kyoryĝ Mindan, but the reference to “ChĎsen” was dropped in 1948 during an organizational restructuring. It is only after this point that Mindan began to be strongly associated with South Korean affiliation. ChĎren was eventually succeeded by ChĎsen SĎren, the Japanese abbreviation of Zai-Nihon ChĎsenjin SĎrengĎkai (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan); the Korean name is Chae-Ilbon Chos̡nin Ch’ongry̡nhaphoe. 27. Chang Hy̡kchu, “KyĎhaku,” ShinchĎ 50, no. 3 (March 1953): 123–39. Chang’s story was published while the Korean War was still being waged. Chang’s decision to naturalize, and his rejection of Korean partisan politics, was partially influenced by the tragedies he witnessed firsthand while reporting on the war for the Mainichi shinbun. Readers can

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28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

find an extended account of the Korean War in his novel Aa ChĎsen (Tokyo: ShinchĎsha, 1952). See, for example, “ChĎsen dĎhĎ ni tsugu,” Yomiuri shinbun, July 15, 1952; “Chang Hy̡kchu-shi ga kika,” Yomiuri shinbun, October 12, 1952. “Chang Hy̡kchu-shi ga kika,” 3. Chang used a number of different pen names in his life, many of which reflect the difficulties he had in establishing himself as a “Japanese” writer. Born Chang ;njung, Chang used the pen name Chang Hy̡kchu (Sino-Japanese reading ChĎ Kakuchĝ) when he debuted as a writer. During the kĎminka period he began to use the Japanese pen name Noguchi Minoru. After the war, he reverted primarily to Chang Hy̡kchu. When he naturalized as a Japanese citizen in 1952, he changed his name officially to Noguchi Minoru but continued to use his Korean pen name for roughly a year. After that he began to use the hybrid pen name Noguchi Kakuchĝ, but not always; between the years 1954 and 1975 he also wrote under the name Minoru Noguchi, with Minoru set apart in katakana. See Yan Hisuku, “Chang Hy̡kchu sengo chosaku nenpu-kĎ,” Nihon Ajia kenkyĝ 8 (March 2011): 111–20. When Chang debuted as a writer in Japan in 1932, his name was given in sinographs only. An early article about Chang in the Yomiuri shinbun (“Noridashita ChĎ Kakuchĝ-kun,” July 19, 1932) gives the pronunciation of his name as “ChĎ Kakuchĝ.” More common in both Japanese and Korean publications, however, was the practice of giving his name in sinographs with no gloss, leaving open the question of pronunciation. Late in his career, Chang published several books in English under the name Noguchi Kaku Chu, including the book Forlorn Journey (New Delhi: Chansun International, 1991), which suggests that Chang would have wanted his pen name to be read as “Kakuchĝ.” “Kokugo no minshuka,” Yomiuri shinbun, February 18, 1946 (morning edition). For a full list of the language organizations and agencies that sprang up after 1945, see Yasuda Toshiaki, “Kokugo” no kindaishi: Teikoku Nihon to kokugo gakushatachi (Tokyo: ChĝĎ KĎron Shinsha, 2006), chapter 4. Sasanuma Toshiaki, “Kokubungaku” no sengo kĝkan: DaitĎa kyĎeiken kara reisen e (Tokyo: Gakujutsu Shuppankai, 2012), provides a detailed look at how the institutions and ideologies of both kokugo and kokubungaku (national literature) endured with little modification from the prewar to the postwar periods.

34. Shiga Naoya, “Kokugo mondai,” KaizĎ 27, no. 4 (April 1946): 97. 35. Seiji Lippit, “Spaces of Occupation in the Postwar Fiction of Hotta Yoshie,” Journal of Japanese Studies 36, no. 2 (2010): 294. 36. Miyamoto Yuriko, “Yuzurihara Masako-san ni tsuite,” in Miyamoto Yuriko zenshĝ, 7:771. Originally published in MinjĎ tsĝshin 11 (April 1949). 37. Yuzurihara Masako, “ChĎsen yaki,” Shin Nihon bungaku 4, no. 4 (April 1949): 59. 38. Homi Bhabha has famously written about postcolonial hauntings as the return of the disavowed or obscured colonial past; see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). In this chapter I also draw on the insights of Ann Laura Stoler, who offers a postcolonial theory of haunting in relation to affective structures of feeling.

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39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

Stoler notes that haunting “occupies the space between what we cannot see and what we know. It wrestles with elusive, nontransparent power and, not least, with attunement to the unexpected sites and lineaments that such knowledge requires” (“Preface,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006], xiii). Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Northern Lights: The Making and Unmaking of Karafuto,” Journal of Asian Studies 60, no. 3 (August 2001): 665. While it is impossible to provide an exhaustive list here, a number of examples are introduced in Isogai JirĎ, Sengo Nihon bungaku no naka no ChĎsen Kankoku (Tokyo: Daiwa ShobĎ, 1992), and Watanabe Kazutami, “Tasha” to shite no ChĎsen: Bungakuteki kĎsatsu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003). It should also be noted that chaotic publishing conditions prevented many writers from publishing any sustained reflections on the war and its immediate aftermath until late 1945 at the earliest. The “reverse course” refers to a change in U.S. policy toward Japan, in which emphasis was shifted from democratization and social reform to integration into U.S. antiCommunist containment policy, both economically and politically. EtĎ Jun, Tozasareta gengo kĝkan: SenryĎgun no ken’etsu to sengo Nihon (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjĝsha, 1989). Jay Rubin, “From Wholesomeness to Decadence: The Censorship of Literature Under the Allied Occupation,” in Journal of Japanese Studies 11, no. 1 (1985): 101, contests EtĎ’s conclusions, arguing instead that Occupation policies gave Japanese writers an unprecedented amount of freedom in comparison with the pre-1945 censorship system, particularly when it came to depicting the erotic. I borrow this phrase from Oguma Eiji, who thoroughly dismantles the myth of monoethnicity in postwar Japan in his monograph Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen: “Nihonjin” no jigazĎ no keifu (Tokyo: Shin’yĎsha, 1995). An English translation by David Askew has been published as A Genealogy of “Japanese” Self-Images (Melbourne, Aus: Trans Pacific Press, 2002).

5. COLONIAL LEGACIES AND THE DIVIDED “I” IN  OCCUPATION - PERIOD JAPAN 1. The chaotic conditions on the peninsula sometimes led to “reverse” migration back to Japan from Korea during this time. See, for example, John Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Invisible Immigrants: Undocumented Migration and Border Controls in Early Postwar Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 32, no. 1 (2006): 119–53. The zainichi Korean poet Kim Sijong, mentioned in chapter 4, is a famous example of someone who “illegally” fled to Japan in response to the post-1945 chaos in Korea. 2. See, in particular, the article “3.1 undĎ to ChĎsen bungaku” by Son Injang in the March 1947 issue and “Sekaishi-teki jĎsei to ChĎsen” by Hosokawa Karoku in the June 1947 of Minshu ChĎsen for examples of this positioning of Koreans in Japan as important but

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3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

peripheral members of the Korean minzoku, working in tandem with but sharply distinguished from the Japanese. For an insightful analysis of Kim’s relationship with his Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai peers, see Sakasai Akito, “Kim Talsu ‘8/15 igo’ ni okeru ‘ikyĎ’ no kĝkan hyĎshĎ,” Juncture 5 (March 2014): 66–78. Tonomura Masaru, Zainichi ChĎsenjin shakai no rekishigaku-teki kenkyĝ: Keisei, kĎzĎ, hen’yĎ (Tokyo: Ryokuin ShobĎ, 2004), 52. Pak Ky̡ngsik, ChĎsenjin kyĎsei renkĎ no kiroku (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1965); Ueno Chizuko, Nashonarizumu to jendæ (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1998). Examples of terms include zairyĝ ChĎsenjin, naichi zaijĝ hantĎjin, hantĎ dĎhĎ, ChĎsenjin rĎdĎsha, or sometimes simply ChĎsenjin in context. For an important article that outlines the koseki system in both the prewar and postwar periods, see Chikako Kashiwazaki, “The Politics of Legal Status,” in Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, ed. Sonia Ryang, 13–31 (New York: Routledge, 2000). Sonia Ryang, “Introduction,” in Diaspora without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan, ed. Sonia Ryang and John Lie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 4. Tonomura, Zainichi ChĎsenjin, 459. The establishment of Korean schools became a particularly contentious issue between Koreans in Japan and the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) during the infamous “reverse course.” Seeing these schools as potential breeding grounds for pro-Communist and anti-U.S. sentiments, SCAP began trying to forcibly shut down the schools through a number of different measures beginning in 1948. Protests erupted among the Korean population, leading to violent confrontations with local police forces and SCAP authorities. For a recent study that summarizes the history and major issues surrounding Korean education in Japan during the Occupation period, see Choi Safa, “SenryĎki Nihon ni okeru ChĎsenjin gakkĎ,” Waseda seiji kĎhĎ kenkyĝ 108 (April 2015): 1–17.

