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- Convenor:
-
Christina Yi
(University of British Columbia)
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- Discussant:
-
Naoki Watanabe
(Musashi University)
- Stream:
- Modern Literature
- Location:
- Torre A, Piso -1, Auditório 002
- Sessions:
- Thursday 31 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
We investigate the ways literature addresses the politics of war mobilization in East Asia from the late 1930s through the 1970s, focusing on fiction and literary criticism produced out of the encounter between Japan and Korea under the conditions of colonial modernity, occupation, and the Cold War.
Long Abstract:
In response to the Modern Japanese Literature Section's call for papers that take up questions of literature and politics, this panel investigates the ways literature has addressed formations and transformations of war mobilization culture in East Asia from the late 1930s through the 1970s, focusing in particular on works of fiction and literary criticism produced out of the colonial encounter between Japan and Korea. Rather than presume a 1945 "rupture," the panel seeks to uncover how ideas of rupture and continuity are themselves narrativized by writers whose careers had been formed in the interstices of colonial modernity and war, whether under the conditions of coercive assimilation in the Japanese colony, under those of the US occupation in Japan, or in the wake of Cold War politics. Taken together, the three papers also show how war mobilization culture of the 1930s-1940s was reconstituted in post-1945 Korea and Japan, and to what effects. In doing so, the panel highlight the interrelated issues of violence and power, colonial/postcolonial continuities, and border-crossings in transwar East Asia, as well as the tactics employed by writers when politicizing their art.
In the first paper Shim discusses non-fictional and fictional works from the late 1930s onwards that addressed the workings of the Pure White Sect (J: Hakuhakukyō, K: Paekpaekkyo) religious cult, situating her analyses in relation to colonial modernity and war mobilization in Korea. Perry then shows how the Korean War was represented in popular Japanese literature written by the ethnic Korean writer Chang Hyŏkchu, in which imperial narratives of class, gender and ethnicity are reconstituted in the so-called "postwar" literary imagination. Finally, Yi's paper explores the discursive formation and theoretical limits of "repatriation literature" (hikiage bungaku) in connection with issues of colonial memory and Cold War culture, using the writings of Morisaki Kazue and Ri Kaisei as examples.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 31 August, 2017, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines depictions of the Pure White Sect, a religious cult in colonial Korea that became exposed to the public in the late 1930s. The paper argues that the sensational and melodramatic aspects of these accounts at once legitimized and pointed to the limits of colonial modernity.
Paper long abstract:
In the 1930s, strange tales of a religious cult named the Pure White Sect (白白教) spread across Korea. In the span of a few decades, this cult had amassed a large following by promising everlasting prosperity and salvation for its faithful from the coming apocalypse. But in 1937, a series of crimes carried out in its name, including the killing of hundreds of its followers, came to light. Many Japanese and Korean pundits blamed the rise of this cult, among other sects, as residues from the earlier times persistent among the unenlightened masses of Korea, portraying them through stock figures well known in imperial accounts of the colony such as the superstitious Korean woman or the backward peasant. This paper, however, argues that the public's fascination with the Pure White Sect was, in several ways, a contemporary product of the late colonial period -- a time of wartime mobilization, rapid industrialization, and marginalization of the countryside. In this presentation I consider a number of non-fictional and fictional accounts published from the late 1930s onwards to analyze depictions of the scandal and horror of the Pure White Sect in relation to the experiences of colonial modernity. I argue that the sensational and melodramatic aspects of these accounts at once legitimized and pointed to the limits of modernization under colonial rule.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the Occupation Era work of Chang Hyŏkchu, among the first Koreans to be naturalised as a Japanese, whose stories about war widows trapped in Korea, in particular, shed light on the simultaneously semi-colonial and post-imperial nature of Korean War fiction written in Japan.
Paper long abstract:
The writer Chang Hyŏk-chu, long reviled as a collaborationist by fellow Koreans, became a naturalized Japanese citizen during the Korean War, a war that set "postwar Japan" onto a miraculous economic recovery, and helped to cement its loyalty to the U.S., which restored its sovereignty in 1952 two years after the war began. Japan's compressed transition from distended empire to independent, democratic statehood was indeed far more complicated than the common moniker "postwar Japan" has tended to suggest, however, and many writers in Japan at the time captured in their fiction the complexities of this moment of Japan's historical transition, which was characterized by the remnants of imperial culture, a semi-colonial relationship to its U.S. occupiers, as well as progressive efforts to create a peaceful, truly postwar democracy. Among those who sought to connect the dots between the Korean War and Japan's miraculously changing fortunes in the early 1950s—Koreans, communists, and colonial returnees among them—the work of Chang Hyŏkchu stands out in particular for the ways it embodies many of the imperial continuities that stubbornly held course during Japan's transition from empire to island nation as it simultaneously aligned itself with a new Cold War regime. If it is in part a nostalgia for colonialism and a new sense of Japanese victimization that helps to suppress in Chang's works an understanding of the human consequences of Japanese imperialism and any sense of Japanese culpability for the Korean War, Chang's Japanese-language works also help establish narratives of class, gender and ethnicity that stand at odds with the egalitarian impulses of a newly democratized Japan. Uniquely positioned as a former colonial subject and long-time Japan-resident to tap into the currents of Japanese popular culture, Chang and his Korean War stories demonstrate how a revival of imperial legacies found a welcome home in the postwar Japanese literary imagination.
Paper short abstract:
This paper illuminates the theoretical and political limits of so-called "repatriate literature" (hikiage bungaku) by comparing Ri Kaisei's "Shōnin no inai kōkei" (Scene Without a Witness, 1970) with Morisaki Kazue's "Hōkan suketchi ni yosete" (Sketches of My Visit To South Korea, 1970).
Paper long abstract:
The reordering of borders in Asia following Japan's defeat to the Allied Powers in 1945 triggered a mass movement of bodies "back" to the national spaces they were now said to belong to. It also led to the creation of the zainichi (resident) Korean population in Japan, as those who were unwilling or unable to repatriate to Korea found themselves stateless and relegated to alien resident status. While the discursive category of hikiagesha (returnee) 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. This paper illuminates the theoretical and political limits of so-called "repatriate literature" (hikiage bungaku) by comparing Ri Kaisei's "Shōnin no inai kōkei" (Scene Without a Witness, 1970) with Morisaki Kazue's "Hōkan suketchi ni yosete" (Sketches of My Visit To South Korea, 1970). Neither Ri nor Morisaki fit the conventional definition of a returnee. Now known as the first zainichi Korean writer to win the Akutagawa Prize, Ri was evacuated from Karafuto (current-day south Sakhalin) to Hokkaido on a boat for Japanese returnees in 1947. Morisaki, a Japanese poet who grew up in colonial Korea, was living in mainland Japan when the war ended and therefore did not technically get "repatriated" anywhere. In bringing these two texts together, my paper will show how the intertwined categories of zainichi and hikiagesha both obscured and eclipsed other narratives of war mobilization and empire.