University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Floating signifiers: tracing zainichi Korean identity in postcolonial literature and visual media

(USC Thesis Other)

Floating signifiers: tracing zainichi Korean identity in postcolonial literature and visual media

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

Floating Signifiers:
Tracing Zainichi Korean Identity in Postcolonial Literature and
Visual Media

Nathaniel Heneghan
University of Southern California
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Ph.D., December 16, 2015

2
Table
of
Contents

Introduction
...............................................................................................................................
3

Chapter
One:

The
Location
of
Creole:

Kim
Sokpom's
"Curse
of
Language"
and

the
Literature
of
Won
Soo-‐il
..............................................................................................
20

Chapter
Two:

“Everything
is
Ending,
Everything
is
Beginning:”

Doubleness

and
Repetition
in
Kim
Sokpom's
The
Death
of
a
Crow
..............................................
74

Chapter
Three:

The
Minority
Machine:

Alterity
and
Excess
in
the
Films
of
Sai

Yōichi
and
Ōshima
Nagisa
...............................................................................................
105

Chapter
Four:

“I
Am
Who
I
Am:”

Postmodern
Cinema
and
the
Erosion
of

Zainichi
Ideology
................................................................................................................
145

Conclusion
............................................................................................................................
188

Bibliography
........................................................................................................................
193

3
Introduction

There is a scene in the film Our School (Uri hakkyo, 2006), which documents a
year-in-the-life of a North Korea affiliated school (chōsen gakkō) in Hokkaido, wherein
the senior class students board a ship for the long ride back to Japan after their two week
“class trip” to Pyongyang. The students smile and wave enthusiastically, many singing
North Korean patriotic songs, to all the acquaintances they have met during the two
weeks. Some students become overcome with emotion and begin to cry. As the vessel
pulls away from the dock, the camera focuses on the North Korean people gathered on
the shore to see the students off. Dressed in formal clothes, they continue to wave even
as they fade from view.
This poignant scene is one that is embedded in the zainichi Korean psyche as it
paradoxically evokes images of the repatriation campaign
1
of the 1960s that sent tens of
thousands of zainichi Koreans
2
to North Korea, permanently severing countless families
and delivering the repatriated to live and work in a homeland they had never known.

1
The repatriation movement (kikoku undō), sponsored by the North Korea affiliated
ethnic organization, Sōren (see note 8), began in 1959 and peaked in 1960-61, following
the overthrow of the Syngman Rhee regime in South Korea, which many regarded as a
sign of the imminence of Korean reunification. Before its temporary suspension in 1967,
a total of 88,611 had been repatriated. From the time of its reopening in 1971 to its final
voyage in 1984, however, repatriation decreased significantly, with the final total number
of repatriations reaching 93,339. Sonia Ryang, "The North Korean Homeland of Koreans
in Japan," in Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, ed. Sonia Ryang
(London: Routledge, 2000), 38.
2
The term “zainichi Korean,” or, in Japanese, “zainichi kankokujin/chōsenjin,” is used to
refer to members of the ethnic Korean minority in Japan, though the issue of
nomenclature is somewhat problematic here. With the erosion of North/South affiliations
within the ethnic Korean community, the common term used to refer to members of the
Korean minority has been truncated to “zainichi,” a word that, taken literally, means
“residing in Japan” and sounds vaguely unsatisfactory in English. However, in lieu of a
better term, zainichi is the name that will be used to designate the Korean minority in this
project, with occasional variation.
4
However, while the emotional mixture of joy and sorrow is similar, the roles here are
reversed: The students are, both physically and symbolically, leaving the homeland
(perhaps never to return), not returning to it. They are returning to their families, not
leaving them. Nevertheless, the people they have met and who have served as their
guides, have, in the span of two weeks, become like family to them. The scene thus also
encapsulates the position of the young generation of zainichi Koreans for whom, to quote
zainichi author Won Soo-il,
3
North Korea exists as “not a place to return, but only as a
place to go.”
4
At the end of their return trip, as their boat approaches the Japanese port of
Nīgata, they are met by a throng of right-wing protestors who attempt to stop the vessel
from docking, a reaction to the 2002 admission by Kim Jong-Il of responsibility for
abductions of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 80s. This moment underscores the
inhospitableness of Japan, the country where the students were born and raised, and even
further complicates issues of “homeland,” which will be discussed throughout this
project.
In the days immediately following their return to Japan, the students are glowing,
ebullient. They are constantly looking at pictures from their trip, revisiting their
experience. As one student puts it, they are still under the spell of the Fatherland. More
than anything, they focus on the people they met in North Korea. “They are just like us,”

3
Won Soo-il (1950-) is a 2
nd
generation zainichi Korean author who was born and raised
in the Osaka ethnic enclave of Ikaino. His major works include the short story collection
Ikaino Monogatari: Chejudo Kara Kita Onnatachi (Ikaino Story: The Women from
Cheju, 1987) and AV Odyssey (1997). As discussed in Chapter 1, most of Won’s fiction
takes place in Ikaino, which he describes as a transnational space comprised of a unique
mixture of Korean and Japanese regional cultures.
4
Won Soo-il, "Ri-kun no yūutsu," (Lee-kun's Blues) in Ikaino Monogatari: Chejudo
Kara Kita Onnatachi (Ikaino Story: The Women from Cheju) (Tokyo: Sofukan, 1987),
112.
5
they say. And yet, unlike the days of old, there is no discussion of a return to the
Fatherland to live, permanently. As a result, one can’t help but perceive the chōsen
gakkō students as no different from their Japanese counterparts, their trip no different
from an ordinary senior class trip wherein students travel in the capacity of cultural
tourists. They may never forget their experience, but they may also never return. Indeed,
in the lead-up to the North Korean trip, one student gestures to the calendar that marks
the dates of their journey. “This is wrong,” he says, smiling. On the date of their return
to Japan, the calendar reads, in Japanese, “Nihon kikoku,” meaning “return to Japan,”
except in this case the “return” (kikoku) is the same word used for “repatriation,” thus
adding an entirely different layer of meaning to an otherwise neutral statement. This is
another telling moment in the film, one that illustrates how zainichi Koreans are both
ideologically and linguistically bound, such that everyday instances like the above are
transformed into politically charged moments that serve as a constant reminder of the
instability and ambivalence of their position in Japan.
Sonia Ryang captures the situation well when she writes that, “The discourse of
North Korea as a home away from home, that is, from Japan in which they actually live,
paradoxically expresses the homelessness through which those Koreans live.”
5

Furthermore, if, as zainichi Korean author Kim Sokpom
6
insists, discrimination against
Koreans is imbedded in the very language of Japanese, the critical component for

5
Sonia Ryang, "The North Korean Homeland of Koreans in Japan," in Koreans in
Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, ed. Sonia Ryang (London: Routledge, 2000), 32.
6
Kim Sokpom (1925-) is one of the most influential zainichi Korean novelists and
thinkers of his generation. Born in Osaka to parents from Cheju Island, his family
relocated to Cheju during WWII before returning to Osaka in 1945. As discussed in
Chapters 1 and 2, the vast majority of Kim’s fiction revolves around the Cheju Uprising
(yon-san jiken) that began in 1948, which he uses as an expression of anti-imperialism
and an interrogation of colonial memory.
6
overcoming this is in reconfiguring the Japanese language in a way that subverts its
ethnic component and, along with it, its imperial associations. In Chapters 1 and 2, I read
Kim’s theory of nihongo bungaku (Japanese language literature) as a form of linguistic
and cultural creolization that attempts to redefine zainichi Koreans as transnational both
in terms of their resistance to colonial and neocolonial discourses of the nation-state and
their ability to bear multiple associations that refute a uniform national or ethnic identity.
There is a moment in another recent film, Dear Pyongyang (2005) that I will
address here as representative of the erosion of what John Lie terms “zainichi ideology,”
7

which has in turn contributed to the extension of notions of transnational identity within
the zainichi community. Dear Pyongyang is a documentary film that narrates what are to
be the final years of a zainichi Korean man and father of the filmmaker, who uses the
film as a platform to reflect upon her ethnic and educational background and the role it
has played in her individual identity formation. It is an extremely personal story that, like
Our School, is shot almost entirely on a handheld camera by the filmmaker herself. The
filmmaker’s father, who lives near the Osaka Korean ethnic enclave of Ikuno (formerly
Ikaino), is a former activist and central leader in the North Korea-affiliated ethnic
organization of Sōren.
8
In 1971, while the director was still a young child, her three older

7
Lie describes zainichi ideology as a form of diasporic nationalism that inherits the
politics of Sōren, but rejects strict allegiance to North Korea. As an ideological
foundation, it stresses the retention of colonial memory, critique of Japanese imperialism,
and resistance to assimilation and naturalization. John Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan):
Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008), 115.
8
Short for Zainichi Chōsenjin Sōrengōkai (General Federation of Resident Koreans in
Japan), Sōren was formed in 1955 following the Korean War and became the dominant
organization among zainichi Koreans in postwar Japan. Its counterpart, the South Korea
affiliated Mindan (Zainichi Daikanminkoku Kyoryū Mindan or Community of Resident
South Koreans in Japan) is in fact the longer standing organization, founded in 1948, but
7
brothers were repatriated to North Korea at her parents’ urging. She accompanies her
parents on their last trip to Pyongyang in 2001, where she is able to meet her brothers for
the first time in several years. While married with bright and lively children, they appear
emotionally withdrawn, hardened by years of difficult living conditions and material
deprivation. Though signs of the failure of the North Korean state are becoming
increasingly evident, the filmmaker’s father is greeted like a hero, and the nationalist
ideology that he espouses at group events remains unchanged. Three years later,
however, with his health faltering, certain changes in his perspective have occurred.
When asked at the dinner table to send a message to his grandchildren in North Korea, he
urges eternal devotion to the teachings of Kim Il Sung. But moments later, when the
filmmaker asks for his advice about her recent plan to travel to New York for a cinema
event, he surprises her with his willing consent that she convert to a South Korean
passport. The filmmaker reads his reaction in two ways: As a partial acknowledgment of
the failure of the North Korean state and the utopian dream of reunification, and a
recognition of his daughter’s individuality in negotiating her own notion of ethnic
identity apart from that of the old zainichi generation. It also demonstrates the decline of
zainichi ideology in general toward a more individualistic or fluid form of
transnationalism.
Through the analysis of zainichi literary and cinematic works, this project
interrogates the intersection of certain theoretical concepts—creolization, double agency,
hybridity, transnationalism, multiculturalism—as a means of exploring evolving notions
of zainichi Korean subjectivity. While I will use several different terms to refer to the

lacked membership among the zainichi community due to South Korea’s general
disregard of Japan’s resident Koreans until the 1970s.
8
Korean minority in Japan—zainichi Korean, ethnic Korean, resident Korean—one that I
consciously avoid is “Korean-Japanese,” a term that surfaced around the turn of the 21
st

century and is used mainly in reference to the new generation of zainichi Koreans.
Though Yang Yong-hi, the author of Dear Pyongyang, uses the cinematic medium to
share a personal narrative that she recognizes as deeply steeped in the zainichi collective
experience, others, such as Kaneshiro Kazuki
9
, strategically deploy the term Korean-
Japanese in an attempt to disown the politics of the old generation entirely. This
hyphenating of ethnic identity (which Lie describes as “an identity that in turn was
something of a nonidentity”
10
) marks a postcolonial turn in zainichi identity politics; by
attempting to escape the nationalist binary of Japanese/Korea, the term unwittingly
reproduces the hierarchical logic of multiculturalism while obscuring the complex
historical relationships between ethnicity and nationality. In short, the term depicts the
zainichi subject as dual citizen, equal parts Japanese and Korean, when the Japanese jus
sanguinis policy toward citizenship dictates that they cannot be both. Far from a critical
strategy to transcend national categories, the hyphenated designation of Korean-Japanese
results in an uncritical acceptance of the inevitability of these same categories that also
entails the willful erasure of colonial memory.

9
Kaneshiro (1968-), who became the poster boy for the new generation of zainichi
authors with the publication of his best-selling and Naoki Prize winning debut novel GO
in 2000 and its filmic adaptation the following year, is known as the biggest champion of
the term “Korean-Japanese.” In a December 2001 interview, however, he disavows even
this, claiming that he would prefer not to be categorized in any way. For a more detailed
discussion of GO, see Chapter 4. Kazuki Kaneshiro and Eiji Oguma, "Sorede Boku Wa
'Shiteiseki' O Kowasu Tame Ni GO o Kaita," Chūo Koron (December, 2001), 325.
10
Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity,
157.
9
“Hybridity” too is a problematic term, not only for its implied immutability but its
historical association with Japanese imperialism and discourses on cultural uniqueness
(nihonjinron). Like multiculturalism, hybridity has been appropriated by the neoliberal
discourse of globalization, with the critical difference being that hybridity “supposes the
production of a third” category based on the interaction of two distinct cultures, while
multiculturalism represents a “composite portrait of separable and predetermined
entities.”
11
Considering Japan’s unique global position as the first Asian country to
modernize, Katō Shūichi’s famous theory of hybridity (zasshusei) posits Japanese culture
as a third term based on an encounter between East and West.
12
By presenting Japanese
culture as a combination of East and West that somehow exists outside of both traditions,
Katō’s concept went on to form the basis of postwar discourses on Japanese uniqueness,
discourses that were used to illustrate Japanese superiority and rationalize their imperial
legacy. Considering its function as a justification for Japanese imperialism—the very
system that zainichi Korean authors seek to protest in their work—use of the term
“hybridity” in the zainichi context is highly problematic. Thus, when it is used in this
project, it is done so generically, to describe a more inchoate condition of dual
subjectivity that is capable of multiple cultural and linguistic affiliations and discloses the
potential for a transnational identity.
Consistent with this idea, the significance of my project resides in its attempt to
destabilize Japanese nationalist discourses embodied in conventional theories of pure

11
Brian Bernards, "Beyond Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Recuperating Creolization in
Postcolonial Sinophone Malaysian Literature," Postcolonial Studies 15, no. 3 (2012),
315.
12
Igarashi Yoshikuni, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese
Culture, 1945-1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 81.
10
literature (junbungaku) and the I-novel (shi-shosetsu). I believe that Shu-mei Shih and
Francoise Lionnet’s theory of “minor transnationalism” is extremely instructive in
investigating zainichi Korean notions of postcolonial identity and is one that I will make
regular reference to in this project. Unlike the neoliberal construct of “Korean-Japanese,”
which follows the logic of the global “vis-à-vis a homogeneous and dominant set of
criteria”
13
that is defined by a hierarchy of the universal and particular, the transnational
acknowledges the existence of national borders but also the ability to transcend them
through “spaces and practices acted upon by border-crossing agents” both dominant and
marginal.
14
More importantly for the purposes of this project, the transnational
designates an originary multiplicity or creolization in which cultures are always already
hybrid.
15
Merging minority with transnationalism, suggest Lionnet and Shih, brings a
new field of meanings, away from the implied monolinguism of “minority discourse.”
16

This is another reason why I prefer anthropologist Kawabata Kōhei’s term “sense
of belonging”
17
over the more fixed and unilateral “identity” to describe the ability of
young zainichi Koreans to maintain a comfortability in a variety of cultural situations and
to participate across diverse spatialities and temporalities. This differs from the old
model of “passing” as Japanese (which will be explored in the work of Won and Kim)
and its implication of a suppression of one’s “true identity,” as for the 3
rd
, 4
th
, 5
th

13
Françoise Lionnet and Shumei Shi, Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005), 359.
14
Ibid.
15
Lionnet and Shih, Minor Transnationalism, 8.
16
Lionnet and Shih, Minor Transnationalism, 10.
17
Kawabata recuperates this common psychological term—one that typically connotes
the exclusionary social practices of an in-group—as an alternative to the conventional
“identity” to describe zainichi subjectivity. The author redefines “sense of belonging” as
a fluid and multifarious approach to identity that enables multiple, rather than singular,
affiliations.
11
generation of zainichi and beyond, every “sense of belonging” constitutes a true identity
in so far as it is reflective of a different aspect of themselves and not reliant upon an
essentialized notion of cultural nationalism. It also runs counter to the Japanese
municipal multicultural project that envisions diversity in terms of the construction of a
“global city” used in service of commerce rather than to facilitate cultural
understanding.
18

With these observations in mind, I offer creolization as the most viable mode of
minor transnationalism and the strongest critical expression of zainichi Korean alterity.
As Brian Bernards points out, the creative potential of creolization resides precisely in its
“incomplete reconciliation” of disparate elements.
19
In contrast to hybridity, creolization
is constantly redefining itself and is thus characterized by a dynamism that “recognizes
culture as an ongoing process that cannot be reduced to a singular outcome.”
20
As I
contend in this project, despite a clear precedent for its application, creolization is a
concept that has been underutilized in studies of zainichi Korean culture. While, in
recent years, creolization has been deployed in a number of different studies of
minoritarian literature, (perhaps most notably in the Sinophone context), zainichi Korean
literature remains ghettoized by their perceived historical particularity, an ironic scenario
in which the marginalized are beholden to the same logic as the hegemon, which

18
Kawabata Kōhei, “Okayama zainichi mongatari—chihō toshi de seikatsu suru zainichi
sansei no renai, kekkon o meguru keiken kara” (An Okayama Zainichi Korean Story—
Experiences of Love and Marriage in 3
rd
Generation Koreans Living in Regional Cities)
in Tabunka shakai no “bunka” o tō: kyōsei comyuniti, media (Interrogating the “Culture”
of Multi-cultural Society: Co-existent Communities and Media), ed. Iwabuchi Kōichi
(Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2010), 119.
19
Bernards, "Beyond Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Recuperating Creolization in
Postcolonial Sinophone Malaysian Literature," 318.
20
Ibid.
12
supposes a homogeneity based on the aforementioned neo-nationalist rhetoric of Japanese
cultural uniqueness (nihonjinron). This results in a willful mystification that discourages
critical analysis and impedes interaction with other global minority communities that
“produces in the minor a reactive notion of authenticity in the form of cultural
nationalism.”
21
Indeed, this was the case with the 1
st
generation of postwar zainichi
Koreans who became mired in homeland politics in a way that obscured differences
between Korean nationals and members of the zainichi community. Much as minor
transnationalism is founded on the action of “border-crossing agents,” this project aims to
extend the conversation on creolization across seemingly disparate contexts and, as Won
Soo-il does in his writing, to reinsert zainichi into the global postcolonial context through
a critical engagement with creolization theory.
Since Norma Field’s foundational 1993 essay, “Beyond Envy, Boredom, and
Suffering: Toward an Emancipatory Politics for Resident Koreans and Other Japanese,” a
number of English language studies devoted to the investigation of the zainichi Korean
minority have been published that have served as invaluable reference and inspiration in
the construction of this project. Melissa Wender’s volume, Lamentation as History:
Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965-2000, is the first and, to date, most comprehensive
survey of postwar zainichi Korean literature in English. Wender analyzes the
transformation of discourses on zainichi Korean identity by linking select literary works
with contemporaneous “grassroots legal movements” that address issues of
discrimination and minority identity in Japan. While Wender’s study highlights the
works of Kim Sokpom’s contemporaries, Ri Kaisei and Kin Kakuei (Kim Hak-yŏn), this

21
Lionnet and Shih, Minor Transnationalism, 9.
13
project attempts to expound upon ideas offered in her text through the intervention of
Kim Sokpom’s critical writing and creolization theory. Christopher Scott’s dissertation
project, Invisible Men: The Zainichi Korean Presence in Postwar Japanese Culture, also
constitutes an important contribution to the study of zainichi literature and culture.
Scott’s thesis—which shares some common ground with this project through an analysis
of the work of Kim Sokpom, Kaneshiro Kazuki, and Ōshima Nagisa—is organized
around four images of zainichi men—spy, rapist, ghost, and queer—as an illustration of
zainichi abjection and discrimination at the hands of mainstream Japanese society.
John Lie’s recent volume, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism
and Postcolonial Identity, while not strictly a work of textual analysis, was particularly
valuable to this study for its incorporation of a diverse and extensive range of cultural and
literary materials to trace the evolution of the zainichi Korean community from one
broadly defined by the experiences of Japanese colonialism and rooted in Korean
homeland politics to a more diffuse postcolonial identity that emphasizes an
individualism that defies traditional political affiliation. The result is thus a sort of
intellectual history of zainichi Koreans and a useful overview for anyone working in the
field.
Recently, greater scholarly attention has been paid to zainichi representation in
the cinematic medium with Mika Ko’s Japanese Cinema and Otherness: Nationalism,
Multiculturalism and the Problem of Japaneseness serving as the most comprehensive
example. Specifically relevant to this study, Ko examines Japanese cinematic
representations of “otherness” through the depiction of zainichi Koreans, Okinawans, and
14
other ethnic groups as an inquiry into the way in which filmic constructions of
multiculturalism contest or reify hegemonic discourses of Japaneseness.
This dissertation project is intended as a theoretical extension and a constructive
counterpoint to the above projects through a reading of zainichi literature and film as an
expression of creolization and doubleness that both underscores the ambivalence of
minority subjectivity and problematizes still dominant assumptions of Japanese
homogeneity through an identity that incorporates multiple social and cultural
affiliations. Most importantly, this project attempts to initiate new dialogues by
grounding zainichi thought in global transnational discourse.
I begin Chapter 1 by outlining Kim Sokpom’s theory of nihongo bungaku
(Japanese language literature), which I read as a form of creolization and potential
strategy for the expression of transnational identity. I explain how, by refusing to accept
the Japanese language as an a priori given, Kim deprives it of its ethnic content and
challenges conventional notions of Japanese literature. My analysis links Kim’s theories
with the concept of the Sinophone for its foregrounding of multiculturalism and multi-
linguism to repudiate Japanese assumptions of homogeneity. The chapter goes on to
discuss how the fiction and literary theory of 2
nd
generation zainichi author Won Soo-il
functions as an extension of Kim’s theory of nihongo bungaku by explicitly situating
zainichi literature within the global tradition of creolization discourse. In works such as
“Ri-kun no yūutsu” (Lee-kun’s Blues), Won performs a double-intervention into the
conventional language of junbungaku (pure literature) through the construction of a
heterogeneous text comprised of multiple languages and dialects. I suggest that the two
authors’ mutual interest in creolization resides in their shared Cheju origins, one that
15
stipulates a kind of double-marginalization that exaggerates the idea of “neither Korean
nor Japanese.” Won’s interest in creolization is also evident in his positioning of the
Osaka ethnic enclave of Ikaino—an ontologically hybrid space that encompasses multiple
cultural experiences, both Korean and Japanese, global and local—as “hometown.” In so
doing, Won narrates the transition from (Korean) homeland politics and cultural
nationalism to a more diverse conception of transnational identity.
The second half of Chapter 1 focuses on an analysis of Won’s 1997 novel AV
Odyssey, an unconventional postcolonial epic in which the zainichi protagonist is forced
to reconsider notions of ethnic and national identity through a series of spectacular
encounters that span Japan and the Korean peninsula. Using Freud’s theories of The
Uncanny and Bhabha’s notions of hybridity, I illustrate how AV Odyssey envisions
postcolonial identity as a doubleness and invisibility by underscoring tropes of repetition
and excess in the novel’s narrative framework. Through the citation of underground
border-crossing networks of narcotics and pornography distribution and the reinvention
of narrative as a database-esque negotiation of space, Won’s novel anticipates the digital
as a potential model for transnational identity. This chapter closes by observing AV
Odyssey’s liminal position in the zainichi literary canon; standing at a transitional
moment in both Japan-Korea relations and zainichi Korean identity, this work illustrates
both the tenacity and the dissolution of zainichi ideology.
Chapter 2 returns to the writing of Kim Sokpom in an analysis of his debut
fictional work Karasu no shi (The Death of a Crow, 1957), one that initiated Kim’s
lifelong literary project of excavating the events of the Cheju Uprising. This chapter
argues that while Won renders his brand of creolization visible at the surface of language,
16
Kim’s version of nihongo bungaku contains a creolization embedded in the text in the
form of an anti-colonial resistance to the standard language of Japanese literature
(hyōjungo). Kim’s literary project thus serves a dual purpose of the retention of colonial
memory and a representation of zainichi alterity. Using concepts from Tina Chen’s
Double Agency, I explain how protagonist Chon Kijun’s role as a double agent
metaphorically embodies the dilemma of the zainichi community, one that is plagued by
multiple divided allegiances. My claim is that discussions of masquerade and
impersonation in Karasu no shi problematize Bhabha’s formulation of mimicry as a
strategy of subversion, while Chon Kijun’s occupation as a government
translator/double-agent deprives him of a stable positionality that refutes what Naoki
Sakai terms the “homolingual address,” or national discourse on translation. By
deterritorializing the Japanese language and rejecting conventional Japanese lyricism,
Kim’s work attempts to challenge notions of pure literature (junbungaku) and the
confessional framework that characterizes the Japanese I-novel (shi-shōsetsu). The
chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of parody in Kim’s writing, which
I view as fundamental to his theory of creolization for its power to mobilize the subaltern
against the authority of hegemonic culture.
Chapter 3 extends discussions from Chapters 1 and 2 to cinema by arguing that
the instances of doubleness and excess in the work of filmmakers Sai Yōichi and Ōshima
Nagisa function as an expression of zainichi alterity. In this chapter, I focus on two of
Sai’s more overlooked films, Mosquito on the Tenth Floor (Jūkai no mosukīto, 1983) and
Soo (2007), which—unlike other films such as Blood and Bones (Chi to hone, 2004)—do
not feature overt representations of zainichi Korean characters, but that I read as visually
17
and thematically embodying the zainichi experience. Through a comparison with the
Sumatakyō Incident (1968) in which a zainichi Korean man shot two Japanese gangsters
and held eighteen people hostage in a Japanese inn, I read Mosquito on the Tenth Floor,
which narrates the moral dissipation of a small-town police sergeant, as a metaphor for
zainichi “disrecognition,” a discriminatory condition John Lie describes as being both
disrespected and ignored by mainstream society.
22
I claim that Sai’s work, while
disavowing any political commentary as well as any pretense of speaking for the zainichi
community, nonetheless retains the spirit of protest of the New Wave by including a
veiled criticism of Japanese neo-imperialism. The chapter then analyzes Ōshima’s Three
Resurrected Drunkards (Kaettekita yopparai, 1968), a film directly inspired by the
Sumatakyō Incident, that employs a transgressive mode of cinematic expression to
destabilize national and ethnic binaries. Lastly, I consider Sai’s Soo (2007), a Japanese-
Korean coproduction filmed in South Korea that, I argue, most thoroughly interrogates
notions of subaltern identity through strategies of doubling, repetition, and masquerade.
In closing, I cite zainichi author Kyō Nobuko’s critique of Sai for exposing the
limitations of these films in terms of gender representation and expressing a desire for
creolization that exceeds even the transgressive strategies that these films offer.
The final chapter considers recent cinematic works such as the Pacchigi! series
(2004 and 2007), GO (2001), and Ao Chong (2000) that address zainichi subjectivity.
These films—in contrast to the work of Sai and Ōshima—aim to both redefine zainichi
identity and fulfill a pedagogical purpose by exposing a mainstream Japanese audience to
the “zainichi experience.” While acknowledging their attempt at forging a transnational

22
Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity, 80.
18
identity, my paper analyzes these films in terms of a postmodern logic that (to reference
Fredric Jameson) replaces parody with pastiche, thus aligning them more with the state-
endorsed project of “multiculturalism” (i.e. globalization) than transnationalism. With
the exception of Ao Chong (as I shall explain in this chapter), these films tend to
champion a neoliberal individualism at the expense of political content. Using the
theories of Karatani Kojin and Ōtsuka Eiji, I go on to connect this postmodern tendency
to the “Murakami effect,” or the immense influence of the literature of Murakami Haruki
on the younger generation of artists, as well as theories of “narrative consumption”
(associated with anime and video games) extended by Ōtsuka and Azuma Hiroki.
As mentioned above, I note a certain pedagogical tendency in zainichi works
analyzed for this dissertation, one that is rooted in the ideal of facilitating a cultural
understanding by educating Japanese audiences about the zainichi experience. The
trouble with this objective, however, is obvious, as it unintentionally shifts the burden to
the minority group to explain their circumstances of discrimination and justify their
existence. It is also consistent with the neoliberal policy of Japan’s Liberal Democratic
Party—that of reducing state sponsored welfare programs, thus placing responsibility at
the level of the individual (jiko sekinin), including matters wholly outside their realm of
control. This dissertation also bears a pedagogical component—one that, I hope, greatly
differs from that described above—of garnering greater critical attention to zainichi
authors like Kim Sokpom, who I regard as one of the most accomplished writers and
theorists on “creolization” (well before this term came into broad usage), but remains
epistemologically isolated in the marginal field of zainichi Korean literature. Even some
of the foremost postcolonial scholars are mystified by the Japanese case (including
19
Gayatri Spivak, who regards Japan as an “absurdity” that she can only defer to other
“specialists”
23
), a stance that only seems to reify assumptions of Japanese uniqueness.
Therefore, by deploying sources and concepts from a variety of disciplines, my hope with
this project is to circumvent the exclusionary logic of traditional Japanese culture and
render zainichi Korean literature and visual media more conversant with global
transnational culture.