10. The same newspaper company would also produce Shin sekai shinbun, the Japanese version of Chosʵn sinbo. For more information on the many different newspapers produced during the Occupation period in Japan, see Kobayashi SĎmei, Zainichi ChĎsenjin no media kĝkan: GHQ senryĎki ni okeru shinbun hakkĎ to sono dainamizumu (Tokyo: FĝkyĎsha, 2007). 11. Minshu ChĎsen 1, no. 1 (April 1946): 1. 12. The first issue lists twelve different names in the table of contents, but in actuality the bulk of the content was written by only two people, Kim Talsu and W̡n Yongd̡k, writing under a variety of pseudonyms. The first issue lists Kim W̡ngi as the editor; by the second issue this position was officially given to Kim Talsu. The number of contributors steadily increased with each issue, with the majority of writers affiliated in some way with ChĎren, the Japanese Communist Party, or Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai. The journal tended to have a strong literary bias, perhaps because of Kim Talsu’s involvement as editor; for example, it produced no fewer than three special issues dedicated to literature alone. 13. For an extended discussion on the subjectivity debates in the immediate postwar period, see J. Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago:

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14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

University of Chicago Press, 1996), and Oguma Eiji, “Minshu” to “aikoku”: Sengo Nihon no nashonarizumu to kĎkyĎsei (Tokyo: Shin’yĎsha, 2002). In the August/September 1946 issue of Minshu ChĎsen, this point is driven home by an advertisement by ChĎren, which states in large, bold print, “The happiness of the Japanese people [ jinmin] is the happiness of the Korean people. Our happiness is peace for all humankind” (120). Minshu ChĎsen 1, no. 6 (December 1946): 88. Hirose YĎichi, Kim Talsu to sono jidai: Bungaku, kodaishi, kokka (Tokyo: Kurein, 2016), introduces a number of essays Kim wrote (in both Japanese and Korean) during the immediate postwar period in which he defended Japanese-language literature by Koreans as belonging to “Korean literature.” As is evidenced by the essays collected in Kim Talsu hyĎronshĝ, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Chikuma ShobĎ, 1976), Kim would later insist that he cared less about categorizing Japaneselanguage fiction than with examining the legacies of Japanese imperialism that had produced it in the first place. For example, Kim Talsu confesses in his essay “RĎdĎ to sĎsaku” (analyzed in later sections) that when he first met Kim Saryang, he didn’t know how to read Korean yet. Song Hyewon has also shown how Korean-language journals that were founded in Japan in the immediate postwar period in fact struggled to find writers who could consistently contribute texts in Korean; see Song Hyewon, “Zainichi ChĎsenjin bungakushi” no tame ni: Koe naki koe no porifonü (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2014), especially chapter 2. As reprinted in Kim Talsu hyĎronshĝ. Originally published in Sekai in June 1954. Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 10. Christopher D. Scott, “Invisible Men: The Zainichi Korean Presence in Postwar Japanese Culture” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2006), argues that Kim’s stories often operate as I-novels and anti–I-novels both. Scott writes that Kim’s “ambivalence toward the I-novel reveals the split subjectivity . . . of the zainichi Korean writer struggling to find an authentic voice in the Japanese language” (41). However, because the “authentic voice” of the I-novel was always coded as middle- or upper-class, male, and Japanese, Kim’s appropriation of it could act as a potent criticism of what was considered a “native” literary form. In sinographs: 慹⃱㶛. Bungei shuto puts a space between ⃱ and 㶛, which suggests that

they are treating Kim’s pseudonym as a Japanese name. A space between 慹 and ⃱, however, would result in a name that could be assumed to be Korean in origin. 21. In the reprinting of “Gomi” in Kim Talsu shĎsetsu zenshĝ (Tokyo: Chikuma ShobĎ, 1980), the gloss of Parugiru (the Japanese katakana rendering of P’algil) is added to the character’s name. I have therefore chosen to use “P’algil” in this book. The same goes for the character Minh̿i. However, it must be emphasized that some readers may have pronounced or interpreted the unglossed names in other ways. The zenshĝ glosses P’algil’s last name in katakana as Pyon, but this may be a misprint; in a later version published in a 1996 anthology titled “Gaichi” no Nihongo bungaku sen (volume 3), the gloss has been changed to Hyon.

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22. Kim Talsu, “Gomi,” Bungei shuto 10, no. 2 (March 1942): 41. Hereafter referred to as “Gomi” (1942). 23. Nojiri’s ethnicity is also unstated, but the family name does not exist in Korean. 24. KyĎwakai, or “Harmonization Association,” was a naichi-based network that was guided by the Ministry of Home Affairs before and during the war. Each branch was responsible for monitoring local Koreans and encouraging loyalty to and assimilation into the Japanese empire. 25. “Gomi” (1942): 42. The word Kim uses for “switch” is tenkĎ, which also connotes the ideological conversions taking place during this time. 26. Kim Talsu, “Gomi,” Minshu ChĎsen 2, no. 8 (February 1947): 17. Hereafter referred to as “Gomi” (1947). P’algil’s name remains unglossed in this version. Nojiri’s name, however, is glossed. 27. While there have always been outcast social groups in Japan, during the Edo period the burakumin status became hereditary, tied to occupations (such as butchery and tanning) considered “unclean” according to the Buddhist and Shinto belief systems. Although class distinctions were formally eliminated by the Meiji government in 1871, discrimination against the burakumin has persisted to the present day. 28. See, for example, Lie, Zainichi, 5. 29. “Gomi” (1947): 23. For an extended explanation of the term, see Ken C. Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), particularly chapter 5. 30. Kim Talsu, “Jinkaisei kĎki,” Minshu ChĎsen 2, no. 9 (March/April 1947): 23. 31. Censorship, of course, was one direct manifestation of Occupation authority that the editors and contributors of Minshu ChĎsen had to face on a regular basis. Kobayashi Tomoko, “Minshu ChĎsen no ken’etsu jĎkyĎ,” Kikan seikyĝ 19 (spring 1994): 176–85, notes that although most journals published in Japan were moved to postpublication censorship by the GHQ/SCAP authorities by the end of 1947, Minshu ChĎsen remained subject to prepublication censorship until the very end because of the politically sensitive nature of the journal. While the short stories discussed in this chapter had no visible marks of censorship on the page, it can be argued that an acute awareness of the postwar systems of power was inscribed in the journal and its contents from the very beginning. 32. Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 96. 33. Kim Talsu, “RĎdĎ to sĎsaku,” in Kim Talsu hyĎronshĝ, 1:30. The perceived distinction between Japanese I-novel fiction and European (particularly Russian) fiction, where the former is judged negatively against the latter, was not new to Kim. In 1924 Nakamura Murao compared the “state-of-the-mind novel” (shinkyĎ shōsetsu), in which the author appears to speak directly to the reader, with the third-person “authentic novel” (honkaku shĎsetsu) as represented by Tolstoy, Chekhov, and other Russian writers. Subsequently even critics who disagreed with Nakamura’s conclusions would implicitly or explicitly maintain this distinction between “Japanese” and “European” fiction. See Tomi Suzuki’s analysis in Narrating the Self, 48–65.

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34. I am grateful to Jon Glade for comments that helped me reach this insight. One can also consider the ways that some contemporary Japanese readers found fault with Kim for his perceived distance from the everyday man, even as they had to grapple with their own relation to the masses. In 1947, the Marxist critic Aono Suekichi, in “ChĎsen bungaku ni tsuite,” Minshu ChĎsen 2, no. 11 (June 1947): 19, criticized “Trash” for what he felt was “the influence—by no means desirable—of contemporary Japanese literature” on the work, which could be seen as a product of Kim’s intimate familiarity with Japanese literary conventions and styles. 35. The influential critic Kawamura Minato (Umaretara soko ga furusato: Zainichi ChĎsenjin bungakuron [Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1999]), for example, places Kim squarely within the I-novel tradition.

6. COLL ABOR ATION, WARTIME RESPONSIBILIT Y, AND COLONIAL MEMORY 1. Contemporary use of the word ChĎsenjin (Korean person) in Japan can (but does not always) indicate Koreans who align themselves with North Korea. Many zainichi Koreans, such as Kim, have also chosen to keep the ChĎsenjin designation as a protest against the division of the peninsula. 2. Kim S̡kp̡m, “ ‘Shinnichi’ ni tsuite,” in TenkĎ to shinnichiha, 3–144 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993). Parts of the essay were originally serially published in Sekai from June 1992 through February 1993 under the title “Kokoku e no toi.” In this chapter, I make use of the Iwanami Shoten version. 3. The debate on pro-Japanese collaboration was jump-started again in 1966 with the publication of Im Chongguk, Ch’inil munhak non (Seoul: P’y̡nghwa Ch’ulp’ansa, 1966). The date of the book’s publication, coming a year after the signing of the normalization treaty with Japan in 1965, was not a coincidence; part of Im’s goal in reigniting the debate on collaboration was to shine a spotlight on the contemporary politicians and institutional systems that had benefited from the silence or historical amnesia surrounding collaboration up to that point. 4. The title Yoidorebune refers to “Le bateau ivre” (Drunken boat), a hundred-line poem by Arthur Rimbaud written in 1871. Ro Tenshin, the heroine of Yoidorebune, is said to have written a poem in Korean with the same title as Rimbaud’s during her school days. See Tanaka Hidemitsu, Yoidorebune, in Tanaka Hidemitsu zenshĝ (Tokyo: Haga Shoten, 1964–1965), 2:269. Subsequent citations of Yoidorebune are to that included in volume 2 of Tanaka Hidemitsu zenshĝ. 5. Hwang Sunw̡n, K’ain ˏi huye (Seoul: Chungang Munhwasa, 1954). Page numbers refer to the English translation by Suh Ji-moon and Julie Pickering published under the title The Descendants of Cain (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997). 6. For a concise explanation of the uneven effects of Japanese colonial rule and subsequent impact on post-1945 collaboration debates, see Jae-Jung Suh, “Truth and Reconciliation

