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Paper short abstract

This paper centers testimony and writing by ethnic Korean patients in Japanese sanatoria, demonstrating how literature became a site of negotiation not only of illness and identity but also imperial belonging and marginalization, a reflection of colonial afterlives that continues into the present.

Paper long abstract

Through their work as doctors, authors, and kataribe (storytellers), Japanese men have been central figures in shaping how the history of Hansen’s disease (leprosy) has been shared in Japan. Their voices have been prioritized and granted authority, and their experiences have often been treated as representative of patient experience as a whole. Yet within Japan’s sanatoria system, women, children, and minority ethnic groups also used literature and testimony to record their experiences of illness and medical quarantine in ways quite different from men. Among these groups, ethnic Koreans constituted one of the largests minority populations within the sanatoria. Furthermore, research by Kim Kibun (2019) demonstrates that ethnic Koreans were disproportionately represented among Hansen’s disease patients in Japan, and their experiences as doubly-marginalized were distinct. In part because of this, writing and testimony by Korean patients is fragmented, in many cases erased, and difficult to trace. This fragmentation and erasure reflects multiple forms of marginalization, including illness, colonial hierarchies, postwar nationality debates, and the pressures of linguistic and cultural assimilation.

Drawing on archives and extant collections of testimony, autobiographical writing, and literary works, by ethnic Koreans who lived in Japanese sanatoria between the 1920s to the 1970s, this presentation examines how literature and testimony, as well as silence and erasure, are negotiations of the conditions of ethnic Koreans living with Hansen’s disease in the imperial afterlife. These silence and the texts that remain can be mapped onto unstable notions of belonging, revealing how patient experience was shaped not only by medical regimes, but also by ethnicity and imperial or citizenship status. By centering marginalized writing, this paper challenges dominant narratives of Hansen’s disease literature and patient experience in Japan, while also demonstrating how oppression is mutifacted continue to shape the histories passed on.