23
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Other Asias (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 11.
20
Chapter
One

The
Location
of
Creole:

Kim
Sokpom’s
“Curse
of
Language”
and
the
Literature
of
Won

Soo-‐il

Zainichi author Kim Sokpom
24
has mentioned in multiple essays and interviews
that he found himself slipping into a pattern of “nihilism” in his late 20s and early 30s, a
tendency that, he claims, he was only able to avoid through the production of his debut
literary work Karasu no shi (The Death of a Crow) in 1957. Kim has often said that the
act of writing “saved him” from his self-defeating nihilism, as it was the only means he
had to process the tragic details and government concealment of the Cheju Uprising
(known in Japanese as the 4/3 Incident), a brutal and protracted episode in Korean history
in which, by some estimates, more than 60,000 were killed and whose memory exists as a
formative component of zainichi consciousness. Karasu no shi, which I will discuss in
greater detail in Chapter 2, is the first of many fictional works by Kim that are based on
the 4/3 Incident, an event to which he will compulsively, relentlessly return.
This story follows the plight of its protagonist, Chon Kijun, a double agent
working as an informant for radical insurgents while maintaining his job as an interpreter
for the Korean military, and the crisis that faces him in the aftermath of the rebellion. As
this project explains, this theme of “doubleness” or “double agency” is one that

24
Kim Sokpom was born in Osaka in 1925 to Korean immigrants from Cheju Island. His
family returned to Cheju during the war before moving back to Osaka in 1946 where Kim
finished his university education at Osaka University.
21
permeates both zainichi Korean literature and the zainichi experience in general. A
double agency is itself reflected in Kim’s use of creolization to challenge conventional
notions of Japanese literature while simultaneously writing within the language, and
further requires that we read creolization more broadly as a form of doubleness or
hybridity that discloses the potential for a transnational identity, a process I will articulate
through my close readings in this and the following chapter. In a reading of these works I
will posit creolization as both, specifically, the “native language” of zainichi Koreans
and, more generally, the language of the subaltern par excellence, in that it is the only one
founded on an originary hybridity that is designed to fully interrogate the mechanisms of
imperialism.
This chapter identifies “creolization” (the use of multiple languages and dialects
in a single text) in zainichi Korean works as a potential literary strategy for expressing
hybrid identity. I claim that, as a result of Japanese colonial policy and the persistence of
systems of discrimination, members of the Korean minority suffer from a split
subjectivity that is manifest in literary tropes of doubleness and invisibility. I will thus
take up instances of creolization in the work of two zainichi authors from two different
generations, Kim Sokpom and Won Soo-il, using Kim Sokpom’s theory of nihongo
bungaku (or Japanese-language literature), which I read as a form of creolization. I begin
with the younger author, Won Soo-il, and readings of his novel AV Odyssey (1997) and
shorter work “Ri-kun no yūutsu” (“Lee-kun’s Blues,” which appeared in the collection
Ikaino Monogatari (1987)) before moving on to analyze Kim’s debut literary work, the
aforementioned Karasu no shi in Chapter 2. All of these works grapple with similar
issues of language, alterity, and doubleness. I’ll map the ways in which Won’s works
22
extend Kim’s ideas on nihongo bungaku, elaborating a comprehensive theory of
creolization within zainichi Korean literature. Won uses the interplay of multiple
languages and dialects to capture a sense of Ikaino (the Osaka ethnic Korean enclave
where he grew up) as a transnational space that exceeds social determinations of what it
means to be Japanese or Korean.
Like many zainichi Korean authors who came before and after him, Kim Sokpom
struggled at length with the idea of writing in Japanese, which he regarded as the
language of the colonizer. However, more so than any other zainichi author Kim was
able to reconcile this aporia by developing a comprehensive theory of minority literature,
which he terms nihongo bungaku or, “Japanese-language literature,” as opposed to the
exclusionary concept of nihon bungaku or “Japanese literature” in Kotoba no jubaku—
zainichi chōsenjin bungaku to nihongo (The Curse of Language: Zainichi Korean
Literature and Japanese) (1971), later republished in revised form as Shinpen ‘zainichi’
no shisō (Zainichi Thought, A New Edition). In it Kim writes that for the zainichi author
the Japanese language contains a built-in reminder of years of colonialism and the
subsequent loss of one’s native tongue. Nonetheless, for those who were raised in Japan
with limited Korean language facility, Japanese represented the only realistic mode of
expression, meaning that any form of resistance would be expressed in the language of
the oppressor. The problem of language is thus bound up with the question of
subjectivity: “The question of whether there exists a foundation for the Korean author to
23
obtain freedom within the framework of the Japanese language must be interrogated
alongside the issue of authorial subjectivity.”
25

The reason for this, Kim writes, is that language is intended as a tool for obtaining
objectivity as it is used to describe the world around oneself. For the zainichi Korean
author writing in Japanese, however, attaining this basic level of objectivity is impossible
as the language itself is not neutral. Instead it is a constant reminder of Japanese
imperialism. As a result, it is the job of every zainichi author to develop techniques for
turning the Japanese language against itself by depriving it of its ethnic content. It is only
in this way that the Japanese language can transcend its own Japaneseness and aspire to
universality through the creation of literature. Kim asserts that the key to depriving
Japanese of its foreign content is in gaining an awareness—via the act of writing—of
Japanese as a “foreign language” through the refusal to accept it as an a priori given.
Thus, for Kim and other zainichi authors, the act of writing is driven by both a fear of
language and an endless confrontation with language—a process that is repeated in every
creation of a new literary work.
Kim’s theories are haunted by the example of prewar zainichi author Kim Sa-
ryang
26
—who was born in Korea during the colonial period—and his choice to write in
Japanese to illustrate the heightened dilemma facing succeeding zainichi generations.
Kim Sa-ryang struggled with the issue of language throughout his writing career.
However, he also claimed that, for him, writing in Japanese was a “choice” based on a

25
Kim Sokpom, Shinpen "Zainichi" no Shisō (Zainichi Thought, A New Edition) (Tokyo:
Chikuma Shobō, 1981), 131.
26
Born in 1914, Kim Sa-ryang is the author of the seminal work “Hikari no naka ni”
(Into the Light) published in 1939 and nominated for the Akutagawa Prize the following
year.
24
pedagogical ideal of enlightening the Japanese readership about the consequences of
colonialism and the history of the Korean community in Japan. Kim Sokpom uses the
career of the elder Kim as an instructive device for the younger generation of zainichi
intellectuals, while also defending his own choice to write in Japanese. As Kim writes,
“If we cite Kim Sa-ryang as an example, we find the conditions of subjectivity where
Japanese was clearly only a ‘device’ (shudan). In the mind of Kim, Korean was still the
focal point, permitting him the emotional distance to choose Japanese to be used as just
one ‘device’ among a multitude of possible languages. For those who lack the ability to
write in Korean, however, it’s no longer correct to view the Japanese language as merely
a ‘device.’”
27
Therefore, for zainichi writers who don’t possess a facility with the Korean
language, Kim implies that this flexibility must be replaced by the heightened critical
awareness of writing in the language of the colonizer. Kim explains his position in
particularly elliptical fashion in the following passage:
I doubt that there are any writers who don’t feel the curse of language
(kotoba no jubaku), but in the case of the zainichi Korean author it is two-
fold. First there is the thought that I will never be able to completely
break free from the curse of the Japanese language, while alongside this
conflicted consciousness, there is also the desire to break free from the
curse, to continue to work to transcend the curse while being cursed. In
other words, for the zainichi Korean to claim their freedom as an author,
they must first question the potential of acquiring freedom within the
system of the Japanese language. This cannot be considered as merely an
issue of the logic of language mechanics, but as an ethical issue as well.
28

Kim’s idea of obtaining an awareness of Japanese as a foreign language here is in
many ways reminiscent of what Deleuze and Guattari term a “coefficient of
deterritorialization” which they regard as a fundamental component of “minor

27
Kim, Shinpen “Zainichi” no Shisō
(Zainichi Thought, A New Edition),
160-‐161.
28
Kim, Shinpen “Zainichi” no Shisō
(Zainichi Thought, A New Edition),
160.
25
literature.”
29
As I discuss later, this notion of foreignness is imbedded in Kim’s
literature, which I read as a form of creolization internal to the text.
Interestingly, Kim’s nihongo bungaku also anticipates the idea of the
“Sinophone,” a concept that, in recent years, has been deployed in academic circles to
discuss diasporic Chinese literature, while problematizing the very same category of
“diaspora studies.” Shu-mei Shih explains that, “Sinophone studies takes as its objects of
study the Sinitic-language communities and cultures outside China as well as ethnic
minority communities and cultures within China where Mandarin is adopted and
imposed.”
30
Moreover, unlike the Francophone and more classic examples of colonial
literature, Sinophone literatures “continue to be played out largely within the nation-state
of China due to the continental nature of China’s colonialism.”
31
Japanese imperialism—
while being largely reserved to the Asian continent—was hardly continental in nature
owing to Japan’s unique position as an archipelago. I argue, however, that the current day
Korean minority occupies a comparable position as a colonized people residing within
the Japanese nation-state, writing in a language that was either adopted or imposed.
Furthermore, like Kim’s nihongo bungaku, the Sinophone foregrounds
multiculturalism and multi-linguism, enabling multiple definitions of Chineseness.
Sinophone literature is therefore, “transnational in constitution and formation but local in
practice and articulation”
32
thus serving as an important model for informing a reading of
zainichi Korean work as it endorses a cultural multifariousness that authors such as Won

29

Gilles
Deleuze
and
Félix
Guattari,
Kafka:
Toward
a
Minor
Literature
(Minneapolis:

University
of
Minnesota
Press,
1986),
16.

30

Shu-‐mei
Shih,
"Introduction,"
in
Sinophone
Studies:
A
Critical
Reader
(New
York:

Columbia
University
Press,
2013),
7.

31
Shih,
"Introduction:
What
is
Sinophone
Studies?,"
3.
32
Shih,
"Introduction:
What
is
Sinophone
Studies?,"
7.
26
Soo-il use to repudiate conventional assumptions of Japanese homogeneity. In this next
section I will demonstrate how Won engages with creolization theory as a means of
extending Kim Sokpom’s ideas on nihongo bungaku and presenting zainichi Koreans as
conversant in the global transnational discourse. As we shall see, Won’s notion of the
transnational is firmly imbedded in the ethnic Korean enclave of Ikaino, which the author
presents as an ontologically hybrid space that encompasses both the local zainichi
experience and the global Korean diaspora.

Won’s Ikaino and the Rebirth of Creole

While a full generation younger than Kim Sokpom, like many other 2
nd

generation zainichi, Won shares the common origin of being born in Osaka to parents
from Cheju Island. As mentioned above, to be from Cheju is to be haunted by the
memory of the 4/3 Incident, a brutal episode that began as a protest against imposed
elections on April 3, 1948 but evolved into a protracted struggle between the Syngman
Rhee military regime and left-wing radicals that lasted until May 1949 and led to the
systematic obliteration of at least 30,000
33
Cheju residents at the hands of the US-assisted
South Korean military. While any reminders of this tragic incident have been willfully
erased from Cheju’s landscape via the island’s reinvention as a tropical tourist destination
with five-star resorts and golf courses, Cheju itself remains a semi-colonial space with a
distinct language and culture, maintaining a tense relationship with the Korean peninsula
somewhat comparable to that of Okinawa and Honshu (Japan’s main island). According
to colonial period studies, residents of Cheju-dō suffered from a kind of double-alterity as

33
Casualty estimates vary widely, with some listing the number at more than 60,000.
27
neither Japanese, nor coming from the Korean capital, a stigma that the region still bears
to this day.
As I mentioned above, Kim Sokpom’s literature is committed to the excavation of
the 4/3 Incident through his obsessive recounting of this historical moment, nearly all of
his works taking place in the events surrounding the Cheju Massacre. This perpetual
return figures as an extension of his theory on the role of literature—to render the
unconscious conscious and exhume historical events such as the Cheju Massacre that
have been forgotten through repression. Indeed, Kim’s magnum opus, Kazantō—the first
three installments of which were published in 1983, some twenty-five years after Karasu
no shi—is a seven-volume work spanning more than 11,000 pages centered on the 4/3
Incident.
Won’s literature, on the other hand, while not preoccupied with the 4/3 Incident
itself, is equally devoted to the preservation of Cheju culture through the representation
of Osaka’s zainichi community and its use of creolization that blends languages and
dialects both Japanese and Korean to create a new literary jargon. Most notably in his
short story collection Ikaino Monogatari: Chejudo kara kita onnnatachi (Ikaino Story:
The Women from Cheju), through the creation of a heterogeneous text that employs both
Japanese (Kansai-ben) and Korean (Cheju) dialects, Won performs a double-intervention
into the conventional language of junbungaku (pure literature). Similar to Kim Sokpom’s
formulation of nihongo bungaku, Won uses creolization to challenge the a priori-ness of
hyōjungo, or the standard language of the Japanese I-novel.
One standout story from the Ikaino monogatari collection, “Ri-kun no yūutsu”
(Lee-kun’s Blues) illustrates this principle clearly, both textually and narratologically.
28
Published in 1987, it follows a few days in the life of the titular Lee-kun, a recent college
graduate working as a juku (cram school) teacher, a job he considers a way station for his
true calling of becoming a real estate surveyor. Unlike most of the stories in the
collection, this one does not actually take place in Ikaino (Osaka’s ethnic enclave, now
known as Ikuno), but around Hattori station in Yao city, just east of Osaka proper.
Through a chance encounter with other resident Koreans (and former Ikaino residents),
Lee is forced to reflect upon the ambivalence he feels toward his “hometown.” He
regards Ikaino itself as a liminal space, somehow existing both inside and outside of
Japan. Throughout the text, the area surrounding Ikaino is referred to as a “foreign land,”
situating the Osaka enclave as its own culturally autonomous space. And yet, as Lee-kun
comes to realize, these borders are much more fluid than he would care to acknowledge,
as evidenced in the following excerpt:
Lee-kun pushed his chair into his desk and stood at the window. Aside
from the pitch-blackness of the Tenjiku River cemetery, the nighttime
cityscape of this foreign land that stretched before him exuded a vague
feeling of neither acceptance nor rejection. Gazing at the sky west by
northwest of the international airport, Lee fixated on a point just south of a
glimmering star and became immersed in thoughts of Cheju. As if
working a jigsaw puzzle, Lee attempted to consolidate these memories
into a unified concept he could call “homeland.”
But if the blood that ran through his veins dictated that he
acknowledge Cheju as his homeland, his natural homeland was none other
than Ikaino. And this Ikaino figured as an extension of the same foreign
land that exuded the vague feeling of neither acceptance nor rejection.
Come to think of it, the water from the Un Canal that traversed Ikaino also
flowed in from a foreign land.
Though he was raised in Ikaino, the TV shows, radio programs,
movies, comic books, and other cultural materials were all of foreign
origin. Even the scene of the Korean market symbolic of Cheju that was
such a part of his mental fabric had become intermingled with the
29
Japanese folksong “My Hometown.” (“A mountain where the rabbits are
tasty/A river full of carp.”)
34

This passage illustrates a critical moment in 2
nd
generation zainichi thought, one
that distinguishes them from the nationalist politics of the previous generation. Lee’s
lack of connection with Cheju forbids him from designating it his “hometown,” despite
his desire to do so. Instead, he realizes, his hometown can be none other than the place
he grew up, Ikaino. But what is Ikaino exactly? Far from being an autonomous space, it
is—like the young Koreans who populate it—ontologically hybrid. Lee realizes that the
images he has come to accept as authentic images of Cheju have been shaped just as
much by Japanese popular culture as they have by artifacts of his Korean cultural heritage.
This passage thus contains a dual criticism that challenges both conventional notions of
Japanese homogeneity and the homeland politics of the zainichi first generation that
ascribes a one-to-one relationship between Koreanness and national identity.
The premise of “Ri-kun no yūutsu” often recalls Kim Saryang’s seminal work
“Hikari no naka ni” (“Into the Light”). As in that earlier work, “Ri-kun” is centered on a
young schoolteacher (the titular Lee, described as “James Dean remade with a seasoning
of garlic and red-pepper paste”
35
) whose attempt to conceal his Korean ethnicity by using
a Japanese tsūmei (assumed name) is thwarted by his impulse to protect a fellow zainichi
student. Under the advice of his senpai and role model, Mr. Yanai, Lee opts to work
under the Japanese family name “Yoshimoto.” In the words of Yanai, “’”Mr. Lee” is fine,
but it can be somewhat confining. It’s better to go with “Yoshimoto” and live free of

34
Won Soo-il, "Ri-kun no yūutsu," (Lee-kun's Blues) in Ikaino Monogatari: Chejudo
Kara Kita Onnatachi (Ikaino Story: The Women from Cheju) (Tokyo: Sofukan, 1987),
132-133.
35
Won, "Ri-kun no yūutsu" (Lee-kun's Blues), 117.
30
worry. If you play along, the Japanese can be surprisingly tolerant.’”
36
In this passage,
the portion I translate as “If you play along” reads in the original as “onaji kamen o
kabutteru bun ni wa,” which might be more literally translated as “If you wear the mask.”
To those familiar with postcolonial texts, this cannot help but evoke Homi Bhabha’s
concept of mimicry, in particular the line, “Mimicry conceals no presence or identity
behind its mask…The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the
ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority.”
37
Thus by donning the
mask, and “playing along,” Lee simultaneously accepts and disrupts hegemonic authority
through the act of mimicry. Again, there is a doubleness here in the tension that exists
between the names “Lee”—which is Korean—and “Yoshimoto”—which is Japanese—
along with a notion of the performativity involved in balancing these two identities.
Indeed, even during classroom scenes in which Lee is the teacher (i.e. Mr. Yoshimoto),
the narrator instead refers to him as “Lee-kun,” a choice that serves to underscore the
protagonist’s psychological confusion while confounding the possibility of maintaining a
singular unitary identity.
Nevertheless, Lee’s attempt to conceal his Koreanness may have gone unimpeded
if not for the appearance of Masaumi and his mother, Yonyuni. The moment that
Yonyuni strode into the cram school offices “the same way she strode into the Korean
marketplace,”
38
Lee is able to identify her as not just Korean, but from Cheju. “This
talent came with his being born and raised in Ikaino.”
39
As such, he treats Yonyuni and

36
Won, "Ri-kun no yūutsu" (Lee-kun's Blues), 116.
37
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 126.
38
Won Soo-il, "Ri-kun no yūutsu" (Lee-kun’s Blues), 114.

39
Won Soo-il, "Ri-kun no yūutsu" (Lee-kun’s Blues), 115.
31
her brash ways with a mixture of exasperation and affection. Her son Masaumi is a large,
awkward boy who struggles both socially and academically. Despite his better judgment,
Lee finds himself assuming the role of Masaumi’s protector in the face of his classmate’s
merciless teasing for both his girth and his Korean-ness. (He is given the nickname
“dumb white pig.”). As a result, Lee is faced with the overwhelming task of facilitating
cultural understanding while concealing his own Korean-ness.
When Masaumi goes missing after class, Lee is urged by Yonyuni to join her in
searching for him. Riding in his car together, Lee unconsciously addresses her in Korean.
In the interest of experiencing the full impact of the text, the passage is included below
first in its original form and then in English translation:

「アイゴ、兄ちゃん、もっとうまいこと運転しや」と文句を
たれた。
「ミアナムニダ（すいません）、オモニ」
李君は無意識のうちに韓国語で謝っていた。
「あれ、兄ちゃん、うちの国の人間か」
容潤の口調がにわかに柔和になった。
「ええ」
「コヒャン（故郷）どこ」
「チェジュド( 済州島) です」
「アイゴ、そか、兄ちゃん、済州島か」
容潤は「こら、ええ調子やげ」と手を打って喜んだ。。
「アイゴ、ウリチベ昌海情けないな」と慨嘆した。

“Hey, can you try driving a little smoother?” Yonyuni complained.
“Mianhamunida (Sorry about that), Omoni.”
Lee-kun unconsciously apologized in Korean.
“Wait, are you from the homeland?”
Yonyuni’s tone instantly softened.
“Yes.”
“Where’s your kohyang (hometown)?”
“Cheju Island.”
“Really? You’re from Cheju?”
32
“This car runs great!” she said, clapping her hands together with
joy…
“My boy is such an embarrassment,” she grumbled.
40

Despite, or perhaps because of, the author’s parenthetical translations, the
heterogeneous text has a disjunctive effect that is meant to disrupt standard reading
practices, forcing the reader to negotiate a text that appears to be in their own language,
yet is somehow foreign. Such instances of creolization appear frequently in Won’s works,
consistent with his approach toward language and thoughts on zainichi literature that he
outlined more formally in a 2001 essay that I consider in more detail below.
Learning that Lee is from Cheju, Yonyuni’s tone softens, if only momentarily.
They eventually find Masaumi crouched in the cemetery that borders the Tenjiku River.
They urge him to go home with them, but he protests, saying that he’s going “to a place
that’s not Korea or Japan”
41
while threatening to jump in the river. After a struggle and
some coaxing, they’re able to talk Masaumi down from the ledge. Masaumi vows to stay
in cram school, while Lee promises to “take care of him.” The story concludes on an
ambiguous note, finding Lee driving home with a renewed sense of purpose mixed with a
feeling of trepidation over events to come.
In the essay, “Zainichi Literature as Post-Colonial—Currents of Creolization,”
Won draws parallels between creolization, postcoloniality, and zainichi literature. He
quotes The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures
42
at
length to illustrate his ideas.

40
Won, "Ri-kun no yūutsu" (Lee-kun’s Blues) 134-135.
41
Won, "Ri-kun no yūutsu" (Lee-kun’s Blues), 140.
42
Translated into Japanese as Posuto koroniaru no bungaku.
33
The crucial function of language as a medium of power demands that post-
colonial writing defines itself by seizing the language of the centre and re-
placing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place. There are
two distinct processes by which it does this. The first, abrogation or
denial of the privilege of ‘English’ involves a rejection of the metropolitan
power over the means of communication. The second, the appropriation
and reconstitution of the language of the centre, the process of capturing
and remoulding the language to new usages, marks a separation from the
site of colonial privilege.
43

This first passage outlines a process of creolization, similar to Kim Sokpom’s theory of
nihongo bungaku, that deprives the hegemonic language of its ethnic or imperial
connotations through an “appropriation and reconstitution.” The second passage that
Won quotes elaborates even further the ideological underpinnings of a creolized text.

The appropriation of the english language is the first of a range of
appropriations which establish a discourse announcing its difference from
Europe. These include the adaptation or evolution of metropolitan
practices: for example, genres such as ‘the ballad’ or ‘the novel’ or even
epistemologies, ideological systems, or institutions such as literary theory.
But the appropriation which has had the most profound significance in
post-colonial discourse is that of writing itself. It is through an
appropriation of the power invested in writing that this discourse can take
hold of the marginality imposed on it and make hybridity and syncreticity
the source of literary and cultural redefinition. In writing out of the
condition of ‘Otherness’ post-colonial texts assert the complex of
intersecting ‘peripheries’ as the actual substance of experience. But the
struggle which this assertion entails—the ‘re-placement’ of the post-
colonial text—is focused in their attempt to control the processes of
writing.
44

It is thus in the act of writing—as described by Kim Sokpom—that the zainichi
author encounters the Japanese language and attempts to reconstitute it as a “foreign

43
Bill Ashcroft, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 37.
44
Bill Ashcroft, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literatures, 77.
34
language” by “tak[ing] hold of the marginality imposed on it” and “writing out of the
condition of ‘Otherness.’” Won, in citing the above texts, attempts to import their ideas
into the zainichi context, positing zainichi literature as conversant in the global tradition
of post-colonial literature. In describing the postcolonial text as “assert[ing] the complex
of intersecting ‘peripheries’ as the actual substance of experience,” the passage may very
well be describing the landscape of Won’s Ikaino. For Won, this effect is deliberate. By
describing (and inscribing) Ikaino as a combination of peripheral cultural elements
(Korea, Cheju, Kansai), the region stands as a physical embodiment of creolization, a
heterogeneous text that opposes the dominant culture by refusing a singular reading.
Referring to the quotation from The Empire Writes Back, Won solidifies this connection
by writing, “The aforementioned ‘hybridity’ and ‘syncreticity’ represent the very essence
of creolization. In other words, one could say that post-coloniality and creolization are
two sides of the same coin.”
45
Won’s literary project, by extending Kim Sokpom’s
theory of nihongo bungaku through the constitution of a local language of Ikaino, is
dedicated to forging this very linkage between postcolonial identity and creolization.
Won attempts to further the connection between creolization theory and the
zainichi situation via an exercise in substitution that is particularly compelling given its
resemblance to a specific episode in “Lee-kun’s Blues.” Won takes the following
quotations from In Praise of Creoleness, replacing instances of “we” or “our” with
“zainichi” so that they read as follows:

45
Won Soo-il, "Posuto Koroniaru Toshite no Zainichi Bungaku Kureōru Ka no Suiryū
(Zainichi Literature as Post-Colonial—Currents of Creolization)," in Posuto Koroniaru
Bungaku no Kenkyu, ed. Niwa Ryoji (Suita-shi: Kansai Daigaku Shuppanbu, 2001), 101.
35
[Zainichi] Creoleness was, therefore, born from this extraordinary
“migan,” wrongly and hastily reduced to its mere linguistic aspects, or to
one single element of its composition. [Zainichi] cultural character bears
both the marks of this world and elements of its negation. [Zainichi]
conceived our cultural character as a function of acceptance and denial,
therefore permanently questioning, always familiar with the most complex
ambiguities, outside all forms of reduction, all forms of purity, all forms of
impoverishment.
46

Creoleness is an annihilation of false universality, of monolinguism, and
of purity. It is in harmony with the Diversity which inspired the
extraordinary momentum of Victor Segalen. Creoleness is [zainichi]
primitive soup and [zainichi] continuation, [zainichi] primeval chaos and
[zainichi] mangrove swamp of virtualities. We bend toward it, enriched
by all kinds of mistakes and confident of the necessity of accepting
ourselves as complex. For complexity is the very principle of [zainichi]
identity. Exploring [zainichi] Creoleness must be done in a thought as
complex as Creoleness itself.
47

And the history of colonization which we took as ours aggravated
[zainichi] loss, [zainichi] self-defamation; it favored exteriority and fed the
estrangement of the present. Within this false memory [zainichi] had but a
pile of obscurities as our memory…Our chronicle is behind the dates,
behind the known facts: [zainichi] are Words behind writing. Only poetic
knowledge, fictional knowledge, in short, artistic knowledge can discover
[zainichi], understand [zainichi] and bring [zainichi], evanescent, back to
the resuscitation of consciousness.
48

Interestingly, Won does not attempt to clarify or unpack these passages, instead
letting the interpolated quotations speak for themselves. The implication of this exercise,
however, is to posit zainichi Koreans as active participants in a rich cultural tradition
from which they have become isolated in the alleged “uniqueness” of their condition, a
presumption that itself mimics the logic of Japanese discourses on cultural uniqueness

46
Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, In Praise of Creoleness
(Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 280.
47
Bernabe, Chamoiseau and Confiant, In Praise of Creoleness, 90.
48
Bernabe, Chamoiseau and Confiant, In Praise of Creoleness, 98-99
36
(nihonjinron) and illuminates the intractability of the colonial mindset. In so doing, Won
is urging zainichi artists to become more conversant with other members of the global
diasporic community and thus finally shed the ideological shackles of Japanese
imperialism.
He concludes this section of the essay with yet another quotation, this from a
different article by In Praise of Creoleness coauthor Raphael Confiant. It reads, “My
feelings toward the French language are divided into both love and hatred.” Here, once
again Won performs an experiment in substitution, replacing “French” with “Japanese” to
read, “My feelings toward the Japanese language are divided into both love and hatred,”
49

claiming that this statement epitomizes the zainichi author’s (and hence his own) attitude
toward the Japanese language. Thus, by making a point of quoting In Praise of
Creoleness at length, projecting its concepts onto the zainichi situation, Won posits
creoleness as the defining characteristic of zainichi identity.
“Ri-kun no yūutsu,” Won links theory and practice by engaging in a similar
exercise in substitution in “Ri-kun no yūutsu.” During class, as the teasing of Masaumi
reaches a fever pitch, Lee writes the lyrics from the “Counting Song of People’s
Rights”
50
on the chalkboard.

Number 1:
All people are equal
Everyone has the same rights
That’s what makes us people

49
Won, "Posuto Koroniaru Toshite no Zainichi Bungaku Kureoru Ka no Suiryū”
(Zainichi Literature as Post-Colonial—Currents of Creolization), 103.
50
Known as 「民権かぞえ歌」(minken kazoe uta) in Japanese, this song was used
during the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement in the 1880s with lyrics borrowed
from the writing of revolutionary Ueki Emori.
37
Number 2:
In this free world
There are still some people who remain ignorant
What a pity this is
51
(131)

Lee has one of the chief troublemakers read the lyrics aloud, replacing the term
“people” (hito) in the first line with “races” (minzoku). The student complies, but Lee’s
message predictably falls on deaf ears. One student even replies with, “’My dad says that
the Japanese Yamato race is the best.’” At this pronouncement, Lee feels “the ghost of
Japanese imperialism pass over him.”
52
While, in spirit, Lee’s exercise is consistent with
Won’s theoretical project of creolization, this passage demonstrates the insufficiency of
mere analogy to refute Japanese imperial assumptions that have been entrenched in the
social consciousness since the colonial period. It also exposes the limitations of mimicry
when counteracted by the opposing desire for concealment, one that compromises Lee’s
pedagogical mission through the threat of exposure.
Nevertheless, the desire for transnationalism—one that permits multiple and
coexistent identifications without privileging one above the other—is painfully evident
both in the above passage and throughout “Lee-kun’s Blues,” which Won maps both
narratologically and in his approach to language. Lee’s love interest, Im Honmi, just
happens to be the niece of his senpai (mentor), Mr. Yanai, an aspiring lawyer who
explains everything in legalistic terms. While observing the paradoxes of nationalism,
Yanai advocates an assimilationist utilitarianism that involves towing the Japanese legal
line, but that reinforces the imperative of concealment. “’We’re constantly constricted by
laws and yet we’re forced to find our way in Japanese society through the legal

51
Won, "Ri-kun no yūutsu" (Lee-kun’s Blues), 131.
52
Won, "Ri-kun no yūutsu" (Lee-kun’s Blues), 132.
38
acquisition of official qualifications. This is yet another example of paradox,’”
53
he
advises Lee. When it comes to Lee’s relations with his niece, he is equally severe:

“If you plan on marrying her, you’re free to kiss her or do
whatever you want,” he said to Lee who had an incredulous look on his
face.
“Sonbei, you mean to say I need a legal basis for even one kiss?”
“As long as nations exist you need a legal basis for everything,”
was Mr. Yanai’s reply.
54

For Lee, as a young zainichi, the existence of national borders—along with their
reminder of Japan’s imperial legacy and the fundamental exercise of law —permeates
every aspect of his existence, from his career to his love life. The vestiges of Japanese
imperialism have not so much disappeared as dispersed, becoming infused in the very
fabric of the Japanese post-capitalist landscape, a concept I will develop further in
Chapter 4 in relation to the fūkeiron movement. Lee’s relationship with Masaumi is thus
built on their shared experience with discrimination, both institutional and otherwise, a
fact that Masaumi too unconsciously associates with the problem of national borders in
his vow to go to a place “that’s not Korea or Japan.”
At the textual level, Won’s transnational desire is manifest in his reinvention of
Japanese as a creole of multiple languages and dialects. Japanese literary critic
Kawamura Minato is arguably the first scholar to identify and associate the concept of
creolization as an aspect of zainichi writing, using Won’s work. In a 1987 article for

53
Won, "Ri-kun no yūutsu" (Lee-kun’s Blues), 116.
54
Won, "Ri-kun no yūutsu" (Lee-kun’s Blues), 119.
39
Tokyo Shinbun
55
, Kawamura cites Won’s Ikaino Monogatari as the specific inspiration
for his thoughts on creole.

Creole is the term used to refer to the language that is formed when a
European language such as French, Spanish, or Portugese becomes
intermingled with an indigenous language of the Pacific, Africa, or Latin
America. By this definition, can’t it be said that the zainichi community
has produced its own language that is a creolization of Japanese? Reading
the recently published Ikaino Monogatari by 2
nd
generation zainichi
author Won Soo-il only serves to reaffirm this perception.
56

Kawamura describes Ikaino Monogatari as a “free-flowing textual space through
which a strange mixture of hihyōjungo (anti-standard) Cheju-accented Korean and Ōsaka
dialect-inflected Japanese circulates.”
57
Kawamura goes on to say that, while it may
offend those who champion a proper, “pure” version of Japanese, he “can’t help but think

55
Later reprinted in Kankoku, Chōsen, Zainichi o yomu (Reading North/South Korea,
Zainichi).
56
Minato Kawamura, "Kureōru Toshite no Nihongo," (Japanese as Creole) in Kankoku,
Chosen, Zainichi O Yomu (Reading North/South Korea, Zainichi) (Tokyo: Impact, 2003),
220.
57
Kawamura cites the following example of creolized text that appears in “Murumaji,”
another short story from Ikaino monogatari. As the homogenizing effect of translation
obscures the creolization inherent in the original text, I’ve chosen to include the Japanese
with an English translation below.

「チェジュド（済州島）にチュウオルのピョンシン（知恵おくれ）の息子いてた。
イルチェシデ（日帝時代）終わってすぐチュウオル済州島帰った。そやけどチェ
ス（運）ないことに選挙反対や、選挙反対ゆもんペルゲンイ（赤）やゆて、チェ
ジュッサラム（済州島の人）とユッチサラム（本土の人）殺しあいしたゆ話お前
も知ってるやろ。そのどさくさに出来たピョンシンの息子コモニム（姑母様）に
預けてチュウオル日本へ逃げてきたやげ。」

“Chuwol had a pyonshin (mentally handicapped) son in Cheju. Right after the Ircheshide
(colonial period) ended, Chuwol returned to the island. Well, the unlucky thing is that he
went right during the election protests, with the yucchi saram (mainlanders) accusing the
Cheju saram (islanders) of being perugeni (Reds) and the two groups started killing each
other off. You’ve heard about this, right? With all the confusion, Chuwol left the kid
with his komonim (mother-in-law) and fled back to Japan.” Kawamura, "Kureōru
Toshite no Nihongo," 219.
40
that this should be regarded as the native language of the zainichi community,
overflowing with the life experiences (seikatsukan) of a people who have refused to give
in to discrimination and disdain and have lived prosperous lives in a foreign country
among foreign people.”
58
This notion of creole as native language, thus affirming an
“originary hybridity,” echoes Lee’s idea from Won’s story that, “If the blood that ran
through his veins dictated that he acknowledge Cheju as his homeland, his natural
homeland was none other than Ikaino.”
59
Kawamura closes his review by stressing the
importance of creolization in the Japanese literary context. “The world of Ikaino-go
depicted in Ikaino Monogatari serves as a precious example of the possibilities for the
Japanese language that have been opened up by the zainichi community. It does so…by
both gauging the level of possibility for a creolized Japanese and suggesting the linguistic
future of not a mono-ethnic, but a multiethnic Japan.”
60
Kawamura thus posits Won as a
pioneer of the creolization movement in Japanese literature and a visionary of the future
of a multiethnic Japan.
Literary theorist Ōtsuka Eiji, like Kawamura, has written of the potential of
dialect for subverting dominant literary paradigms as well as the danger of succumbing to
the language of genbun itchi in his criticism of Murakami Haruki. Ōtsuka observes that
the received view of Murakami’s literature is that it reads like American literature that
has been translated into Japanese, thus lending it a subversive quality that “serious
literature” lacks, while suggesting the idea that a (re)translation of Murakami’s work into
English should mark a return to the original. Ōtsuka challenges this notion, however,

58
Ibid.
59
Won, "Ri-kun no yūutsu," 133.
60
Kawamura, "Kureōru Toshite no Nihongo," 220.
41
stating that Murakami’s work in fact epitomizes a literature in which the original can only
exist in Japanese through the absence of an English original that would seem to exist.
For Ōtsuka, the “uncomfortable” quality of the writing of Murakami
61
is connected to his
wholesale internalization of hyōjungo and consequent disavowal of the Kansai dialect.
Far from being a progressive writer, this positions Murakami as the natural successor of
the junbungaku genre and the inheritor of genbun itchi, a system of Japanese restructured
during the Meiji Restoration with Western influence.
62
To Ōtsuka, the example of
Murakami thus demonstrates the impossibility of writing “Japanese literature” (nihon
bungaku, not nihongo bungaku) in a language other than hyōjungo—that, in effect,
choosing Japanese literature=choosing hyōjungo—and reveals the inherent
incompleteness of modern Japanese literature that can only be read as a translation of
English (for which no real translation exists).
I link Ōtsuka’s ingenious formulation to the importance of creolization as a form
of political resistance in minority literature. While Murakami Haruki’s failure to
embrace his native dialect of Kansai-ben ultimately constitutes a reification of genbun
itchi and the imperial discourse of the shi-shōsetsu, Won Soo-il employs the language of
the subaltern to destabilize this very same discourse. Through the self-conscious use of a
brand of creolization that blends Kansai-ben and the Cheju dialect, Won performs a
double-intervention on hyōjungo, deterritorializing the Japanese language and, as
Kawamura suggests, exposing the myth of Japanese homogeneity.

61
Murakami, like many zainichi authors, grew up in the Kansai region. Unlike these
zainichi authors, however, he refuses to incorporate his regional dialect into his literature.
62
Ōtsuka Eiji, Sabukaruchā Bungakuron (Theory of Subculture Literature) (Tōkyō:
Asahi Shinbunsha, 2004), 670.
42
Later in this chapter I will return to Won’s work to contend that, by constructing a
heterogeneous text that incorporates multiple languages and dialects, Won Soo-il’s 1997
novel AV Odyssey constitutes an expression of alterity, fulfilling many of the concepts
outlined in Kim’s discussions of nihongo bungaku. In addition, through his use of
unorthodox narration, Won creates an uncommon epic tale that both interrogates Japan’s
colonial past and discloses the potential for a transnational identity. In crafting a farcical
novel that straddles the line between genre fiction and “serious literature” and addressing
complex historical issues (colonialism, war responsibility, Japan-Korea relations)
alongside vulgar or lowbrow content (the adult video and sex industry), Won confounds
traditional concepts of Japanese literature on multiple levels. Won’s work, which follows
in the tradition of irreverent popular fiction pioneered by authors such as Nōsaka
Akiyuki, in fact serves as a kind of bridge between two very different generations of
zainichi authors, occupying a liminal space somewhere between parody and pastiche. AV
Odyssey thus anticipates the self-described “entertainment novel” of Kaneshiro Kazuki
while retaining the political content and anti-colonial sentiment of Kim Sokpom’s literary
output.

