Organizer and Chair: Kota Inoue, New York University

Discussant: Kimberly Kono, Smith College

The last few decades have produced a rich body of studies on the Japanese Empire. An overall concern in many of these works has been the impact of the colonizer’s rule on the colonized lands and peoples. As Western colonial histories were increasingly scrutinized through their cultural dimensions in the last decade, colonialism has come to be seen as a system of rule that ultimately affects not only the colonized, but also the colonizer. Some of the recent studies of British and American imperialisms place particular emphasis on how the culture of empire shaped the national identity at home. This panel highlights colonialism’s relevance to colonial and postcolonial Japanese culture by problematizing the image of Koreans. Panelists examine the representation of Korean Others in literary works by both ethnic Japanese and Korean authors, such as Nakajima Atsushi, Kim Saryang, Yang Sogil, Kim Talsu, Noguchi Kakuchû, and Kim Munjip. Language, urban space, and the heterosexual male body are closely scrutinized as sites where Otherness was uneasily negotiated. In addition, social discourses around the anti-Korean militia after the Great Kanto Earthquake and the proclamation of the Security Preservation Law in 1925, both of which had a great impact on the perception of the Other, are analyzed as a symptom of Japanese imperial culture. The first three papers focus on the colonial period proper, emphasizing the complex interactions between the colonizer and the colonized, while the final paper looks at the problem of postcolonial subjectivity in literary works by Korean residents of Japan.

Hang Kim, The University of Tokyo, Japan

The great earthquake in 1923 made Tokyo broken down, and become the turning point of security system in Japan. The government immediately invoked martial law, which was the first case in Japan. And People, suffered from fire and collapse of their house, has organized self-defense-corps (Jikeidan) in order to secure their family, community, and country. This is the beginning of the tragedy. The rumor, that many Koreans threw poison into well, set fire everywhere, and was coming to attack Tokyo, has been running through all stricken area. Immeiately, Jikeidan elaborated the strategies and tactics for meeting the 'enemy,' which consisted of identifying Koreans by their Japanese pronunciation and countenance, and wiping out them by collaborated operation. After this experience of invocation of martial law and the great massacre, the security system of Japan has been transformed. The enactment of "Policing law (Chianijihou)" in 1925 was representing this transformation. What was changed in this transformation was policy on enemy. Before Kantodaisinsai, they thought of enemy as defending against, but after, as creating elaborately and aggressively. I will present this process, focusing on military and policing action under martial law, Jikeidan's strategies and tactics, and thought control in 1920s.

Kota Inoue, New York University

At his death in 1942, Nakajima Atsushi had only published two books and was virtually an unknown writer. As Komori Yôichi has recently argued, the wide recognition of his name today is largely due to the continuous inclusion of his short story, "Sangetsuki" in school textbooks since the end of WWII. The humanistic reading mode that prevails in schools has inevitably promoted the short story, based on a Chinese classic about an elite bureaucrat who turns into a tiger, as a simplistic moral story. Komori suggests that such depoliticized reading is only possible by suppressing the historical specificity of the story’s settinga period of factional power struggle and armed conflict. Despite the depoliticized image shaped by the common perception of "Sangetsuki," Nakajima’s personal life intersected with Japan’s colonial administration, and he often set his story in colonial peripheries. The focus of my paper, "Toragari (Tiger Hunt)," is a story in which the narrator, an ethnic Japanese, recalls several episodes about his Korean schoolmate in Seoul. While describing his childhood friend, the narrator at times makes observations about the friend’s complex and suppressed feelings about his own ethnicity. But the story points to the colonial conditions in more oblique ways as in the title, which serves as a reference to, through the legendary tiger hunt by the warrior Katô Kiyomasa, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea. This paper teases out the colonial conditions embedded in the story by focusing on the story’s depiction of urban life in Seoul and Tokyo.

Ho Duk Hwang, University of California, Irvine

This article will focus on colonial bilingual writing and the problematic of conversion in Korean modern literature, highlighting in particular the literature of the colonial period between the late 1930s and the end of the war. The politics of language (as determinant of race, imperial and linguistic hierarchy, etc) will be investigated. Linguistic imperialism and the problems of wartime collaboration will be read through the Japanese language work of authors writing in the colonies. (Tanaka Hidemitsu, Yuasa Katsue, Yi Kwang-su, Choi Jae-seo, Yi Suk-hoon , etc). Particularly, I will take the work of Kim Sa-ryang the pioneer of Zainichi Korean literature as my principal text ("Into the Light" and "Pegasus"), while also looking at the writings of the "Keijo (Seoul) Japanese Literary Circle." In these works, I will tease out the relationship between the imperial city and the colonial city. I will further argue that the logic of conversion among Korean writers can be explained as the conversion from eating mouth-hole=anal-hole (bare life) to speaking mouth-hole =law==hygiene =national language (political life). Korean’s bare life in Tokyo which described by Kim Sa-ryang will be contrasted with the concept of political life in Keijo Circle who converted into collaborators of Japanese rule.

Christopher D. Scott, Stanford University

The recent film Chi to hone (Blood and bones, dir. Sai Yoichi, 2004), based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Yan Sogil, resurrects a problematic image of zainichi ("residing-in-Japan") Korean men as hypermasculine: violent, aggressive, and bestial. Such stereotypes not only reproduce the racial paranoia of the colonial term futei senjin ("unruly Koreans"), they also reveal the often patriarchal and masculinist tendencies of zainichi Korean discourse in general. In this paper, I argue that these tendencies emerged in the early postwar period, when zainichi Koreans were stigmatized and emasculated as "invisible men" through the increased surveillance and regulation of racial boundaries and gender roles during the Cold War. In particular, I examine the zainichi Korean male body as a nexus of anxieties about racial and ethnic assimilation and gender and sexual identity. My analysis focuses on three literary texts by zainichi Korean male writers: Kim Tal-su's "Me no iro" (Dirty looks, 1950), Noguchi Kakuchu's Henreki no chosho (A record of my exploits, 1954), and Kim Mun-jip's Ariran toge (Arirang pass, 1958). In each, the zainichi Korean protagonist's attempts to "pass" as Japanese are motivated and undercut by concerns about his own heterosexual manhood. These texts underscore the postcolonial traces ("blood and bones") of colonial bodies in postwar Japan. At the same time, they reflect and redefine the imbrication of race and masculinity ("blood and boners") in postwar Japanese literature, from Tamura Taijiro's Nikutai no mon (Gates of flesh, 1947) to Nosaka Akiyuki's "Amerika hijiki" (American hijiki, 1967).