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7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

in South Korea: Confronting War, Colonialism, and Intervention in the Asia Pacific,” Critical Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (November 2010): 503–24. Koen De Ceuster, “The Nation Exorcised: The Historiography of Collaboration in South Korea,” Korean Studies 25, no. 2 (2001): 210–11. USAMGIK was the South Korean counterpart to the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) in Japan; it operated from September 1945 to August 1948, after which control was ceded to the First Republic of South Korea with Syngman Rhee as the first president. See also Yi Kangsu, Panmin t’ˏgwi yʵn’gu (Seoul: Nanam Ch’ulp’an, 2003). De Ceuster, “The Nation Exorcised,” 212. Charles K. Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 75. For an extended discussion, see Charles K. Armstrong, “Surveillance and Punishment in Postliberation North Korea,” positions 3, no. 3 (winter 1995): 695–722. Yi Kwangsu, “Na ̿i kobaek,” in Yi Kwangsu chʵnjip (Seoul: Samjungdang, 1968), 13:267. Kim S̡kp̡m, “ ‘Shinnichi’ ni tsuite,” 80. I am indebted to Theodore Hughes for this insight into the affective connotations of belonging embedded in the term shinnichi/ch’in’il. The term also opens up the question of degree and relation in a way that the English word “collaboration” does not, as it defines collaboration through a quality of closeness in both act and identity. Michael D. Shin, “Yi Kwangsu: The Collaborator as Modernist against Modernity,” Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 1 (February 2012): 115–20, notes that the singling out of Yi Kwangsu as a paradigmatic pro-Japanese collaborator after 1945 can be explained in part by the public’s affective identification with Yi, which in turn transformed into a national trauma. For more on the ways the figure of collaboration is produced through inversion, see Theodore Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), chapter 5. In his article on Korean collaboration with the Japanese during the late colonial period, John Whittier Treat, “Choosing to Collaborate: Yi Kwang-su and the Moral Subject in Colonial Korea,” Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 1 (February 2012): 88, notes that such collaborations produced a body of work that “strove in tandem for cognates Japanese kindai and Korean kˏndae ‘modern’: a goal that became politically and catastrophically collaborationist when that word was metonymically exchanged (this time in the Japanese language alone) for the racialist category of Nihonjin.” This idea of betrayal can be found in Kim S̡kp̡m, “ ‘Shinnichi’ ni tsuite,” 92, where Kim outlines Yi’s “path to pro-Japanese collaboration and betrayal of the Korean people.” The 1948 Anti-Traitor Law lists these kinds of activities in detail. The full document can be accessed at http://www.law.go.kr/lsInfoP.do?lsiSeq=3399#0000. Quoted in Takemae Eiji, Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy, trans. Robert Ricketts and Sebastian Swann (New York: Continuum, 2002), 452. Utsumi Aiko, ChĎsenjin BC kyĝ senpan no kiroku (Tokyo: KeisĎ ShobĎ, 1982). Tamura TaijirĎ, “Nikutai ga ningen de aru,” in Nihon kindai bungaku hyĎron sen: ShĎwa hen, ed. Chiba Shunji et al., 365–72 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2004); originally

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

published in the May 1947 issue of GunzĎ. As Douglas Slaymaker, The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2004), 44, points out, however, Tamura “roots that freedom from the body in the (male) body,” making the gendered carnality of his female characters a problematic issue. Tamura, “Nikutai,” 370. Tamura TaijirĎ’s “Shunpuden” (1947) is a notable example of an Occupation-period story featuring Korean women (that is, in the original, uncensored version; the final published version coded the ethnicity of certain characters more obliquely and changed the ethnicity of others to Japanese in order to win the approval of the Occupation censors). H. Eleanor Kerkham, “Pleading for the Body: Tamura TaijirĎ’s 1947 Korean Comfort Woman Story, Biography of a Prostitute,” in War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia, 1920–1960, ed. Marlene J. Mayo, J. Thomas Rimer, and H. Eleanor Kerkham (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2001), 333, makes the following cogent point about the function of Koreans in Tamura’s text: “As concerned as Tamura personally may have been over the fates of young Korean women forced by foreign occupation and by war into situations of true human horror, their condition is mere background. He foregrounds his narrator’s mind, which frequently moves from the real circumstances of the lives of the Korean ianfu, into an exploration of what we can only call the nikutai theory.” The DaitĎa Bungakusha Kaigi is based on the DaitĎa Bungakusha Taikai (Greater East Asian Writers’ Conference), a pan-Asian conference meant to promote and fit into Japan’s imperial visions of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Although the conference convened for the first time in November 1942, Tanaka changes the date in Yoidorebune to September 1943. Aohitokusa Renmei (literally, “green human grass”) is a fictional organization that closely resembles the real-life Ryokki. Tanaka, Yoidorebune, 254. Only the first chapter of Yoidorebune was published during Tanaka’s life (in the November 1948 issue of SĎgĎ bunka); the full novel was published posthumously by Oyama Shoten in December 1949. Biographical information taken from “Tanaka Hidemitsu nenpu,” in Tanaka Hidemitsu zenshĝ, vol. 11. Dazai’s influence on Tanaka was profound. Tanaka thought of Dazai as a literary mentor, inspiration, and friend, and it was Dazai’s literary connections that gave him a foothold in the Tokyo publishing industry. Today, Tanaka is more often remembered for the sensational details of his death rather than for his fiction: in November 1949, filled with sleeping pills and alcohol, Tanaka committed suicide at Dazai’s grave. “Yoidorebune batsu,” in Tanaka Hidemitsu zenshĝ, 9:411. Kim Talsu, “TaiheiyĎ sensĎka no ChĎsen bungaku,” Bungaku 28, no. 8 (August 1961): 82. Shunsuke Tsurumi, “The Korea Within Japan,” in An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, 1931–1945 (New York: Routledge, 1986), 58. The lectures were given from 1979 to 1980 and later published in Japan in Japanese by Iwanami Shoten in 1982. In the English-language book version, Tsurumi translates tenkĎ as “a conversion which occurs under the pressure of state power” (12). He emphasizes the specific history of the term by linking it to the political conditions of interwar and wartime Japan, when leftist politi-

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27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

cians, writers, and sympathizers were made to recant their Marxist convictions in support of the imperial state. Kawamura Minato, “Yoidorebune” no seishun: MĎ hitotsu no senchĝ, sengo (Tokyo: KĎdansha, 1986). See, for example, Nam Bujin, Kindai bungaku no “ChĎsen” taiken (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppansha, 2001); Nagumo Satoru, Tanaka Hidemitsu hyĎden: Burai to muku to (Tokyo: RonsĎsha, 2006); and Ch’u S̡kmin, “ ‘Tenma’ to Yoidorebune no hikaku kĎsatsu: Sakamoto KĎkichi to Tanaka Hidemitsu o chĝshin ni,” Higashi Ajia Nihongo kyĎiku, Nihon bunka kenkyĝ 2 (March 2000): 337–58. Tanaka, Yoidorebune, 229. The narrator also often uses phrases such as sono koro (at that time; see pages 231, 237, and 338), sengo (postwar; see page 338), and haisen (war defeat; see page 338) to temporally bracket the events of the story. Satoru Saito, Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 13. Allan Hepburn, Intrigue: Espionage and Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), xiv. Tanaka, Yoidorebune, 297. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1992), 226. In her book, Bronfen draws upon psychoanalytic theory and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s articulation of women as privileged commodities in systems of exchange that are “both socio-economic and semiotic” (225) in order to demonstrate how female bodies—and in particular, dead ones—operate as aesthetic and textual tropes in nineteenth-century Western literature and art. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 2; emphasis in original. One might consider, for example, how the name James Bond works as an identifier of both the spy and the spy genre itself (“a James Bond novel”), and how Ian Fleming’s novels often employ third-person limited to give the reader an intimate look into the workings of James Bond’s mind. Saito, Detective Fiction, 273. This conclusion raises another issue: the postwar fate of KĎkichi, who would presumably have been repatriated back to Japan following Korea’s liberation. In reality, the author Tanaka Hidemitsu was drafted by the military multiple times from 1937 to 1940 and was living free in Japan when the war ended; he would therefore not have been considered a “repatriate.” In his seminal book Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen (Tokyo: KĎdansha, 1980), Karatani KĎjin describes the “discovery of interiority” as profoundly mediated through genbun itchi and the confessional mode; see particularly chapters 2 and 3. As mentioned in chapter 2, Karashima Takeshi was a scholar of Chinese literature who taught at KeijĎ Imperial University. Tsuda Katashi (1906–1990) also taught at KeijĎ Imperial University and was the chief editor of Ryokki. Karashima Takeshi is said to

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41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

have been the model for Professor Karashima in Yoidorebune and Tsunoi in “Tenma.” Tsuda Katashi is said to have been the model for Tsuda JirĎ in Yoidorebune and Æmura in “Tenma.” See, for example, Kim Yunsik, Han-Il munhak ˏi kwallyʵn yangsang (Seoul: Ilchisa, 1974), and Ch’u, “ ‘Tenma’ to Yoidorebune.” Nam Bujin, in Kindai bungaku, 65, argues for the “Tamura TaijirĎ model” theory; Yokote Kazuhiko, in commentary for “Zainichi” bungaku zenshĝ 11, ed. Isogai JirĎ and Kuroko Kazuo (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppansha, 2006), assumes that “Tanaka” is meant to be Hayashi Fusao. Kim Hy̡ngs̡p, “Tanaka Hidemitsu no ChĎsen kankei shĎsetsu kĎsatsu,” Irʵ ilmunhak 36 (November 2007): 203–23, argues for the necessity of moving away from model theories. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man in the Crowd,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 396; first published in 1840; emphasis in original. Of course, we can find criticisms against such male-centered narratives made by women writers themselves during the colonial period and thereafter. In a roundtable discussion published in Samch’ʵlli in September 1940, for instance, the novelist Ch’oe Ch̡ngh̿i criticized Kim Saryang for his “superficial” portrayal of Bun Sogyoku in “Tenma”; see “Y̡ryu siin kwa sos̡lga ̿i ‘munhak, y̡nghwa’ r̿l mal han̿n chwadamhoe,” Samch’ʵlli 12, no. 9 (September 1940): 184. In this regard I follow the call of Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, who has argued that the diverse range of so-called kĎmin literature “force[s] us to recognize the futility of attempts to contain the complexly interactive nature of any literary tradition, cultural heritage, or personal life within a teleologically conceived narrative” (“Beyond Cultural and National Identities: Current Re-evaluation of the Kominka Literature from Taiwan’s Japanese Period,” in Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory, ed. Rey Chow [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000], 120).