(Self)-Effaced Origins: Double Agency and the Act of Naming

AV Odyssey opens by introducing our hero with the following passage:

It wasn’t because he (yatsu) was a particular person of influence in the
international market behind Tsuruhashi station that he was given the
nickname “Chicago Cubs” ( シカゴ甲秀). The name in fact smacked of
an Americanism so affected as to be practically intolerable. No, for him,
the idea that, ‘It sounds cool, like Bruce Lee’ was enough to provide him
43
endless joy. Well, if the person in question doesn’t object, why should
anyone else bother to grumble about it?
63

The protagonist’s nickname—one that is derived through a play on the Japanese
pronunciation of his first name (Kapusu) to which he adds the prefix “shikago” (Chicago)
in katakana—challenges conventional concepts of naming and origin. It could also be
regarded as a parody of tsūmei (“assumed name”), a common practice amongst zainichi
Koreans in which they assume a Japanese name in an attempt to “pass” as Japanese and
avoid any potential discrimination against them. It is also suggestive of the colonial era
policy known as sōshi kaimei wherein the Japanese colonial government forced Korean
nationals to adopt Japanese names as part of their mission to reinscribe them as Japanese
and, by extension, efface Korean culture. In the case of our hero, however, his nickname
is not imposed by an external power, nor is it adopted in an attempt to conceal his Korean
ethnicity. In fact, rather than serving as a disavowal of his Koreanness, through
associations with both Bruce Lee and a historic American professional baseball
organization, this idiosyncratic nickname imbues Won’s protagonist with a transnational
quality that transcends both conventional notions of ethnic identity and traditional
systems of naming.
As I will argue in this section, this act of self-naming stands as a microcosm of
Won’s creolization theory by permitting multiple senses of identification both “foreign”
and domestic and undermining assumptions of Japanese homogeneity. Characters in AV
Odyssey confound issues of simple minority identification through split and/or elastic
senses of affiliation between Korea-Japan, North-South, center-periphery. In so doing,

63
Won Soo-il, AV Odyssey (Tokyo: Shinkansha, 1997), 7.
44
they demonstrate Freud’s assertion that a term can easily be converted to its opposite, a
concept I will explore later in this chapter.
The protagonist’s “real” name (Yan Japsu) is rarely mentioned in the novel except
in the odd occasion when a greater degree of formality is required. He is instead almost
universally referred to by either his self-appointed nickname or the pronoun “yatsu,” a
vaguely pejorative term that might be translated as “that guy.” The beginning of AV
Odyssey therefore recalls the opening passage of another zainichi Korean work, Mandogi
Yūrei kitan (The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost) by the aforementioned Kim Sokpom.

At Kannon Temple, in the heart of a deep valley, there was a young priest
who worked in the kitchen, a temple hand, in other words. People called
him “dimwit.” When they didn’t call him that, they called him
“Mandogi.” And when they didn’t call him that, they called him plain old
“temple hand.” Of them all, “Mandogi” was the least insulting, but that
was the Buddhist name given to him when he entered the priesthood. If
you have a priest’s name, you should still have the secular name you had
before you became a priest, but he didn’t have a common name like that.
He just had the nickname “Keiton” (meaning “dog shit”), and that was it
for his names. In other words, he had been nameless since birth. People
feel strange around the nameless; they make you wonder what it is to be
human.
64

Much like the titular Mandogi, Chicago Cubs’ absence of a proper name suggests
both a namelessness and a doubleness produced by Japanese colonial policies such as
sōshi kaimei and symptomatic of the displacement of the zainichi community in general.
For Cubs, it is precisely this absence that discloses an invisible doubleness of an origin
that has been erased. Echoing Ōtsuka’s critique of Murakami, the nicknames “Mandogi”

64
Kim Sokpom, Mondogi Yurei Kitan, trans. Cindi Textor (The Curious Tale of
Mandogi's Ghost) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 1.
45
and “Chicago Cubs” indicate an original that does not exist.
65
Christopher Scott uses
Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry to “show how Mandogi’s Japanese name, Mantoku
Ichiro, both mimics and mocks colonial authority. Almost Japanese but not quite, the
name ‘Mantoku Ichiro’ challenges the colonial identity of the Japanese language as a
‘national language’ (kokugo).”
66
As in Kim’s theory of nihongo bungaku, Scott thus
reads Mandogi’s name “as a strategic misuse or subversion of the Japanese language.”
67

I would argue that, by employing his own unorthodox system of naming (“Chicago
Cubs,” “yatsu”) Won is initiating a similar act of subversion. In so doing, Won is
critiquing both the unity of the Japanese language and the transcendental mode of the
Japanese I-novel, which presumes a unified subjective experience. On the other hand,
this nickname (and, hence, this erasure) is one that has been chosen by the protagonist
himself, its “exotic” associations hinting at a nascent transnational potential.
The book’s hero is the proprietor (and sole employee) of a foundering adult video
distribution company located in the heart of Osaka’s red light district. Through a series
of chance encounters, Chicago Cubs is gradually drawn into an elliptical plot of
international political intrigue. Cubs himself is a simple but innocent man—a perpetual
bachelor in his early 40s—whose “mind is always occupied by sexual thoughts” and has
a tendency to fall in love with every woman he meets. Central to the plot is Cubs’ search
for his long-lost father who went missing before his birth and was, until recently,

65
As Christopher Scott observes, this theory can also be applied to Mandogi as a literary
work in the sense that it reads like a translation without an original. Unlike the case of
Murakami, however, this effect is intentional and reflects an attempted subversion of
standard Japanese rather than a reification of the same.
66
Christopher Scott, "Invisible Men: The Zainichi Korean Presence in Postwar Japanese
Culture" (PhD diss, Stanford University), 117.
67
Ibid.
46
presumed dead during the Korean War (or “Yugio Incident,”
68
to which it is referred in
the novel) as a volunteer soldier in the South’s zainichi division. The truth, as Cubs
comes to discover, is in fact far more complicated than even the above would suggest. It
turns out that Cubs’ father has for years been wandering the streets of Pusan—dressed in
his old army uniform and clutching a battle-worn bugle—as a sort of local character who
warns unsuspecting passerby of the alleged conspiracy between the communist North and
the Japanese state. The father (aboji) constitutes both an (living) apparition of Korea’s
war dead and an anachronism that straddles the material and spectral worlds. Aboji is
thus an embodiment of the zainichi 1
st
generation whose circumstances have been
reduced to a nomadic vagabond due to Japanese colonialism.
Cubs’ search for his father serves as a metaphor for the author’s own experience
as well as the zainichi experience in general—one that is often founded on the search for
one’s origin and a desire for wholeness that can never be fully recovered. Similarly, the
conclusion of AV Odyssey offers no simple resolution, ending on a tenuous note. Despite
valiant efforts, Cubs is never able to locate his father and is left to wonder if he indeed
exists at all. Nevertheless, through this series of mysterious encounters Cubs unwittingly
interrogates his Korean origins, stumbling upon a level of social engagement heretofore
unavailable or unthinkable to him. Here, as in many other zainichi works, the loss of the
father represents the loss of homeland brought about by the Yugio Incident and the
subsequent North-South division. It is therefore no coincidence that the disappearance of
Cubs’ father corresponds with the outbreak of the Korean War—a date that constitutes
yet another “origin,” that of the Korean diaspora—and that the long-sought father-son

68
In South Korea the Korean War is commonly referred to as “Yugio,” meaning “6-25,”
which marks the date of the outbreak of the war.
47
reunification is inevitably tied up with the quest for a reunification of the Korean
peninsula.
Cubs first receives word of his father through his encounter with Feja, a seductive
young Korean woman who is introduced as the daughter of a long-time friend of his
mother. Feja has been sent to Osaka in place of her mother—who has fallen into ill
health—to purchase goods at the electronic district (Den-den Town) to be resold in Korea
at a healthy markup. Cubs happily escorts Feja to Den-den Town and, following their
rousing success at bargaining, is convinced to accompany Feja back to Korea to complete
their business. Hearing wedding bells in his head, Cubs is soon jolted back to reality
when Feja’s driver runs off with the goods and a desperate Feja entreats Cubs to lend her
$3,000 to compensate for the lost merchandise whose sale was meant to pay for her
mother’s treatment. After getting her the money, she too disappears and Cubs is left to
wonder if he has been duped. Feja too bears multiple affiliations, acting as a double
(triple?) agent whose identity is perpetually in flux.
As Tina Chen discusses in her study of Asian-American literature, Double
Agency, Asian American identity is one characterized by the act of “impersonation,” the
performance of divided allegiance.
69
Asian Americans are commonly viewed as “never
American enough” and are thus forced to impersonate themselves. These acts of
impersonation, Chen claims, both reveal origins and confound issues of betrayal by
containing an inherent critique of conventional identity formation, the very system that
enables the notion of a “double agent.” Zainichi are similarly regarded as “never
Japanese enough,” or, to quote Scott quoting Bhabha, “almost Japanese but not quite.”

69
Tina Chen, Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and
Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 245.
48
AV Odyssey, by foregrounding characters with duel personalities, dramatizes the zainichi
experience of multiple affiliations (or “sense(s) of belonging,” to borrow Kawabata
Kōhei’s expression), while often resorting to acts of impersonation to pass as “normal
Japanese.”
Once again, the example of the Sinophone proves instructive here as a model for
multiple identities. Brian Bernards writes how recent work on Sinophone literature has
applied creolization to socio-cultural processes, not just linguistic ones. Sinophone
literature, and Sinophone Malaysian literature in particular, attempts to recuperate the
trope of creolization as “an ongoing process of cultural formation in the present.”
70
In
this context, creolization “recognizes culture as an ongoing process that cannot be
reduced to a singular outcome, offering neither a finished product (hybridity) nor a
composite portrait of separable and predetermined entities (multiculturalism),” instead
aspiring to a more fluid form of transnationalism that “retains the potential to spark
positive changes that defy its traumatic origins.”
71
Won’s AV Odyssey engages with a
similar model of creolization in terms of both linguistic and social construction. Not only
does language shift fluidly between Japanese and Korean, “standard” speech and regional
dialects, but the interaction between characters reveals the complex and shifting senses of
ideological affiliation at work in the zainichi community.
Cubs himself has become estranged from the political activism of the zainichi
community ever since he quit the Mindan (South Korean affiliated) youth group years

70
Brian Bernards, "Beyond Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Recuperating Creolization in
Postcolonial Sinophone Malaysian Literature," Postcolonial Studies 15, no. 3 (2012),
317.
71
Bernards, "Beyond Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Recuperating Creolization in
Postcolonial Sinophone Malaysian Literature," 318.
49
ago. However, following an accidental reunion with his old friend and former fellow
youth group member, Ko Yoni, and the rumors of his father’s reappearance, he becomes
suddenly reinvested in zainichi issues. Cubs, after hearing news of his father from his
exasperated mother, reacts with the following,
He definitely recalled hearing, in his youth, his mother [omoni] saying
something like, ‘Your father was dragged off by a worthless woman and
was left for dead in a field.’ But unfamiliar terms like ‘division of zainichi
volunteer soldiers’ or news of his father enlisting in the army and being
sent to Pusan to fight the communists—that is, the North—sounded so
bizarre as to be from a suspense novel. Not to mention the idea that he
might still be living somewhere in Pusan. It was almost enough to make
you fly off the handle. On the verge of falling off his chair, Cubs was
abruptly jolted back to reality by a sharp, “Get ahold of yourself!” from
Tossun [his mother].
72

Politics—much like the Korean homeland itself—always seemed distant and
arcane to Cubs, particularly when compared to more immediate carnal desires not
unconnected with his AV business, but his father’s connection to these issues lend them a
much more personal urgency. His father’s resurfacing not only signals a return of the
repressed but also triggers a realization of the interrelatedness of different cultural and
political spaces, rekindling an idealistic interest in the reunification of the Korean
peninsula. As Cubs muses at one point, “When he [yatsu] and Ko Yoni were active in
the zainichi youth group…while his mind was constantly filled with sexual fantasies, his
aspiration was always to ‘reunify the homeland.’ At every gathering, when it came time
to sing ‘Urie he sofon’ (‘My Wish’) Cubs would uncharacteristically burst into song with
the other participants. One part of the lyrics surfaced in the back of his mind: ‘My wish

72
Won, AV Odyssey, 56.
50
is for reunification/Onward reunification.’”
73
While Cubs tries to cynically justify his
AV distribution business to Feja as a means of undermining Japan as an economic
superpower by brainwashing its citizens with sexual thoughts, thereby reducing worker
productivity, his earnestness belies an unwavering form of social engagement. The fact
that this reengagement occurs during Cubs’ search for his father suggests a
correspondence between political activism and the exploration of one’s ethnic or national
origins. Beginning with the act of naming, Cubs’ interrogation of zainichi subjectivity
mimics the process of writing described in Kim Sokpom’s theories of creolization. As
Kim suggests, this act of writing cannot be a neutral one but must formally challenge the
presumed universality of Japanese literary expression through a systematic
defamiliarization. In his “odyssey” of self-discovery, Cubs questions binaries of North-
South, Korea-Japan, while also illuminating the underlying historical tensions that
contributed to the production of the zainichi Korean community.

Repetition Against Repeating: Yugio and Japan’s Imperial Legacy

There is a curious sense of repetition that permeates Won’s novel and underscores
tropes of duplication and excess in the narrative framework. These repetitions are echoes
of Kim Sokpom’s pedagogical mission of continual return to the site of historical atrocity
in his work. In this section, I also associate this pattern of repetition with Freud’s writing
on “the uncanny,” which he connects with the doppelganger trope in art that is born out
of a sense of trauma or displacement. Most conspicuous of these repetitions in AV

73
Won, AV Odyssey, 108-109.
51
Odyssey are the digits “625,” which are repeated throughout the narrative in different
contexts. As explained in the novel, these numbers are most commonly associated with
the outbreak of the Korean War, which took place on June 25, 1950 and is often known
in South Korea as the “Yugio Uprising” or “6/25 Incident.” For our hero, Chicago Cubs,
these numbers not only signify the beginning of the end for the unification of the Korean
peninsula, but also constitute the origin of his father’s disappearance. This string of
digits then repeats itself in unexpected contexts provoking an odd sense of the uncanny.
Cubs—not long after he first learns of his father’s reappearance—is contacted by
an old war buddy of his dad’s who now works as a travel guide in Pusan and is the one
responsible for his father’s rediscovery. Cubs is informed that his father is now headed to
Tokyo in a desperate attempt to recover an underground pornographic video that features
his daughter performing sexual acts on two different government elites—one from the
South and one from the North. Were this video to fall into the wrong hands, this could
mean the death of Cubs’ half-sister(!) as well as the humiliation of the government
figures in question. Reeling from the news of his father’s return from the dead and the
existence of a heretofore unknown half-sister, Cubs is struck by another shocking
discovery: the woman in the video (i.e. his half-sister) is none other than Feja, the
Korean woman who ran off with Cubs’ money. Still adding to the intrigue is the catalog
number on the video: 625, otherwise known as “Yugio.” Cubs is thus confronted with
the task of recovering the video while attempting to intercept his father in the process.
The quest to recover the “underground” video (now gravely labeled “Yugio”)
mimics/doubles the mission to recover and expose lost episodes that have been willfully
forgotten or repressed in the annals of Korean history. This narrative device functions
52
much like Kim Sokpom’s perpetual return to the Cheju Incident in an attempt to liberate
its memory from the official version of history propagated by the South Korean regime
and return it to the zainichi historical consciousness. Read in concert with Freud’s The
Uncanny, one of the earliest essays on the doppelganger effect in art, that argues that a
sense of the uncanny (“something that has been repressed and now returns”) is one that is
achieved through excess and repetition, i.e. doubleness (147), we can interpret the
doubleness in zainichi Korean literature as a representation of that which cannot be
represented, an excess produced through the repression of historical trauma.
For instance, Freud illustrates how the term heimlich (faimilar) is easily converted
to its opposite, unheimlich (uncanny) in the same way that the familiar sight of the adult
videotape is numbered to morph into the continual evocation of the 625 Incident. Freud
writes that “this word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas,
which are not mutually contradictory, but very different from each other—the one
relating to what is familiar and comfortable, the other to what is concealed and kept
hidden.”
74
This conversion finds its origins in trauma, as the term “uncanny” comes to
embody a paradoxical field of associations that “applies to everything that was intended
to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open.”
75
Freud goes on to detail
manifestations of the doppelganger effect in the following passage:

[M]otifs that produce an uncanny effect…involve the idea of the “double”
(the Doppelganger), in all its nuances and manifestations—that is to say,
the appearance of persons who have to be regarded as identical because
they look alike. This relationship is intensified by the spontaneous
transmission of mental processes from one of these persons to the other—

74
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (New York: Penguin, 2003), 132.
75
Ibid.
53
what we would call telepathy—so that the one becomes co-owner of the
other’s knowledge, emotions and experience. Moreover, a person may
identify himself with another and so become unsure of his true self; or he
may substitute the other’s self for his own. The self may thus be
duplicated, divided and interchanged. Finally there is the constant
recurrence of the same thing, the repetition of the same facial features, the
same characters, the same destinies, the same misdeeds, even the same
names, through successive generations.
76

Here Freud posits split personality, dual identity, and double agency as primary
expressions of the uncanny, which finds its origins in personal or historical trauma, a
condition that resonates particularly with members of the ethnic Korean minority.
Furthermore, he foregrounds a “repetition of the same thing” in the recurrence of “the
same characters, the same destinies, the same misdeeds, even the same names, through
successive generations,” tropes that are repeated throughout AV Odyssey.
Homi Bhabha thus appropriates Freud’s notion of the uncanny in his theory of
mimicry, which reads hybridity as a form of subversion in which the colonized coopts the
identity of the colonizer (“so that the one becomes co-owner of the other’s knowledge,
emotions and experience”) to the point where the two become nearly indistinguishable—
“almost but not quite.”
77
This processs instantiates a blurring of boundaries, destabilizing
the very hegemonic definitions of colonizer and colonized while also questioning the
value of conventional forms of political subversion that rely on binary divisions. Bhabha
extends Freud’s theories by invoking “the unhomely” as a form of transnationalism that
“is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations.”
78
He adds that, “To be
unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the ‘unhomely’ be easily accommodated in that

76
Freud, The Uncanny, 141-142.
77
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 122.
78
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 13.
54
familiar division of social life into private and public spheres,”
79
thereby differentiating it
from traditional constructions of hybridity or multiculturalism. Using semiotics, Bhabha
outlines conditions that underlie an understanding of the process of identification that
“reveal the deep psychic uncertainty of the colonial relation itself.”
80
This form of
postcolonial identification is characterized by doubleness, invisibility, a splitting of the
subject, and a lack of ontological wholeness that is “represented in a narrative of negation
and repetition.”
81
Therefore, “the impasse or aporia of consciousness that seems to be the
representative postmodernist experience is a peculiar strategy of doubling.”
82
To enter
postcolonial literature is thus to enter the world of double inscriptions in which “[t]he
performance of the doubleness of the splitting of the subject is enacted in the writing…; it
is evident in the play on the metonymic figures of ‘missing’ and ‘invisibleness’ around
which their questioning of identity turns.”
83

AV Odyssey, in interrogating the complexities of Korean minority identity and the
aporia of postcolonial consciousness, reproduces this economy of doubling and
displacing, visibility and invisibility, negation and repetition. To use Bhabha’s
terminology, these tropes illustrate zainichi existence as a form of “double inscription,” a
palimpsest of scribblings and erasures that results from a fragmented history based in
Japan’s failed imperial project. This is expressed through the
disappearance/reappearance of the aboji (Chicago Cubs’ father), the reoccurrence of
double agents—or multiple characters with multiple identities—and the repetition of the

79
Ibid.
80
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 63.
81
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 67.
82
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 70-71.
83
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 75.
55
same thing, that is 6/25 or Yugio. In the case of the latter, these digits resurface not only
in reference to the outbreak of the Korean War or the elusive underground adult video,
but also in more obscure contexts (the date of a character’s
84
birthday, the date in 1988
(year of the Seoul Olympics) when Cubs’ father was first rediscovered in Cheju)
producing an uncanny sense of repetition.
The repetition of these specific numbers—625—signifies the paranoid fear shared
by so many characters in AV Odyssey of a second outbreak of the Korean War,
something that Cubs and others are determined to prevent through the recovery of the
Yugio video. As the video is said to hold the key to interrupting a second Yugio
Incident, it is no surprise that it has been inscribed with the numbers 625. Through this
act of repetition, Won expresses the same preoccupation that defines Kim Sokpom’s
literature—the retention of colonial memory as a form of insurance not to repeat these
same atrocities, a repetition against repeating. This idea is also at work in Freud’s
construction of the uncanny, which he describes in the following passage:

In the first place, if psychoanalytic theory is right in asserting that every
effect arising from an emotional impulse—of whatever kind—is converted
into fear by being repressed, it follows that among those things that are felt
to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that
the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now
returns. This species of the frightening would then constitute the uncanny,
and it would be immaterial whether it was itself originally frightening or
arose from another affect. In the second place, if this really is the secret
nature of the uncanny, we can understand why German usage allows the
familiar (das Heimliche, the ‘homely’) to switch to its opposite, the
uncanny (das Unheimliche, the ‘unhomely’), for this uncanny element is
actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to
the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed. The
link with repression now illuminates Schelling’s definition of the uncanny

84
Specifically, that of Mari, Cubs’ love interest and daughter of double-agent Im Miha.
56
as “something that should have remained hidden and has come into the
open.”
85

This idea of “nothing new or strange, but something that was…estranged from
[the psyche] only through being repressed” also describes the position of the Cheju
Incident in Korean memory. The memory of this incident was something long repressed
by official state discourse but has recently come to light in part through the efforts of
intellectuals such as Kim Sokpom. Its uncanniness is thus derived from its homeliness as
“something that should have remained hidden and has come into the open.” As Freud
speculates, this may be why the very process of psychoanalysis—which attempts to
uncover these repressed memories via a plumbing of the unconscious—has come to be
regarded as uncanny: “Indeed, it would not surprise me to hear that psychoanalysis,
which seeks to uncover these secret forces, had for this reason itself come to seem
uncanny to many people.”
86

This conception of psychoanalysis as a method to plumb the unconscious is in
fact an integral component of Kim’s theory of literature. Kim, in many different
interviews and essays, engages with Freud’s logic by emphasizing the unique power of
literature to access a sort of collective unconscious to excavate historical memory,
thereby positing literature as akin to psychoanalysis. Kim has said that the role of the
author is to depict the muishiki (unconscious) world by accessing the consciousness of
others, much like the work of a shaman.
87
Furthermore, it is through the unconscious that

85
Freud, The Uncanny, 147-148.
86
Freud, The Uncanny, 150.
87
Kim Sokpom, Kim Sokpom "Kazantō" Shōsetsu Sekai O Kataru!--Chejudō Yon-San
Jiken/Zainichi to Nihonjin/Seiji to Bungaku O Meguru Monogatari (Kim Sokpom's
57
one gains access to the universal (=collective unconscious), a possibility that can only be
disclosed through literature. This conception is formulated as an explicit criticism of the
shishōsetsu (I-novel) model of social consciousness—one which champions a personal
but ultimately elitist form of interiority derived from its insularity—as the purest mode of
literary expression.

“The Uncanny Lives at Home”—Diasporic Origins and the Loss of Hometown

Psychoanalytic scholar Hugh Haughton speculates on the cause of Freud’s
preoccupation with the uncanny, suggesting that it was inspired by the particular
historical moment in which it was written and Freud’s own fear of possible displacement.
In 1919, Freud’s own hometown had fallen under the shadow of colonialism. He is
quoted as mourning Austria’s surrender of South Tyrol by writing, “To be sure, I’m not a
patriot, but it is painful to think that pretty much the whole world will be foreign
territory.”
88
Here Freud echoes a colonial anxiety that is both consistent with his ideas on
the uncanny (the uncanny lives at home) and resonates with the thoughts of Kim and
other zainichi authors by expressing a fear of being displaced in one’s own “hometown.”
Interestingly, 1919, the year of The Uncanny’s publication as well as the above quote,
also marked two important—and seemingly conflicting—moments in Japanese
imperialist history that would contribute to the displacement of zainichi generations to
come. These moments reveal Japan’s burgeoning colonial aspirations as well as their

Literary World of Kazantō Explained!--Tales of the Cheju Uprising, Zainichi Koreans
and Japanese, and Literature and Politics) (Tokyo: Yubun Shoin, 2010), 66.
88
Freud, quoted in Hugh Haughton, “Introduction,” The Uncanny, l.
58
intense racial insecurity vis-à-vis the West. On February 13, 1919 at the Paris Peace
Conference, the Japanese delegation proposed the following “racial equality clause” to
the League of Nations:

The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations,
the High Contracting Parties agree to accord as soon as possible to all
alien nationals of states, members of the League, equal and just treatment
in every respect making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account
of their race or nationality.

As Naoko Shimazu explains in her study of the Racial Equality Proposal, the fate
of this proposal was “complicated by many layers of misapprehension on all sides”
89
that
ultimately resulted in the clause’s rejection. The Japanese never intended the proposal to
advocate universal racial equality (a concept, Shimazu claims, did not exist at the time);
rather, it was motivated by Japan’s aspiration of being acknowledged as a “great power”
on equal terms with Western nations.
90
Despite its wording, the proposal took a cue from
the Wilsonian idea of “self-determination” which was only meant to apply to a select few
(i.e. not other Asian nations). It was also built on the dialectic between Asia-shugi (Pan-
Asianism) and datsu-a-ron (Japanese secession from Asia), two discourses that were
linked as a defense against Western imperialism and a consequent justification of
Japanese colonialism.
91
The proposal’s failure, which fulfilled Japan’s greatest fear of

89
Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919
(London: Routledge, 1998), 3.
90
Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919, 7.
91
Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919, 94.
59
rejection by the West, had two major implications for Japan: a disillusionment with the
West and an excuse for an “independent” (pan-Asian imperialist) foreign policy.
92

While Japan attempted to justify the “equality of nations” to the Western powers,
they used the same imperialist logic to implement increasingly assimilationist rule on the
Korean peninsula. 1919 was also a watershed date for Japanese colonial rule of Korea in
that it marks the March First Uprising, an event that triggered widespread anti-colonial
demonstrations and rioting that lasted well into the early summer. Interestingly,
according to Michael E. Robinson, Wilson’s Fourteen Points—the same rhetoric that
inspired the Japanese delegation in Paris—also influenced many Korean nationalists who
had received their education abroad (mostly in Japan) and who took part in the
demonstrations in demanding self-determination for their home country.
93

While the March First Uprising was unsuccessful in the sense that it did not lead
to Korean independence and only instigated a shift in Japanese colonial policy to a more
lenient but even more manipulative brand of “cultural rule,” its memory remains a
significant moment in the Korean nationalist narrative as a “shining moment of national
unity during the long dark night of Japanese rule” that inspired subsequent independence
movements.
94
Even more significant perhaps is the ironic fact that this movement was
only made possible by Korean students returning from Tokyo who had been steeped in
the same principles of humanism as the Japanese imperialist authorities, constituting
another kind of “return of the repressed.”

92
Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919, 170.
93
Michael E. Robinson, Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 47.
94
Ibid.
60
Robinson, in reference to the Japanese colonization of Korea, argues that one of
the central components of the colonial experience is the feeling of living in a place
(home) that is no longer one’s own. This experience once again echoes Freud’s
characterization of the uncanny (“unhomely”) as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of
“deterritorialization.” Kafka, who was a contemporary of Freud but only received critical
attention posthumously, has been said to grapple with a similar sense of displacement as
a Czech writer living and writing in German, a displacement that his work embodies.
Won Soo-il has similarly struggled with the idea of “hometown,” and his writing
is steeped in an awareness—if only secondhand—of the colonial experience. For the
elder generation of which he writes in Ikaino monogatari, the hometown is Cheju-dō,
itself occupying an ambivalent position both geographically and ideologically in relation
to the Korean peninsula. Won, however, comes to the realization that his hometown, in
so far as he has one, is the ethnic enclave of Ikaino, another liminal space that, being
located in Japan and populated by Korean immigrants, is both Japan and Korea and yet
somehow neither, transcending the J-K binary as a third place that is ontologically
distinct from the other two. Kitamura Iwao, referencing Won’s “Ri-kun no yūutsu,”
draws a generational distinction between Won’s work and that of earlier zainichi authors,
one that is reflected in his characters’ attitude toward repatriation. Quoting the opening
of Won’s story, for the second generation and beyond, the “homeland” of Cheju-do exists
“not as a place to return, but only as a place to go.”
95
Then again, quoting Lee-kun’s
meditations on origins, “‘But if the blood that ran through his veins dictated that he
acknowledge Cheju as his homeland, his natural homeland was none other than

95

Kitamura
Iwao,
"Won
Soo-‐Il,"
in
Zainichi
Bungaku
Zenshu,
eds.
Jirō
Isogai
and

Kazuo
Kuroko,
Vol.
12
(Tokyo:
Bensei
Shuppan,
2006),
420.

61
Ikaino.’”
96
As a result, it is Ikaino and its pastiche of “scene(s) of the Korean market
symbolic of Cheju that was such a part of his mental fabric.”
97
This is the impression one
gets from reading AV Odyssey—Ikaino not as a narrow urban ghetto, but a vast
international marketplace that possesses its own mythology and origins, an ontologically
hybrid space composed of both traditional and pop-culture images. The fluid identity of
Ikaino in Won’s work can be regarded as a metaphor for the Chōsen nationality itself
98
,
which does not allude or connect to any actual place but is itself a kind of floating
signifier.
99
Whether it is Kim’s Cheju or Won’s Ikaino, zainichi literary works
demonstrate how “hometown” is relegated to the realm of the imaginary. In the
following section, I will investigate yet another form of transnationalism at work in AV
Odyssey, that of the network of drug and pornography distribution that links distant
geographical and ideological spaces.

In the Name of the Father: Drugs, Porn, and Transnationalism

In Won’s AV Odyssey, the trope of repetition is also manifest in Cubs’ pursuit of
his lost father, a search that is inextricably tied up with networks of distribution and

96
Ibid.
97
Kitamura,
"Won
Soo-‐Il,"
421.
98
As Kim and others have explained, “The postwar Japanese government, using the same
logic as the colonial era authorities to demand Japanese citizenship, employed an alien
registration system that designated the nationality of all zainichi Koreans as ‘Chōsen.’
Not only did a nation called ‘Chōsen’ not exist in the postwar, but those zainichi who
refused to convert to South Korean citizenship were relegated to a status that did not
correspond to any actual place.” Kim Sokpom and Adachi Fumito, Kimu Sokpom
“Kazantō” shōsetsu sekai o kataru, 28-29.
99
Lie uses this term to refer specifically to the “Korean-Japanese” identity that emerges
in zainichi literature of the 1990s. This will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4.
Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity, 157.
62
duplication. Cubs’ aboji is both literally and figuratively lost: Figuratively in the sense
that he has been missing since Cubs’ birth and literally in that he aimlessly wanders the
streets of Tokyo in search of the pornographic video Yugio, which is also lost. He is
recovered (i.e. Cubs learns that he is no longer dead) only to go missing again. We are
thus left with multiple searches triggered by multiple disappearances. Indeed, at several
points in the story, Cubs acquires the impression that he is following in his father’s
footsteps, both in attempting to retrace his physical path and unconsciously repeating the
elder’s actions. Wandering through dark Tokyo alleys in search of the video, Cubs finds
himself trailed by a police officer.
“He hears a policeman call out to him from behind. Cubs musters all his
energy to run in a random direction. He breaks free from the crowds,
winds through alleys, seeking out a dark place untouched by the neon
glow. Perhaps this is how his father ran once. The father with his military
bugle in hand, the son with an old photo of his father pressed close to his
chest—both running from the authorities. Man, what the fuck is
happening?”
100

Much as aboji was seduced by the (former) North Korean double-agent Im Miha
(and nearly convinced to repatriate to North Korea before breaking free to volunteer for
the South Korean side instead), Cubs finds himself hopelessly attracted to Im’s daughter,
a young half-Korean, half-Japanese woman and employee of Ko Yoni’s hostess club who
has been enlisted to help in the search for aboji. At one point in their search, Chicago
Cubs starts to give in to sexual thoughts, imploring Mari to do the same:

“I can’t take it anymore.”
“So I guess you don’t care what happens to your father then.”

