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.