Organizer: Ann Sherif, Oberlin College
Chair: Ken K. Ito, University of Michigan
Discussants: David Luft, University of California, San Diego; Norma M. Field, University of Chicago
This panel will examine issues surrounding ethnicity, literary texts, film, and artists in postwar Japan and Germany. One impetus for the panel is recent scholarly and popular challenges to the myths of Japan and Germany as homogeneous cultures and societies. Contradicting this desire for a pure national identity are the increasingly vocal presence of ethnic minorities in both countries and vigorous debates over citizenship. We employ Max Weber’s definition of ethnic groups as "groups that entertain a subjective belief in the common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs, or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration."
In Japan, the prominence of Resident Korean (Zainichi Kankoku Chosenjin) writers and filmmakers attests to changing notions of what constitutes Japanese art, as well as cultural identity. The status of zainichi writers and filmmakers’ works, however, remains highly contested, because social, cultural, and legal discrimination persists against this minority. Casting a further shadow over the understanding of ethnicity is the continuing controversy over Japan’s prewar colonization of Korea and the legacy of forced labor and "comfort women." This panel aims at exploring issues of ethnicity, gender, and race in the works of important Resident Korean writers and filmmakers, in particular Chong Ch’u-wol, Nakata Toichi, Lee Yang Ji, and Yu Mi Li.
In postwar Germany as well, a number of writers and filmmakers of Turkish descent, such as Saliha Scheinhardt, have come to the forefront. They, like the Resident Korean writers in Japan, have been denied citizenship because of their parentage, and have encountered culture clashes involving concepts of gender and family as well. The panel will look into "mainstream" German feminists’ efforts to "enlighten" Turkish women as to the oppressive nature of their relations with men, and the ultimately empty promise that conformity to "mainstream" feminisms will buy them assimilation in German society.
A comparison of ethnicity and literature and cinema in Japan and Germany will provide a richer understanding of notions of national and ethnic identities than would a single country study. The panel also brings together scholars from the disciplines of literature and history.
Korean Osakas: Urban Space, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Film and Narrative
Melissa Wender, Bates CollegeOsaka looms large in narratives by Resident Koreans in contemporary Japan. I will examine an author and a filmmaker in whose works Osaka acts not merely as background but as subject, and as an essential aspect of ethnic and national identity. Of particular interest is the way in which these artists regard the contours of city spaces as dominated by gender.
First I will discuss poetry and prose by Chong Ch’u-wol, whose works focus on Ikaino, Osaka’s Korean neighborhood and especially the role of women there in building and maintaining the Korean community. Chong’s romanticization of the attachment of women to local community raises the question of whether national affiliation is figured as masculine.
Nakata Toichi’s 1994 film Osaka Story, in contrast, is set not in the Korean neighborhood, but travels through various urban settings. The title seems to suggest that Osaka, the main working class city, gave rise to the ultimately unhappy marriage of the filmmaker’s Korean father and Japanese mother. At the same time, many of the scenes suggest an indeterminacy of location. Nakata’s use of space works in interesting parallel with the narrative of the story in which the narrator/filmmaker finds himself in conflict about gender, gayness, and ethnic background.
I will use the work of Chong and Nakata to consider the range of ways that Resident Koreans have identified with geographical spaces in Japan, and, in turn, to explore the ways that urban allegiance relates to other forms of identification (national, ethnic, gender, sexual).
Translating Turkish Women: Gender, Immigration, and the Construction of Cultural Identity in Contemporary German Society
Rita Chin, Oberlin CollegeThis paper examines the commercially successful short stories about Turkish women by the Turkish-German author, Saliha Scheinhardt. Despite her efforts to champion the cause of Turkish women, Scheinhardt’s writings often seem to portray them as weak, helpless, or driven to violence because of their oppression. These images served to confirm German preconceptions of Turkish gender relations and, at the same time, made her one of the most celebrated representatives of Turkish women in the Federal Republic of Germany. Scheinhardt’s stories placed her at the center of the heated public debate that took place in the mid-1980s about the headscarf and the traditional position of Turkish women within their culture, and more precisely, the question of whether Turks were so essentially different that they could never be accepted in German society. In the broader context of public discussion about the permanent residence of Turks in the Federal Republic, then, Turkish gender relations became the primary issue through which Germans of all political stripes—conservative, liberal, feminist—measured the viability of extending the definition of German cultural identity to include people of Turkish descent. Ultimately, this paper argues, traditional Turkish gender relations (represented in both Scheinhardt’s stories and the headscarf) became a symbol of the insurmountable gulf between Turks and Germans, a gulf which could only be overcome if Turkish women renounced their inherited, "backward" gender roles and embraced those of "progressive" German society.
Critical Responses and Literary Prizes: Lee Yang Ji as Zainichi Activist and Artist
Ann Sherif, Oberlin CollegeLee Yang Ji’s capture of the Akutagawa Prize for literature in 1988 has significance beyond her literary career, because it sparked heated public dialogue about the status of ethnicity in Japanese narrative and culture. Lee (1955–1992) was not the first Resident Korean (zainichi) to win Japan’s most prestigious literary prize, and she was only one of the many politically active zainichi to highlight issues of ethnic identity within a non-pluralistic society. My paper will focus on the qualities of Lee’s writing that make them powerful for a broad reading audience, and that inspired many younger zainichi writers and activists, and also look at the varieties of critical and political responses to her writings.
A second-generation Resident Korean, Lee vividly evoked the destructive potential of the social context of individuals who are culturally Japanese, yet excluded from citizenship, and for whom ethnicity is both shameful and desirable, because nationality remains tentative. Lee repeatedly considered the resulting quest for a mythical Korean motherland and mother tongue—a move Back to Korea—which promised salvation, in addition to focusing on gender relations, generational divides, and Japan’s dark colonial past. I will discuss the sophisticated manipulation of narrative voice apparent in Lee’s activist writings, her literary critical essays, and her novellas. I will argue that her fiction has found an eager audience because of her skillful evocation of the body as the site of spiritual and political agony, such as ethnic self hatred, alienation, and longing for the homeland.