100
Won,
AV
Odyssey,
93.
63
Aboji! You fucking asshole! What the hell’s going on! Why do
you have to show up at a time like this! I’ve never even seen your face.
The saddest thing is how you knew that omoni was pregnant with me and
decided to elope instead. So the Yugio Incident happens and you’re
suddenly awakened to your own patriotism? I don’t think so. Before that
you were seduced and brainwashed by a pair of big tits. And those tits
were Mari’s mom’s—but let’s forget about that.
But, really, what kind of luck is this? To fall in love with the
daughter of a secret agent who seduced your father and, in the end,
separated father and son—if this isn’t fate I’m not sure what is. But then
there’s the feeling of Mari’s soft breasts. I think I understand now Dad’s
reasons for being seduced. In the end, I am my father’s son. In this case,
all you can do is surrender to the moment.
101

In Cubs’ unwitting imitation of his father’s actions, we see the uncanny pattern
described by Freud as “the constant recurrence of the same thing…the same characters,
the same destinies, the same misdeeds, even the same names, through successive
generations.” Despite Cubs’ attempt to forge a distinct individual identity, he is bound to
the destiny of his estranged father through a separation, the severance of the Korean
peninsula and the trauma of civil war. Ironically, it is precisely Cubs independent
business—and its conterminous network of distribution—the same one that Cubs uses to
assert his independence, that brings him closer to his father.
The appearance of Mari, however, even further problematizes the possibility of a
singular zainichi identity. The daughter of a North Korean secret agent turned venture
capitalist and a Japanese adult video distributor, Mari is both ethnically and symbolically
hybrid, representative of a new generation of zainichi unimpeded by ideological

101
Won,
AV
Odyssey,
233-‐234.
64
affiliation. When talk turns political, Mari pleads utter indifference
102
, as in the following
exchange with her father:

“Unfortunately, the powers that be in the North and South aren’t
able to completely squash the people’s desire for reunification. If they
tried, it would be fatal. But at the same time, they don’t have the courage
to allow freedom of exchange at a grassroots level. And that’s because
they fear it could lead to chaos, resistance, or revolt.”
“So that’s why they just make the appearance of cooperating.”
“That’s half true. Because half of them thinks that they’re
ethnically obligated to do so.”
“Well, it makes no difference to me.”
“Mari, you know that half of your blood is your mother’s (Omae
no chi no hanbun wa onma no chi nanyado).”
“How many times are you going to say that? I’m really sick of
hearing it.”
“I only say it because you say things like what you just said.”
“I was born and raised here and I’ll live how I want!”
“I’m not denying that.”
“Then please don’t interfere.”
“But indifference isn’t good.”
“I’m a highly inquisitive person, so I’m not indifferent. I’m just
not interested.”
103

In her exchange with her Japanese father, Mari encapsulates the young generation
of zainichi who shun political discourse as framed by the older generation, but express a
genuine curiosity in ethnic origins when approached from a more personal perspective.
We see this same tendency in zainichi Korean filmmakers Sai Yōichi and Lee Bongou, as
well as author Kaneshiro Kazuki, who will be discussed in Chapters 3 and 4,
respectively. Later, when Cubs implores Mari to take her father’s words into account and
inherit the social consciousness of her mother, she bluntly rebukes him with: “I’m not a

102
In this regard, Mari resembles Sugihara, the hero of Kaneshiro Kazuki’s debut novel,
GO. His character will be further explored in Chapter 4.
103

Won, AV Odyssey,
221.
65
revolutionary (kakumeika).”
104
Nevertheless, Mari, as Cubs’ unofficial right-hand
(wo)man, becomes more and more absorbed in the search, including the political issues it
implicates. At one point, Cubs, much more conscious of the political and historical
forces involved in their increasingly futile search, becomes overwhelmed and exhausted
by what might be described as the burden of history. Expressing his frustration to Mari
results in the following exchange:

“God, I’m tired of being Korean (chōsenjin).”
“Then maybe you should just quit.”
“You say that, but it’s not like quitting a job.”
“You shouldn’t take it so seriously.”
“So it’s not your problem then?”
“What do you mean? I’m half Korean, you know.”
“That’s right.”
Cubs vaguely recalled his shared identity
105
with Mari.
“I think it’s important to consider all the possibilities. I talk to my
dad like I don’t give a shit about mom’s homeland, but that’s not really the
case. I rebel because I care. And whatever my mom’s past or present is,
she’s the only mom I have.”
106

As in the previous passage, this conversation delineates Mari’s perspective on
ethnic identity, this time vis-à-vis Cubs, who while not of the 1
st
generation still feels
beholden to the generational expectation of what it means to be Korean. By contrast,
Mari’s sense of identity is more fluid and thus more performative; as she is not
ideologically aligned with any one group, she is comfortable with the act of negotiating
between multiple spaces that some might consider mutually exclusive, a propensity that, I

104
Won Soo-il, AV Odyssey, 227.
105
The term used here for identity is 同一性 (doitsusei) with “identity” written above in
furigana. It’s an interesting choice, in relation to Mari’s statement, given that the word
also holds the meaning of “sameness” or “uniformity.”
106
Won, AV Odyssey, 244.
66
suggest, is related to her technical mastery with computers. Still later, Cubs muses on
Mari’s position in relation to his own:

Cubs despised the Japanese from the bottom of his heart. On the other
hand, Mari is half-Japanese. And her dad is Japanese. So there was part
of him that couldn’t give in to complete hatred. Somewhere inside him
there’s always this wavering indecision that covers him like a fog. Didn’t
I once have the grandiose plan of spreading pornography all across Japan,
leading to the country’s cultural downfall? Man, those were the
days…Well, no matter how much you struggle, the filth of being born and
raised in Japan never really comes off. Even so, I can never become
Japanese, nor do I want to.
107

If Cubs’ character vaguely reflects the tenacity of zainichi ideology, the
appearance of Mari represents the limitations of the very same. Cubs continues to
struggle with an anti-Japaneseness inherited from the elder generation’s anti-imperialism,
one that generates a guilt at being born in Japan and causes him to question his
relationship with Mari. While Cubs appears to attribute her ambivalence to her racial
hybridity, Mari’s position is far more generational than racial. In many ways, she
embodies the character of the “new zainichi,” as described in a Newsweek (Japan edition)
feature article from 2003, who is intent on “consider[ing] all possibilities” and is capable
of maintaining multiple identities without the ideological baggage of previous
generations.
108
This fluidity in turn coincides with her ability to navigate digital space.
When the two start to work together, Mari naturally assumes control of office duties and
Cubs is left to wonder how a woman whose job has been to “suck off countless men in a

107
Won,
AV
Odyssey,
255.
108
Deborah Hodgson, “Hyphenating Japan: Nyū zainichi ga nihon o kaeru,” Newsweek
(Japan edition), November 26, 2003, 20.
67
dimly lit room”
109
can have such talent with a computer. For Mari—and other members
of the younger generation—a facility with computers gives her the ability to connect with
an unseen network and render the invisible visible. Synthesizing the theories of Lev
Manovich and Azuma Hiroki, the encroachment of digital technology has generated a
transition from a “grand narrative” (represented here by zainichi ideology) to “database
consumption” (in the case of Azuma) or a “negotiation of space” (in Manovich). While
not directly addressed in their work, both Manovich and Azuma imply that this shift has
impacted the very process of identity formation, one that is exemplified in the character
of Mari.
In fact, though published in 1997, before the internet had fully evolved into the
complex border-crossing network it has become today, AV Odyssey contains many details
that, when taken together, can be said to anticipate the rise of the digital. The very
structure of the novel constitutes less a conventional narrative as a database-esque
negotiation of space. This narrative structure is one based on movement, following an
almost RPG logic by tracing Cubs as he passes through different spaces—Osaka, Seoul,
Tokyo—in search of a missing item/person. At one point, Im Miha—a professional
secret agent—admires Cubs familiarity with sketchy “international” spaces.
110
For his
ability to navigate diverse spaces, the novel posits Cubs as a transnational figure and his
business—AV distribution—as the model of transnationalism par excellence. This
underground network of pornography (and later narcotics) is able to traverse national
borders, using complex routes to connect North and South via a common locus of desire

109
Won,
AV
Odyssey,
193-‐194.
110
The term employed here is 無国籍 (mukokuseki), one that also has the connotation of
“statelessness.” Won, AV Odyssey, 169.
68
when political differences render them otherwise uncommunicative. And while the
goods being circulated are videotapes (not strictly digital, but a digital precursor), the
tropes of duplication, dubbing, multiple versions/iterations that are grounded in the
material properties of this technology and haunt this narrative metaphorically reflect the
complex condition of zainichi identity construction. One of the questions surrounding
the lost Yugio video is how many versions actually exist when a concrete number is
rendered indeterminate through duplication.
Cubs’ unwitting involvement in the drug trafficking world reveals how these
complex networks establish the precedent for a transnational identity, even when the
professed goal is a nationalist one. Cubs is coerced into becoming a dealer for an anti-
aging drug by another one of Im Miha’s old contacts, a mysterious multinational
entrepreneur by the name of George Pak. As Pak explains, this drug (designated
“tonirufan,” or toitsumaru (Good Ship Reunification)) will be marketed to elderly
Koreans whose one desire is to live to see the reunification of the Korean peninsula
become a reality. Pak states his utopian goals in particularly severe terms: “’In the event
that the long-awaited reunification comes to be realized, I will take the drug formula to
my grave and be reduced to ashes along with it. Isn’t that the way it should be?
Reunification is everything, and if our newly reunified homeland (urinara) comes to be
saturated with youthful senior citizens, the future of our young people doesn’t seem
particularly rosy, does it?’”
111
The reason Cubs is being recruited, however, is for the
sale of this same drug to the Japanese. “‘My plan is to sell this drug to elderly zainichi at
a reasonable price. Of course, there is really no profit to be had there. But this is where

111
Won, AV Odyssey, 118.
69
you come in. Using your company as an intermediary, I’d like you to sell tonirufan to
rich Japanese men and women. The only difference is that, in this case, the product will
be called “Eden.”’”
112
Pak thus introduces a bifurcated marketing approach that profits
off of former imperialists to fulfill the nationalist dream of reunification.
The above passage discloses the tenacious desire for reunification in the zainichi
imagination as well as the gradual acknowledgment of the impossibility of the same. The
severance of North and South has been so long-standing that the possibility of
reunification is relegated to the realm of fantasy. Only with the assistance of a miracle
drug that enables eternal life can the dream of reunification be realized, an assertion that
stands as both utopian and exceedingly cynical at the same time. And it is only through
narcotic sales—a transnational network if there ever was one—can the border between
North and South finally be erased. Tonirufan thus stands as an ambiguous symbol: the
old generation’s (literally) undying fixation with homeland politics through a desire for
reunification as well as a desire for transnationalism, one that entails an erosion of
nationalist ideology.
In the end, the drug tonirufan—like many aspects of AV Odyssey—is left a
mystery. Much like Cubs’ aboji, the reader is left to wonder if the drug or its inventor,
George Pak
113
, exists at all or is part of an elaborate conspiracy orchestrated by one of the
enemy parties. Cubs and Mari—unable to locate the Yugio Tape by the designated
deadline—fear that Cubs father and the double-agent/love interest Feja who are
supposedly being held captive by Japanese right-wing thugs will be executed as

112
Won, AV Odyssey, 119.
113
The above request was delivered to Cubs via a prerecorded video. Cubs never meets
George Pak in person.
70
promised. With little recourse, the two (who have grown closer over the course of the
search)—either as a diversion or out of sheer exasperation—start to have sex only to be
interrupted by a police raid seeking out their arrest. While the charges against Mari are
ultimately dropped and she is released a few days following her arrest, the novel ends
with Cubs still wallowing in jail, being held under suspicion of selling and distributing
illegal drugs and pornography. The lack of resolution reveals the tenuous nature of
North-South, Korea-Japan relations at the time of writing. Furthermore, the complex,
fragmented nature of the plot serves to underscore the difficulty of a coherent
understanding of the intensely fractured history of Japan-Korea relations. As Cubs muses
in the closing pages:

In Cubs’ days in the Youth Alliance, while it’s true that his mind was
constantly consumed by sexual fantasy, he also felt that he possessed an
understanding of the political situation in his divided homeland. But this
understanding of the political situation amounted to nothing more than the
fragments of a jigsaw puzzle. Ultimately, a vague understanding is the
same as ignorance. While the Lockheed Scandal that led to the downfall
of Tanaka Kakuei convinced Cubs of the existence of backroom dealers in
the political world, his powers of imagination were not able to stretch
beyond the Genkai Strait to the North and South of his homeland.
This is why when Kim Hyon Hui—one of the perpetrators of the
bombing of Korean Air flight 858—appeared on his TV screen, Cubs was
able to regard it as none of his concern. It’s also why he was able to
shamelessly enjoy the Seoul Olympics with Tossun in tow and why, when
Faja appeared out of the blue, he suspected nothing and gladly
accompanied her on a trip to Den-den Town to stock up on electronic
goods.
114

Here Cubs references a myriad of recent cultural and political events that drew
greater attention to the existence of resident Koreans in a presumed homogeneous

114
Won, AV Odyssey, 303.
71
Japanese society and, in turn, caused many zainichi to reconsider their own position in
this “foreign land” that, for all intents and purposes, constituted “home.” While Cubs
feels edified by the details of his adventure, he is none the greater for it. It is particularly
interesting that he describes his understanding of the situation as “fragments of a jigsaw
puzzle,” as Won uses the exact same term (jigusō pazuru) in “Ri-kun no yūutsu” to
explain Lee’s struggle to construct a unified mental portrait of Cheju. This fragmentation
signifies, above all else, the collapse of the “grand narrative” that is zainichi ideology and
the subsequent shift to an individualized approach that discloses both a transnational
potential through the coexistence of multiple affiliations and the danger of recuperation
by neoliberal discourses that traffic in similar notions of individualism and globalization.

Conclusion: AV Odyssey and Postcoloniality

Won, in the brief afterward that follows AV Odyssey, explains his motivations for
writing the novel. He reveals that he was only able to write AV Odyssey after ten years of
stifling writer’s block. Once begun, what was initially intended as a short exercise in pop
fiction quickly expanded into a full-length work. Won explains that he wrote this novel
to illustrate how, “The trauma of the 38
th
parallel (san-paru-son) divided not only the
homeland (urinara), but the zainichi community as well. This is why I was able to
complete AV Odyssey with an entertaining light touch.”
115
At the same time, Won’s
novel stands at the precipice of the dissolution of this very same ideological division. AV
Odyssey was in fact written during a transitional moment in Japan-Korea relations that,

115
Won, AV Odyssey, 318.
72
perhaps not coincidentally, stands between two major global sporting events—the 1988
Seoul Olympics and the 2002 Japan-South Korea World Cup. The events that surround
the publication of this work reveal the encroachment of neoliberalism in the guise of
globalization concurrent with the erosion of zainichi ideology. In the previous year
(1996), FIFA announced the Japan-South Korea joint hosting of the 2002 World Cup. In
1998, South Korea partially lifted the ban on the importation of Japanese cultural goods
before abolishing the ban entirely in 2004. 2004 also marked the height of the so-called
“Korean wave” (hallyu, or hanryū in Japanese) distinguished by the unprecedented
popularity of Korean pop culture goods in Japan. Though many have questioned the
positive impact of this phenomenon on the zainichi community
116
, the Korean wave at the
very least symbolized a knew-found receptiveness to and interest in Korean culture which
continues to this day.
Won, citing a 1996 review by Kitaoka Toshinori that observes similarities
between his work and that of earlier zainichi authors (particularly “Hikari no naka ni,”
(1939) the seminal work by 1
st
generation author Kim Sa-ryang that Kim Sokpom also
cites in his formulation of nihongo bungaku), writes:

It’s easy to suppose how for me—the author of “Lee-kun no yūutsu”—the
image of “Hikari no naka ni” glows in the back of my consciousness like
an electric lamp. But this is because that, for the zainichi who have
supposedly become post-colonial, the state of contemporary Japan (the
former colonizer) is nonetheless founded on a colonial mentality which, it
is fair to say, cannot help but be repeated (saisei sareru) in the zainichi
author’s consciousness and sensibility.
117

116
See especially Iwabuchi Koichi, “When the Korean Wave Meets Resident Koreans in
Japan: Intersections of the Transnational, the Postcolonial and the Multicultural” in East
Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 2008), 243-264.
117
Won, "Posuto Koroniaru Toshite no Zainichi Bungaku Kureōru Ka no Suiryū,” 96-97.
73

Won thus underscores the continuity and “repetition” between the colonial and
the postcolonial, one that is often obscured in the overdetermination of “rupture” in
discussions of these concepts. AV Odyssey also figures as a transitional work in that it
constitutes a continuation of the concerns of earlier zainichi writing while also
anticipating the transnationalism of Kaneshiro Kazuki and the new generation of zainichi
artists active in the new millenium, but without the disavowal of the political that so
characterizes these latter works. Kaneshiro’s GO, in its haste to disassociate itself from
the older generation deemed “dasai” (uncool) by Sugihara and his peers, succumbs to the
cultural neo-colonialism of globalization in its construction of a transnational model. AV
Odyssey, on the other hand, outside of Chicago Cubs’ alleged ignorance, remains deeply
informed of zainichi history, if only to transcend this foundation through its own
provisional brand of transnationalism. Won, as an author, while included in the Zainichi
bungaku zenshū (Complete Works of Zainichi Korean Literature), occupies a liminal
position in the zainichi canon, making him a minor author in the field of minor literature.
I would argue, however, that it is precisely this liminality
118
founded in the creolized
“mental fabric” of Ikaino that distinguishes Won’s work as a progenitor of a “minor
transnationalism” that entails equal investment in the global and local.

118
“These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—
singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of
collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.” Bhabha,
The Location of Culture, 2.
74
Chapter
Two

“Everything
is
Ending,
Everything
is
Beginning:”

Doubleness
and
Repetition
in
Kim
Sokpom’s
The
Death
of
a
Crow

Like Won’s AV Odyssey, Kim Sokpom’s debut literary work, The Death of a
Crow (Karasu no shi, 1957), is fraught with a doubleness that embodies the paradox of
the zainichi experience, while challenging nationalist assumptions about Japanese
literature. As this chapter explains, if Won renders his brand of creolization visible at the
surface of language, Kim’s version of nihongo bungaku contains a creolization embedded
in the text in the form of an anti-colonial resistance to the standard language of Japanese
literature (hyōjungo). On the other hand, the concept of doubleness is rendered even
more explicit in The Death of a Crow in that the narrative’s central dilemma revolves
around protagonist Chon Kijun’s position as a double-agent. I argue that through the
combination of an internal creolization that defamiliarizes the Japanese language and the
use of the trope of doubleness or double-agency, Kim’s The Death of a Crow envisions
an anti-imperial Japanese-language literature founded on the retention of colonial
memory.
First published in 1957 (some nine years after the events depicted took place) in a
minor literary journal to little acclaim
119
—is arguably the first literary work to address
the Cheju Incident, an event that was otherwise willfully erased from official state
histories. It is precisely this state endorsed amnesia—one that had already been set in

119
The Death of a Crow was published in the journal Bungei Shuto but received little
attention until its republication as a stand-alone volume a decade later in 1967.
75
motion less than ten years after the event—that Kim is attempting to combat in creating
this work. In the 1985 afterword to the Kodansha edition of The Death of a Crow, Kim
writes:
The story The Death of a Crow that appears in this collection is one that
I’d been holding in my heart for a long time, throughout my late twenties.
In a way, this is a work that was born out of the danger of my youth and
also proved to be my salvation by allowing me to escape this very same
danger. The fact that, when compared to my other writings, I still feel the
most affection toward my debut work, is based on this reason…Though
thirty years have now passed since I wrote The Death of a Crow, in
looking back I see that this story formed the foundation of my body of
work, dictating all of the works that would come after.
120

Indeed one can see how The Death of a Crow initiates Kim’s literary mission of
continual interrogation of the Cheju Incident while also forming the basis for his theory
of nihongo bungaku that would be more thoroughly articulated in later essays. Elsewhere
Kim has spoken of the impact that learning and writing about the Cheju Incident had on
his life. The “danger of youth” that he references in the above quotation refers to the
pattern of nihilism that he had fallen into in his younger days. As part of a lengthy
interview, Kim said
The crucial moment for me was when, in 1950, I met the woman I would
later depict in “The Woman with No Breasts.” Through this meeting I was
finally able to see the Cheju Incident for what it was. The impact it had
was truly immense. “You consider yourself a nihilist, but what do you do
with this?” It was really a shock. It was the difference between thinking
that life had meaning or no meaning. At the moment I thought, “Life has
no meaning, so I may as well die,” I encountered this great shock. It
wasn’t a minor shock that could be resolved through death. It was a shock
that I was forced to accept by continuing to live. This in turn gave me the

120
Kim Sokpom, Karasu no Shi (The Death of a Crow) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1985), 317-
318.
76
power to write The Death of a Crow, which would then contribute to the
writing of Kazantō.
121

Through the act of writing about the atrocities that took place in his own
“homeland,” Kim was thus able to transcend his pattern of nihilism toward a more
developed form of social consciousness based on a comprehensive theory of language.
The doubleness that permeates The Death of a Crow was also in part influenced
by Kim’s own double-life—namely, his experience working as an underground political
activist. In 1952, Kim moved to Sendai where, posing as the reporter for a local
newspaper, he worked as a secret operator for an extremist Marxist organization. Unable
to bear the tension of this double life, Kim abandoned the organization for Tokyo, but he
would channel this experience of working as a double agent into the creation of Chon
Kijun, the protagonist in The Death of a Crow. According to Kim, most of the remaining
members of his small radical organization either repatriated to North Korea where they
have since gone missing (and are presumed dead) or were driven to suicide by the sheer
stress of the lifestyle. In this sense, the writing of The Death of a Crow and subsequent
development of his own brand of literary activism served as another salvation for Kim by
allowing him to escape the grim fate of other zainichi radicals.
As in the Asian American literature that that is the subject of Tina Chen’s study
Double Agency, the double agency in The Death of a Crow represents a divided
allegiance that is performed through the act of impersonation. My claim in this chapter is
that the double agent Chon Kijun—who is forced to impersonate a government translator

121
Kim Sokpom, Kim Sokpom "Kazanto" Shosetsu Sekai O Kataru!--Chejudo Yon-San
Jiken/Zainichi to Nihonjin/Seiji to Bungaku O Meguru Monogatari (Tokyo: Yubun
Shoin, 2010), 243-244.
77
while working as a secret informant for the guerilla fighters—metaphorically embodies
the dilemma of the zainichi community, one that is plagued by multiple divided
allegiances—Japan and Korea, North and South, center and periphery. While Kim’s
stated mission in writing The Death of a Crow is to awaken readers to the tyranny of
South Korean (and indeed any form of) state hegemony by exposing them to the grim
details of the Cheju tragedy, it also describes the situation at “home,” in the zainichi
community itself. Indeed, one of the remarkable aspects of Kim’s literature is its ability
to use episodes in Korean history to examine issues of zainichi consciousness.
The Death of a Crow takes place roughly over the course of a week in the late fall
of 1948, some six months after the outbreak of the Cheju Uprising (yon-san jiken), on the
eve of Syngman Rhee’s arrival to the island and the subsequent declaration of martial law
on November 17 that signified a commitment to the thorough obliteration of the
“partisan” element, including any family members, however remote, that might be
associated with the leftist cause. The protagonist Kijun’s only remaining connection to
the already significantly depleted guerilla movement is his childhood friend Jan Yonsok.
The two hold secret meetings on a remote cliff south of the city every ten days to
exchange news of important developments in the movement and vital changes in
government policy toward the insurgents. Only a day after their most recent meeting,
however, Kijun learns of a forthcoming shakeup in administrative leadership that
involves his transfer to the capital city of Seoul within the next week. With no method of
expediting their next meeting (their one method of communication is a secret series of
flares when a meeting needs to be postponed), Kijun becomes consumed by a desperation
that exacerbates his identity crisis and accelerates his descent into self-destruction.
78
To compound the tension even further, Kijun is ordered to travel to the internment
camp for partisan sympathizers where he witnesses the shocking execution of Yonsok’s
sister—and Kijun’s former love interest—Suni, and their parents. En route, Kijun
passes through his old village where he and Yonsok grew up and is startled to find it
completely deserted. Kijun arrives at the prison camp the next morning and tours the
facilities where his worst fears are confirmed: He finds Yonsok’s parents and sister
locked behind bars among the inmates who are scheduled to be executed that day. After
forcing himself to witness their execution, Kijun returns to headquarters where he learns
of the imminent arrival of President Syngman Rhee and the Minister of Defense,
signaling a certain death knell for the guerilla movement.

“Face Like a Mask”—The Limitations of Mimicry

Similar to Won’s AV Odyssey, the narrative of The Death of a Crow is driven
forward by a series of chance encounters. In the case of Kim’s story, it is the repeated
encounters with the same two notorious local figures that threaten the maintenance of
Kijun’s dual identity and heighten his fear of discovery. The first of these two is a local
oddity and shamanistic-like figure known only as “denbō jī.” A homeless cripple, the old
man wanders the town offering to suck the pus from anyone’s abscess (his nickname
translates to “Grandpa Tumor”) in exchange for money or drink. Kijun repeatedly
encounters denbō jī at the most inopportune times—on his way to his secret rendezvous
with Yonsok, for example—which leads him to wonder if the old man somehow suspects
him of wrongdoing. The more immediate threat to Kijun’s secret, however, is Lee
79
Sankoon. The disgraced son of a wealthy industrial bank executive, Sankoon has also
taken to wandering the streets, drinking in excess and creating public disturbances. In his
limitless free time, he becomes fascinated with Kijun, whose inscrutability he at first
regards as intriguing and later as suspicious. His suspicion is based on the impression
that Kijun has a “face like a mask,” a phrase that is repeated throughout the story.
Sankoon’s suspicion has little material basis until he acquires a pack of half-smoked
cigarettes from denbō jī that the latter received from Kijun. “He was strangely drawn to
the cigarettes, much in the way that he was drawn in by Kijun’s mask-like expression.”
122

In the pack, along with the unsmoked cigarettes, Sankoon finds cigarette butts embedded
with a strange seaweed, information that he uses to conclude that Kijun has taken to
venturing outside the city. While unable to draw anything conclusive from this evidence,
the cigarette butts only serve to confirm Sankoon’s suspicions and heighten his curiosity
about Kijun.
During their last and most meaningful encounter, at a local tavern on the night
following Suni’s execution, Sankoon engages the reluctant Kijun in conversation, leading
to a lengthy meditation on the nature of impersonation. Sankoon begins his interrogation
with the confession that, “’I’m thinking of becoming a spy.’”
123
Though this is framed
merely as a hypothetical, Kijun, in his agitated state, is greatly unnerved by the statement.
As Kijun feigns ignorance, Sankoon presses forward: “‘What I’m trying to say isn’t
political in nature. Rather, I’m interested in it from a conceptual (kannenteki)
standpoint.’”
124
Sankoon continues,

122
Kim, Karasu no Shi (The Death of a Crow), 105.
123
Kim, Karasu no Shi (The Death of a Crow), 127.
124
Kim, Karasu no Shi (The Death of a Crow), 128.
80

“I’d like to hear what you think of my thoughts on being a spy. But it’s
not a political issue…If I, with my singular will, decide to become a spy, I
believe that I have the ability to do so from either side. What do you think
of this ambiguous human position? That’s what I want to know. A man
like you—for a man in your position—you must have thought about it.
What does it mean to trust another person? What I’m interested in is the
ability to have two different organizations—that is, two different worlds—
wrapped around my little finger like a wind-up doll.”
125

Kijun, “exceedingly fatigued by the repetition of the word ‘spy,’” protests and
attempts to leave. Sankoon makes a last ditch effort to detain him by repeating his earlier
point, “’It’s your spirit (tamashī) that I want. Wait, that’s not what I mean. I’m not
suggesting that you’re a spy. But when I look at you, I’m reminded of a mask. I feel that
there must be something inside it. That’s what I want.’”
126

The narration then makes an interesting shift in perspective, aligning with the
subjectivity of Sankoon rather than Kijun, as if swapping protagonists midstream. In this
brief passage, the narrator illuminates Sankoon’s train of thought in describing an even
more detailed meditation on mimicry:

It was just that afternoon that Sankoon had stared at his own face in the
mirror, thinking of Kijun. In his own face he looked for Kijun’s
expression of inexpression (hyōjō no muhyōjō)—that is, his expressionless
expression (muhyōjō no hyōjō)—this is what Sankoon wanted. He tried
removing his face of all expression, but what ultimately remained was his
own face. For Sankoon, who was shut off from the world of action and
fed off of abstraction alone, this feat was possible. But for Kijun, he was
inclined to dismiss it as a façade. Or perhaps Sankoon was searching for a
direction of his own in that facial expression. Unable to find a foothold in
the shocking world of the present, becoming mired in one’s own
thoughts—this was close to describing Sankoon’s condition.
127

125
Kim, Karasu no Shi (The Death of a Crow), 129.
126
Kim, Karasu no Shi (The Death of a Crow), 130.
127
Ibid.
81
Sankoon’s description of Kijun—“a face like a mask” and “an expressionless
expression”—evoke both Tina Chen’s notion of impersonation and Bhabha’s mimicry. It
also serves as a metaphor for the zainichi experience—as well as the experience of the
subaltern in general—of maintaining multiple affiliations, something akin to the work of
a double-agent. Furthermore, Kijun’s work as a double-agent and his fear of discovery
allegorizes the zainichi custom of “passing” (as Japanese) by adopting a Japanese name
and, by extension, assuming a Japanese identity. It is Kijun’s ability to maintain a façade
that, Sankoon suspects, masks genuine human emotion and is hence the object of the
latter’s envy. What Sankoon is addressing here, in his rambling monologue, is the
paradoxical implications of the role of a spy, which he is unable to process intellectually.
On the one hand, to work as a spy requires a genuine personal or ideological investment
in a cause, which Sankoon—ensconced in abstract theoretical musings—lacks. On the
other, it demands a staunch “expressionless expression” even when subjected to the most
intense trauma—which is precisely the situation that threatens to break Kijun down and
expose his secret, the cardinal sin for a double-agent. The irony in this passage, then, is
derived from the fact that Sankoon considers himself too dispassionate to work as a
double-agent, while it is this very same passion built on personal connection that is the
source of Kijun’s unraveling.
By working as a translator for the GHQ—a pseudo-colonial authority—Kijun
impersonates a government collaborator. But if this is a classic example of “mimicry,”
its subversive potential is complicated by Kijun’s complicity in the murder of his own
people. As the guerilla movement becomes increasingly hopeless, Kijun becomes more
and more entrenched in his government role, trapped by his own inability to act or
82
disavow his role in the tragedy. Having so thoroughly internalized his collaborationist
persona, Kijun thus problematizes Homi Bhabha’s formulation of mimicry in which the
colonial object assumes the guise of the colonizer, destabilizing the dominant culture
through a partial presence that is “almost the same, but not quite.”
128
Bhabha writes, “As
Lacan reminds us, mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization of repression of
difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying
it in part, metonymically. Its threat, I would add, comes from the prodigious and
strategic production of conflictual, fantastic, discriminatory ‘identity effects’ in the play
of a power that is elusive because it hides no essence, no ‘itself.’ And that form of
resemblance is the most terrifying thing to behold.”
129
As a result, “Mimicry conceals no
presence or identity behind its mask [my emphasis]: it is not what Cesaire describes as
‘colonization-thingification’ behind which there stands the essence of the presence
Africaine.”
130
Bhabha’s concept of mimcry is revolutionary precisely because of its
apparent lack of revolutionary content. Instead, by adopting a form of activism that is
more akin to camouflage, the colonized subverts the dominant culture from within, in a
way that is imperceptible to colonial authority. In short, the colonized subverts the
dominant culture by making it his/her own. This process mirrors Kim’s approach toward
creolization in The Death of a Crow, which destabilizes the language of the colonizer
through a creolization that is internal to the text, i.e. a “de-colonization-thingification”
from within.

128
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 122.
129
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 128-129.
130
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 126.
83
However, while Kijun’s position as a double-agent may differ from what Bhabha
describes as an act of mimicry in that it includes an intentionality that the latter
formulation lacks, it nonetheless problematizes both the subversiveness and sustainability
of the act. When Kijun first assumed his role as a double agent there was, what Sankoon
perceives and the reader can only presume, a “presence behind the mask,” the job as
interpreter acting as camouflage for his true vocation of radical informant. His work as
interpreter, however, further confounds this convenient separation through the blurring of
boundaries of subjectivity. As a linguistic mediator between the American military and
the Korean government, Kijun occupies a literal in-between-ness. In this sense, he is—to
borrow the language of Naoki Sakai—devoid of a “stable positionality.”
131
He is a
mediator, an intermediary, and a kind of medium. His subjectivity is brought into
question and oftentimes presumed not to exist. Sakai addresses the aporia that surrounds
the job of translation in ways that are extremely useful here. Sakai views the problem of
translation as inseparable from the 19
th
century emergence of the idea of a unified (and
uniform) Japanese ethnicity and language. In other words, the practice of translation is
confined by national discourse (in what Sakai terms the “schema of cofiguration).”
132
As
a result, the homolingual address assumes a homogeneous group to whom collective
comprehension is guaranteed. The heterolingual address, on the other hand, does not
assume a unity of language. Rather, it “does not abide by the normalcy of reciprocal and

131
Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism,
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 231.
132
Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism, 3.
84
transparent communication”
133
and treats translation as a hybridizing instance wherein
the subject of enunciation and enunciated are not expected to coincide.
By challenging the unity of the Japanese language through his formulation of
nihongo bungaku, Kim Sokpom’s literature is similarly committed to a subversion of the
homolingual address. It is the “schema of cofiguration” (the process of translation as
conceived by the nation-state) that also precipitates Kijun’s undoing. Sakai describes the
relationship between the representation of translation and alterity in the following
passage:

Only in the representation of translation can we construe the process of
translation as a transfer of some message from “this” side to “that” side, as
a dialogue between one person and another, as if dialogue should
necessarily take place according to the model of communication. Thus the
representation of translation also enables the representation of ethnic or
national subjects, and, in spite of the presence of the translator who is
always in between, translation, no longer as difference or repetition but as
representation, is made to discriminatorily posit one language unity
against another (and one “cultural” unity against another). In this sense,
the representation of translation transforms difference in repetition into
species difference (diaphora) between two specific identities, and helps
constitute the putative unities of national languages, and thereby
reinscribes the initial difference and incommensurability as a specific, that
is, commensurate and conceptual, difference between two particular
languages within the continuity of the generality of Language. As a result
of this displacement, translation is represented as a form of
communication between two fully formed, different but comparable,
language communities.
134

The job of translator (in The Death of a Crow) thus exists as a metaphor for
zainichi alterity in which “difference in repetition” is converted to binary opposition in
the representation of translation. In the schema described by Sakai above, zainichi

133
Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism, 8.
134
Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism, 15.
85
Korean literature is denied a place in the Japanese canon much as zainichi are denied a
real position in Japanese society. As the “difference” of zainichi literature is not
recognized in the discourse of national language, it is displaced to the outsider position of
“foreign literature” thereby preserving the myth of Japanese homogeneity/uniqueness.
Kijun, as translator, is forced to embrace the homolingual address and, along with it, the
binary discourse of the nation-state. As his commitment to what was initially a façade is
internalized, the identity behind the mask is eroded, along with any potential for political
subversion. The turning point comes when he encounters Suni in the internment camp,
and Kijun realizes that she will die without knowing “the truth.”

