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.