EPILOGUE 1. See, for example, Usui Yoshimi, “TenbĎ,” TenbĎ 1, no. 6 (June 1946): 67. While Usui wrote that he felt “horrified” (ritsuzen) at Shiga’s proposal, he agreed that radical language reform was necessary in order to ensure Japan’s postwar survival. 2. Most notably the essays of Maruyama Masao, a political scientist who claimed that Japan’s “incomplete” modernity had prevented the formation of the authentically autonomous subject. For more information, see Oguma Eiji, “Minshu” to “aikoku”: Sengo Nihon no nashonarizumu to kĎkyĎsei (Tokyo: Shin’yĎsha, 2002). 3. Shiga Naoya, “Kokugo mondai,” KaizĎ 27, no. 4 (April 1946): 97. 4. For a valuable English-language resource on the literary influences and interactions between postwar Japan and France, see Douglas Slaymaker, ed., Confluences: Postwar Japan and France (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002).

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5. For more on these intersections, see Ukai Satoshi, “Koroniarizumu to modaniti,” in Tenkanki no bungaku, ed. Mishima Ken’ichi and Kinoshita Yasumitsu, 206–26 (Tokyo: Mineruva ShobĎ, 1999). An English translation by Lewis E. Harrington titled “Colonialism and Modernity” can be found in Contemporary Japanese Thought, ed. Richard F. Calichman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 6. Although there are many ways to romanize his name, Ri Kaisei has indicated that he prefers the Sino-Japanese romanization Ri Kaisei; see Melissa Wender, Lamentation as History: Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965–2000 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 220. 7. After Japan’s defeat, Koreans on Karafuto were recategorized as non-Japanese. Because the 1946 repatriation agreement between the Soviet and Japanese governments targeted only former naichijin settlers, Koreans were put in political limbo, a situation that effectively resulted in exile status for more than forty years (permission for Koreans to return to South Korea was finally granted in 1986). See Yulia Din, “Dreams of Returning to the Homeland: Koreans in Karafuto and Sakhalin,” in Voices from the Shifting Russo-Japanese Border: Karafuto/Sakhalin, ed. Svetlana Paichadze and Philip A. Seaton, 177–94 (New York: Routledge, 2015). Some Koreans were able to “pass” as Japanese and get themselves repatriated to Japan. In his long travel account Saharin e no tabi (Tokyo: KĎdansha, 1983), 352–53, Ri Kaisei recalls that his father had been able to get the family onto one of the repatriation boats through a Japanese passport (a memory that was later challenged by Ri’s brother, who claimed that they had been able to leave because of the kindness of a Soviet administrator). The account was originally published in thirteen installments in GunzĎ from January 1982 to January 1983. 8. Ri Kaisei, “ShĎnin no inai kĎkei,” Bungakukai 24, no. 5 (May 1970): 84. 9. Kawamura Minato, Umaretara soko ga furusato: Zainichi ChĎsenjin bungakuron (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1999), 139. 10. Ri, “ShĎnin,” 111. The phrase used by Ri is the idiomatic expression hotoke tsukutte tamashii irezu, which literally means “making a Buddha but without putting in the soul” (that is, creating something but neglecting to include its most vital element). 11. Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), 138. 12. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 5, shows how these vectors necessarily exist “in and through relation with each other—if in contradictory and conflictual ways” (emphasis in original). More recently, Song Hyewon, “Zainichi ChĎsenjin bungakushi” no tame ni: Koe naki koe no porifonü (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2014), argues that we should widen our definition of zainichi literature to include Korean-language as well as Japanese-language texts, as doing so allows us to hear the voices of marginalized women who had limited access to the Japanese language, or who wished to reclaim the mother part of “mother tongue” (bogo). While I am mindful of the need to consider zainichi literary production as produced between and with the Korean and Japanese languages, this monograph is not a study of “zainichi literature” per se but an examination of the

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13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

linguistic practices and ideologies that inform literary categories. The Japanese language should be understood as a frame of reference in this context, and not a dividing line. Brett de Bary, “Morisaki Kazue’s ‘Two Languages, Two Souls’: Language, Communicability, and the National Subject,” in Deconstructing Nationality, ed. Naoki Sakai, Brett de Bary, and Iyotani Toshio (Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2005), 246. Morisaki Kazue, “Futatsu no kotoba, futatsu no kokoro: HĎkan suketchi ni yosete,” HenkyĎ 1 (June 1970): 131. In the version reprinted in the collection Futatsu no kotoba, futatsu no kokoro: Aru shokumin nisei no sengo (Tokyo: Chikuma ShobĎ, 1995), Morisaki changes all the given names to letters (Mr. A, Mr. B, etc.). Adding to this linguistic conundrum is the fact that he must also contend with the irreconcilability of ChĎsengo (the language of ChĎsen, a nation that no longer exists on the map) and Kankokugo (the language of Kankoku, a post-1945 designation that points to the South Korean state). In the essay, Morisaki writes omoni in katakana. If romanized from the Korean, it is ʵmʵni. Oguma Eiji, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen: “Nihonjin” no jigazĎ no keifu (Tokyo: Shin’yĎsha, 1995). It is not a coincidence that this was also the period when so-called Nihonjinron (theories of the Japanese) discourse took hold in the public imagination, fueled by best sellers such as Nakane Chie’s Tate shakai no ningen kankei (1967) and Doi Takeo’s “Amae” no kĎzĎ (1971). It was not until 1981 that legislation was passed in Japan extending permanent resident status to all former colonial subjects still living in Japan. A new residency status called special permanent resident (tokubetsu eijĝsha) was introduced in 1991, giving wider rights and more unified protection to former colonial subjects. Mun Ky̡ngsu, “Zainichi ChĎsenjin,” in Sekai minzoku mondai jiten, ed. Umesao Tadao (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1995), 457. ChĎsen (in Korean, Chos̡n) was the name used for the Korean kingdom between 1392 and 1897. Korea was renamed the Korean Empire (Taehan Cheguk) in 1897, but upon Japanese annexation in 1910 the peninsula was renamed once again as Chos̡n. In 1948, the South adopted the name Republic of Korea (Taehan Min’guk) and the North, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (Chos̡n Minjuju̿i Inmin Konghwaguk). Quoted in Sonia Ryang, ed., Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin (New York: Routledge, 2000), 6. See Chikako Kashiwazaki, “The Politics of Legal Status,” ibid., 28. The twenty-first century has seen an intensification if anything of the battle over minority rights and just social representation. The tremendous wave of “newcomer” immigrants from Latin America and Southeast Asia, as well as South Korea, has brought with it the demand for more sustained, dedicated, and long-term policies on issues ranging from Japanese as a Second Language instruction to national pension plans to school bullying, but it

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23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

remains to be seen if the national government’s current response of relegating responsibility to municipalities will be an effective or adequate one. Ri Kaisei, “JushĎ no kotoba,” Bungei shunjĝ 50, no. 3 (March 1972): 319. The judges’ comments run from pages 312 to 317. Furui Yoshikichi, “Hyakkaime wa,” Bungei shunjĝ 67, no. 3 (March 1989): 437. The judges’ comments run from pages 432 to 437. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 18. Yi Yangji used zainichi ChĎsenjin in the essays “Watashi wa ChĎsenjin” (Kangaeru kĎkĎsei no hon, 1977) and “Sanjo no ritsudĎ no naka e” (Sanzenri, 1979), among others. This is not to suggest that we can draw a neat line between race and ethnicity in Japan. There were many terms used to anthropologically differentiate between various groups of people in Japan starting from the Meiji period, including jinshu (race), kokumin (citizen, national subject), shuzoku (tribe, race), and minzoku (people, ethnic nation, ethnos). While some scholars have defined jinshu through biological determinants such as consanguinity and minzoku through social determinants, by the 1930s the latter word had considerable overlap with the former. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 32, points out, minzoku was a concept that “allowed a convenient blurring between the cultural and genetic aspects of ethnicity, while emphasizing the organic unity of the Japanese people.” Others have shown how Korean difference was racialized in Japanese media during the colonial period and after; a recent monograph is Todd A. Henry, Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 2; first published in French in 1952. Kim S̡kp̡m, “Gengo to jiyĝ: Nihongo de kaku to iu koto,” in Kotoba no jubaku: “Zainichi ChĎsenjin bungaku” to Nihongo (Tokyo: Chikuma ShobĎ, 1972), 84.

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198

INDEX

Abe IchirĎ, 171n28 Aikoku kodomo tai. See “Patriotic Children’s Squad” (Aikoku kodomo tai) (Yi Ch̡ngnae) Akita Ujaku, 56 Akutagawa Prize: “Ascent” (Obi JĝzĎ), 59, 65, 171n28; “A Tale of Excrement and Urine” (Hino Ashihei), 24; colonial and peripheries interest, 45, 161n26; first winner, 25; founding of, 27; “Into the Light” (Kim Saryang), xxviii, 35, 45, 166n29; “Northern Conflict” (Yuzurihara Masako), 88; “The Woman Who Fulled Clothes” (Ri Kaisei), 143, 149–50; Yuhi (Yi Yangji), xxiv, 149, 150 Alien Registration Law (1947), xxiii, 77 Althusser, Louis, 134–35 Anti-Traitor Law (1948), 122, 181n16 An’ya kĎro (A Dark Night’s Passing) (Shiga Naoya), 6 Aono Suekichi, 180n34 “Appeal to Korean Intellectuals, An” (ChĎsen no chishikijin ni utau) (Chang Hy̡kchu), 15

Ara Masahito, 169n9 “Arirang” (Korean folk song), 78–79, 173n14 Artists of the Peninsula, The (HantĎ no geijutsuka-tachi) (Kim S̡ngmin), 9–11; on colonialism, 10–11; film adaptation, 15, 16, 18–21, 22–23; introduction, xxviii; Japanese hegemony in, 11; judges’ comments, 9, 11, 162n30; Kim S̡ngmin on, 11; on Korean film industry, 10, 19; metropole context, 9–10; publication history, 162n29; synopsis, 10–11. See also Spring on the Peninsula (HantĎ no haru) (film) Asano Akira, 50 “Ascent” (TĎhan) (Obi JĝzĎ), 59–66; critics on, 64–65; edits prior to Japanese publication, 65–66; framing by Japanese editor, 65; framing by Korean editor, 66; homosocial bond, 62, 64; introduction, xxviii, 49; names in, 61; publication history, 59, 171n28; relationship between colonizer and colonized, 62–64, 66, 80; synopsis, 59–60; verbal-visual disjunction, 60–61 Atkins, E. Taylor, 11, 173n14