Suni will die for eternity. At the same time, he must die as well. He will
die inside of her, die like a dog. In his head, he heard the sound of one
truth being split in two. With this, the chance for him to vindicate himself
with her will be forever dead. In the end, she will die cursing his name,
transcending him in the process. How much simpler would it be for him
to be a traitor? A traitor who is not a traitor—seeing her standing there in
the last moments of her life, this was the final blow. Afterward, he will be
dragged down in the backward tide of remorse, struggling not to drown.
Why, after all the opportunities—regardless of whether it would be a
violation of organizational code—was he unable to tell her the truth? And
why didn’t he?
135

Like Bhabha, in Kijun, Kim complicates the binary of real/assumed identity. As
the above passage demonstrates, while mimicry in its ideal threatens to destabilize the
unity of colonial culture through the act of imitation, Kijun’s crisis represents an instance
of mimicry gone awry, revealing the limitations of mimicry within the confines of a
thoroughly oppressive regime. Waiting too long to remove the mask, Kijun realizes that

135
Kim, Karasu no Shi (The Death of a Crow), 119.
86
there is no longer anything underneath—the mask seems to have fused with his skin,
becoming integral to his very identity.

The Curse of Language: The I-Novel and Colonial Memory

Ono Teijiro writes,
The world of Kim’s work, which follows the guerilla battle as it unfolds
deep in the bosom of the symbolic Mt. Halla, is a black and white world—
or a gray one. In conjunction with the author’s acute vocabulary, this tone
creates the pointed and shadowy beauty of a woodblock print. This is a
monochromatic world that is completely foreign to Japanese lyricism. For
the author, this captures the mental image of his homeland. Like the
shinsaro [of The Death of a Crow] the author’s soul is frozen to the core.
It possesses a frightening sharpness that seeks to negate any tender
emotions or proclamations. And this is because the passion and reflection
that the author pours into each word pursues the reader at every step.
136

In this passage, Ono contrasts the gritty black and white prose of Kim with the
soft lyricism that typifies Japanese junbungaku. This monochromatic world Ono
identifies is the realization of the anti-imperial project that Kim elucidates in Kotoba no
jubaku (The Curse of Language). As I discussed in Chapter 1, for Kim, the problem of
language is bound up with the question of subjectivity. And for the zainichi Korean
author this is a doubly fraught endeavor in that one is confronted with the task of
discovering a method to obtain subjectivity in the language of the colonizer. The key, in
Kim’s estimation, is to expose Japanese language as a construction, rather than an a priori
system. As Ono points out, Kim achieves this in The Death of a Crow by instilling the
awareness of Japanese as a foreign language. This provocation is generated through the

136
Ono Teijiro, Sonzai no Genki: Kim Sokpom Bungaku (Rudiments of Existence: The
Literature of Kim Sokpom) (Tokyo: Shinkansha, 1998), 28.
87
systematic rejection of conventional Japanese lyricism and the shi-shōsetsu (I-novel)
confessional framework that forms the literary roots for notions of ethnic homogeneity
and purity. As Kim writes in the essay watashi ni totte no kotoba (“What Language is to
Me”),
The writing of fiction (kyokō) is not something that should be emphasized
only to the zainichi Korean author. The novel—shi-shōsetsu included—is
to a greater or lesser degree a form that is able to transcend reality and
connect with the imaginary. However, for the zainichi author (and for me
personally), that which lends fiction importance is wrapped up in the issue
of language. Based on the way it is used, language has the ability to
undergo a transformation by transcending itself and entering into a
fictional world. And the only way to liberate the zainichi author writing in
Japanese from the bonds (in a word, the curse) of language is to channel
language into a fictional space.
137

Here Kim establishes the inherently transcendent potential of the fictional
medium to liberate the minority author from hegemonic power structures. He cautions,
however, that this transcendence is contingent on the author’s ability to reconstitute
language in a way that empowers minority subjectivity, an idea that is explained in more
detail in the following passage:
Language forms the building blocks of the structure known as fiction and,
at the same time, depending on its application, is able to enact a
transformation through a connection with the universal. As a result, the
author’s salvation resides in an awareness of the curse of language as it is
(sono mama). Specifically for the zainichi Korean author, for whom an
awareness of the curse of language is especially important, it is hard to see
the world of the shi-shōsetsu as a space where one can break from this
curse. What I aspire to here is a work of fiction outside of the I-novel
framework that, like an architectural structure, creates a close to perfect
fictional space. As the ability to transcend one’s existence—characterized
by the curse of language—is not available to the author in the creative
process of the shi-shōsetsu, neither is the catharsis of breaking from the
curse of language…Considering the issue of language, zainichi Korean

137
Kim Sokpom, Shinpen "Zainichi" no Shisō (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1981), 134.
88
authors should develop a method that expunges all shi-shōsetsu elements
from their work.
138

In articulating a form of literature that contains a built-in criticism of hegemonic
literary modes, Kim is describing a system of writing in which creolization is internal to
the text. This resembles the “cultural creolization”
139
that Bernards cites in some
Malaysian Sinophone literature in that the creolization does not exist at the surface of
language (as an outward blending of multiple tongues), but is internal to it in its
“awareness of the curse of language” and consequent commitment to a literary mode
outside of the shi-shōsetsu model. To borrow again the language used in In Praise of
Creoleness cited in Won’s essay, creoleness has been “wrongly and hastily reduced to its
mere linguistic aspects” and is more analogous to a way of being.
140
Several critics have
observed that Kim’s literature reads like it was translated into Japanese from a foreign
language. The tendency may be to dismiss these remarks as an unconscious attempt to
exotify Kim’s work (much as the logic of Orientalism is used to bar minority art from the
Western canon), but based on Kim’s literary theory, it is clear that this effect is
intentional. Unlike the work of Murakami Haruki, which, as discussed in Chapter 1,
reads like a translation from English for which no original exists, Kim’s fiction stands not
as a recapitulation of the language of hyōjungo, but a deterritorialization of same. Rather,
by reimagining Japanese as a foreign language, the result is a work that is unrecognizable

138
Kim, Shinpen "Zainichi" no Shisō, 136-137.
139
Brian Bernards, "Beyond Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Recuperating Creolization in
Postcolonial Sinophone Malaysian Literature," Postcolonial Studies 15, no. 3 (2012),
313.
140
Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, In Praise of Creoleness
(Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 88.
89
from any Japanese literature that has come before it, thus lacking a critical precedent by
which it might be judged.
Ono, in addition to his observations on the use of language, also highlights the
opposition of light and dark in The Death of a Crow, which, he argues, serves to illustrate
the protagonist’s dual identity. He reads the frequency of “light” or “white” imagery as
symbolizing Kijun’s desire to see a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel, a dawn at
the end of the dark, protracted guerilla struggle that would somehow justify his
complicity in the brutal acts of the Korean state. This opposition also represents Kim’s
literary mission of excavating the events surrounding the Cheju Incident to lift the shroud
of state imposed amnesia. In the following scene, where Kijun awaits Suni’s execution,
the white of the falling snow seems to be already obscuring the atrocities about to take
place, as if anticipating the government’s attempt to erase the events of the Cheju
Incident.

The execution was carried out in the middle of the afternoon. It was
delayed an hour due to the severity of the snow. Yonsok’s sister and
parents disappeared into the snow on top of the scaffold. Their deaths tore
Kijun apart inside until the very end.
141

The white of the snow creates a beautific, almost dreamlike space that ironically
evokes scenes from Kawabata Yasunari’s Yukiguni (Snow Country, 1947)
142
and
obscures the true nature of the atrocity. There is a sense that the event has been forgotten

141
Kim, Karasu no Shi (The Death of a Crow), 121.
142
Published soon after the end of World War II, Snow Country has been criticized
alongside Kawabata’s later works for a “self-Orientalism” that attempts to present a
beautified version of Japanese tradition to the West that elides issues of colonialism and
wartime aggression. Kawabata was the first Japanese author to receive the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1968.
90
before it occurred (if it indeed occurred at all), with only Kijun forced to carry around its
haunting memory. Besides the executing officers, the only other witnesses to the scene
are a small gathering of crows, their blackness disrupting the tranquil snowscape.

The wind scattered the snow about, burying the scene in white. The
snowy landscape was dotted by spots of black—what appeared to be a few
crows. There was no exaggerated sorrow or struggles of rage, nor the
howls of bloodthirsty savages. The flock that, like the snow that piled up,
observed the execution in silence, irritated Kijun to no end.
143

The crows serve as silent observers, appearing at inopportune times throughout
the novel as both figures of surveillance and reminders of the atrocities taking place.
Kijun’s irritation is the irritation of being burdened with a memory that he would
otherwise like to forget. The crows seem to haunt him throughout the story, interrupting
the white of amnesia. Kijun’s irritation with the crows ultimately proves unbearable,
culminating in his violent outburst at the end of the novella, one that can be read as a
metaphor for zainichi “disrecognition.” After learning of the forthcoming arrival of
Syngman Rhee and the defense ministry in a meeting, Kijun retreats to the courtyard to
smoke. The grounds overlook a pile of fresh corpses, dumped under a sakura tree earlier
that morning and now awaiting transport for mass burial. Among them is the body of a
young woman—possibly in her late teens, Kijun speculates. He glimpses a single large
crow flitting about on a branch above, looking to alight on the girl’s corpse. After
drawing his pistol and downing the crow in one shot, his aggravation shifts to the corpse
of the young woman.

143
Kim, Karasu no Shi (The Death of a Crow), 121.
91
He heard a buzzing behind him, and the Chief’s grin sparkled somewhere
within. Kijun was seized by the desire to bury his bullets into the chief’s
belly…Kijun took a step forward and quietly fired three shots into the
chest of the helpless girl. Why he decided to shoot the girl with the bullets
he had reserved for the Chief, he couldn’t say. Thank God! This was his
instinctive reaction. Those ill-fated bullets that seemed to pierce his own
chest dug deeply into the breast of the girl, spurting fresh blood…
Everything is ending; everything is beginning.
144

This devastating passage that closes The Death of a Crow overflows with the
contradictory impulses of self-preservation and self-destruction, a situation that
epitomizes both the condition of the colonial object and the zainichi condition of
disrecognition. In addition, the last line, “Everything is ending, everything is beginning”
underscores the doubleness and repetition implicit in zainichi Korean identity. In this
singular moment, on the eve of Syngman Rhee’s arrival, everything is “ending” in the
sense that Kijun’s homeland and sense of community has been lost and “beginning” in
that this act of neocolonial aggression will initiate a condition of indeterminate
statelessness that will come to dominate the literature of Kim and so many other zainichi
authors. All of Kijun’s rage toward the state regime is misdirected at the crow and later,
the girl. In Kijun’s mind, the image of Suni is superimposed over the corpse of the girl so
that his initial impulse is to protect her from the crow’s violation. However, this too
ultimately morphs into aggression when he finds himself unable to turn the gun on the
chief.
This passage is very much reminiscent of the short story “Fuji no mieru mura de,”
(In the Shadow of Mount Fuji, 1951) by another zainichi Korean author, Kim Tal-su,
commonly considered the godfather of postwar zainichi literature. This story bears a

144
Kim, Karasu no Shi (The Death of a Crow), 140.
92
similar conclusion, with the young zainichi protagonist, frustrated by the discrimination
experienced at the hands of the Japanese—as well as a member of the eta class who he
once considered a comrade—turns his gun on a classic symbol of Japanese imperialism.

Stopping in my tracks, I looked back. The sun wasn’t up yet, but in the
dawn light, the eastern face of Fuji, bright white and proper, stood
glimmering before my eyes.
I lifted the gun, and took aim at Fuji. I pulled the trigger with
every last bit of my strength. The gunshot shattered the mountain’s
silence. I fired again and again in rapid succession. Then I went on and
on, shooting at Mt. Fuji like a man gone mad.
145

Taken together, these passages describe what John Lie terms zainichi
“disrecognition,” a state of being both disrespected and unacknowledged that defined
zainichi consciousness in the postwar. “In the postwar period, though the legacy of
colonial hierarchy slowly dissipated, ethnic Koreans lost their legitimate place in
monoethnic Japan. That is, when acknowledged, they were deemed inferior, but more
commonly they were not even acknowledged.”
146
Lie credits this disrecognition as the
cause of the high incident of suicide in the zainichi community as well as sensational
violent incidents such as the Komatsugawa Incident in 1958 and the Kim Hiro case
(Sumatakyō Incident) in 1968.
147
In these cases of disrecognition, as in the literary
examples above, anger accumulated from years of ethnic discrimination is displaced onto
an unrelated object. In this sense, the state-sponsored oppression in The Death of a Crow

145
Kim Tal-su, "In the Shadow of Mount Fuji," (Fuji no mieru mura de) in Into the
Light: An Anthology of Literature by Koreans in Japan trans. Sharalyn Orbaugh
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011), 65.
146
John Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial
Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 81.
147
This case, along with the concept of disrecognition, will be discussed in greater detail
in Chapter 3.
93
functions as a metaphor for institutionalized discrimination in Japan. This is why
Kijun—at wit’s end yet with a startling sense of self-preservation intact—finds himself
firing into the corpse of the girl rather than his loathsome superior. Nevertheless, Kijun’s
final thoughts as he flees the premises are, “I have to go on living, he thought. This is the
place where I must fulfill my duty, and this is the place where I must be buried,”
148
a tacit
pledge to resist reassignment and stay in Cheju to insure that this memory is preserved.
Kim has often explained his literary project as not only a means of recuperating
the memory of a traumatic experience, but also of accessing memories of a traumatic
event that one did not personally experience. By foregrounding the novel as the only
venue for transcending the “curse of language,” Kim is echoing Won’s citation of In
Praise of Creoleness: “Only poetic knowledge, fictional knowledge, literary knowledge,
in short, artistic knowledge can discover us, understand us and bring us, evanescent, back
to the resuscitation of consciousness.”
149
As Kim explains in an interview:

I think of the unconscious as not simply accumulated memories that have
become subconscious, but a deeper form of unconsciousness, like
something that has been forgotten but that, in the act of fiction writing,
becomes conscious again through its linkage to poetic expression. In this
case, the subconscious belongs to the personal, while the unconscious is a
domain that transcends the personal. In other words, the deeper and
thicker the unconscious, the better. This is the type of unconscious that
enables a connection to the lost memories of the dead who were massacred
in the Cheju Incident.
150

148
Kim, Karasu no Shi (The Death of a Crow), 141.
149
Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, In Praise of Creoleness, 99.
150
Kim, Kim Sokpom "Kazanto" Shosetsu Sekai O Kataru!--Chejudo Yon-San
Jiken/Zainichi to Nihonjin/Seiji to Bungaku O Meguru Monogatari, 236.
94
In this passage, Kim offers literature as the only method for accessing
“unconscious” (i.e. collective) memories that, to quote Freud, are “nothing new or
strange, but something that was…estranged from [the psyche] only through being
repressed.”
151
Kim compares the job of the novelist to that of a shaman (mundan) who
“functions as an intermediary between reality and unreality, the physical and the
spiritual…That [the spiritual] is a world that you can’t comprehend in a realistic way.”
152

Instead, these collective unconscious memories can only be accessed through a work of
literature in which the author functions as the medium. The author, by documenting the
personal experiences of those involved, is able to access something universal (fūhen),
revealing the connectivity of a particular incident. Some may point out that this
formulation relies too heavily on assumptions of authorial privilege, that what this
amounts to, in effect, is the author “speaking for” the victims, who themselves have no
voice. This recalls Spivak’s seminal essay on minority literature, “Can the Subaltern
Speak?” which claims, through the use of semiotics, that once the subaltern subject is
able to speak for themselves, they are by definition no longer subaltern. Kim’s model,
however, prohibits the kind of authorial exploitation of which Spivak is so critical. He is
quick to point out that while some level of objectivity (Kim was not present for the Cheju
Incident itself) is necessary for the novelist to perform his task, a personal connection to
the events in question (Kim is from Cheju) is equally as important. The ultimate goal
then is to both bring the author closer to the event and allow the survivors to attain some

151
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (New York: Penguin, 2003).
152
Kim, Kim Sokpom "Kazanto" Shosetsu Sekai O Kataru!--Chejudo Yon-San
Jiken/Zainichi to Nihonjin/Seiji to Bungaku O Meguru Monogatari, 34.
95
of the objectivity of the author, granting them, finally, a “freedom of sorrow”
153
to mourn
their dead.
Kim Sokpom’s theories on connectivity and social consciousness are particularly
compelling when compared to his critique of the I-novel form, a mode that has made
similar claims to the universal. When Kim asserts that the novel must be a profoundly
social endeavor, he evokes the words of Kobayashi Hideo, the godfather of Japanese
literary criticism and the ultimate champion of what was to become the I-novel form.
Kobayashi, when referring to the work of Gide, describes a modern literature that
contains multiple “cuts,” or perspectives on an event that create an inclusive and totalized
fictional world.

To be sure, there are dimensions to an actual event that could never appear
in fiction, no matter how faithfully the writer sought to describe them.
Something happens, and in an instant a multitude surrounds the event:
those who immediately witness it, those who hear about it indirectly, those
who are emotionally affected by it, and so forth. Nothing happens in
isolation. And in the reverberating cries that well up all around it, the
event reveals a countless number of ‘cuts’…. It would seem that writers
possessed of a universalist idea can only imagine a single way of cutting.
Yet the very fact that an incalculable number of people exist who
understand this universalist idea in an incalculable number of ways, gives
the idea life in society.
154

Here Kobayashi attempts to articulate the I-novel’s literary aspiration of
universality through the use of multiple “cuts” that reflect a range of perspectives on a
common experience or concept. Kobayashi later explains the tenuous balance that the

153
Kim, Kim Sokpom "Kazanto" Shosetsu Sekai O Kataru!--Chejudo Yon-San
Jiken/Zainichi to Nihonjin/Seiji to Bungaku O Meguru Monogatari, 65-66.
154
Hideo Kobayashi, "Discourse on Literature of the Self (Watakushi Shosetsuron)," in
Literature of the Lost Home : Kobayashi Hideo--Literary Criticism, 1924-1939, trans.
Paul Anderer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 83-84.
96
novel form strikes between mimesis (“reality as it is”) and fabrication that imagines an
unseen interconnectedness between self and others:

A novelist tries to express reality as it is, without any trace of scissor cuts.
Or at least he tries to wield the scissors so as to simulate a multiplicity of
cuts that would seem to represent reality as it is. And so events, ideas, and
characters must not be defined and molded to possess a single, static
shape. The author should create as though he were reflecting the lives of
others, when in fact each fictional character is holding up a mirror at
different angles to the light.
155

Kobayashi thus endorses the shi-shōsetsu as a heightened form of social
awareness, a novel that aspires to the universal by capturing a network of diverse
perspectives on the same event—much as Kim’s work aims to capture the Cheju
experience—while being far from the insularity for which the I-novel would come to be
known once the genre was codified. However, the true historical development of the I-
novel problematizes Kobayashi’s role as a socially progressive thinker. As Inoue Hisashi
points out in a 2001 round-table discussion with Kim Sokpom, it was the suppression of
the leftist movement that enabled the emergence of a “pure literature” that privileged
“literariness” (bungaku-sei) over politics (seiji), a trend for which Kobayashi Hideo was a
staunch advocate.
156
Indeed, Kobayashi’s essay ultimately retreats to a form of
conservatism by claiming that “style” should be the true subject of an author’s work, in
effect expelling political content from the literary realm. Kim posits postwar zainichi
literature in general as an extension of the prewar shi-shōsetsu discourse in its insular

155
Kobayashi Hideo, "Discourse on Literature of the Self (Watakushi Shōsetsuron)," 84.
156
Inoue Hisashi et al., Zadankai Shōwa Bungakushi, Vol. 5 (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 2004),
257.
97
preoccupation with the self, a tendency he seeks to counteract through his formulation of
nihongo bungaku.
In the same round-table discussion, Korean literary scholar Pak Yuha defends
zainichi appropriation of the I-novel by suggesting that, for many zainichi authors
157
,
when contemplating individual identity in a literary form, some recourse to the shi-
shōsetsu model is perhaps inevitable. Kim then clarifies his stance by stating:

I’m not attempting to deny the shi-shōsetsu…Indeed, in the scheme of
zainichi history, there was something inevitable about that trend. Unlike
their Japanese counterparts, for the zainichi author, whether consciously or
not, personal background is always accompanied by a certain social
element. However, when grappling with the issue of identity, they tend to
succumb to the shi-shōsetsu model. Whether this can be helped or not,
I’m not sure, but as an author, there is definitely an element of
carelessness there. And that is the carelessness of what Ms. Pak described
earlier as “colonial literature.”
158

Kim touches on several important issues here, the main one surrounding the issue
of intentionality. Is there a place for minority consciousness within the I-novel model?
Can Kim Hak-yŏng’s Frozen Mouth be read as a parody of the shi-shōsetsu (as some
have claimed
159
), or is the resemblance largely unintentional and therefore unexamined?

157
Pak is thinking in particular of Kim Hak-yŏng, whose novella Kogoeru kuchi (Frozen
Mouth, 1970) is a provocative exploration of zainichi identity that is also driven by a
confessional narrative structure heavily influenced by the shi-shōsetsu. Kim Sokpom is
highly critical of this author’s work, which he regards as compelling but too deeply
entrenched in the language of junbungaku to seriously interrogate minority perspectives.
158
Inoue, et al., Zadankai Shōwa Bungakushi, 280.
159
Inoue Hisashi praises Frozen Mouth by saying, “While the premise is a bit weak, the
love story is melodramatic in the best sense, the result being an unexpected parody of the
shi-shōsetsu. The Japanese I-novel is usually completely devoid of political content. But
that suddenly pops up in this work. In other words, it appropriates the shi-shōsetsu style,
but in fact aims to destroy it in the process.” Inoue, et al., Zadankai Shōwa Bungakushi,
287.
98
In other words, is there enough basis to consider the potential for works like Kim Hak-
yŏng’s as a form of literary mimicry and thus as a means of subversion?
Consider again Bhabha’s theory of mimicry and whether it qualifies as an
effective method of subversion within the literary medium, here, specifically, in the form
of a parody of the I-novel. Bhabha suggests that mimicry is best performed
unconsciously, the colonizer’s culture adopted and reconstituted by the colonized until it
becomes unrecognizable in a sort of subliminal detournemont. It is resemblance as a
form of disavowal.
160
However, Kim Sokpom’s point is that ultimately, in Kim Hak-
yŏng’s work and other zainichi literature that experiments with the shi-shōsetsu mode,
the I-novel confessional framework is privileged over and severely confines any genuine
expression of alterity and thus can only reify the Japanese colonial discourse. Thus,
rather than destabilizing the “normalized” colonial state (in this case, the I-novel
framework or pure Japanese literature on the whole), ethnic discourse is instead
subordinated to this very same system of knowledge.

Just as Ms. Pak says, what the zainichi I-novel brings [that is new] is an
ethnic realization (minzokuteki na mezame), while writing about one’s
youth or formative years. I’m not trying to dismiss that. What I am
dismissing is the work that strictly abides by the shi-shōsetsu method—the
imperative that, while the foundational context is completely different—
one must follow the shi-shōsetsu model.
161

What Kim is particularly critical of is the work that subordinates the “ethnic
realization” to the I-novel framework itself. Kim’s critique of pure literature is even

160
“The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is
therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a
difference that is itself a process of disavowal.” Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 122.
161
Inoue, et al., Zadankai Shōwa Bungakushi, 280-281.
99
more evident in the striking element of parody in his work, one that I regard as the final
component of his theory of creolization. As I discuss in the final section of this chapter,
this is a brand of parody that rejects the “blank parody” of Kim Hak-yŏng’s pseudo-
confessional writing in favor of a mode of protest intended to repudiate Japanese
hegemonic culture.

Conclusion: “The Venom of Raucous Laughter”—Parody in Kim Sokpom

Above I argue how Kim Sokpom’s literature challenges or even rejects Bhabha’s
construction of mimicry. Here, I will suggest that it is instead closely related to what
Won Soo-il calls “the venom of raucous laughter (kōshō no doku).” “If you were to
describe creoleness in other terms, it would be none other than the venom of raucous
laughter. Just a drop of this poison is enough to put a dramatic change into effect.”
162

Won explains that this “raucous laughter” contains a built-in satirical element (the source
of the “venom”) that can be used to mobilize a marginalized collective against authority.
Won illustrates this idea with a passage from another Kim short story, “Kanshu Pak
shobo” (“From the Desk of Warden Pak”) in which the titular character, an uneducated
former luggage transporter, uses the post-Cheju Incident regime as an opportunity for
social mobility to become the warden of a female prison. The clueless Pak is mocked
relentlessly by female inmates who refer to him using a local term meaning “pockmarked
face,” sending him into a futile etymological reverie regarding the possible connotations

162
Won Soo-il, "Posuto Koroniaru Toshite no Zainichi Bungaku Kureoru Ka no Suiryu
(Zainichi Literature as Post-Colonial—Currents of Creolization)," in Posuto Koroniaru
Bungaku no Kenkyu, ed. Ryoji Niwa (Suita-shi: Kansai Daigaku Shuppanbu, 2001), 107.
100
of this term. Won quotes this passage to demonstrate how hybridized language is
employed by the subjugated to mock the powers-that-be. He writes, “The power of
creolization resides in its ability to capture and transform the language of the colonizer in
the creative process, generating the venom of raucous laughter.”
163
In this quote, Won
describes a form of parody akin to Kim’s system of nihongo bungaku in its shared
objective of turning conventional literary language against itself.
As Won suggests, despite the exceedingly grim circumstances of The Death of a
Crow, it derives much of its critical power from an unexpected element of sardonic
humor (or what Won might term “the venom of raucous laughter”). This element
surfaces most frequently during Kijun’s interactions with his superiors, who function as
the equivalence of a colonial authority. The higher-ups’ uncanny ability to muster a
humorous remark at the most inappropriate time serves to underscore the brutality of
their actions and accentuate the pathos of the situation, while also constituting a mode of
resistance by evoking a solidarity through the mockery of an authoritian system. Prior to
the execution that, Kijun would later learn, was to include Suni and her parents, the
corpulent chief of police makes the following remarks to Kijun.

“I say it’s a shame to waste live ammunition on these people. Better to
drown them in the ocean or bury them alive. But these are the orders of
the civilized American military…Actually, right before the execution, I
tell those commies, ‘Thanks to the American authorities, we’re able to
waste ammunition on killing you by firing squad.’ I just want to let them
know, I guess. When it comes to American orders, there’s no way to
intervene.”
164

163
Won, "Posuto Koroniaru Toshite no Zainichi Bungaku Kureōru Ka no Suiryū
(Zainichi Literature as Post-Colonial—Currents of Creolization)," 108.
164
Kim, Karasu no Shi (The Death of a Crow), 108.
101
These remarks seem at once unthinkably cruel and thoroughably believable, given
the unfathomability of the event in question. More importantly, it achieves Kim’s goal of
solidarity by mobilizing the reader against the occupying authorities. Similarly, in the
novella’s closing scene, after Kijun kills the crow, his superior, Captain Kim, feels the
need to weigh in.

“Ha ha, this is quite wonderful,” said Captain Kim, tapping Kijun
on the shoulder from behind…
“Truly excellent marksmanship—getting it in one shot. Those
birds really are a bad omen in the morning. Ha ha, do I hate crows. First
of all, their color is unpleasant. And there’s that terrible squawking. Like
the raspy voice of some old bag who’s about to kick the bucket. That’s
what I think. When my mother was dying, she was so scared of crows—
that ‘caw caw.’”
165

The above two passages bear a similarity in that they contain an ironic element of
humor during a time of great crisis. While they do not openly mock the authority figures
in question as in the passage Won quotes in “From the Desk of Warden Pak,” they have
the unmistakable air of parody, depicting Kijun’s superiors as both unthinkably callous
and ineffectual. In this case, parody comes in the form of a reminder of American
influence in the rigid hierarchy of imperialism. While the local authorities take great
pleasure in lording over the helpless “commies,” there is the constant reminder that they
are merely petty functionaries following orders from above. In the latter of these
passages, the reminder of this authority comes through indirectly, in Captain Kim’s
choice of words. Where he says, “this is quite wonderful,” the original reads, “Kore wa
kore wa wandafuru desu na.” This stands as a subtle reminder of how thoroughly
American imperialism has been interpellated, to the point where it has infiltrated

165
Kim, Karasu no Shi (The Death of a Crow), 139.
102
everyday language, and the complex layering of colonial authority that results in an
additional creolization at the level of culture. The fact that Kim’s work is written in
Japanese but takes place in Korea among Korean-speaking subjects—thus also standing
as a sort of translation for which no original exists—only heightens the sense of
creolization. Kim thus channels the powers of creolized language to create “the venom
of raucous laughter” that demystifies figures of authority by exposing them as deeply
flawed individuals whose brutality belies a personal inadequacy. In turn, Kim exposes
national language as something that is manufactured, turning the language of the
colonizer against itself in an act of literary subversion.
Kim’s theoretical writing provides additional grounds for the connection between
creolization and parody. In the opening to his essay on Cheju Island—the subject that
constitutes the majority of his literature—entitled “Naze ‘Cheju-do’ o kaku ka” (“Why
Write of Cheju”), Kim articulates the importance of humor in the creation of fiction.
Kim first establishes humor historically as the cultural domain of the commoner used to
mock the self-importance of the elite. “In the past, the Eastern gentleman almost never
laughed. While harboring a cold, murderous smile, the nobleman—this goes for the
Korean yangban as well as the Japanese samurai warrior—was completely without
humor. Instead, it was the people who laughed at this.”
166
Kim implies that the novelist
has inherited this underdog tradition of using the humorous art of parody to lampoon
authority figures. However, he articulates yet another reason for the importance of
humor. When beginning to write about the Cheju Uprising, Kim writes:

166
Kim, Shinpen "Zainichi" no Shisō, 206.
103
As one who did not directly experience the event, in order to confront this
immeasurably tragic and frightful reality, I could only do so not through a
realistic re-creation, but by deflecting it through the creation of a complete
fiction. While “deflect [kawasu]” is not quite the right word, I knew that
as long as I didn’t use the crucible of fiction to comprehend and
reconstitute reality, creating a new space and order, I could not break free
from the overwhelming shadow of the reality of the incident. In a fictional
world that transcends truth and confronts reality, I found salvation in a
form that communicates the circumstances [jōkyō] of the incident. I’m not
using the novel to write history, which makes humor all the more essential
as a means of emphasizing the fictional quality of the work. In this sense,
I feel that the creation of humor is deeply connected with the powers of
imagination that support a work of fiction.
167

Kim thus establishes humor/parody as both a fundamental element of social
protest and an essential tool for confronting and comprehending the underlying truth of
historical tragedy without being overwhelmed by the sheer tragedy of the event itself.
Humor is therefore related to his formulation of nihongo bungaku in that it is used to
reclaim language from the hegemonic authorities in obtaining an objectivity about the
event in question. Parody is integral to the mechanism of nihongo bungaku, itself a
version of creolization that subverts the language of the colonizer by reminding the
reader of its constructedness. In presenting “the venom of raucous laughter” as a key to
creolization, and by extension, zainichi literature, Won Soo-il picks up a thread from
Kim’s nihongo bungaku. Much like the passage he cites in Kim’s “From the Desk of
Warden Pak,” Won’s works employ localized dialects (a mixture of Cheju Korean and
Osaka Japanese) as a form of subversion against the standard Japanese language of pure
literature.

167
Kim, Shinpen "Zainichi" no Shisō, 207-208.
104
We are reminded of Fredric Jameson’s writings that pit parody against pastiche,
with the former being the distinguishing characteristic of modernism and the latter of
postmodernism.

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic
style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it
is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior
motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any
conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily
borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus
blank parody…
168

Here, Jameson’s wording echoes the linguistic turn in literary criticism, while
also evoking that act of mimicry that would be later extended by Bhabha. While
postcolonial in constitution, both Kim and Won’s works retain the political urgency of
parody through the refusal to accept language as an a priori given, thus distinguishing
their fiction from the succeeding generation whose work cannot help but bear the
homogenizing effects of globalization despite (or perhaps because of) their insistence
upon individualism. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, the work of the “new zainichi”
generation, is nostalgic in more ways than one, both in its approach to the past and its
lack of “satiric impulse,” linking them to the same humorless noblemen that they attempt
to transcend.

