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Korean and Japanese modern literary figures struggled to create colloquial-style sentences that matched spoken language. Through single pov, Iwano Hōmei and Kim Dong-in succeeded in vividly portraying the protagonist's inner world, thereby creating a new descriptive technique for modern J-K novels.

Paper long abstract

Early modern writers in Korea and Japan had to think in foreign languages rather than their native tongues in order to craft colloquial sentences. Through single pov, Iwano Hōmei and Kim Dong-in succeeded in vividly portraying the protagonist's inner world, thereby creating a new descriptive technique for modern Japanese and Korean novels.

The issue of how to use the third-person pronoun like "he" together with a subjective emotive verb in a single sentence is directly related to the establishment of single pov. By using the third-person instead of the first-person, the narrator and the protagonist do not completely overlap; a gap is maintained between them. Yet, the author attempts to portray the inner world of "him" or "her" while still referring to them in the third-person. Therefore, the method of single pov is a narrative technique that maintains both the subjectivity and objectivity of the character simultaneously.

In other words, single pov is a narrative device that prevents the narrator from being fully drawn into the character’s perspective, which includes the use of the third-person point of view—akin to an omniscient perspective—and the past tense. Through single pov, the narrator brings out the character’s voice without losing critical distance. Ultimately, the distance between the narrator and the character is secured by the use of the third-person and the past tense. This highlights the distinction between everyday language and literary language. The third-person and past-tense expressions seen in single pov, along with the absence of conjectural expressions, function as devices that signal fictionality. A narrative style in which the author hides their own presence, uses the third-person for the character, and simultaneously expresses the character’s inner world is a literary technique that represents both the truth and fiction of the novel’s world. It can also be described as a new form of confessional narrative through the third-person.

Ultimately, the unification of written and spoken language passed through the era of experimentation and expression in the modern literature and bore fruit.

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Prohibited in early modern period, news reporting is quite a modern practice in Japan. This paper examines how narrative techniques reporting current affairs changed in Japan from the late 19th century until the interwar period, which, concomitantly, led to transitions in perceptions of reality.

Paper long abstract

News reporting was quite a modern practice in Japan, for it had been prohibited in early modern period. Pioneering journalists, many of whom were literary writers, had to create ways to convey real-world events to readers, sometimes modifying classical literary styles, and other times refining styles of existing oral culture.

Employing the classical writing style based on the Japanese reading of classical Chinese passages (kanbun kundoku style) with heavy use of couplets and metaphors, newspapers and magazines for intellectuals originally presented news reports as solemn pieces of literature. As modern concept of journalism spread, however, reporting articles started using fewer rhetorical expressions and presenting matter-of-fact reports of events. Since around the turn of the century, moreover, the kanbun kundoku style was gradually replaced by the “da-dearu” style, supposedly colloquial, yet in effect, used mainly in written language, in which the narrator is suppressed and thus sounds objective. Yet, even if written in this style, when the text consists of narration based on the author’s inner thoughts and of direct citations of featured people’s words, it could present the represented world in a quite mimetic way.

The modern news reporting has its origin in popular periodicals as well. Early newspapers for the less educated, launched in the mid 1870s, included news articles in the “desu-masu” style, a colloquial style used for both spoken words and writing, in which the enunciation of the narrator was emphasized. Written in this discursive style, popular periodicals presented news reports as stories narrated by the author, echoing oral performing arts. While the enunciation of the narrator sounds quite mimetic, the represented world of events was not mimetically presented. In contrast, during the interwar period, popular news reports increasingly put an emphasis of enunciation not on the narrator, but on the featured: with the narrator’s “voice” oscillated and retreated, and the enunciation of the interviewees pronounced, they presented the interview scene quite mimetically.

Examining the narration of diverse news reporting in Japanese mass media from the late 19th century until the interwar period, this paper reveals transitions in expression of “reality” and explores their implications.

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"Provisional Self in Kibei Literature: Reexamining Minoru Kiyota's War Narratives" examines Kiyota’s memoir of his WWII and Korean War experiences written in Japanese and in English translation. It explores the different expressions of self across both narratives and what they convey and occlude.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the narrative and ideological complexities embedded in Minoru

Kiyota’s accounts of his service as a Japanese American language mediator during the Korean

War, focusing on the striking discrepancies between his original 1990 Japanese text Nikkei

hangyakuji and its 1997 English translation Beyond Loyalty. As a Kibei—an American of

Japanese ancestry educated in Japan—Kiyota occupied a liminal cultural position that shaped

both his wartime experiences and his later self-representation. By analyzing the divergent

narrative strategies of the two versions, this study argues that the instability of Kiyota’s

identity as an intermediary manifests not only thematically but structurally at the level of

narrative voice.

The English translation, published during a period of renewed attention to Japanese

American redress following the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, adopts a first-person

autobiographical mode that aligns with Asian American literary traditions emphasizing

collective testimony. Translator Linda Klepinger Keenan frames the work as a personal

narrative of resilience and civil rights advocacy, situating Kiyota within a broader community

of Japanese Americans seeking to articulate the long-term consequences of wartime

incarceration. In contrast, the original Japanese version employs a third-person fictionalized

narrator, “Keiichi,” which Kiyota justifies as a means of capturing psychological truth beyond

the constraints of documentary literature. This choice produces a deliberate ambiguity

between narrator and protagonist, reflecting the author’s own unsettled sense of self as both

insider and outsider in the United States and Japan.

Through close readings of key scenes depicting the protagonist’s fraught role

mediating between U.S. military personnel and Korean allies, this paper demonstrates how

each version constructs a different relationship between author, narrator, and audience. The

English text presents a coherent autobiographical “I,” while the Japanese version blurs

narrative boundaries, creating a provisional and unstable subjectivity. These narrative

divergences parallel Kiyota’s broader reflections on the challenges of serving as a cultural

bridge between Japan and the United States, particularly amid postwar racial tensions and shifting geopolitical landscapes.

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This paper examines two popular song genres that emerged through transnational collaboration in the early twentieth century and were later redefined in postwar Japan and Korea. Focusing on lyrics, it analyzes how perspective structures subjectivity and shared emotional experience in the regions.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines Japanese enka and Korean trot as two interrelated popular song genres that crystallized in the early twentieth century through close interactions between Japanese and Korean musicians within a shared imperial and colonial cultural space. Although today they are widely regarded as distinct national traditions, enka and trot were initially shaped through collaboration and mutual influence, before being renamed, redefined, and institutionalized as separate genres in postwar Japan and Korea.

Focusing on song lyrics, this study analyzes how the narrative perspective functions as a central mechanism for constructing subjectivity and emotional meaning in these genres. Perspective is understood here not merely as a grammatical point of view but as a relational structure that connects narrative voice, experiential focus, and listener engagement. In enka and trot, shifts between internal and external perspectives organize how longing, loss, and endurance are narrated and shared, transforming individual emotion into a collectively resonant experience.

By comparing representative postwar lyrics from Japan and Korea, this paper demonstrates that enka and trot share a common narratological logic shaped by the historical conditions of modernity, war, and social upheaval in East Asia, while also developing culturally specific modes of emotional articulation. These songs embody a distinctive fusion of Western musical forms and East Asian sensibilities, producing narrative structures rooted in orality and voice.

Through this analysis, the paper argues that enka and trot should be understood as original twentieth-century popular music genres of East Asia—hybrid cultural forms that reinterpret Western music through local emotional and narrative traditions. Their narratological features reveal how modern East Asian popular music functions as a site where orality, modernity, and subjectivity intersect, offering insight into the broader cultural history of the region.