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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how translation is socially organized and spatially situated between Japan and Korea through an ethnographic study of CUON and its book café Chekccori in Jimbochō. It shows how translation works as cultural infrastructure linking places, communities, and affect across borders.

Paper long abstract

Keywords: translation, place, publishing, Japan–Korea relations, poetry

How are practices of translation located and understood, both socially and in terms of physical place, in the space between Japan and Korea? Through participant observation and interviews, this anthropological research analyzes the spaces created by CUON, a publishing house specializing in translations of Korean literature, and its book cafe Chekccori located in Jimbocho, Tokyo. Describing the role of CUON, Zainichi Korean author Kim Sok-Pom remarked to me, "It's like a terminal. Well, not yet at the level of a terminal... but shall we say international? It's not that it is perched in a small shop in Kanda (Jimbocho), it is that it's spreading its wings from there." These metaphors of movement in place—a terminal and a bird poised to fly—point to a dynamic, multidirectional interconnection between Japan and Korea created through books. I sketch an ethnographic portrait of CUON, Chekccori, and the community of translators and authors who gather here.

Focusing on the production of a book of renshi (connected poems) written in conversation between Tanikawa Shuntaro and Shin Kyeong-Nim, mediated by translator Yoshikawa Nagi and CUON CEO Kim Sungbok, I aim to show that translation creates a multi-modal infrastructure for affective transnational connections. By tracing the evolution of the book, which grew from a taidan (conversation) event held in Jimbocho, events held in Paju, South Korea (included in the book as transcripts), and composed via correspondence, I show a social world where textual creation and translation unfold through connectivity crossing borders.

Translation studies has often approached linguistic communities as bounded entities, whereas this research foregrounds their overlap, entanglement, and mutual constitution. Drawing on Susan Gal's understanding of translation as a tool that can create "material persistence and social connection over time and space" (Gal 2015, 236), I reexamine how texts and translations restructure relationships between Korea and Japan. I frame Jimbocho and Paju as sites of translation in and the book itself as a textual and social space. Through this analysis, I shed light on intersections of place, community, and practices of translation in the relational space between Japan and Korea.