INDEX

Bahktin, Mikhail, 40–41 Banshĝ Plain, The (Banshĝ heiya) (Miyamoto Yuriko), 77–81; as I-novel, 103; introduction, xxix; Korean differentiation, 80–81; Koreans as foil to Japanese, 77–78, 80, 91–92, 111; on Koreans unable to leave Japan, 81; postwar Japan focus, 72–73, 77; publication history, 72, 172n3; revision to highlight inward Japanese focus, 77; translation in, 78–79 Bary, Brett de, 146 “Before and After 8/15” (8/15 zengo) (Kim Talsu), 73 “Before and After the Greater East Asian Writers’ Conference” (DaitĎa Bungakusha Taikai zengo) (Kawakami TetsutarĎ), 57 Bhabha, Homi, 175n38 bifurcated histories, 74–75 Bond, James, 183n36 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 183n34 Bungakukai (journal), 27, 54–55, 56, 58, 165n18 Bungei (journal), 32, 50, 67, 69–70 Bungei shunjĝ (journal), 27, 30, 35, 59, 65–66, 99, 149 Bungei shuto (journal), 35, 104 Bungei Taiwan (journal), 170n25 buraku, 110 burakumin status, 110, 179n27 Butler, Judith, 27 chaeil tongp’o (compatriots residing in Japan), 158n20 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, xxvii Chang Hy̡kchu: on “Ascent” (Obi), 64–65; audience and value as writer, 12; condemnation as collaborator, 83; critics on, 7–8, 12, 138; “Hell of Hungry Spirits” (GakidĎ), 6–8, 161n17; introduction, xvii, xxvii, xxix; Japanese naturalization, 86, 174n27; on Korean literature, 65, 69–70;

in Modan Nihon, 30; pen names, 175n30; play on The Tale of Ch’unhyang, 163n47; reputation and self-perception, 8; support for kĎminka, 15. See also “Intimidation” (KyĎhaku) (Chang Hy̡kchu) Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne, 184n45 Chapman, David, 174n26 Chiba Prize for Popular Art, 9 Ching, Leo, 4, 14, 114 ch’inilp’a (pro-Japanese), xxx, 123, 124 Ch’oe Chaes̡, 53, 54, 171n28 Ch’oe Ch̡ngh̿i, 184n44 Ch̡n Uhy̡ng, 20, 163n48 Ch̡ng Ins̡p, 33 ChĎren (League of Koreans in Japan), 83–84, 99, 174n26, 178n14 ChĎsen bungaku no kibĎ (“Hopes for Korean Literature”) (Kikuchi Kan), 27–28 ChĎsen bungaku no shinhĎkĎ (“The New Direction of Korean Literature”) (Chang Hy̡kchu), 65 ChĎsen no chishikijin ni utau (“An Appeal to Korean Intellectuals”) (Chang Hy̡kchu), 15 ChĎsen yaki. See “Korean Lynching” (Yuzurihara Masako) ChĎsen zakkan (“Miscellaneous Impressions of Korea”) (Tanizaki Jun’ichirĎ), 28–29 ChĎsenjin (Korean person), 118, 149, 180n1 Chosʵn minju sinmun (journal), 99 Chosʵn sinbo (journal), 99 ChĝĎ kĎron (journal), 25 citizenship and residency rights, xxiii, 77, 86, 98, 117, 149, 186n18 Clark, Katerina, 40 collaboration, pro-Japanese: basis for designation, 124; Chang Hy̡kchu condemned for, 83; gendered approach to, 140; Im Chongguk on, 180n3;

200

INDEX

introduction, xxx, 119, 140; Kim S̡kp̡m on, 118, 123–24; lack of definition consensus, 121; perceived responsibilities of collaborators vs. colonizers, 124–25; repercussions and rehabilitation, 118–19, 121–22; terminology for, 123, 124, 181n13; Treat on, 181n14; Yi Kwangsu condemned for, 122–23, 181n13, 181n15 colonialism, 34, 151 colonialism, Japanese: acquisition of colonies, xx; annexation rhetoric, 156n11; colonial subjects in war effort, 50–51; cultural producers’ visits to colonies, 28–29, 164n12; Japanese language and, 151; postwar inclusion of former colonial subjects, 76; postwar reflection on, 100; right to cross colonial borders, 23; use of term, 158n22; war responsibility discourse and, 126. See also kĎminka (imperialization) ideology; Korea comfort women, 97 DaitĎa Bungakusha Taikai (Greater East Asian Writers’ Conference), 54–55, 58–59, 182n21 DaitĎa Bungakusha Taikai zengo (“Before and After the Greater East Asian Writers’ Conference”) (Kawakami TetsutarĎ), 57 “Dancing Girl, The” (Maihime) (Mori Ægai), xvii Dark Night’s Passing, A (An’ya kĎro) (Shiga Naoya), 6 Dazai Osamu, 126, 128, 182n23 Descendants of Cain (K’ain ˏi huye) (Hwang Sunw̡n), 120–21 detective novel, 132–33, 137 dialogism, 40–41 dĎka (assimilation), 14 Drunken Boat, The (Yoidorebune) (Tanaka Hidemitsu), 127–39; on collaboration innocence and guilt, 137, 138; on

confession, 137, 138; critics on, 128–29, 138; decadence and collaboration/ wartime guilt responsibilities, 131–32, 133–34; detective novel references, 132; disruption of colonial order, 130–31; gendering of collaboration, 140; gendering of Korean and Japanese categories, 134–35, 135–36; I-novel and, 137–38; interpretation of, 129–30; introduction, xxx, 120, 126–27; kĎminka reconceptualization in, 135; parallels with “Pegasus” (Kim Saryang), 139; possible real life models, 139, 183n40; postwar fate of protagonist, 183n38; publication history, 182n22; reader’s interpretive task, 137–38; synopsis, 127; Tanaka’s notes on plot, 128, 139; temporal bracketing, 183n30; title reference, 180n4 Duara, Prasenjit, 74, 173n7 education: in colonial Korea, xxi, 3, 23, 51, 157n12; Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), 3; kokugo (national language) component, 3–4; Korean schools in Japan, 177n9; practices between Japan and colonies, 159n7 Eiga hyĎron (journal), 33 8/15 zengo (“Before and After 8/15”) (Kim Talsu), 73 ethnic nationalism, 83 EtĎ Jun, 93, 176n42 Fanon, Frantz, 151 Fifteen-Year War, 155n1. See also Pacific War; Second Sino-Japanese War film industry, Korean, 10, 16, 17–18, 19, 22, 161n28 Fleming, Ian, 183n36 “Flesh Is Human” (Nikutai ga ningen de aru) (Tamura TaijirĎ), 126 Flock of Poor People, A (Mazushiki hitobito no mure) (Miyamoto Yuriko), 75

201

INDEX

France, xv, 142 Fujisawa Kanji, 65 Funahashi Seiichi, 150 FunnyĎtan (“A Tale of Excrement and Urine”) (Hino Ashihei), 24, 26, 164n1 Futatsu no kotoba, futatsu no kokoro: HĎkan suketchi ni yosete (“Two Languages, Two Hearts: Sketches of My Visit to South Korea”) (Morisaki Kazue), 146–48 gaikokujin (foreigner), 150 GakidĎ (“Hell of Hungry Spirits”) (Chang Hy̡kchu), 6–8, 161n17 Geibun (journal), 59 gender: collaboration and, 140; in kĎminka ideology, 23, 40, 42; Koreans and Japanese categories and, 134–35, 135–36; Korean school enrollment, 23. See also women Germany, xx, 48 Girard, René, 136 Gluck, Carol, 72 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 53, 170n17 Gomi. See “Trash” (Kim Talsu) Gomibuchi Noritsugu, 26 Greater East Asian Writers’ Conference (DaitĎa Bungakusha Taikai), 54–55, 58–59, 182n21 “GyĎja” (Yi Kwangsu), 158n21 Hamada Hayao, 170n25 Han Sik, 5, 30, 170n17 Hana no machi (Ibuse Masuji), 162n36 Hanscom, Christopher P., 160n13 HantĎ no geijutsuka-tachi. See Artists of the Peninsula, The (Kim S̡ngmin) HantĎ no haru. See Spring on the Peninsula (HantĎ no haru) (film) Hasegawa Nyozekan, 125 Haya Mizuki, 81, 173n18 Hayashi Fusao, 48–49, 56, 71, 139

“Hell of Hungry Spirits” (GakidĎ) (Chang Hy̡kchu), 6–8, 161n17 Hepburn, Allan, 133 Hikari no naka ni (“Into the Light”) (Kim Saryang), 35, 166n29 hikiagesha (Japanese returnees), 88, 92, 146 Hill, Christopher L., 156n9 Hinatsu EitarĎ (H̡ Y̡ng), 33 Hino Ashihei, 24, 25–26, 29, 45, 49, 164n1 H̡ Y̡ng (Hinatsu EitarĎ), 33 Holquist, Michael, 40 homosocial desire, male, 64, 136 “Hopes for Korean Literature” (ChĎsen bungaku no kibĎ) (Kikuchi Kan), 27–28 Hotta Yoshie, 88 “How One Korean Became Conscious of Literature” (Ichi ChĎsenjin, watakushi no bungaku jikaku) (Kim Talsu), 102 Hughes, Theodore, 22, 167n32, 171n29, 181n13 Hutcheon, Linda, 167n33 Hwang Sunw̡n, 120–21 Ibuse Masuji: Hana no machi, 162n36 Ichi ChĎsenjin, watakushi no bungaku jikaku (“How One Korean Became Conscious of Literature”) (Kim Talsu), 102 Ikite iru heitai (Living Soldiers) (Ishikawa TatsuzĎ), 25, 26 Ilsang yong-̡ e iss̡s̡ ̿i Ilbonj̡k chanjae (“Japanese Vestiges in Daily Speech”) (Yi H̿is̿ng), 82 Im Chongguk, 180n3 Im Ch̡nhye, 66, 159n3 Im Hwa, 5, 82, 165n18 imperialization. See kĎminka (imperialization) ideology Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), 3 Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA, Taisei Yokusankai), 48 Inoue Yasushi, 149–50