168
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991), 17.
105
Chapter
Three

The
Minority
Machine:

Alterity
and
Excess
in
the
Films
of
Sai
Yōichi
and
Ōshima
Nagisa

To me, the easiest people in the world to understand are my parents: my father, who
happens to be Korean, and my Japanese mother. I come from a mixed-race background,
so to me that's what's interesting. I'm familiar with both cultures and have both cultures
within me, but I don't completely affirm either one. I don't recognize one or the other
more, but I navigate a complicated path where I agree and disagree with both, like a
"hybrid." The hybrid and the view of the hybrid I think is what's most interesting.
Sai Yōichi
169

Q: Are you Japanese?
A: No, I’m Korean.
Q: Why is that?
A: Because I’m Korean.
Three Resurrected Drunkards, 1968
170

In Chapters 1 and 2, I analyzed the doubleness manifest in the literature of Kim
Sokpom and Won Soo-il that, I claim, both permeates the zainichi Korean experience and
discloses the potential for a transnational identity. This paper extends the conversation to
cinema by arguing that the instances of doubleness and excess in the work of zainichi
Korean filmmaker Sai Yōichi and Japanese avant-garde filmmaker Ōshima Nagisa serve
as an expression of zainichi alterity. Many of Sai’s films depict the struggle of
individuals that live at the social or geographic margins of Japanese society, with two of
his better-known films—All Under the Moon (Tsuki wa docchi ni deteiru, 1993) and

169
Brian Hartzheim, “Yoichi Sai,” Midnight Eye: accessed April 1, 2015,
http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/yoichi-sai/
170
Kaettekita Yopparai (Three Resurrected Drunkards), DVD, directed by Ōshima
Nagisa (1968; New York: Criterion, 2010).
106
Blood and Bones (Chi to hone, 2004)— being adaptations of zainichi novelist Yan
Sogil’s works that foreground members of the zainichi community. I would like to use
this chapter, however, to look at two of Sai’s more overlooked films, Mosquito on the
Tenth Floor (Jūkai no mosukīto, 1983) and Soo (2007), neither of which feature overt
depictions of zainichi characters, but that I read as visually and thematically embodying
the zainichi experience. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, these representations are
achieved through cinematic strategies of “difference and repetition” articulated in the
writings of Gilles Deleuze. I will then go on to discuss the 1960s films of Sai’s
predecessor Ōshima Nagisa—focusing in particular on Kaettekita yopparai (Three
Resurrected Drunkards, 1968)—which employ similar transgressive strategies to
interrogate minority identity, but that, I argue, encounter limitations that jeopardize their
own radicalism when it comes to gender representation.
Sai Yōichi got his start in film as an assistant director on Ōshima Nagisa’s
controversial 1976 film, In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korīda). Despite being the
youngest person on the production, Sai was promoted to first assistant director, a move
typical of the rabble-rousing Ōshima. Despite the continuity of their relationship (Sai
was cast as an actor in Ōshima’s last feature film before his death, Taboo (Gohatto,
1999)), Sai has consistently disavowed the influence of the older director in interviews
and discussions. In a sense, this tradition of disavowal is the continuation of a practice
initiated by Ōshima and his peers in their formative years. Most filmmakers of Ōshima’s
generation (commonly dubbed the nouvelle vague or “New Wave”) were forced to work
under an established director (which, during that era, would have been a member of the
so-called “golden age” of filmmakers, which includes Kurosawa Akira and Mizoguchi
107
Kenji, among others) as part of the rigid studio apprenticeship system before becoming a
full-fledged director of their own and openly rejecting everything their mentor
represented.
171
Sai is not wrong to so adamantly differentiate his body of work from that
of Ōshima as there is very little outward resemblance between the two. As the films of
the New Wave function as a refutation of the cinema of the Golden Age, Sai’s generation
of filmmakers in part represent a rejection of the polemicism or “seriousness” of the New
Wave, while also retaining certain elements of their political sensibility, if not their visual
style per se. I would thus argue that, while often seamlessly integrated into the visual
grammar that characterizes mainstream Japanese cinema, Sai’s work nonetheless inherits
the spirit of experimentation—and with it the spirit of protest—that characterizes
Ōshima’s works.
Sai’s work is also accompanied by a second disavowal, that being any pretense of
speaking for or otherwise representing the zainichi community. This disavowal too is a
generational one in that it ultimately amounts to the rejection of the homeland politics
that saddled his elders. In the same interview from whence the epigraph for this chapter
is taken, Sai says, “Korean-Japanese who can speak out or belong to special
organizations often ask me to take a strong position. But I always refuse. That's not why I
make movies. The cynical thinking and sense of irony in my films reflect something that
I as an individual was born with, and it's not something handed down to me by my people
or race.”
172
Nevertheless, as in the opening quote, Sai credits his mixed background as
the basis for his “hybrid” worldview. This would situate him in a space similar to

171
Perhaps the most widely circulated example is Imamura Shōhei, who toiled under the
famous director Ozu Yasujiro for many years, a fact he initially resented until later in life
when he acknowledged Ozu’s influence.
172
Hartzheim, “Yoichi Sai.”
108
Chicago Cubs’ love interest, Mari, from AV Odyssey, also one of mixed-race background
that openly declares her indifference to politics, while remaining an “inquisitive person”
that cannot fully disguise her social engagement.
173
What Sai is really protesting here is
any strict identification to political organizations both in general, but here specifically in
relation to the nationalist organizations of Sōren and Mindan (affiliated with North and
South Korea, respectively) that so dominated the consciousness of older zainichi
generations. Instead, Sai attributes his personality to a sort of a priori individualism that
that he “was born with,” a common refrain that will be echoed in the younger generation
of zainichi writers and directors to be discussed later in Chapter 4 of this dissertation.

“I am a Policeman=?”—Mosquito on the Tenth Floor and Zainichi Disrecognition

What is perhaps most fascinating about Sai Yōichi’s films is his ability to capture
the zainichi experience metonymically, using cinematic tropes that comment on the
paradox of minority identity without resorting to a direct representation (save for the
aforementioned examples of All Under the Moon and Blood and Bones). Never is this
more evident than in Sai’s debut feature, Mosquito on the Tenth Floor (Jūkai no
mosukīto, 1983), which I read as an allegory of zainichi ressentiment derived from a
sense of what John Lie terms “disrecognition” to describe the common zainichi condition
of being simultaneously disrespected and unacknowledged by mainstream society. “In

173
It is interesting to note that despite both Sai and his longtime producer Lee Bongou’s
(discussed in more detail in Chapter 4) alleged disdain for politics, a companion volume
containing lengthy discussion (conducted in the traditional zadankai (round table) or
taidan (one-on-one conversation) format) of zainichi issues is published alongside the
release of nearly any “serious” film.
109
the postwar period,” Lie writes, “though the legacy of colonial hierarchy slowly
dissipated, ethnic Koreans lost their legitimate place in monoethnic Japan. That is, when
acknowledged, they were deemed inferior, but more commonly they were not even
acknowledged.”
174
Mosquito on the Tenth Floor follows the plight of an unnamed
middle-aged police sergeant stuck in a dead-end job as supervisor of a provincial police-
box in Chiba prefecture. The police officer is a recent divorcee who is plagued by a
gambling addiction and browbeaten by an ex-wife who only contacts him to demand the
money he owes her in delinquent child-support payments. Before long, he finds himself
mired in debt with no recourse but to begin borrowing money from shady loan-shark
offices that he quickly squanders on boat races. Unable to pay off his loans, the
policeman is pursued by low-level gangsters from the loan offices, precipitating an
unraveling which culminates in his desperate attempt to rob a local post-office.
In depicting the policeman’s downfall, Mosquito on the Tenth Floor functions as
a portrait of alienation and misdirected violence in the vein of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi
Driver (1976). While there are no visible signs that would inscribe the protagonist as a
member of the Korean minority, I believe that—along with the notion of
disrecognition—the film can be read as a representation of the social disconnect that
results from the erosion of the zainichi community since the dissolution of Korean ethnic
organizations beginning in the 1970s. These are the same ethnic organizations (Sōren,
Mindan) that Sai lampoons in a particularly memorable wedding banquet sequence in All
Under the Moon wherein the lead, a taxi driver and resident Korean, exploits zainichi
Korean rhetoric only as a means to hit on other zainichi women. Nevertheless, as a

174
John Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial
Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 80.
110
reading of Mosquito on the Tenth Floor and other ethnic Korean narratives demonstrate,
the absence of these organizations leaves a spiritual void in zainichi communities that
precipitates social disconnect and alienation. In Sai’s Mosquito the protagonists gradual
withdrawal from society is performed in two specific ways—in an increasing obsession
with computer games and a sense of ressentiment (mis)directed at state institutions. In
one scene, there is a shot of the police captain reprimanding the officer for his repeated
indiscretions in the modern-day language of risshin shusse
175
with the Japanese flag
situated prominently in the background. This shot echoes the political sentiment of
Ōshima Nagisa’s films of the 1960s, many of which include the appearance of the
Japanese flag with a black hi no maru, which stands as a symbol of protest against
Japanese imperialism.

I always tell my officers, “Being a policeman is your career, but you’re
also a public servant.” Your job is to make people feel safe. To build a
nation that is free of crime. We are a part of that system. I understand
you’re not satisfied being a box officer, but Japan is the only nation in the
world that has developed a system that so effectively connects the police
to the public at large. It’s a system that has its roots in the earliest samurai
eras. The police box has a proud tradition. You’ve served faithfully at
this task for almost 20 years. A man is only what he makes of
himself…Whether you’re a police captain, a commissioner, or a box
officer, your salary is a little different, but your duty to the public is the
same…Even if you’re stuck as a box chief till you retire, you’ll get a tidy
pension and you can spend your golden years in peace. Take your
grandchildren to the resort town of Atami and relax all day. That time will
come for you. Are you listening? You’re not going to speak? This is the
end of the line. Get your act together. Atami! Think Atami!
176

175
This term, roughly translated as “social mobility through hard work,” is a term that
emerged in the Meiji era to encourage Japanese citizens to participate in the building of a
modern nation-state with the implicit promise of material success.
176
Jūkai no mosukīto, directed by Yōichi Sai (1983; Tokyo: Happinet, 2009), DVD.
111
The Japanese flag looms in the background for virtually the full duration of the
captain’s monologue, visually aligning him with the discourse of the nation-state. Here,
Sai forgoes the conventional shot-reverse shot structure, instead opting to have the officer
stand in the foreground as a sort of partial presence, while the camera focuses on the face
of the captain. With his back to the camera, the viewer is deprived any access to the
officer’s reactions, much as he deprives any real access to his family and loved ones. In a
convoluted attempt to inspire the officer to mend his ways, the captain’s speech invokes
both the noble tradition of the samurai and the capitalist promise of rewarding a career of
drudgery with a comfortable retirement of leisure and material pleasure. By associating
the work of the police with the samurai tradition, the captain engages in a typically
nationalist version of historical revisionism in which samurai are the altruistic champions
of the common people. In the captain’s view, the police represent an extension of the
samurai tradition in that they function as an embodiment of the kokutai (national polity
or, more literally, national body), the same logic used by the Japanese government to
ideologically align and mobilize their populace during WWII. The captain also urges the
officer to “Think Atami!” referencing one of Japan’s most popular resort towns at the
time. Filmed just a few years before the onset of bubble economy excess, this declaration
symbolizes the burgeoning economy of Japan wherein lifetime employment and a
comfortable retirement of leisure seemed not just realistic but virtually guaranteed. By
seamlessly conflating the notion of public service with a future life of material opulence,
the captain’s speech encompasses the mid-1980s Japanese nationalist discourse wherein
material wealth functions as a basis for cultural merit. It is precisely this sort of
112
conventional “success story” that the officer is rejecting in his doomed rampage of self-
destruction and excess.
If we are to view the above scene as a veiled criticism of Japanese neo-
imperialism, it should come as no surprise that the officer’s final and most aggressive
attack is leveled at a state institution—the post office, which, in Japan, also serves as one
of the largest banks in the country. The officer attempts an escape only to realize that a
swat team has surrounded the building. He then retreats back into the post office where
he recites in a blank monotone what can be presumed to be questions and answers from
the police officer’s promotional exam that he has failed multiple times.

Problem #1: Explain the basic rule and duties of a field officer.
Answer: A field officer conducts systematic operations based in a specific
location. It is this officer’s duty to protect this nation’s citizens from the
threat of crime and danger, and to insure peace and tranquility in the area.
In fulfilling this obligation, the officer must be vigilant at all times, day or
night, or days off, no matter where he is, or the circumstances of the
location. In the event a police incident occurs, he must immediately take
appropriate action…
177

The officer’s reverie is interrupted when he is tackled by members of the police
SWAT team that have stormed the building. This speech--in the juxtaposition between
its bureaucratic content and the officer’s tone of voice that is utterly bereft of emotion—
implicates the oppressiveness of the police state for its intolerance of difference and
disregard for human rights. Here the promotional exam operates as a stand-in for the
naturalization process that all ethnic Koreans must undertake in order to become Japanese
citizens. The officer’s perfect recitation implies that he in fact knows the answers, but

177
Jūkai no mosukīto, DVD.
113
refuses to answer them correctly in an act of defiance against the state. His performance
can be read as a commentary on the degrading nature of the naturalization process, which
has since relaxed somewhat since the 1985 revision of nationality laws, but nonetheless
encourages a singular identity in line with concepts of Japanese monoethnicity.
In addition to the sense of protest and transgression that pervades Sai’s film, there
are some interesting parallels between the diegesis of Mosquito on the Tenth Floor and
high-profile crimes committed by ethnic Koreans—particularly the 1968 Sumatakyō
Incident—which support a reading of the film as an allegory of zainichi disrecognition.
The perpetrator of this crime was zainichi Korean Kim Hiro, who, much like the lead of
the film, was “relentlessly pursued by gangsters for unpaid loans.”
178
Kim, after shooting
the debt collectors as well as a police officer who had assailed him with racist comments,
held eighteen people hostage in a Japanese inn for almost four days before being arrested
by police detectives disguised as members of the press. Afterwards he explained his
actions as an accumulation of the ethnic discrimination he experienced since his youth.
Mass media coverage of Kim’s case brought the plight of zainichi Koreans into the
national consciousness, with Kim’s attorneys stressing the brutal legacy of Japanese
imperialism as a main contributing factor in Kim’s crimes. By claiming that Kim’s case
was an, “‘ethnic problem’ created by the crime against Korea by Japanese state and
society,”
179
the attorneys attempted to universalize Kim’s experience as that of all
zainichi Koreans at the hands of the institutional racism of the Japanese state. Many

178
Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity,
92.
179
Quoted in Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial
Identity, 92-93.
114
zainichi Korean intellectuals, including novelist Kim Tal-su, also came to Kim’s defense,
even working with Kim’s team of lawyers during the trial.
The officer’s downward trajectory, culminating in an attack on the post office,
links him with Kim Hiro as the institutions that turned their backs on him become the
target of his disrecognition. In what might be the most enigmatic aspect of Sai’s film,
another presence that becomes the object of, first, the officer’s salvation and later his
disrecognition, is that of computer technology. In the film’s opening sequence, the police
officer is shown inspecting goods at an electronics store and later obsessively perusing a
computer catalogue in the karaoke bar that he often frequents. The figure of the
computer in this film seems to encompass the contradictory impulses of alienation and a
desire for social connectedness, thereby anticipating both the video game induced
isolationism of hikikomori and the potential for interconnectedness via social networking.
Much like in Won Soo-il’s novel, AV Odyssey, nascent computer technology is situated
as a potential means of communication, though Sai’s film adopts a decidedly more
pessimistic perspective in this regard. Roughly a half-hour into the film, the police
officer purchases a Sharp MZ series computer with the first batch of money borrowed
from the loan companies. After unpacking it, one of the first things he does is to type, in
English, “I AM A POLICEMAN=?” as if posing a question to an invisible interlocutor
across the cyber void. Shunning any sense of fraternity with his coworkers, the police
officer gradually withdraws from society, devoting all his free time to gambling, drinking,
and computer games. He also becomes romantically involved with a lonely bar hostess
named Keiko who teases him for his computer obsession, regarding the device as little
more than an overpriced toy.
115
Thus while the computer is seen as contributing to the police officer’s alienation,
it also communicates a social, if not erotic, desire. The sparse side room (what might be
dubbed the “play room”) of the man’s apartment where the computer is placed is used for
only two purposes—computing or copulating with the various women he lures to his
apartment, with these two tasks often performed in tandem. If the joystick and keyboard
that the officer toggles are merely “toys for boys,” then women are placed on the same
ontological plane, reduced to mere objects of companionship or providers of erotic
pleasure as a substitution for genuine social connection. In one particularly memorable
scene, the police officer and Keiko stand naked before the computer screen as it projects
abstract lines of color in the otherwise dark room. Here the computer is situated in a
position of voyeuristic phallocentrism as a silent observer of the officer’s sexual exploits.
Later in the film, the officer, in one of his late night computer sessions, programs the
screen to repeat the word “omanko” (pussy) which he then switches to “man” with a click
of the keyboard. In the end, the computer becomes the victim of the officer’s
disrecognition, meeting its untimely demise when it is tossed off the 10
th
floor balcony,
marking the policeman’s complete withdrawl from society and the beginning of his
violent rampage.
The time of Mosquito’s production is marked by the emergence of the personal
computer in both Japanese and North American markets and, with it, a newfound
discussion regarding the role of technology in the domestic sphere. In the United States,
the January 3, 1983 issue of Time magazine named the computer the “Machine of the
Year” for 1982, the first and only time an inanimate object has been given the annual
“Man of the Year” award. As a reading of these articles will attest, notions of the
116
American dream were deeply embedded in any discussion of the burgeoning potential of
this new device. The playfully satirical tone of the Time feature’s introduction reveals in
particular how the computer had come to embody all the contradictory impulses implicit
in the American dream—both desire and material wealth as well as productivity and
efficiency—and figured as an extension of manifest destiny in a time where its literal
application had become untenable. In a word, it represented the moment when neo-
imperialism was sublimated to the electronic realm. This short piece, written in a droll
voice resembling that of a coercive used-car salesman, insists that, “Time is money. Most
of all, time is dreams. And computers give you time for dreams.”
180
This message serves
as a regular refrain throughout the piece, linking the concept to global expansion and
manifest destiny.

Now I'll tell you something about machines in American history. No, don't
walk away; won't take half a minute. We may have turned into what looks
like a nation of doohickeys, but that isn't what we had in mind at the start.
What our forefathers (bless 'em) wanted was the land, not machines, the
great, wide, beautiful land that was thought to go on forever. When the
machines came clanging along, they were supposed to let folks enjoy the
land more, the green grass and the blue water. Only they got out of hand,
you see, until all the lovely forever greens and blues got squeezed in a
corner full of national parks and the sky choked black with factories. That
isn't what we intended, though. Machines were meant to open the territory,
not close it down.
What's all this got to do with computers? you ask. I'll tell you.
They reopen the territory, that's what they do. Oh, not the land, of course.
That's gone like the topsoil, with the wind. But the land was never our real
territory anyway. It was the dream, my friends; the territory was always
the New World ideal. We don't ever want to run out of that, do we?
Goodbye land. Hello space. This here screen and keyboard might have
come along any old decade, but it happened to pop up when it did, right
now, at this point in time, like the politicians call it, because we were

180
Roger Rosenblatt, “A New World Dawns,” Time, January 3, 1983,
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,953631,00.html
117
getting hungry to be ourselves again. That's what I think, buddy. "The
most idealist nations invent most machines." D.H. Lawrence said that.
Great American, D.H.
181

In Japan, the promise of computer technology in the home captured a similar
sense of imagination, both financially and intellectually, while remaining consistent with
the post-imperialist goal of economic growth and expansion. The lead feature article
(“The Computer Moves In”
182
) in this same Time issue is packed with testimonials on
how the computer has made one’s business more profitable and efficient or allowed them
to avoid nightmare commutes by working from home. For the police officer in Mosquito
on the Tenth Floor, the computer represents a similar opportunity to achieve a
“competitive advantage” via technical mastery, as well as to probe one’s ontological
origins in a search for a sense of identity outside his occupation of state civil servant.
The term “personal computer” alone connotes neo-liberal concepts of individualism with
its dissemination paradoxically evoking concerns about “dehumanization.” The
aforementioned feature article suggests how the advent of the personal computer blurs
distinctions between home and work, urban and rural, foreseeing an erosion of privacy
while acknowledging the potential for new connections. Much as the collapse of these
distinctions instantiates a search for new social connections beyond the traditional
boundaries of the workplace, the officer finds himself using the computer as a vehicle for

181
Ibid.
182
The article’s title is a relevant one to Mosquito on the Tenth Floor as well. In the film,
the computer quite literally occupies its own room, like that of a surrogate housemate.
As the story progresses, the computer seems to encroach on the officer’s personal space,
if not his very sense of being, precipitating his disillusionment and the computer’s
destruction.
118
new “senses of belonging” following the erosion of zainichi ethnic organizations and the
feeling of community (imagined or otherwise) they engendered.
Whether due to a failure of mastery or disappointment at its limitations, for the
officer the computer is ultimately revealed as yet another oppressive system. While there
is discussion in “The Computer Moves In” of the “democratization of new technology”
that the personal computer supposedly represents, there is also evidence of the reverse—
that the device is far from ideologically neutral, its application governed by dominant
power structures. For members of minority groups, as for the police officer in Mosquito,
the computer thus becomes an object of exclusion that is consequently perceived as a
vehicle of surveillance—a hostile extension of the police state. The article quotes an
Atari executive who lauds the openness of the computer, considering its lack of a
codified system an inherent virtue: “The great thing about computers is that they have no
gravity systems. The logical system is one that you make up. Computers are a wonderful
way of being bizarre.”
183
However, in user response and the police officer’s alienation, it
becomes clear that the computer is not in fact open but epistemologically isolated—a
closed system that does not respond to any form of logic outside its own and facilitates a
“disrecognition” as just another platform of nationalist ideology. Nonetheless, what is
compelling about the computer in Mosquito is its position as an object of desire for social
connection, one that anticipates the role of the Internet and social media for facilitating
“senses of belonging” in a way that will displace (if not perhaps replace) traditional
community and ethnic social structures.

183
Otto Friedrich, “The Computer Moves In,” Time, January 3, 1983,
http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-
/faculty/debaron/482/482readings/machine%20of%20the%20year.html
119

This Isn’t the End: Repetition and Transgression in Three Resurrected Drunkards

Sai’s mentor, Ōshima Nagisa, was also among those endlessly fascinated by the
Sumatakyō Incident as it unfolded, even attempting to enter the crime scene to “show his
support” with fellow filmmakers Wakamatsu Koji and Adachi Masao on February 22,
1968 after a long night of drinking.
184
As Ōshima reflects years later:

For me, the timing of [the incident] was really impeccable. I had done so
much work on the Korean problem already and, sure enough, here was the
perfect incident. I felt a combination of arrogance at having predicted the
event before it happened and panic that, “Well, if something like this
happens, there’s nothing left to do.” With the Kim Hiro incident it’s as if
the world had overtaken fiction. I can’t say that it was completely
unanticipated, but I thought that if someone were to take it this far in
reality, there’s no way I could just do the same thing in film.
185

Ōshima’s statement contains a peculiar mix of excitement and anxiety over the
event, though not perhaps for the reasons one would expect. Rather than expressing a
dread over the possible consequences it might have for ethnic Koreans in Japan,
Ōshima’s anxiety appears to be born solely out of a concern for his own work, lending
his statement a certain whiff of exploitation.
Elsewhere, however, Ōshima has spoken more seriously about the discrimination
faced by ethnic Koreans.

Here we have the presence of Japanese and the presence of zainichi
Koreans. To both groups, the other’s presence is completely irrational.
And the ones who produced this irrationality are the Japanese. It is only

184
Ōshima Nagisa, Ōshima Nagisa 1968 (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2004), 204.
185
Ibid.
120
when crimes are committed by zainichi Koreans do the Japanese feel their
presence to be irrational. On the other hand, ethnic Koreans live with the
irrational presence of the Japanese day and night. It is thus natural that the
Japanese question their responsibility in creating this presence.
186

In a compelling reversal, Ōshima implicates Japan’s imperial legacy in
constituting a society in which their very presence is threatening to those who do not
belong to the supposedly homogeneous Japanese race. In other words, zainichi generally
have the luxury of invisibility (to the Japanese), while Japanese imperialism—embedded
as it is in all government and capitalist systems—is, to the resident Korean, pervasive and
inescapable. In his own oblique way, Ōshima is making the same argument as Kim
Sokpom does in his theory of nihongo bungaku, one that claims that discrimination is
imbedded in the Japanese language itself. Much like Kim’s literary project, the solution
for Ōshima thus resides in the production of a new cinematic grammar that constitutes a
form of resistance against the discriminatory practices inherent in conventional Japanese
film.
Some scholars, however, are critical of the ways in which zainichi Korean
characters are deployed in Ōshima’s films, reading their representations as subjugated to
the director’s larger political agenda. In his dissertation, Christopher Scott demonstrates
how Ōshima’s representation of Ri Chin’u
187
as the character R in Kōshikei (Death By
Hanging, Ōshima’s first of two 1968 films to address the “zainichi problem”)

186
Ōshima Nagisa, “Fujōri na sonzai toshite no Nihonjin” (The Japanese as an Irrational
Presence), Shūkan Asahi, March 8, 1958, 24-25, quoted in Ōshima, Ōshima Nagisa 1968,
205.
187
Ri Chin’u, an eighteen-year-old zainichi man, allegedly raped and killed two Japanese
high school girls in 1958 in what is known in Japan as the Komatsugawa jiken
(Komatsugawa Incident). Ri was convicted and executed for his crimes four years later,
despite the lack of substantial evidence.
121
unintentionally reproduces the myth of zainichi Korean as rapist while reifying Japanese
discourses of homogeneity. Scott, referencing Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, reads
R’s disappearance at the end of the film as both a comment on the invisibility of the
zainichi Korean in Japanese society and a potential act of subversion. On the one hand,
R’s disappearance enables the tenability of the Japanese discourse of monoethnicity,
while on the other, it “act[s] as a site (or sight) of zainichi Korean agency and
resistance”
188
that conceives invisibility as “a source of power and subversiveness.”
189

Yomota Inuhiko, also writing on the films of Ōshima, elaborates on this idea, stating that
the film’s representation of Ri dramatizes Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept that “existence
precedes essence.” R’s invisibility is derived from the fact that, as a zainichi Korean, he
is not legally identified as a person in the Japanese system; his visibility is thus only
achievable through the incident itself.
190
Far from criticizing the institution of capital
punishment or lamenting the existence of discrimination, what Ōshima is really doing
with this film, according to Yomota, is to illuminate the relations between power
structures and systems of representation to reveal the limitations of cinematic
representation.
191
Thus, when R disappears from view, this is because his existence
exceeds the boundaries of conventional representation—much as he remains invisible
within the Japanese system—situating him paradoxically as a figure of both absence and
excess.

188
Christopher Scott, “Invisible Men: The Zainichi Korean Presence in Postwar Japanese
Culture” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2005), 97
189
Ibid.
190
Yomota Inuhiko, Ōshima to Nihon (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 2010), 171.
191
Yomota, Ōshima to Nihon, 173.
122
Yomota describes how Ōshima uses the above sense of paradox to interrogate
minority identity using the medium specificity of cinema. On the one hand, R embodies
a cinematic existence whose complexities can only be expressed through techniques
specific to the medium. On the other, Ōshima’s films reveal the limitations of
representation within this same cinematic medium. This chapter extends Yomota’s
theories to an analysis of both Ōshima’s and Sai’s films claiming that—rather than the
direct representations seen in the former’s Death by Hanging and the latter’s All Under
the Moon and Blood and Bones—it is the directors’ more experimental pieces that
capture the aporias that characterize zainichi Korean existence, using transgressive filmic
techniques of doubling and repetition, as in Three Resurrected Drunkards and Soo.
Following Yomota’s theories, I argue that these limits of representation are what link
avant-garde film techniques with subaltern identity. Much as Kim Sokpom uses
creolization to challenge constructions of national literature, Ōshima and Sai employ
transgressive techniques as a means of protest against Japanese neo-imperialism in the
form of conventional cinematic representation.
Christopher Scott contends that, despite the massive media coverage that
surrounded the event as it occurred, the Sumatakyō Incident failed to capture the
Japanese cultural imagination in the same way as Komatsugawa. The author neglects to
mention, however, that Ōshima’s second film from 1968, while not a direct
representation in the style of Kōshikei, was nonetheless conceived in part as a response to
the Kim Hiro incident. As Ōshima reflects on the incident:

We were really of the mind to go to the scene of the crime and fight.
Unfortunately, we were stopped before we could get there. We were on
the verge of becoming criminals ourselves. It was a real shame that we
123
weren’t able to make it. The state is much more clever, and they truly had
the ability to put a stop to it. It was out of the frustration of being unable
to prevent the incident ourselves that Three Resurrected Drunkards was
conceived.
192

Perhaps even more so than most Ōshima films, a great deal of controversy
surrounds Three Resurrected Drunkards, in terms of both its conception and reception.
Despite Ōshima’s resolute insistence on Sumatakyō as the chief inspiration for the film,
there is other documentation to suggest that the scenario for the film was in fact largely
completed even before the incident took place.
193
However, as the above quotes from
Ōshima indicate, the incident’s occurrence during the development of Drunkards was in
a way the perfect storm for the socially conscious filmmaker, and his desire to respond to
the event and contemplate its political significance is readily apparent both in the film’s
structure and its subject matter. Perhaps the film’s most obvious allusion to Kim Hiro is
in the outfit—a turtleneck, vest, and “bird-hunter’s cap” that Kim wore during the
Sumatakyō Incident—a disguise that many of the characters find themselves dawning at
one point or another in the film. As the narrative unfolds, the central characters continue
to exchange clothes, such that multiple “actors” don the Kim Hiro “uniform,” frustrating
any consistent sense of identification. As I will argue in this section, the acts of
masquerade and repetition that permeate the film and propel the narrative forward also
function as cinematic expressions of the complexity of zainichi Korean identity by

192
Ōshima, Ōshima Nagisa 1968, 205-206.
193
A journal entry from frequent collaborator and film critic Matsuda Masao dated
February 16, 1968 reads, “Amidst snow, Oshima and the Three Resurrected Drunkards
writing crew return from their lodgings and begin plotting out production.” Quoted in
Ōshima, Ōshima Nagisa 1968, 207. The Sumatakyō Incident took place from Feb. 20 to
24. This suggests that certain details related to Kim Hiro may have been added after the
fact.
124
destabilizing the notion of a singular ethnic association. If Ōshima’s Death by Hanging
exposes the limitations of cinematic representation for depicting minority identity, then
Three Resurrected Drunkards attempts to exceed these same limitations through a
transgressive mode of cinematic expression meant to defy audience expectations and
challenge viewer endurance.
The film opens with a scene of three college friends (dubbed Stretch (ō-noppo),
Middleman (chū-noppo), and Shorty (chibi) corresponding to their respective heights and
played by the three members of the popular band The Folk Crusaders
194
) frolicking on a
beach in Kyūshū, dressed in the military style jackets that were popular at the time. The
friends take turns pointing their fingers at each other’s heads execution-style, a pose that,
we realize later, is an imitation of the famous image of a Vietnamese general murdering a
Vietcong operative taken by AP photographer Eddie Adams. As the three young men
remove their clothes and wade into the surf, a hand emerges from the sand, grabbing two
sets of the young men’s clothes to replace them with the uniforms of a Korean soldier and
a high school student, respectively. When they change and approach a vendor to buy
cigarettes, the owner becomes suspicious and phones the authorities, forcing the three to
flee and take refuge in a public bath. There they encounter a young woman (“onēchan,”
or “older sister”) who, through a hole in the partition that separates the male and female
pools, overhears their conversation and suggests they steal another’s clothes as a means

194
The Folk Crusaders, having just come off the success of their hit song “Three
Resurrected Drunkards” (from which the film takes its title), were compelled to make an
accompanying star vehicle by their record label. The group chose Ōshima to direct,
supposedly because he shared their hometown of Kyoto, and Shōchiku studios secured
the rights with the only directive being to make a film that 1) stars The Folk Crusaders, 2)
uses the title “Three Resurrected Drunkards” and 3) is a comedy. Ōshima, Oshima
Nagisa 1968, 207.
125
of disguise. The set of clothes that Middleman changes into is the aforementioned Kim
Hiro “uniform.”
As the trio leaves the bath, however, they are detained by Korean army deserter
Lee Chonil and Korean college student Kim Fah who, the group learns, are the original
owners of the mystery clothes found on the beach. Lee, who stowed away with Kim to
Japan to avoid Vietnam combat, forces the two members to change back into their
clothes, thus initiating an increasingly nonsensical chain of masquerade and performance.
He insists that the three must die (in uniform) so that he and Kim can live on
unsuspected. The trio manage to escape but are quickly apprehended by Japanese
authorities who naturally mistake them for Korean stowaways. What follows is an
absurdist montage in which they are sent back to Korea only to be shipped off to Saigon
to “die” at the front. After being shot on the battlefield, they wake up assuming that they
are dead, but instead find themselves “resurrected” near the same beach in Kyūshū where
they first lost their clothes. Onē-chan immediately reappears (now wearing the Kim Hiro
hat), urging them to change clothes once more as if no time has elapsed since their
deportation/repatriation.
Arguably the most remarkable (and subversive) aspect of Three Resurrected
Drunkards is the repetition that occurs halfway through the film. The first and second
half are separated by a brief two-minute interlude; at roughly the thirty-five minute mark,
the film cuts to a scene of the three friends interviewing people (including Yu Do-yun,
the actor who played R in Death by Hanging as well as Ōshima himself) outside of
bustling Shinjuku station. It then cuts back to the main diegesis of the film, where the
three friends huddle in the small bathroom of a train to avoid the Korean stowaways. As
126
the train enters a tunnel, the screen fades to black and the film begins again with the
opening sequence of the friends frolicking on the beach. The first fifteen minutes of
footage are repeated almost verbatim, with increasingly noticeable divergences. The
opening beach scene is repeated exactly, but when the three young men approach the
cigarette vendor, subtle variations on the initial performance begin to emerge. According
to theater reports, audiences were thoroughly confused by this manipulation, many
thinking that the projector had malfunctioned and started the film over again.
Production notes suggest that the original idea was to repeat the opening sequence
three times, but the producers ultimately settled on two, figuring that any more would be
too disorienting. Nevertheless, Ōshima insists on the centrality of this device to the
film’s production, suggesting that it never would have been made were it not for this
experimental concept. “This is a concept that is unique to cinema (eiga dokutoku), and it
was the arrival at this cinematic idea that made this film possible.”
195
This is another
example of Ōshima’s use of the formal properties of cinema to confront viewers with the
complexity of subaltern identity. This repetition, or “return,” halfway through the film
resonates with discussions of repatriation, homecoming, and naturalization that
continually revolve around zainichi identity. Unlike conventional narrative cinema,
which relegates any serious political discussion (assuming that there is any) to the realm
of narrative content, Three Resurrected Drunkards approaches these issues in both terms
of form and content, seemingly reinforcing Yomota’s notion of the connection between
minority discourse and formal experimentation. As Susan Sontag famously contends,
Western art has been subjugated to standards of interpretation that read art as a mimetic

195
Ōshima, Ōshima Nagisa 1968, 211.
127
expression that privileges content over form.
196
In Drunkards, Ōshima situates himself as
a proponent of Sontag’s avant-garde project, which seeks to overturn the hierarchy of
interpretation in favor of a cinema of parody and abstraction.
The interlude that separates the main repetition in Drunkards is itself an
additional repetition. The three members of The Folk Crusaders interview seemingly
average passersby outside Shinjuku station; interviewer and subject then repeat the same
pattern of question and answer ad infinitum.