202

INDEX

I-novel: explanation of, 103, 137; history/ fiction distinction and, 129; Kim Saryang and, 35; Kim Talsu and, 102–3, 115, 116, 117, 178n19, 179n33, 180n35; Miyamoto Yuriko and, 103; vs. Russian literature, 116, 179n33 “Intimidation” (KyĎhaku) (Chang Hy̡kchu), 83–86; introduction, xxix, 83; on kĎminka contradiction, 93; on national language dilemma for Koreans, 83–85; publication history, 83, 174n27; synopsis, 83; on transcending ethnic and national divisions, 85–86, 87 “Into the Light” (Hikari no naka ni) (Kim Saryang), 35, 166n29 Irvine, Judith, xvii Ishikawa TatsuzĎ, 25–26, 29, 45 ItĎ Sei, 50, 165n18 Iwakura Masaji, 171n28 Japan: appeal of France for, 142; citizenship and residency rights, xxiii, 77, 86, 98, 117, 149, 186n18; competing definitions, 94; homogeneous nation myth, 77, 94, 148–49; minority rights and just social representation, 186n22; race and ethnicity, 187n26; terms for “Japanese,” 14. See also colonialism, Japanese; kokugo (national language); kokumin bungaku (national literature); kĎminka (imperialization) ideology; Koreans, in Japan; language, Japanese; metropole, Japanese; Occupation period; zainichi Japanese Communist Party, xxix, 5, 96 Japanese-language literature (Nihongo bungaku): approach to, xvi, xvii–xviii, xxiv, xxvii, 151–52; Chang Hy̡kchu on, 65, 69–70; early years, 5; increase in Korean readership, 29, 165n13; Kikuchi Kan on, 12, 27–28; Kim Talsu on, 116, 178n15; kĎminka impact on, 2; number of, 159n3; relationship with metropole, 6,

8–9, 12, 34; terminology debate, 152, 155n3; use and origins of term, xvi–xvii. See also kĎmin literature; Koreanlanguage literature; zainichi literature Japanese Nationality Law (1950), 98 “Japanese Vestiges in Daily Speech” (Ilsang yong-̡ e iss̡s̡ ̿i Ilbonj̡k chanjae) (Yi H̿is̿ng), 82 Japanophone literature, 155n3. See also Japanese-language literature Jinbo KĎtarĎ, 51–52, 54 Kaebang sinmun (journal), 99 K’ain ˏi huye (Descendants of Cain) (Hwang Sunw̡n), 120–21 KaizĎ (journal), 6–7, 8 Kajii Noboru, 165n17 Kannani (Yuasa Katsue), 4, 159n9 Karafuto (south Sakhalin), 88, 143, 185n7 Karashima Takeshi, 58, 139, 166n30, 183n40 Karatani KĎjin, 183n39 Kawabata Yasunari, 35, 166n29 Kawakami TetsutarĎ, 56, 57, 58, 170n25 Kawamura Minato, 129, 138, 145, 161n26, 180n35 Keirin (journal), 96 Kerkham, H. Eleanor, 182n20 Kikuchi Kan: influence on Kim Talsu, 102; introduction, xxviii, 26–27; on Kim S̡ngmin, 9; Korean Arts Prize, 32, 166n21; on Korean involvement in Japanese literature, 12, 27–28; on Samukawa KĎtarĎ, 45; visits to Korea, 28 Kim Haegy̡ng (Yi Sang), xxv, xxvi, 158n19 Kim Hwallan (Helen Kim), 42, 168n40 Kim Hy̡ngs̡p, 184n42 Kim Ilsung, 122 Kim Kijin, 5 Kim, Michael, 165n13 Kim Munjip, 139, 166n30

203

INDEX

Kim Saryang: Akutagawa Prize and, xxviii, 35, 45, 166n29; “anti-Japanese” posthumous reputation, 173n19; defense of Japanese-language writings, 43–44, 81–82; gaikokujin (foreigner) term and, 150; “Into the Light” (Hikari no naka ni), 35, 166n29; introduction, xxviii, 34–35; in Modan Nihon, 30, 35. See also “Pegasus” (Tenma) (Kim Saryang) Kim Sijong, 73–74, 176n1 Kim S̡kp̡m: ChĎsenjin (Korean person) usage, 180n1; on collaborators, 118; criticism of Yi Kwangsu for collaboration, 122, 123–24, 181n15; introduction, 119; on Japanese language, 151; on Japanese-language literature, xvi Kim S̡ngmin, xxvii, 9, 11, 12, 15, 169n16. See also Artists of the Peninsula, The (HantĎ no geijutsuka-tachi) (Kim S̡ngmin); Spring on the Peninsula (HantĎ no haru) (film) Kim Talsu: acknowledgment of Korean experience in Japan, 117; on The Drunken Boat (Tanaka), 128; on inability to read Korean, 178n16; I-novel and, 102–3, 115, 116, 117, 178n19, 179n33, 180n35; introduction, xvii, xxix, 95–96; on Japanese-language literature, 101, 116, 178n15; on Japanese surrender in Pacific War, 73; literary influences, 116; Minshu ChĎsen and, 96, 177n12; scholarship on, 96. See also “Trash” (Gomi) (Kim Talsu) Kim W̡ngi, 177n12 Kindai bungaku (journal), 99 Kobayashi Hideo, 24, 56, 158n21 Kobayashi Tomoko, 179n31 Koiso Kuniaki, 51 Kojima MasajirĎ, 166n29 kokugo (national language) ideology: codification of Japanese language and, 156n8; contradictions in and ethnic distinctions, 2, 4–5, 47, 143; in education

policy, 3–4; impact on divergent voices, 23; imperialization through, 2, 13–14; incorporation of Japanese into Korea, 65; introduction, xxviii; Korean adaptation as kugʵ, 81, 117, 174n21; vs.Nihongo (Japanese language), xx–xxi; postwar changes to, 86–87; promotion in Korea, 159n2; Shiga’s proposal and, 141; Ueda on, 3. See also kĎminka (imperialization) ideology Kokugo mondai (“National Language Issues”) (Shiga Naoya), xv–xvi, xviii, xxx, 141–43 Kokumin bungaku (journal), 49, 52–53, 59, 66, 69 kokumin bungaku (national literature): definition, 49–50; introduction, xxviii, 48; Japanese writers in Korea and, 59; Jinbo on, 51–52; linguistic and ethnic hierarchy in, 53, 58–59; Marxist support for, 169n9; place of colonial literature in, 51–53, 54, 69–70, 71; term origins, 48 kokutai (national polity), xix, 3 kĎminka (imperialization) ideology: colonial nature of, 22, 45–46, 71; vs. dĎka (assimilation), 14; ethnic equality promise, 14–15; gender in, 23, 40, 42; imperial subject goal, 1–2, 13, 34, 124; introduction, xxvii–xxviii; Japanese identity issues and, 14, 15, 167n32; in Korean film industry, 17–18; Korean military volunteer program, 24–25, 44–45, 164n2; Korean particularity and, 33–34; literary canonization and, xxvi–xxvii; literary impact, 2, 5–6, 29; “Naisen ittai” slogan, 34; national language policies, 3–5, 13–14; paradox of, 167n32; “Pegasus” (Kim Saryang) on, 35–36, 36–38, 41; postwar reconceptualization, 120, 135; promotion in Korea, xxi–xxii, 159n2; in Spring on the

204

INDEX

Peninsula (film), 16. See also kokugo (national language) ideology kĎmin literature, 184n45. See also Japaneselanguage literature Konoe Fumimaro, 48, 51 Korea: annexation, xx; colonial education policy, xxi, 3, 23, 51, 157n12; cultural industry and consumption, xxii, 11–12, 28, 165n13; film industry, 10, 16, 17–18, 19, 22, 161n28; imperialization through national language, 13–14, 21–22; Japanese cultural producers on, 28–29, 164n12; Japanese fluency rates, 163n43; Japanese name adoption, xxi, 170n22; kĎminka (imperialization) promotion, xxi–xxii, 159n2; language, 186n15; liberation space (haebang konggan), xxiii; as literary subject, 26; military volunteer program, 24–25, 44–45, 164n2; names for, 186n20; national language debate, 81–83; in New Order discourse, 49; postwar literature fragmentation, xxiii; postwar partition, xxii, 76–77; Shinto in, 168n39; strategic importance for Japan, 1; war mobilization, 51. See also collaboration, pro-Japanese; Koreans, in Japan; North Korea; South Korea; zainichi Korean Arts Prize (ChĎsen Geijutsu ShĎ), 32, 166n21 Korean-language literature: availability in wartime period, 54; periodicals in Japan, 99, 178n16; postwar division between North and South, xxiii; suppression of, xxii, xxvii, 2, 160n14, 165n13. See also Japanese-language literature Korean League for Concerted National Power (Kokumin SĎryoku ChĎsen Renmei), 48, 68–69, 168n2 Korean League for the National Spirit Mobilization Movement (Kokumin Seishin SĎdĎin ChĎsenren), 42

“Korean Lynching” (ChĎsen yaki) (Yuzurihara Masako), 88–92; introduction, xxix, 88–89; on knowledge, 90; on kĎminka contradiction, 93; on postwar Japanese experience, 90–92; publication history, 88; synopsis, 89–90; temporal framing, 89 Koreans, in Japan: buraku term and, 110; citizenship and residency rights, xxiii, 77, 86, 98, 117, 149, 186n18; complexity of experience, 117; immigration history, 97–98; impact of Korean partition on, 83; inability to leave Japan, 81; in Karafuto, 185n7; Korean education, 177n9; repatriation to Korea, 95, 98; reverse migration back to Japan, 176n1; terms for pre-1945 population, 98; U.S. Occupation views of, 125. See also zainichi Korean War, 117, 118–19, 174n27 kugʵ (Korean national language), 81, 117, 174n21 Kume Masao, 56, 166n29 Kurahara Korehito, 75 Kuroi Senji, 150 Kusano Shinpei, 57, 170n25 KyĎhaku. See “Intimidation” (Chang Hy̡kchu) KyĎwakai (Harmonization Association), 179n24 “Labor and Writing” (RĎdĎ to sĎsaku) (Kim Talsu), 116, 178n16 Lai Minghong, 8 language: colonization by, 117; German national language debate, xx; Korean, 186n15; Korean national language debate, 81–83; nation-state and national languages, 156n9; as subjective, xxvi language, Japanese: codification, 156n8; colonialism reflected in, 151; complexity of access to, 146, 147, 148; Kim S̡kp̡m

205

INDEX

language, Japanese (Cont.) on, 151; Korean fluency rates, 163n43; national language proposals, xv–xvi, xviii–xx, 141–43, 184n1; naturalization and language rights, 85–86; postwar changes to, 86–87; problems from inconsistencies in, 162n36; unifying nature of, 74. See also kokugo (national language) ideology language ideology, xvii–xviii Lee Yeounsuk, 156n8 liberation space (haebang konggan), xxix Lippit, Seiji, 87–88 literature: alternative economy of value, 161n26; canonization, xviii, xxvi–xxvii, 149–51; censorship during Occupation period, 93, 176n42, 179n31; detective novel, 132–33, 137; inspiration from colonies, 28–29, 164n12; “Korean boom” phenomenon, 166n24; Korean commodification and markets, 28, 29, 32–33, 45; literary form, xviii; literary prizes, 12; military’s relationship’s with, 26; postwar fiction, 93–94, 126, 176n40; postwar periodicals, 99; role of elite connections, 171n28; scholarship on colonial literature, xxiii–xxiv; spy novel, 133, 137; superficial interest in Korean writers, 33, 165n18. See also I-novel; Japanese-language literature; kokumin bungaku (national literature); Koreanlanguage literature; zainichi literature Living Soldiers (Ikite iru heitai) (Ishikawa TatsuzĎ), 25, 26 Lu Heruo, 8 Mack, Edward, 161n26 Maeil sinbo (newspaper), 13 Ma Haesong, 30, 31, 165n17, 166n21 Maihime (“The Dancing Girl”) (Mori Ægai), xvii Maki Hiroshi (Yi S̡khun), 70

Manchuria (Manchukuo), 1, 7, 26 Manchurian Incident, xxvii, 1, 2, 5, 21, 30 “Man of the Crowd, The” (Poe), 139–40 Maruyama Masao, 184n2 Marxism, 76, 100, 169n9 Mazushiki hitobito no mure (A Flock of Poor People) (Miyamoto Yuriko), 75 McClintock, Anne, 185n12 metropole, Japanese: commodification of colonies by, 28, 32–33, 45; cultural producers’ interest in colonies, 27–29; impact of ideology on peripheries, 165n15; Korean Arts Prize, 32; Korean skepticism in metropole interest, 33; Modan Nihon’s colonial focus, 29–31, 32; relationship of colonial writers with, 6, 8–9, 12, 34; responsibility of for colonies, 31–32 military: Ishikawa’s depictions of, 25; Korean volunteer program, 24–25, 44–45, 164n2; literature’s relationship with, 26. See also Pacific War; Second SinoJapanese War Mills, Charles, 151 Minami JirĎ, 30, 51, 159n2 Mindan (Korean Residents Union in Japan), 83, 174n26 minority rights, 186n22 Minshu ChĎsen (journal), 96–97, 99–101, 115, 177n12, 178n14, 179n31 minzoku (people, ethnos), 70, 96, 187n26 “Miscellaneous Impressions of Korea” (ChĎsen zakkan) (Tanizaki Jun’ichirĎ), 28–29 Mitarai Tatsuo, 30 Mitchell, Timothy, 71, 172n43 Miyamoto Kenji, 75, 173n8 Miyamoto Yuriko: A Flock of Poor People (Mazushiki hitobito no mure), 75; I-novel and, 103; introduction, xxix; life, 75, 173n8; Nobuko, 6; Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai and, 75, 76; on Yuzurihara, 88. See

206

INDEX

also Banshĝ Plain, The (Banshĝ heiya) (Miyamoto Yuriko) Mizuno Naoki, 170n22 Modan Nihon (magazine), 27, 29–32, 35, 165n17, 166n23 Mori Arinori, xviii–xix, 156n7 Mori Ægai: “The Dancing Girl” (Maihime), xvii Moriai Takashi, 166n21 Morisaki Kazue, 146–48 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, 92, 187n26 Mugi to heitai (Wheat and Soldiers) (Hino Ashihei), 25–26 Mumyʵng (The Unenlightened) (Yi Kwangsu), 32, 35 Murayama Tomoyoshi, 30, 163n47, 165n18 MurĎ Saisei, 166n29 “My Confession” (Na ̿i kobaek) (Yi Kwangsu), xxx, 120, 123–24, 138

Nihonjinron (theories of the Japanese) discourse, 186n17 Nihon no fĝzoku (journal), 33 Nikutai ga ningen de aru (“Flesh Is Human”) (Tamura TaijirĎ), 126 Ningen (journal), 99, 125 Nishi Masahiko, xvii No Ch’̡nmy̡ng (Ro Tenmei), 139, 140, 166n30, 167n34 Nobuko (Miyamoto Yuriko), 6 “Northern Conflict” (Sakuhoku no tatakai) (Yuzurihara Masako), 88 North Korea: Hwang Sunw̡n and, 120; identification with and Japanese residency, xxiii, 149; land reforms and legal system, 122; Minshu ChĎsen alignment with, 96, 99; name, 186n20; treatment of collaborators, 122. See also Korea

Na ̿i kobaek (“My Confession”) (Yi Kwangsu), xxx, 120, 123–24, 138 Nagumo Satoru, 129 naisen ittai (mainland Japan and Korea as one body): contradictions in, 36–37, 64; interpretations of, 15, 19, 34; lack of Japanese interest in, 165n18; realization of, 62–63, 66 Nakamura Murao, 179n33 Nakano Shigeharu, 75 Nam Bujin, 129, 184n42 nationalism, ethnic, 83 national language. See kokugo ideology; language “National Language Issues” (Kokugo mondai) (Shiga Naoya), xv–xvi, xviii, xxx, 141–43 “New Direction of Korean Literature, The” (ChĎsen bungaku no shinhĎkĎ) (Chang Hy̡kchu), 65 New Order Movement (Shintaisei UndĎ), 48–49, 51

Obi JĝzĎ, xvii, xxviii, 59, 65, 150. See also “Ascent” (TĎhan) (Obi JĝzĎ) Occupation period: censorship during, 93, 176n42, 179n31; introduction, xxii–xxiii, xxix, 72; Japanese identity reconfiguration, 143; Japanese language changes, 86–87; Japanese returnees, 88, 92, 146; Korean schools in Japan, 177n9; literature during, 75, 76, 93–94, 126; other repatriated Japanese subjects, 88; reflection on colonial past, 100; “reverse course” policy change, 93, 176n41; territorial redistribution, xxii; war responsibility discourse, 125–26 Oda Sakunosuke, 126 Odagiri Hideo, 101, 125, 169n9 Oguma Eiji, 148–49, 176n43 Ækuma Nobuyuki, 125–26 “On ‘Pro-Japanese Collaboration’” (“Shinnichi” ni tsuite) (Kim S̡kp̡m), 118, 122, 123, 180n2, 181n15 Æoka ShĎhei, 150

207

INDEX

Osaragi JirĎ, 9 Overcoming Modernity (Kindai no ChĎkoku) symposium, 71

proletarian arts movement, 2, 5–6, 8, 76, 96, 160n15 publisher’s forum (shuppan konwakai), 26

Pacific War: postwar territorial redistribution, xxii, 76–77, 145–46; reactions to Japanese surrender, 72–74; use of term, 89, 155n1. See also military; Occupation period; Second SinoJapanese War Pak Ch’un-g̿m, 45 Pak Ky̡ngsik, 97 Pak Y̡ngh̿i, 58 parody, 167n33 “Patriotic Children’s Squad” (Aikoku kodomo tai) (Yi Ch̡ngnae), 67–71; colonial factors in publication, 68–69, 70–71; homogenize Japanese quality, 68; introduction, xxviii, 49; point of view, 171n37; publication history, 67; synopsis, 67; on women and children, 67 “Pegasus” (Tenma) (Kim Saryang), 35–43; Bun Sogyoku’s (female) role, 39, 42–43, 44, 140, 184n44; critical reception, 167n33, 184n44; dialogism and, 40–41; ending, 42–43; on exile, 41–42; gender in conceptualization of Koreans, 40, 42; on imperialism’s effect, 36–39, 41, 43, 44; introduction, xxviii, 35–36; laughter in, 41; parallels with The Drunken Boat (Tanaka), 139; parody in, 39, 167n33; possible real life models, 139, 166n30, 183n40; purpose of fiction/nonfiction doubling, 139 Perry, Samuel, 160n15 Poe, Edgar Allan, 132, 139–40 Poole, Janet, 45 postcolonial: use of term, 158n22 postcolonial hauntings, 175n38 postwar period: use of term, 158n22. See also Occupation period Pratt, Mary Louise, 34

race, 14, 187n26 “Record of My Impression of Three Capitals” (SankyĎ inshĎ ki) (Yi Kwangsu), 55–59; audience question for Korean Japanese-language writers, 56; distinctions between colonial Koreans and Japanese, 56–57, 58–59; Hamada Hayao’s account, 170n25; introduction, xxviii, 54–55; Kawakami TetsutarĎ’s account, 57–58; synopsis, 55–56 residency rights. See citizenship and residency rights resistance, xxv, 124, 135. See also collaboration, pro-Japanese returnees, Japanese (hikiagesha), 88, 92, 146 Rhee, Syngman, 118, 119, 122 Ri Kaisei: background and career, 143–44; ethnic terms used to describe, 149–50, 151; repatriation from Karafuto, 143–44, 185n7; “Scene without a Witness” (ShĎnin no inai kĎkei), 144–46; spelling of name, 185n6; “The Woman Who Fulled Clothes,” 143, 149–50 RĎdĎ to sĎsaku (“Labor and Writing”) (Kim Talsu), 116, 178n16 Ro Tenmei (No Ch’̡nmy̡ng), 139, 140, 166n30, 167n34 Rubin, Jay, 176n42 Russian literature, 116, 179n33 Ryang, Sonia, 98 Saito, Satoru, 133, 137 Sakaguchi Ango, 126 Sakakiyama Jun, 49, 50 Sakhalin. See Karafuto (south Sakhalin) Sakuhoku no tatakai (“Northern Conflict”) (Yuzurihara Masako), 88