Q: Anata wa nihonjin desu ka? (Are you Japanese?)
A: Iie, kankokujin desu. (No, I’m Korean.)
Q: Sore wa naze desu ka? (Why is that?)
A: Kankokujin dakara desu. (Because I’m Korean.)
197

As question and answer are repeated, voices begin to overlap, instantiating a
blurring of subject and object. Ōshima has said that this scene was inspired by the
writings of Frantz Fanon, whose Black Skin, White Masks had recently captured the
revolutionary imagination of Japanese leftists. The dialogue, the director claims, was
realized through a combination of Fanon’s writing and the proclamation of French
student activist Daniel Cohn-Bendit during the social unrest of 1968 that “We are all
German Jews.”
198
By importing it to the Japanese context, the statement is thus changed
to “We are all Koreans” in an attempt to challenge ethnic binaries and emphasize the
heterogeneity of the Japanese “race.” Here Ōshima’s concept bears a resemblance to the
substitution exercise that zainichi author Won Soo-il would later perform with theoretical

196
Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 4.
197
Kaettekita Yopparai (Three Resurrected Drunkards), DVD.
198
Ōshima, Ōshima Nagisa 1968, 215.
128
texts on creolization by importing them to the zainichi Korean context. By inserting the
term “zainichi” or “Korean” into these dialogues, these authors both render ethnic
Koreans “visible” and situate the zainichi community as an active element within the
larger discourse on imperialism and diaspora. It can also be argued, however, that the
insistence of “We are all Koreans” found in the film constitutes an act of cooptation that
is not dissimilar to the logic of Japanese colonial policy. By sublimating zainichi identity
to the bodies of average Japanese, the scene is, in effect, displacing true Korean
experiences of discrimination and privileging Japanese subjectivity.
The second half of the film repeats this trope as the “resurrected” trio, in
experiencing the events a second time, assume a defiant posture, internalizing the Korean
identities that were originally imposed upon them. When the Korean stowaways outside
the bathhouse confront them for a second time, the three friends undermine the
interrogation by claiming that they are the “real Koreans.” Onē-chan and her foster
father/husband rush to their defense, asserting that the three men are indeed real Korean
soldiers that have just returned from the war. Later on in the film, the following
exchange takes place, illustrating the extremes to which their act of masquerade has
taken.

Ō-noppo: That was good acting [like a Korean] last night.
Chibi: What do you mean, acting?
Ō-noppo: That we’re Korean and they’re Japanese.
Chibi: Huh? But it’s all true.
199

As the above scene demonstrates, the young men (aside from Ō-noppo, whose
clothes were not stolen and thus was never asked to assume a Korean identity) are

199
Kaettekita Yopparai (Three Resurrected Drunkards), DVD.
129
thoroughly convinced of their own Koreanness, seeming to dramatize Freud’s claim that
one term is easily converted to its opposite, as any uncanny encounter also contains an
element of the familiar.
200
They are so convinced, in fact, that they end up murdering the
two stowaways, as well as Onē-chan’s “husband,” who they assume to be her oppressor.
Once again, roles are reversed as Onē-chan revokes her support, claiming that “Koreans
won’t kill other Koreans.” Nonetheless, the young men’s Korean identities, assumed or
otherwise, prove intractable. In the film’s closing scene, the trio peers out the train
window to witness a mural depicting Vietnam atrocities. Beneath the artistic rendering of
the famed Vietcong operative’s execution, the two Korean stowaways are executed in
identical fashion, while Chū-noppo declares, “But I’m Ii Chonil!” Is this intended as a
statement of solidarity? Or is it a critique of the neo-liberal appropriation of minority
discourses as an assertion of credibility that, nonetheless, precludes an honest
contemplation of Japan’s imperial legacy? If Ōshima’s remarks are to be taken at face
value, it is more the former. However, this has the unfortunate consequence of reifying
Japanese subjectivity at the expense of true Korean experience. If it is true that “We are
all Koreans,” this naturally eliminates the necessity for actual testimonials by zainichi
Koreans that address the discrimination suffered at the hands of Japanese authority.
Ōshima’s films are indeed plagued with these sorts of conflicted statements, which
problematize his position as a champion of minority rights and augment claims of
exploitation.
On the other hand, the middle scene that separates the first and second half of
Three Resurrected Drunkards, does not only function as a gesture of solidarity, but also

200
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (New York: Penguin, 2003), 134.
130
simulates or mimics zainichi everyday experience. Numerous zainichi narratives—from
Kim Hak-yŏng’s Frozen Mouth (Kogoeru kuchi, 1970) to Sagisawa Megumu’s Hontō no
natsu (1992) to Kaneshiro Kazuki’s GO (2000)—have dramatized the experience of
being detained in the street by Japanese police officers (for either a minor infraction, or
for no reason at all) and being ordered to present a form of identification. This seemingly
mundane or routine situation is, for zainichi Koreans, an extremely fraught, almost
mythical one as it usually results in their having to produce their alien registration card
(gaikokujin tōroku shōmeisho)
201
, a document they must keep on their person at all times
or be subject to a punitive fine or incarceration. Ethnic Koreans are thus placed in the
position of having to reveal their ethnic identity and explain their “inexplicable
presence”—to quote Ōshima’s essay—at a moment’s notice or suffer the exceedingly
serious consequences. The interaction from the above scene (“No, I’m Korean.” “Why
is that?” “Because I’m Korean”), in its tautology, mimics this quotidian but paradigmatic
experience that has for so long emblematized zainichi Korean identity.

201
On July 9, 2012 a new immigration law was put into effect replacing the gaikokujin
tōroku or “alien registration” system with a new “residents registration” system, in which
foreign residents are recorded alongside Japanese residents in the jūminhyō (residents’
register). In this new system, the Alien Registration Card is subsequently replaced with a
Residence Card (zairyū kādo), which, nonetheless, serves roughly the same function as
the old form of identification. The new law also places zainichi Koreans in the separate
category of “Special Permanent Residents,” issuing them a Special Permanent Residence
Certificate rather than a Residence Card. This certificate differs from the old Alien
Registration Card in that, “You are not required to always carry your special permanent
resident certificate on your person.” “However,” it adds, “if you are requested to present
your special permanent resident certificate by an immigration official, etc., it may be
necessary for you to present it; for example, the official may accompany you to the place
where the certificate is kept.” “Issuance of a Special Permanent Resident Certificate to a
Special Permanent Resident,” Changes to the Immigration Control Act, accessed April
24, 2015, http://www.immi-
moj.go.jp/english/newimmiact/q_a_details2_english.html#q2-3
131
One last component that, I would argue, is troublesome in this scene is the largely
unproblematic use of the term “kankokujin,” which, in the film’s subtitles for the
Criterion release, is translated simply as “Korean.” However, as anyone familiar with the
Japanese language might know, this term is used for the specific purpose of designating
South Korean nationals. The default nationality for zainichi Koreans, on the other hand,
is “chōsen,” a designation that is tied to the pre-division state of unified Korea, but that
no longer corresponds to any actual place, while a national category for those from North
Korea (kita-chōsen) does not in fact exist due to the absence of diplomatic relations
between North Korea and Japan. In addition, the name “chōsenjin” is a highly fraught
one; having accumulated derogatory associations since the colonial period, it has come to
assume a role akin to a racial epithet.
202
Admittedly, the stowaways depicted in Three
Resurrected Drunkards are from South Korea; however, by employing the same term
“kankokujin” in the interview scene outside the station, the film conflates zainichi with
South Korean nationals, thereby aligning them politically with that same nation. Thus,
while confounding national designations, Ōshima also elides zainichi historical
experience and recapitulates Japanese nationalist discourse by reinscribing zainichi
Koreans within the confines of national borders. To put it another way, it is doubtful that
every resident Korean, in the purely hypothetical scenario where they are approached on
the street with the question, “Are you Japanese?” would reply in the same uniform
fashion. Some may indeed say, “No, I’m kankokujin,” while others may say, “No, I’m
chōsenjin,” or use the transliterated English term “Korian.” Still others might answer in
the affirmative, “Yes, I’m Japanese.” Ōshima, in his shortsighted attempt to collapse

202
See Kim Sokpom’s Shinpen “zainichi” no shisō.
132
certain nationalist binaries (Korean/Japanese), he unwittingly reaffirms others
(kankoku/chōsen) by adhering to a uniform logic of nomenclature.
Nevertheless, the recurring tropes of mimicry and masquerade in Three
Resurrected Drunkards are intended to challenge yet another binarism not directly related
to issues of zainichi identity. Much as Death by Hanging was criticized for sublimating
zainichi identity into a protest of capital punishment, Three Resurrected Drunkards—as
the above scene illustrates—might be accused of subordinating discussions of minority
identity to a protest of the Vietnam War and the presence of US military bases. While
there is little reason to doubt Ōshima’s intention to address the “zainichi problem”
through a cinematic allusion to Kim Hiro, this element is ultimately an after-thought as
the film’s true intention is to interrogate Japan’s complicity in the Vietnam War. Yomota
Inuhiko describes how the endless role reversal that takes place in the film serves to
confound binaries and reveal the interrelatedness between oppressor/oppressed,
aggressor/victim.
203
While functioning as the role of aggressors on the Vietnam
battlefield, South Korean soldiers were also victims of the draft system that sent them off
to war in the first place, one that the Japanese were able to bypass under Article 9 of their
Constitution which bars the nation from using war as a means of settling international
disputes. In this sense, it was Korean participation in the war that enabled Japan’s
position as a so-called “distant observer” with Korean soldiers functioning as substitutes
for the Japanese, a situation that Ōshima’s film allegorizes through the swapping of
military uniforms. This ambiguity complicates the culture of victimization and discourse

203
Yomota, Ōshima to nihon, 184.
133
of disarmament that dominated Japan in the post-war, serving as a reminder of their
legacy of imperial aggression.

In the Realm of the Subliminal—Ethnic Identity and Doubleness in Soo

Following Three Resurrected Drunkards, any overt depiction of Korean-ness in
Ōshima’s films will disappear from view
204
, a fact some might connect with the failure of
the Leftist movement—and the subsequent disinterest in ethnic minority causes—in
Japan at the end of the 1960s. Zainichi Koreans in general will disappear from the
surface of Japanese pop culture until the early-1990s at which time a minor Korean
cultural boom will occur in the wake of the 1988 Seoul Olympics. As I argue in my
analysis of Sai Yōichi’s films Mosquito on the Third Floor and Soo, however, cinematic
representation of zainichi Koreans does not so much disappear as become relegated to the
realm of the subliminal. Elsewhere, in films such as Tsuki wa docchi ni deteiru (All
Under the Moon) and Chi to hone (Blood and Bones)—both adaptations of novels by
zainichi Korean author Yan Sogil—Sai will engage in more direct representations of
ethnic Korean identity. However, it is my claim here that his 2007 film Soo, a Japanese-
Korean coproduction filmed in South Korea is the cinematic work that most thoroughly
interrogates notions of identity through strategies of doubling, repetition, performance,
and masquerade.
Soo occupies an uncanny position in Sai’s filmography in that it is his only work
to be shot entirely in Korean with a cast of Korean nationals. Sai himself admits to

204
Kitano Takeshi’s role as a brutal Japanese army sergeant of Korean decent in Merry
Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) would the one exception.
134
having trouble making sense of this film, stating in an interview that, “Even when I watch
it, I just think it’s a weird movie. I don’t know why it ended up that way. It’s a strange
film.”
205
Evidently, this sense of confusion extended to the audience as well, who were
allegedly confounded by their inability to place it in traditional national categories.
While the film did reasonably well at the Korean box office, Sai claims that, “When
Korean audiences or critics see the film, they say that it’s not a Korean movie. But it’s
not a Japanese movie either. It became a movie that kind of drifts about in the waters in
between the two countries.”
206
Though this might seem a reasonable response to a
transnational coproduction, what makes it provocative in this case is that there are no
visible indications in the film Soo that would mark it as anything other than a Korean
national production.
207

This ambivalence, however, echoes the debates that have historically surrounded
zainichi Korean literature, which often hinge on the question of whether these works
should be categorized as Japanese literature (nihon bungaku) or “foreign literature.” In
this sense, Soo amounts to Sai’s attempt at “writing in Korean,” an ideological
experiment and act of protest undertaken by Kim Sokpom and other zainichi authors at
certain points in their career that attempts to escape the Japanese colonial legacy by
writing in the Korean language. And while the film does not signify an attempt to
revolutionize cinematic grammar in the manner of Kim Sokpom’s literary project,
through tropes of repetition and excess, Soo plays, both formally and diegetically, on
notions of affiliation and transgression that resonate with minority identity.

205
Hartzheim, “Yoichi Sai.”
206
Ibid.
207
Even in the film’s closing credits, Sai is listed under his Korean name, Choi Yang-il,
obscuring any Japanese affiliation.
135
The film follows the story of an enigmatic hit man, Taesoo (or simply, “Soo,” as
he is dubbed by the authorities), as he attempts to track down his estranged twin brother
(Taejin) with the help of a private investigator. Through the use of flashback, we learn
that gangsters kidnapped Taejin in a case of mistaken identity (or “disrecognition”) when
the two were youths. When a young Taesoo, the more mischievous of the two, attempts
to snatch a bag filled with drug money from the gang’s boss as they traverse the public
market, the group seizes the innocent Taejin by mistake, an event that haunts Taesoo and
serves as the origin of his moral dissipation. The separation of “orphan” brothers not
only allegorizes the severance of North and South, but also recalls the North Korean
repatriation campaign of the 1960s and 70s that permanently fractured so many zainichi
Korean families. Near the opening of the film, as Taesoo replays a voice message left by
the private investigator announcing the discovery of his brother, the camera pans around
his apartment to settle on a photograph of the twins in their youth.
208
Virtually without
exception, repatriation for resident Koreans meant a complete loss of communication
with loved ones in Japan such that the repatriated assumed a spectral presence in their
former homes, something akin to a missing person. Unfortunately, information of
Taejin’s whereabouts was also leaked to the gangsters who kidnapped him as a boy and,
on the verge of reunification, Taejin is murdered by a sniper’s bullet to the head, right
before Taesoo’s eyes.
In a search of Taejin’s apartment, Taesoo discovers that his brother was a police
detective who had just been transferred to the homicide department, the very same unit

208
There is a similar scene in the documentary film Dear Pyongyang (2005)—and indeed
many zainichi narratives—showing a photo of the narrator’s brothers who repatriated to
North Korea while she was still a child.
136
assigned to Taesoo’s case. Ironically, with Taejin’s death, it is instead Taesoo who
disappears by assuming his brother’s identity in an attempt to track down the killers (even
cutting his own face to approximate the scar left by the gangsters that serves as Taejin’s
distinguishing feature). Taejin’s love interest, a detective in the same department,
immediately recognizes the presence of an imposter and, after some resistance, the two
join forces. Interestingly, Taesoo demonstrates next to no intellectual curiosity about the
life of his deceased brother, being fully preoccupied by the act of revenge, one that
initiates a seemingly endless chain of destruction and death. The final third of the film is
devoted to Taesoo’s infiltration of the gang’s headquarters, leading to a bloody
confrontation in which he is the last one standing, albeit with mortal wounds that, one can
only assume, will lead to his death as well.
While a conventional reading reduces Soo to little more than a revenge fantasy,
through the repetition of the double, the film also functions as a meditation on
masquerade and the maintenance of multiple identities through performance, tropes that
are highly suggestive of the zainichi Korean experience. Deleuze describes how, in the
system of representation, repetition has been subordinated to resemblance and is
consequently defined only in terms of negation or lack. Representation, he writes,
dictates that categories cannot be open—by contrast, repetition is defined only by
movement and distinguished by divergence, transgression, and particularity. Phantoms
and simulacra thus exist as enemies of representation in that they are “conditions of real
experience.
209
” Deleuze continues, “When we consider repetition as an object of
representation, we understand it in terms of identity, but we also then explain it in a

209
Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 285.
137
negative manner. In effect, the identity of a concept does not qualify a repetition unless,
at the same time, a negative force (whether of limitation or of opposition) prevents the
concept from being further specified or differentiated in relation to the multiplicity that it
subsumes.”
210

The character of Taesoo defies conventional notions of identity formation by
attempting to balance multiple affiliations as he pursues the specter of his brother, even
after the latter’s death. The current young generation of zainichi intellectuals has
similarly challenged nationalist constructs of identity politics through the formation of
coexistent multiple identities (described as “senses of belonging” by Japanese
anthropologist Kawabata Kōhei
211
). As Sai’s film illustrates, in the scheme of
representation that is Japanese national identity, zainichi exist as a doubleness, a
repetition (both Japanese and Korean, but accepted as neither) capable of multiple
affiliations that the state attempts to define negatively. If Blood and Bones endeavors to
process the trauma afflicted by and upon the 1
st
generation of ethnic Koreans and All
Under the Moon questions the ideological underpinnings of the old generation and its
representative organizations (Sōren, Mindan) through parody, then Soo is consonant with
the same impulse of these films, as well as his larger filmography in general, through the
application of a heterogeneous style that challenges binary categories. While the effect of
Soo may be baffling even to those familiar with the director’s body of work, it also

210
Ibid.
211
Kawabata Kōhei, “Okayama zainichi mongatari—chihō toshi de seikatsu suru zainichi
sansei no renai, kekkon o meguru keiken kara” (An Okayama Zainichi Korean Story—
Experiences of Love and Marriage in 3
rd
Generation Koreans Living in Regional Cities)
in Tabunka shakai no “bunka” o tō: kyōsei comyuniti, media (Interrogating the “Culture”
of Multi-cultural Society: Co-existent Communities and Media), ed. Iwabuchi Kōichi
(Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2010).
138
figures as a cryptic continuation of his commitment to the expression of the zainichi
minority experience as a doubling that, to reference Freud’s The Uncanny, is “nothing
new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged
only through being repressed.”
212

Conclusion: Battered Women—Zainichi Cinema and Problems of Gender
Representation

Another “repressed” element of both Sai and Ōshima’s films that deserves further
critical examination is their gender politics. Maureen Turim—the author of the first and,
to date, only English language “auteur study” of Ōshima—has criticized the director’s
films for “imagin[ing] female desire primarily as role reversal.”
213
However, one could
easily extend this critique to identity construction in general as it is depicted in Ōshima’s
films (and in Three Resurrected Drunkards in particular), which tend to emphasize the
performative, and hence constructed, aspect of identity. Nevertheless, Turim is right to
point out the circumscribed notions of female subjectivity represented in Ōshima’s
cinema. While Ōshima is eager to excoriate the internecine debate that doomed the New
Left in Japan, he unintentionally reproduces their chauvinistic politics in his
representation of female characters. As Turim observes in Ōshima’s Treatise on
Japanese Bawdy Songs (Nihon shunkakō, 1967), women do not so much act as are acted
upon. The one zainichi female character, Kaneda, is raped by strangers in an apparent
reference to the Korean “comfort women” who, during WWII, were coerced into sexual

212
Freud, The Uncanny, 147-148.
213
Maureen Turim, The Films of Ōshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 193.
139
slavery by the Japanese military. Similarly, Onē-chan in Three Resurrected Drunkards,
who we later learn is zainichi Korean, is compelled to service the Korean stowaways,
another transparent allusion to comfort women. In both instances, the female characters
serve as stand-ins for the abject position of the Korean nation or the zainichi minority.
The question thus arises of whether female subjectivity in Ōshima can exist as anything
other than a metonym for the nation-state. Kyung Hyun-Kim, in his study of Korean
film, observes that “one of the dominant tendencies of Korean cinema is to provide
allegories of the nation through the figurations of tragic women.”
214
More recent Korean
films, such as A Petal (1996)—whose director, Jang Sun-woo, has interestingly been
compared to Ōshima—that address historical trauma refuse a national allegorical reading,
despite the temptation to do so. These films distinguish themselves from the old Korean
cinema by not simply observing historical trauma, but also offering strategies for
recovery, something that Ōshima’s films fail to do, being content to represent Korean
victimization at the hands of Japanese imperialism as the abused female subject.
The claim of chauvinism and a general absence of strong female characters has
also been leveled at Sai Yōichi’s cinema. Particular scrutiny has been paid to the Connie
character in All Under the Moon, a Filipina bar hostess and love interest of zainichi
protagonist Tadao who did not appear in Yan Sogil’s source text. Iwabuchi Kōichi
summarizes the response of ethnic Korean critics who claim that, by including Connie—
an optimistic smart-talking hostess who speaks Japanese in a comical Osaka dialect—Sai
is recapitulating the same strategies of representation found in conventional Japanese
cinema. The film, according to zainichi critic Li Sang-t’e, attempts to “deconstruct a

214
Kyung Hyun Kim, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004), 120.
140
reified image of resident Koreans in Japan by exploiting another reified image, that of
Filipinos.”
215
And while the film rejects the conventional depiction of ethnic minorities
as “weak victims,” many of these same critics wonder if the depiction of Connie is
merely replacing one stereotype of Filipina in Japan with another. As Iwabuchi points
out, this problem of representation is related to larger issues in All Under the Moon which
evinces “a strategic deployment of hybridity…to realize that there may be a space that
exists between the binary opposition between two ‘pure’ identities, ‘Koreanness’ and
‘Japaneseness’” but struggles to move beyond a one-dimensional image of resident
Koreans that reduces zainichi subjectivity to generational difference.
216
In a piece by
zainichi cultural critic Kyō Nobuko
217
included in the companion volume to Sai’s film,
Tsuki wa docchi ni deteiru o meguru 2, 3 no hanashi (A Few Stories Around All Under
the Moon) that is quoted in Iwabuchi’s essay, she writes: “Both the image of resident
Koreans represented in Moon which may be fresh to many Japanese and the popular
image which is not represented in the film are only stereotypes of resident Koreans in
Japan. I really want to resist either image being imposed on me.”
218
Interestingly, this
highly critical passage figures as Kyō’s only allusion to the film to which the volume is
ostensibly devoted. She goes on to write, “I have, in the past, articulated zainichi

215
Iwabuchi Kōichi, “Political Correctness, Postcoloniality, and the Self-Representation
of ‘Koreanness’ in Japan,” in Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, ed.
Sonia Ryang (London: Routledge Curzon, 2000), 66.
216
Iwabuchi, “Political Correctness, Postcoloniality, and the Self-Representation of
‘Koreanness’ in Japan,” 70.
217
Kyō Nobuko is best known for her debut nonfiction piece Goku futsū no zainichi
kankokujin (Just an Ordinary Zainichi Korean, 1987) that argues for a more
individualized sense of ethnic identity less based on nationality or identity politics.
218
Kyō Nobuko, “Kono yo no dokonimo nai kotoba o sagashitai” (Looking for a New
Way of Representing Koreanness in Japan), in Tsuki wa docchi ni deteiru o meguru 2, 3
no hanashi (A Few Stories Around All Under the Moon) (Tokyo: Shakai Hyōronsha,
1994), 182.
141
Koreans as a new breed (jinshu) that is neither Japanese nor Korean but that stands
between those two nations. But to me now, the term ‘zainichi kankokujin,’ which is
derived through the combination of the two frameworks of Japan and Korea, seems
suffocated by this national binary and confined by stereotypes.”
219

Kyō then describes her quest to transcend national categories by discovering her
“own sound” (jibun no oto) or “own mode of expression” (jibun no hyōgen) through
music. Ultimately she arrives upon the popular musical genre of enka, which she
describes as a “multi-ethnic
220
music born out of the movements of wanderers.”
221
Kyō
adds, “Precisely because they possess no fixed location (ibasho), every place on earth
becomes theirs.”
222
In Kyō’s view, in contrast to the openness of this musical idiom, the
term “zainichi kankokujin” is so burdened by the residue of politics and history as to be
irredeemable for the purposes of self-expression. “For years I have searched for a word
to replace the socially and historically loaded term ‘zainichi kankokujin.’ As of now, I
can think of no term to take its place.”
223
The author concludes by synthesizing the
keywords used throughout her piece into a single statement of purpose. “For me, as an
individual (ko), I want to live as one with no fixed place (ibasho), wandering (hyōhaku)
the earth in a multi-ethnic (konketsu) spirit.”
224
As a result, “I will search for my own
personal language. From this project, a new mode of expression will be born. Through

219
Ibid.
220
The term Kyō uses here is “konketsu,” which, translated literally, means “mixed
blood.”
221
Kyō, “Kono yo no dokonimo nai kotoba o sagashitai,” 191.
222
Ibid.
223
Ibid.
224
Kyō, “Kono yo no dokonimo nai kotoba o sagashitai,” 192.
142
the tireless pursuit of self (ko), a form of expression that possesses the power of
universality will be produced.”
225

In the desire for creolization, Kyō recalls the sentiments of zainichi authors Kim
Sokpom and Won Soo-il, while championing an individualism—familiar from statements
by Sai Yōichi—that disavows adherence to national politics or indeed national
boundaries in general. Though lacking the concrete praxis developed by Kim and Won,
one cannot help but hear echoes of these authors in Kyō’s call for a “new mode of
expression.” In her preoccupation with a vagabond placeless-ness, however, Kyō’s
thought resembles less the politically-charged minor transnationalism advocated by
Lionnet and Shih, which stipulates a steadfast investment in the local, and more the
apolitical neoliberalism of which Kyō has occasionally been accused. The question thus
becomes whether such a methodology—to become a “rootless grass” to quote Sugihara
of Kaneshiro Kazuki’s GO
226
—is truly sustainable without any sense of place to serve as
a foundation. Kyō’s desire to develop a mode of expression that exceeds national
boundaries is nonetheless a profound and salient one that resonates with a generation of
resident Koreans that feels trapped by the neo-nationalist discourse of economic growth
and competition. Additionally, Kyō’s use of music as both an analogy and a medium for
exploring new modes of linguistic expression offers an intervention into the hyper-
masculine practices of the artistic elite through a gendered approach that emphasizes
fluidity and performativity.
By contrast, the female character in Soo, whose generic role problematizes the
subversiveness of Sai’s film, possesses a sense of subjectivity that is slight at best, thus

225
Kyō, “Kono yo no dokonimo nai kotoba o sagashitai,” 193.
226
See Chapter 4.
143
functioning largely as a vessel for male desire. As the love interest of Taesoo’s deceased
brother Taejin, she initially resists the aloof hitman before eventually surrendering to his
attraction based seemingly on his physical resemblance to her dead lover. Though, like
Connie in All Under the Moon, she is hardly the retiring portrait of femininity (she and
Taesoo often go toe-to-toe, matching verbal as well as physical jabs), her subjectivity is
ultimately subordinated to Taesoo’s overriding desire for revenge. Taken as a whole,
Sai’s serious films conceive of zainichi identity as an exclusively male domain that
relegates women to companions at best and victims of abuse at worst. The result, I would
claim, is a cinema much like Ōshima’s—one that is transgressive in structure and
practice, but is unable to transcend phallocentric gender representations.
Isolde Standish describes how Ōshima and other taiyōzoku (Sun Tribe)
filmmakers (a movement from whom Ōshima took pains to distinguish himself but of
which he was nonetheless an active participant in creating) used sex and violence as
primary methods for criticizing postwar humanism by shifting “the locus of the
individual…to the materialism of the body and not some abstract ideological essence
associated with the spirit,”
227
but that ultimately resulted in a male-dominated and
misogynistic subjectivity. While successfully creating a “counter-aesthetic” through the
rejection of conventional “humanist” psychology and cinematic practices, Ōshima’s
emphasis on male desire replicates the chauvinistic worldview of the Japanese New
Left.
228
Standish writes that despite the “transgressive credentials” of Ōshima’s 1976
film In the Realm of the Senses, it remains strictly located within a phallocentric

227
Isolde Standish, A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film
(New York: Continuum, 2005), 223.
228
Standish, A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film, 252.
144
worldview through the overvaluing of the penis as the sole source of pleasure.
229
This
analysis might be extended generally to Ōshima’s and, I believe, Sai Yōichi’s
filmography as well. Both directors create a transgressive cinematic practice through
strategies of repetition and doubling that destabilizes national binaries while
foregrounding minority subjectivity, but also elides discussion of gender, reducing
women to mere repositories of male desire.
There is an interesting linkage between the Leftist films of the 1960s and more
recent films (such as Pacchigi! (2004) and GO (2001)) that address zainichi identity and
form the subject of the next chapter. In their emphasis on the unifying power of pure
love and discursive approach to history, these newer films in many ways signify a return
to the “humanist” films that Ōshima and his cohort sought to criticize. In other ways,
their spectacular violence and visual dynamism link them to the transgressive spirit that
lies at the heart of the Japanese nouvelle vague (New Wave) movement. In Pacchigi!—a
period piece that “returns” to 1968, the year in which Three Resurrected Drunkards was
first released—the familiar refrain of the Folk Crusaders’ “Imjin River” will be repeated,
not so much as a plea for reunification of the Korean peninsula (as the song’s Japanese
lyrics might suggest), but more for reconciliation, this time between the Japanese and
ethnic Korean communities of Kyoto. As the following chapter will discuss, however,
Pacchigi!’s historical revisionism suggests that this reconciliation is one that might only
be achieved through the willful erasure of colonial memory and suppression of evidence
of discrimination.