208

INDEX

Samukawa KĎtarĎ, 45 Sandò mainichi (magazine), 9, 27, 162n29 San Francisco Peace Treaty, 86, 98, 116–17 SankyĎ inshĎ ki. See “Record of My Impression of Three Capitals” (SankyĎ inshĎ ki) (Yi Kwangsu) Sasaki Mosaku, 166n29 SatĎ Haruo, 35, 166n29 “Scene without a Witness” (ShĎnin no inai kĎkei) (Ri Kaisei), 144–46 Scott, Christopher D., 178n19 Second Sino-Japanese War, xxi, 1, 13, 97, 155n1. See also Pacific War Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 136 sensĎ sekinin (war responsibility), xxx, 119, 124–26, 137 Shidehara Taira, 4, 159n7 Shiga Naoya: A Dark Night’s Passing (An’ya kĎro), 6; influence on Kim Talsu, 102, 116; I-novels of, 103; on Japan’s national language, xv–xvi, xviii, xxx, 87, 141–43, 148; Yuhi (Yi Yangji) and, 150 Shin, Michael D., 181n13 Shin Nihon bungaku (journal), 72, 99, 125 Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai (Society for New Japanese Literature), xxix, 75–76, 96 Shin sekai shinbun (newspaper), 177n10 ShinchĎ (journal), 33, 50, 99 “Shinnichi” ni tsuite (“On ‘Pro-Japanese Collaboration’ ”) (Kim S̡kp̡m), 118, 122, 123, 180n2, 181n15 Shinsei (journal), 99 Shinto, 168n39 Shiobara TokisaburĎ, 30 ShĎnin no inai kĎkei (“Scene without a Witness”) (Ri Kaisei), 144–46 “Shunpuden” (Tamura TaijirĎ), 182n20 Sinsidae (journal), 162n38 Slaymaker, Douglas, 181n19 Song Hyewon, 178n16, 185n12 sĎshi kaimei (Japanese name adoption), xxi, 170n22

South Korea: Japanese relations, 149; name, 186n20; treatment of collaborators, 118–19, 122; U.S. postwar rule, 121, 181n7. See also Korea Spring on the Peninsula (HantĎ no haru) (film), 18–21; changes from original text, 16; current availability, 162n41; folktale within, 18, 163n47; introduction, xxviii, 15; kĎminka focus, 15, 16, 18; last scene, 20, 22, 23, 163n52; mistress’s portrayal, 22–23, 163n50; music in, 163n52; on naisen ittai, 19–20; opening scene, 18; production, 16, 18; self-referential staging of Korean ethnicity, 18–19, 20–21; silence in, 20, 163n48. See also Artists of the Peninsula, The (HantĎ no geijutsuka-tachi) (Kim S̡ngmin) spy novel, 133, 137 Stoler, Ann Laura, 175n38 subjectivity (shutaisei), 100–101 Suh, Serk-Bae, 82–83 Suzuki Takeo, 31 Suzuki, Tomi, 103 Taiwan, xx, 28, 52, 58 Takashi Fujitani, 64, 164n2 Takii KĎsaku, 166n29 Takubo Hideo, 150 Tale of Ch’unhyang, The (folktale), 18, 163n47 “Tale of Excrement and Urine, A” (FunnyĎtan) (Hino Ashihei), 24, 26, 164n1 Tamura TaijirĎ, 126, 139, 181n19, 182n20 Tanaka Hidemitsu, 59, 69, 120, 127–28, 182n23, 183n38. See also Drunken Boat, The (Yoidorebune) (Tanaka Hidemitsu) Tanizaki Jun’ichirĎ, 28–29, 56, 164n12 tenkĎ (ideological conversion), 128, 182n26 Tenma. See “Pegasus” (Kim Saryang) Terada Akira, 58 TĎhan. See “Ascent” (Obi JĝzĎ) TĎjĎ Hideki, 51

209

INDEX

Tokieda Motoki, 159n2 Tokunaga Sunao, 8, 75 “Trash” (Gomi) (Kim Talsu), 103–16; 1942 version, 104–9; 1947 version, 109–12; “aigo” phrase meaning, 108–9, 110–11, 115; capitalist logic for disenfranchised, 106–7; on collaborators, 113; critics on, 180n34; diverse readings in, 107–8, 109; divisions revealed by, 115–16; as I-novel, 115; introduction, xxix, 103–4; on Korean Japanese-language literature, 116; language and names issues, 104–5, 106, 178n21; positioning of narrator, 112–13; positioning of protagonist, 110; pseudonym published under, 178n20; publication history, 104, 109; on relationship between Japanese and Korean, 107–8, 111–12; “return home” ambiguity, 108, 114–15; synopsis, 105–6, 109–10, 111; “Trash Barge Postscript,” 112–15; violence in, 111; “work hard” ambiguity, 108 Treat, John Whittier, 181n14 Tripartite Pact, 48 Tsuda Katashi, 139, 183n40 Tsuda Tsuyoshi, 166n30 Tsurumi Shunsuke, 128, 182n26 “Two Languages, Two Hearts: Sketches of My Visit to South Korea” (Futatsu no kotoba, futatsu no kokoro: HĎkan suketchi ni yosete) (Morisaki Kazue), 146–48 Ueda Kazutoshi (Ueda Mannen), xix–xx, 3, 47, 143, 150 Ueno Chizuko, 97 Unenlightened, The (Mumyʵng) (Yi Kwangsu), 32, 35 United States of America: South Korea postwar rule, 121, 181n7. See also Occupation period Uno KĎji, 166n29

Uri sinmun (journal), 99 Usui Yoshimi, 184n1 Wanpaoshan Incident (1931), 158n1 war responsibility (sensĎ sekinin), xxx, 119, 124–26, 137 Watt, Lori, 145–46 Wheat and Soldiers (Mugi to heitai) (Hino Ashihei), 25–26 Williams, Raymond, xviii “Woman Who Fulled Clothes, The” (Ri Kaisei), 143, 149–50 women: in colonizer-colonized relationship, 147–48; homosocial desire and, 64, 136; in Korean military volunteer program, 44–45; male portrayals of intellectual women, 167n34, 184n44; in nineteenthcentury Western literature and art, 183n34; in “Shunpuden” (Tamura TaijirĎ), 182n20. See also gender W̡n Yongd̡k, 177n12 Workman, Travis, 20, 155n3 Yamada SeizaburĎ, 171n28 Yamamoto Sanehiko, 28 Yanaihara Tadao, 125, 161n17 Yasutaka TokuzĎ, 7, 28, 30, 35 Yi Ch̡ngnae, xxviii, 68–69. See also “Patriotic Children’s Squad” (Aikoku kodomo tai) (Yi Ch̡ngnae) Yi H̿is̿ng, 82, 174n21 Yi Hyos̡k, 30, 53 Yi Kwangsu: condemnation as collaborator, 118, 122–23, 181n13, 181n15; criticism of Japanese literary interest in Korea, 33; “GyĎja,” 158n21; introduction, xxviii, 49, 120; Korean Arts Prize, 32; Korean military volunteer program promotion, 25; in Modan Nihon and other Kikuchi publications, 30, 32, 166n23; “My Confession” (Na ̿i kobaek), xxx, 120, 123–24, 138; pro-Japanese promotion,

210

INDEX

xxvi, 48; The Unenlightened, 32, 35; in Yuhi (Yi Yangji), xxv. See also “Record of My Impression of Three Capitals” (SankyĎ inshĎ ki) (Yi Kwangsu) Yi Py̡ng-il, 18. See also Spring on the Peninsula (HantĎ no haru) (film) Yi Sang (Kim Haegy̡ng), xxv, xxvi, 158n19 Yi S̡khun (Maki Hiroshi), 70 Yi T’aejun, 30, 82 Yi W̡njo, 82 Yi Yangji, 150, 151, 157n18, 187n25. See also Yuhi (Yi Yangji) Yi Y̡ngch’̡l, 173n18 Yoidorebune. See Drunken Boat, The (Tanaka Hidemitsu) Yokomitsu Riichi, 166n29 Yomiuri shinbun (journal), 44, 48–49, 86, 87 Yoshikawa Eiji, 9

Young, Louise, 165n15 Yu Chin-o, 58, 69 Yuasa Katsue: Kannani, 4, 159n9 Yuhi (Yi Yangji), xxiv–xxvi, xxvii, 150, 157n17 Yuzurihara Masako, xxix, 88, 146. See also “Korean Lynching” (ChĎsen yaki) (Yuzurihara Masako) zainichi: civic and literary activities, 99; formation, 98–99, 146; implications for Japan, xxx; position in Japan, xxv, 96; relationship to colonial past, 145; status after 1965 normalization treaty, 149; term origins, xxiii, 116–17. See also Koreans, in Japan zainichi literature, xxiii, xxiv, xxix, 96–97, 185n12

211