229
Standish, A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film, 261-262.
145

Chapter
Four

“I
Am
Who
I
Am”

Postmodern
Cinema
and
the
Erosion
of
Zainichi
Ideology

One of the distinguishing characteristics of “minor literature,” as Deleuze and
Guattari famously proclaimed, is that “everything in them is political.”
230
In addition,
everything in minority literature “takes on a collective value.”
231
Furthermore, the
authors claim:
Indeed, precisely because talent isn’t abundant in a minor literature, there
are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to
this or that ‘master’ and that could be separated from a collective
enunciation. Indeed, scarcity of talent is in fact beneficial and allows the
conception of something other than a literature of masters; what each
author says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he
or she says or does is necessarily political, even if others aren’t in
agreement.
232

This radically differentiates minor literature from its major counterpart in which
“the individual concern (familial, marital, and so on) joins with other no less individual
concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere environment or a background.”
233

In contrast to Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of minor literature, however,
recent works of literature and film by the ethnic Korean minority in Japan are
distinguished by the outward absence of political content—and, in some cases, a

230
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17.
231
Ibid.
232
Ibid.
233
Ibid.
146
complete indifference or instinctive revulsion to anything political—particularly when
compared to work of previous generations. Sugihara, the young hero of Kaneshiro
Kazuki’s breakthrough 2000 novel (adapted to a film of the same title a year later), GO,
at one point interrupts his Marxist father’s ideologically tinged reminiscence by
screaming the word “dasei,” a term often employed by young people to dismiss anything
that is “uncool” or is otherwise past its cultural prime. Even the author, Kaneshiro, has
insisted in multiple interviews that he would like his writing to be thought of as mere
“entertainment,” thus seemingly disavowing any claim to serious content. This
evacuation of the political describes what John Lie has termed the decline of “zainichi
ideology”
234
—a mode of intellectual resistance based on anti-Japanese sentiment and the
retention of colonial memory—toward a more diffuse or individualistic approach toward
ethnic identity.
In this chapter, I will consider the legitimacy of Deleuze and Guattari’s claim in
the context of recent works of zainichi cinema. Are all works of minority literature (and,
indeed, everything within them)—including those without any overt political content—in
fact political in nature? Furthermore, is it possible for these works to be political while,
as in Kaneshiro’s work, simultaneously disavowing the political? Or is this question
itself outmoded (“dasei,” if you will), irrelevant to postmodern works that treat identity
as a kind of floating signifier that refuses to be bound by any ideological or national
affiliation? One might also question D&G’s assertion on the basis of essentialism:
Doesn’t the insistence on the collective character of minority literature reify a double
standard of individuality that is extended to the cultural majority but denied to the already

234
John Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial
Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 115.
147
subordinated? Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih caution in the introductory chapter
to Minor Transnationalism that even in the groundbreaking theoretical approaches of
Deleuze and Guattari, there exists certain recourse to hierarchical models: “For them, the
minor’s literary and political significance rests on its critical function within and against
the major in a binary and vertical relationship.”
235
They follow this with a quote from
Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka text (“A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor
language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language,”
236
which
implies that the revolutionary content of a minor work in fact emanates from its
subordinate status within a dominant culture.
One might also ask whether Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation can be extended
to the cinematic medium so liberally. After all, their putative subject is the literature of
Franz Kafka, a writer of Jewish extraction who lived in Prague and wrote in German
during the Austro-Hungarian empire. Interestingly, however, the authors suggest that the
work of Kafka (and, indeed, minor literature in general) finds its proper analogue in film
rather than other literature. Minority literature, in possessing a “high coefficient of
deterritorialization,”
237
strips language of its representative function, directly linking
word and image. Deleuze and Guattari insist that, in this mode, “Language stops being
representative in order to now move toward its extremities or limits.”
238
Language in
minority literature thus transcends the very system of signification toward a more direct
form of expression comparable to film. This claim subtly inverts the epistemological

235
Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005), 2.
236
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 16.
237
Ibid.
238
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 17.
148
hierarchy by not only presaging the cinemafication of literature, but also positing film as
the ideal medium for the expression of minority identity.
This statement also resonates with how second-generation
239
zainichi writer Kim
Sokpom characterizes revolutionary literature in Shinpen “Zainichi” no shisō in that it is
both pure language and transcends the restrictions of language. For Kim, this can only be
attained once the writer establishes his own subjectivity through the rejection of language
(which, for Kim and other zainichi writers, is Japanese) as an a priori system. The key,
then, is in gaining an awareness of Japanese as a “foreign language” (what Deleuze and
Guattari might describe as the process of “deterritorialization”), thereby exercising the
author’s agency to determine meaning. For zainichi authors of Kim’s generation, for
whom the act of writing was fraught with paradox, this awareness may seem second
nature, if not inescapable. For a young zainichi generation divorced from the colonial
experience and any easy identification with the Korean peninsula, however, an
unproblematic acceptance of Japanese as one’s native language might be inevitable. The
problem thus becomes how one is able to maintain a sense of political engagement for
fighting discrimination in Japanese society while abnegating old modes of resistance.
The answer may reside in adopting a transnational identity that, as outlined by Lionnet
and Shih, is “not bound by the binary of the local and the global”
240
or dominant and
periphery and encompasses a diverse number of “cultural practices and networks of

239
Kim has remarked that, in terms of age, he is actually closer to the first generation,
while the subject matter and timing of his literary output affiliates him with the second
generation of zainichi writers. Kawamura Minato describes Kim as a member of the “1.5
generation.”
240
Lionnet and Shih, Minor Transnationalism, 6.
149
communication”
241
that exceed any unifying theory. With this concept in mind, this
chapter will examine recent examples of zainichi cinema—the two Pacchigi! films (2005
and 2007, respectively), GO (2001), and Ao Chong (2000)—that suggest potential models
for zainichi transnational identity, highlighting the respective possibilities and limitations
of each representative strategy.
Factors both internal to the zainichi community and applicable to Japanese and
global society in general have contributed to the shift from zainichi ideology based on the
retention of colonial memory to depoliticized constructions of ethnic identity centered on
a philosophy of individualism. The depoliticization of contemporary zainichi literature
(and, indeed, art in general) discloses a confluence of political and ideological conditions
coterminous with postmodernism and, in the words of Fredric Jameson, “closely related
to the emergence of this new moment of late consumer or multinational capitalism.”
242

There is a loss of distinction between high and popular culture and pastiche displaces
parody, resulting in a sort of blank parody or neutral act of mimicry stripped of its
political import. Coextensive with pastiche is the idea that all styles have already been
taken and that any “new” style that emerges can only imitate past forms or resort to
solipsism.
243
Jameson identifies the nostalgia film as one representative form of pastiche.
The Pacchigi! film series, while conventionally read as a statement of zainichi
empowerment, can be viewed as just such an example of the nostalgia film. This chapter

241
Lionnet and Shih, Minor Transnationalism, 7.
242
Fredric Jameson writes that postmodernism as a cultural movement can be understood
as a rejection of the dominant form of modernism. Rather than a complete rejection or
change in content, however, postmodernism is best described as modernism removed of
its subversive element. Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the
Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 2009), 20.
243
Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, 7.
150
argues that while Pacchigi! and GO masquerade as progressive films that speak for the
new transnational generation of ethnic Koreans, they ultimately reify the same neoliberal
logic exemplified by the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party policy of “multiculturalism.”
As I discuss later, only Ao Chong is able to evade this tendency and envision a genuine
transnationalism that is equally invested in the global and local.

Pacchigi! and the Nostalgia Film

Pacchigi! was released in early 2005 to nearly universal critical acclaim and box
office success. Kinema Jumpo named it the best film of the year in its annual top ten list.
Even the characteristically ornery and often idiosyncratic Eiga Geijutsu ranked the film
number two overall in its critic’s poll. Several critics praise the film for its entertaining
and nostalgic tone combined with its serious commitment to addressing social issues.
Film festival curator Itō Takeshi, for example, declares it the best film of the year,
writing, “No complaints about this top film—it interweaves social issues with an
exhilaratingly entertaining story of youth.”
244
Putting aside for a moment the question of
whether a critical approach to social issues is truly sustainable within a nostalgia film, the
latter comment rings especially ironic given that Pacchigi! is, if anything, marked by an
elision of political content in favor of a conventional feel-good love story that
paradoxically enables the transcendence of ethnic divisions.
245
As film scholar Kuraishi
Ichiro has pointed out, what is troubling about Pacchigi! is that the happiness of the

244
Arai Haruhiko and Itō Takeshi; et al., “2005 Nihon eiga besuto ten, wāsuto ten,” Eiga
Geijutsu 56, no. 1 (2006): 16.
245
Consistent with the spirit of the first film, one poster for Pacchigi! Love & Peace
bears the slogan, “We can overcome through love (Ai de koerareru).”
151
characters is only achieved through the willful erasure of colonial memory, a strategy
seemingly designed to make Japanese audiences feel at ease.
Pacchigi! is set in Kyoto in 1968 and narrates the intersecting lives of a group of
zainichi high school students from the local chōsen gakkō (North Korean-affiliated
school) and Kōsuke and his occasional companion Norio from the nearby public high
school. The film kicks off (both literally and figuratively) when Kōsuke and Norio are
caught in the middle of a skirmish between students on a school trip from Nagasaki and
chōsen gakkō students, triggered by one Japanese student’s bullying of Kyeong-Ja, a girl
from the Korean school.
246
The fight ultimately and dramatically results in the Korean
students tipping over a parked school bus with their foes trapped inside. But, in the midst
of the violence, Kōsuke catches eyes with Kyeong-Ja and is immediately smitten. An
unexpected chance to approach her arrives when their homeroom teacher sends Kōsuke
and Norio to the Korean high school to make amends by proposing a soccer friendly
between the two schools. After some persistence on Kōsuke’s part, he and Kyeong-Ja
become intimate, bonding largely over a shared love of music. By extension, Kōsuke
also becomes close with her brother An-Seong and his friends who represent the
archetypal high school burnouts—rarely do they attend class and most of their time is
devoted to drinking and fighting. Many of the episodes involving the three friends depict
their violent run-ins with the karate team from Kōsuke’s high school. But despite their
grim prospects, they all have big plans for the future. An-Seong, being a prodigious

246
Interestingly, this scene evokes the 1929 Gwangju Student Movement, an incident that
was likewise incited by the Japanese harassment of Korean female students, the rare
example of a colonial memory that was not lost in the minds of the filmmakers.
Unfortunately, the significance of this association is ultimately subordinated to the
violent spectacle that is Pacchigi!’s mise-en-scène.
152
soccer player (though we are never granted the privilege of seeing him play, since he
quits the team before the start of the film), declares early in the film his plan to repatriate
to North Korea to join the national soccer team. His friend Bong-Ho hopes to enroll in a
North Korean affiliated university and go on to a career as a foreign diplomat. And
Jaeduk clings to a distant fantasy of becoming an action star for the Toei movie studio.
Complications intervene, however, when An-Seong accidentally impregnates his
Japanese girlfriend, Momoko. The three friends brainstorm possible fundraising methods
to pay off Momoko’s hospital bills, ultimately arriving upon the idea of selling An-
Seong’s school jacket, advertising it as that of an undefeated fighter on the streets of
Kyoto. Jaeduk volunteers to seek out a buyer alone and, donning An-Seong’s jacket,
takes to the streets. As luck would have it, he encounters the East High karate team who
have banded together with the Ōsaka faction to take out their revenge on An-Seong. In a
case of mistaken identity, Jaeduk is beaten to a bloody pulp and, in fleeing from the
scene, meets his unfortunate demise when he’s struck in the head by a wayward lead pipe
from a braking truck. Meanwhile, as part of his courtship of Kyeong-Ja, Kōsuke also
seeks acceptance from the zainichi community in Kyoto’s Higashi Kujo. This is
accomplished with surprisingly little difficulty until Kōsuke commits a faux pas at
Jaeduk’s funeral and is ordered to leave by the community elder. His mistake is quickly
forgiven, however, when later that night the funeral mourners catch a broadcast of
Kōsuke giving a live performance of the popular (but “banned”) song “Imjin River”
247
at
the local radio station. As the credits roll, the audience is left with scenes from the

247
Adapted from a 1957 North Korean folk song, The Folk Crusaders’ Japanese language
version of “Imjin River” became a national hit in 1968 before being banned for political
reasons.
153
characters’ futures from a year or two later. Virtually without exception, each character
is on course toward accomplishing their respective dreams. Kyeong-Ja and Kōsuke
embody the portrait of the modern couple with unlimited future prospects. An-Seong and
Momoko ride a train with their young son on a fine day to some undisclosed locale. And
Bong-Ho is seen chatting with a professor as a student at the North Korean affiliated
university.
What distinguishes Pacchigi! as a “nostalgia film” is its incorporation of a
contemporary postmodern perspective into a story set in the 1960s. Fredric Jameson
provides many different examples of the nostalgia film (“films about the past and about
specific generational moments of the past,”
248
) which, in the narrow sense, includes
period films like American Graffiti (1973) and Chinatown (1974), but, in the broader
sense, could also include Star Wars (1977) and Body Heat (1981). What these films have
in common is that “[their] narratives do not represent our historical past so much as they
represent our ideas or cultural stereotypes about that past.”
249
Jameson concludes, rather
grimly, that, “If there is any realism left here, it is a ‘realism’ that springs from the
shock…of realizing that, for whatever peculiar reasons, we seem condemned to seek the
historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself
remains forever out of reach.”
250
By Jameson’s description, Pacchigi! also fits into the
category of nostalgia film in that it is based on a discursive projection of 1960s Japan
rather than a genuine attempt to capture the feeling of that era.

248
Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, 7.
249
Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, 10.
250
Ibid.
154
In the aforementioned Eiga Geijutsu year-end issue, in which Pacchigi! is ranked
the second-best film of the year, Arai Haruhiko is the only writer to offer a truly critical
perspective on the film. As editor-in-chief of the journal, he is also able to get in the final
word. Though Arai doesn’t place it on his personal list of worst films of the year, he
makes a point of singling out Pacchigi! for harsh criticism. He writes that, from the
opening concert scene that shows a foppish rock band called Group Sounds making
female audience members faint with their Beatles-esque performance, he was seized with
the unpleasant feeling that this film is made up of mere caricatures (“kore karikachua ni
shiteru na to iya na kanji ga shita”).
251
Arai also compares Pacchigi! to another film
released that year, Always: San-chome no yūhi (Always: Evening in the 3
rd
Ward), a
particularly gratuitous example of the nostalgia film and voted the worst film overall in
the same issue of Eiga Geijutsu. Furthermore, as Kuraishi Ichiro observes, the decision
to set the film in 1968 implies that zainichi discrimination is already a thing of the past.
Indeed, based on the film’s depiction, any sense of colonial memory is already relegated
to older members of the 1
st
generation who are mostly discredited as being out of touch.
Even An-Seong’s decision to repatriate to North Korea is articulated in decidedly non-
political terms, as if he were choosing which sports team to support.
His intended repatriation, thus removed of its subversive content, oddly
recapitulates the logic of Shimazaki Tōson’s Hakai (The Broken Commandment, 1906),
the first and arguably most famous modern Japanese novel to feature a person of minority
background (in this case, burakumin) as its main character. Tōson’s novel has for years
been celebrated for both its literary merit and its position as a forerunner of the buraku

251
Arai and Itō; et al., “2005 Nihon eiga besuto ten, wāsuto ten,” 44.
155
liberation movement, but recent analysis has brought its supposed progressiveness into
question. At the conclusion of the novel, the protagonist Ushimatsu, after breaking his
vow to his father by confessing his buraku background, reveals his plan of leaving Japan
to begin a new life abroad in Texas. As Michael Bourdaghs points out, this moment
reproduces Japan’s coeval policy of imperial expansion that encouraged minority groups
to participate in the Japanese empire by emigrating to other countries. Ushimatsu, as a
member of the eta class, in other words, can only participate in the national project
abroad, “finally becom[ing] Japanese at the moment he leaves Japan.”
252
Far from being
a repudiation of Japanese hegemony and its unjust policy of discrimination, Ushimatsu’s
decision to move to Texas signifies a vow (or commandment, if you will) to serve his
country abroad where presumably the only kind of discrimination he will encounter will
be on the basis of his Japaneseness.
For An-Seong, while leaving Japan hardly makes him Japanese (quite the
opposite, in fact), his unproblematic departure for the homeland recapitulates the binary
of “repatriation or assimilation,” an ideology that has long formed the basis of nationalist
state discourse. As Arai phrases it, “When it comes to fainting [at the Groups Sounds
concert] or the Zenkyōto movement, the film looks at it from the perspective of thirty-
seven years later. But in the case of zainichi discrimination or the repatriation movement,
the perspective remains unchanged from 1968. I could not help noticing this unevenness
(sabetsu).”
253
As if to up the irony even further, Kuraishi observes that the Japanese
government had in fact suspended the repatriation boats between 1967 and 1970, a fact

252
Michael Bourdaghs, The Dawn that Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese
Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 68.
253
Arai and Itō; et al., “2005 Nihon eiga besuto ten, wāsuto ten,” 44.
156
that once again brings the filmmakers’ commitment to historical detail (and adherence to
caricature) into question.
Kuraishi also problematizes the role of Jaeduk’s death in Pacchigi!. Being by far
the most marginalized character with the fewest prospects for the future, Jaeduk’s death
serves as a “convenient solution” to the vexing reminder of the Korean minority’s
deplorable circumstances. Jaeduk’s death thus metonymically embodies the Japanese
attitude toward colonial responsibility and the existence of the Korean minority. As
Kuraishi writes, “In this way, Jaeduk’s death is a salvation or solution for (Japanese) film
audiences, and by extension for ordinary Japanese people: by eliminating this tragic
figure and leaving only those who are capable of self-reliance and self-promotion
(including An-Seong, Kyeong-Ja, Gang-Ja and Bang-Ho), the film enables Japanese
audiences to reconcile the zainichi tragedy as something that can be eliminated from
memory.”
254
I would add that it also functions as a recapitulation of the colonial logic
deployed in The Broken Commandment in which problem groups are eliminated or
placed outside of view to perpetuate the notion of homogeneity and national solidarity. It
is only through Jaeduk’s erasure that the neo-liberal myth of individual self-realization is
sustained and the characters are able to achieve their dreams without confronting any
serious issues of discrimination.
Though a seemingly trivial detail deployed for the sake of comic relief, the
inclusion of Bang-Ho’s mutilated genitalia figures as another dubious choice on the part
of the filmmakers. Early on in Pacchigi!, Bang-Ho implores his father for money to pay

254
Ichiro Kuraishi, “Pacchigi! and Go: Representing Zainichi in Recent Cinema,” in
Diaspora Without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan, ed. John Lie and Sonia Ryang
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 111.
157
for surgery to repair his chronic phimosis (a disease of the foreskin in which it cannot be
fully retracted). Jaeduk and An-Seong assume the burden of raising the money for him,
but the botched surgery results in what one can only assume (judged by the shocked and
comical reactions of those who have seen it) to be a severely deformed genitalia. Bang-
Ho is seen to be wearing a special type of long underwear as a reminder of his malady.
This peculiar detail is reminiscent of another trope in The Broken Commandment.
Tōson’s novel creates a hierarchy between high class “new commoners” such as
Ushimatsu and his mentor, the intellectual Rentarō, who have realized some degree of
social mobility, and the lower class buraku who still reside in the slums, an area depicted
in terms of abject filth and disease. Despite Ushimatsu and Rentarō’s relative high status,
however, they are both plagued by illness (tuberculosis, to be specific) and have been
seen to cough up blood and exhibit other signs of being marked by infectious disease. As
minority status (in this and the case of zainichi Koreans) is not something that can be
discerned from outward appearances, Tōson’s work institutes a vocabulary of markings
that renders the invisible visible through language (what Bourdaghs describes as the
“écriture of discrimination”
255
), with illness metonymically standing in for racial
inferiority. Though Bang-Ho may go on to university and realize his dreams of
becoming an elite diplomat, his deformity serves as a perpetual reminder of his
marginalization, while his emasculation renders him unthreatening, to the presumed
comfort of the Japanese audience.
Amidst the aforementioned subtextual reminders of zainichi inferiority, Pacchigi!
instantiates an interesting inversion: It is the Japanese protagonist (Kōsuke) who lobbies

255
Bourdaghs, The Dawn that Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese
Nationalism, 56.
158
for acceptance into the zainichi community and is devastated upon his temporary
rejection. This inversion, along with the film’s romanticized conclusion, obfuscates the
gravity of discrimination faced by zainichi during this time period. Though their
impoverished circumstances are alluded to throughout the film, by situating the Japanese
character as seeking entry into the Korean world, Pacchigi! places the majority and
minority groups on the same social plane, the implication being that the latter’s
marginalization is in part by choice. This fallacy relies on the contemporary rhetoric of
neoliberal individualism for its legitimacy: With the erasure of political factors, actions
are reduced to the choice of the individual, resulting in an artificial world that operates on
a neo-Darwinian logic. Pacchigi! shifts the burden to the zainichi community to accept a
good-hearted Japanese youth with a sincere interest in Korean culture into their midst,
with the audience sympathetically aligning with Kōsuke when this acceptance is
withheld.
In one of the film’s signature scenes, Kyeong-Ja responds to Kōsuke’s request to
go out with him with a hypothetical question: “Say that we date for a long time… And
we end up getting married. Could you become a Korean? (Chōsen-jin in nareru?)” This
formulation cleverly inverts the relationship between the Japanese and the marginalized
Korean minority but also ignores the grief and anxiety that many zainichi experienced
when attempting to conceal their ethnic identity for the sake of assimilation into Japanese
society. While being subjects of bullying and physical abuse (mostly by the
aforementioned karate team), for the most part the characters in Pacchigi! display their
ethnicity openly and with pride. Nevertheless, it is highly unlikely that they would have
been as readily accepted as the film suggests. It is only the insertion of neo-liberal ideals
159
of self-determination that allows the convenient erasure of historical reality in favor of a
discourse of utopian individualism.
It is also possible, however, that the exaggerated right-wing response on certain
popular internet forums such as “2-chaneru” was in part responsible for Pacchigi!’s
inflated reputation as being more radical than it actually was. The numerous threats to
director Izutsu Kazuyuki were well publicized, lending the film a subversive—if not self-
righteous—air that is perhaps undeserved. Such is the effect of the internet, arguably the
postmodern medium par excellence for its tendency to situate reality and fiction on the
same ontological plane, an issue that will be explored in greater depth later in this
chapter.

Pacchigi! Love & Peace and the War-Retro Mode

Pacchigi! Love & Peace (hereafter L&P), released two years after the first film,
functions as a sort of loose sequel to its predecessor. It catches up with the Lee siblings,
An-Seong and Kyeong-Ja, some seven years later in 1974. The scene has shifted from
Kyoto to the ethnic Korean enclave of Tokyo’s Edagawa where the family has come to
seek out better medical treatment for An-Seong’s young son, Chansu, who is displaying
early signs of muscular dystrophy. The film opens much like the last one: with a
dramatic fight scene between An-Seong and his old rivals (the Higashi High karate team
have rematerialized, now as low-level yakuza hoodlums in Tokyo), this time on a Tokyo
train at Higashi Jūjo station. This chance encounter precipitates a friendship between An-
Seong and a young Japanese train operator, Satō, who intervenes when he sees An-Seong
160
about to be knocked unconscious by the yakuza group leader. The film that follows,
however, adopts the tone of a family melodrama, thus standing in contrast to the “seishun
eiga”-like air of its predecessor. Satō’s heroics also cost him his job, but his
unemployment brings him closer to the Lees, in whom he discovers the warm family
atmosphere he has always desired, being a runaway from a single-parent home in Iwate
prefecture.
L&P then follows the Lee siblings (and Satō) as they seek out funds to cover
medical expenses for Chansu’s rapidly deteriorating condition. After being scouted by a
talent agency, Kyeong-Ja decides to pursue a career in the entertainment industry
(geinōkai), agreeing to conceal her name and ethnic identity (she works under the
pseudonym Aoyama Ryōko). Following an auspicious debut in a television game show,
Kyeong-Ja is propelled—seemingly overnight—into Japanese stardom, appearing in
fashion magazines, films, and TV dramas. She finds some comfort in the fact that there
are many other zainichi in the entertainment industry, though they too work under
assumed Japanese names (tsūmei). Kyeong-Ja starts to have second thoughts, however,
when she is offered a leading role in a nationalistic World War II film, Taiheiyō no
samurai (Samurai of the Pacific) that depicts tokkōtai soldiers (“Japanese Special Forces”
unit, more commonly known as “kamikaze”) as heroic martyrs sacrificing themselves for
the survival of the Japanese way of life. After much deliberation, she eventually takes
the role, but, overcome by her own hypocrisy, confesses her Korean background in front
of a stunned audience at the film’s premier.
As Kyeong-Ja climbs the ladder in the entertainment world, An-Seong (with the
help of Satō) pursues capital through more illicit means. When junk collecting proves
161
insufficient, An-Seong approaches an old Korean moneylender (and friend of his
deceased father from Cheju Island) asking for a 5 million yen advance. The woman
instead gives him some gold bars which he must exchange offshore with riders of a
mysterious Korean boat for American dollars. The first mission goes off without a hitch,
but when they find themselves set up by their ship captain right before a second attempt,
they flee the scene. In a case of bad timing, their car gets stopped at a railroad crossing,
and Satō surrenders himself to allow An-Seong to take the money home to his son.
When An-Seong meets his mother and sister at the hospital to bring Chansu home, he is
informed by the doctor that Chansu’s condition is incurable. He then flies into a rage,
vowing to pull his son from yet another hospital. The film closes on a hopeful note,
showing Chansu able to ride a bike for the first time without the assistance of training
wheels.
It is clear that L&P was very much a labor of love for executive producer Lee
Bongou, as certain major plot points are based on autobiographical details. While
remaining deeply personal, the film also aspires to an all-encompassing whirlwind tour of
zainichi tropes including such familiar topics as Japanese colonialism, forced
conscription of Koreans during WWII, comfort women, homeland politics, failure of the
repatriation campaign, the Cheju massacre, shamanism, discrimination in Japan, Koreans
in the Japanese entertainment industry, etc. In this sense, L&P participates in a
perpetuation of zainichi ideology for its anti-Japanese (that is to say, anti-nationalist and
anti-imperialist) underpinnings and its emphasis on the tragic nature of zainichi history,
162
despite Lee’s open disdain for ideology in general.
256
L&P also has a pedagogical quality
that is largely absent from the first film, as if part of Lee’s objective is to educate the
Japanese audience on the zainichi experience. In addition, the film is intercut with
flashback scenes from An-Seong/Kyeong-Ja’s father’s wartime experience of fleeing his
native Cheju for Yap Island (now part of Micronesia) to escape conscription into the
Japanese army. These scenes were supposedly inspired by Lee’s own father’s experience
as an army deserter during World War II.
In Isolde Standish’s study of Japanese avant-garde cinema of the 1960s and
1970s, she explains how filmmakers such as Ōshima Nagisa and Yoshida Yoshishige
deliberately avoided the flashback structure employed in Japanese mainstream “war-
retro” films as “The generic convention of beginning in an ‘originary present’ and then
merging into flashback of an individual’s reminiscences establishes a causal teleological
progression that places an origin for the present in a determinant past as in Until the Day
We Meet Again and The Sacrifice of the Human Torpedos.”
257
Instead, influenced by
existentialism and Italian realism, the Japanese avant-garde preferred to create films that
refused to participate in collective victimization by foregrounding the fallibility of
memory. These films did so by presenting “a representation of a thought about the

256
In a section appropriately entitled “I hate politics” (seiji ga kirai) in Ai, Heiwa,
Pacchigi!, a volume published as a sort of companion piece to Pacchigi! Love & Peace,
Lee explains how his aversion to politics is based on the negative experiences his father
had with Sōren (the North Korean affiliated zainichi organization). He writes, “With the
making of Pacchigi!, opportunities for social critique increased. Until now, I’ve tried to
keep a distance from politics, and I’ve always disliked political discussion in general.
This is most likely the result of the way that my father was toyed with by ideology.”
Izutsu Kazuyuki and Lee Bongou, Ai, Heiwa, Pacchigi (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2007), 34.
257
Isolde Standish. Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the
1960s and 1970s (New York: Continuum International, 2011), 146-147.
163
event,”
258
rather than a presentation of the event itself, emphasizing a diegetic present to
ensure acceptance of responsibility for one’s own actions. Standish writes, “The aim of
the filmmaker thus shifts from an emphasis on the meaning of images and sequences, to
an emphasis on their effects.”
259
The result is works that stress formal experimentation,
employing repetition and fragmentation that challenge conventional cinema and histories.
Indeed, there is a certain similarity between Pacchigi! Love & Peace and the
project of the 1960’s avant-garde, though the methods used to achieve their goals are
radically different. The nationalist war film, Taiheiyō no samurai (Samurai of the
Pacific), that Kyeong-Ja appears in but ultimately rejects is intended as a thinly veiled
criticism of Ore wa, kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku (For Those We Love, 2007), a film
penned by ultra-nationalist (and former Tokyo governor) Ishihara Shintarō. Ore wa was
released a mere one week before L&P in 2007 and is very much the contemporary
equivalent of the war-retro films mentioned above for its veneration of the Japanese
Special Forces as the epitome of heroism. Indeed, L&P can be considered
groundbreaking in the sense that it challenges mainstream nationalist narratives by
presenting the possibility of alternate or subaltern histories. Furthermore, it attempts to
invert the nationalist discourse by depicting a colonial subject and Japanese army deserter
as the true hero. Lee Bongou writes how he intended L&P to be a statement of anti-war.
“I think of all wars as the mere killing of life. This is why I thoroughly reject war and, if
possible, hope to distance myself from it completely. And this is why my version of the

258
Standish takes this quotation from Hayden White’s essay “The Modernist Event,” in
reference to the work of Sartre.
259
Standish, Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and
1970s, 59.
164
war film is a drama that serves as a renunciation of war in which the hero runs away
without fighting.”
260

In the climactic scene, in which Kyeong-Ja confesses her zainichi identity, the
film intercuts both flashbacks to her father’s wartime experiences and excerpts from the
fictional war film in which she starred. As the confession scene progresses, the insertions
become more frequent and dramatic, with Kyeong-Ja’s father narrowly surviving the
American air bombing of Yap Island. Though the effect of the rapid alternation between
the two narratives is disjunctive, there is little doubt as to which is intended to be the
“real” version and which is fabricated, as the veracity of the father’s story is never called
into question. So while the sequence effectively subverts the nationalist narrative, it fails
to negate its totalizing impulse, ultimately replacing one grand narrative with another,
thus positing the Lee family’s story as the representative zainichi experience. The
father’s flashback scenes are initially presented as the rumination of An-Seong, but their
application is inconsistent. Far from being “a representation of a thought,” they are shot
from a conventional omniscient perspective that constitutes an attempt at a realistic
presentation of the event and is indistinguishable from the totalizing gaze of the
mainstream war film. Lee states his manifesto (sengen) on the title page of Ai, Heiwa,
Pacchigi!: “This is a film that asks the question of ‘Why am I here?’” The “here” is
clearly meant to be Japan, but the search for meaning that this statement represents only
reifies the teleological project of the very films that L&P is said to protest. To reference
Standish once again, while avant-garde films of the 1960s sought to destabilize the
collective memory of mainstream cinema that perpetuated the discourse of Japanese

260
Lee Bong-ou, Pacchigi!-teki: Sekai wa eiga de kaerareru (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,
2007), 141.
165
victimization, L&P echoes the logic of these war films in the sense that—for all its
emphasis on the importance of history—it attempts to expunge historiography in favor of
“personal experiences” that stand in for collective memory, thereby merely shifting the
victimization discourse from Japan to the zainichi community. It is this
overdetermination of the tragedy of the zainichi condition from whence L&P derives its
melodrama.
It is in this way that certain aspects of L&P bear resemblance to Tōson’s The
Broken Commandment, which has often been the subject of criticism for its perceived
exploitation of minority identity in service of the shi-shōsetsu (“I-novel”) mode of
confession. At her speech during the premier, Kyeong-Ja “confesses” her Korean roots
much as Ushimatsu confesses his eta origins in Tōson’s novel. Karatani Kojin has
famously theorized that the notion of “confession” (and, furthermore, interiority) was
founded on an inversion. He stresses that the concept did not in fact exist in Japan before
it was imported from the West, but that its introduction compelled Japanese authors to
invent something to confess. The trope of confession then became central to the shi-
shōsetsu framework as a measure of literary modernism. Kyeong-Ja’s public admission
thus serves as a reification of the shi-shōsetsu discourse for privileging narrative
conventions over a true exploration of discrimination in Japan. There is in fact little
exploration of discrimination at the level of the everyday in L&P; instead, the filmmakers
choose to displace it to the metaphorical realm.
261
When the Lee siblings have a teary

261
To quote Deleuze and Guattari: “Diaries, 1921: ‘Metaphors are one of the things that
makes me despair of literature.’ Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all
signification, no less than all designation. Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor.
There is no longer any proper sense or figurative sense, but only a distribution of states
166
confrontation outside the hospital after An-Seong is told by the medical staff that there is
no easy cure for his son’s ailments, Kyeong-Ja cries out, “Why do we have to be Korean?
I never asked to be born as a Korean! (“Nande watashira, chosenjin nan? Chosenjin ni
nanka umaretanakatta wa.”
262
) This lamentation seems vaguely incongruous, however,
given the overall lack of representations of discrimination in the two Pacchigi! films.
While the family’s impoverishment can be directly linked to their minority status, at no
point are they denied treatment based on their ethnicity, nor are they at a particular lack
of funds (however method by which these funds were acquired) for amortizing the
medical bills. This particular crisis, therefore, is wrought by the universal absence of an
adequate treatment for Chansu’s muscular dystrophy. In an interview included with the
L&P bonus DVD, Lee Bongou explains how Chansu’s illness
263
is intended as a
metaphor for the hardships suffered by the zainichi community. This implies that, in
terms of representation, Chansu’s mere status as a minority Korean is somehow
insufficient, that a more tangible adversity is called for. What the filmmakers resort to,
then, is similar to the “écriture of discrimination” seen in The Broken Commandment—a
positivistic method of representation for the sake of rendering the invisible visible. The
Chansu character thus suffers from a form of double inscription with a metaphor for his
minority status written over the Korean ethnicity that it signifies.

that is part of the range of the word.” Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor
Literature, 22.
262
Pacchigi! Love & Peace, directed by Kazuyuki Izutsu. (2007; Tokyo: Happinet, 2007),
DVD.
263
The Chansu character combines two different autobiographical details from Lee’s life.
The name “Chansu” was in fact Lee’s father’s name. “Chansu,” when pronounced in
Japanese, is a homonym for the katakana loan word meaning “chance” or “opportunity.”
Lee has remarked that the name was selected with this correlation in mind. Chansu’s
illness was based on Lee’s older brother who died of complications from muscular
dystrophy when Lee was still a child.
167
Izutsu Kazuyuki, the director of the Pacchigi! series, admits that the first film
represented an idealization of the time period rather than a concerted attempt at realism.
He says that L&P, on the other hand, is far more realistic, reflecting the cold facts of
discrimination while narrating the shift from the 1960s, an era of hope and political
idealism, to the 1970s, an era marked by resignation in which activism was replaced by
commercialism following the failure of the leftist movement. Elsewhere, Lee has insisted
on the authenticity of Pacchigi!, claiming to the critic Yomota Inuhiko that “there is not
one false story in this film. They’re all true. People tell me, ‘You came up with a really
great story,’ but all I did was piece true stories together like a jigsaw puzzle.”
264
It is
clear that the Pacchigi! films were constructed through two contrary impulses, that of a
nostalgia that, to repeat the words of Jameson, “do not represent our historic past so much
as they represent our ideas or cultural stereotypes about that past,” and a sense of realism
(based, one might say, in Japanese literary naturalism) that, paradoxically, is just as
rooted in the logic of the pastiche, relying on a composite of “real-life events” for a form
of verisimilitude. It also mirrors the totalizing impulses of war films such as Ore wa in
that it upholds the binary opposition of fact and fiction. L&P operates on the assumption
that the historical event is something that is knowable and thus attempts a realistic
reconstruction (or “presentation”) of that event.
L&P’s approach toward history is similar to that described by Hayden White who,
extending the thoughts of Jameson, argues that, since the advent of modernism—and
even more so in the postmodern era—“the referential function of images of events is

264
Lee Bong-ou and Yomota Inuhiko, Pacchigi! Taidanhen: kenka, eiga, kazoku, soshite
Kankoku (Pacchigi! Conversation Collection: Fights, Films, Family, and Korea)
(Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2005), 54.
168
etiolated,” blurring distinctions between the real and the imaginary.
265
Lost is a one-to-
one correspondence between the “facts” of an event and their meaning, with the facts
rendered a “function of the meaning assigned to events.”
266
White continues:
Any attempt to provide an objective account of the event, either by
breaking it up into a mass of its details or by setting it within its context,
must conjure with two circumstances: one is that the number of details
identifiable in any singular event is potentially infinite; and the other is
that the “context” of any singular event is infinitely extensive or at least is
not objectively determinable. Moreover, the historical event, traditionally
conceived as an event which was not only observable but also observed, is
by definition an event that is no longer observable, and hence cannot serve
as an object of a knowledge as certain as can a present event which can
still be observed.
267

For the historian, as well as the filmmaker who grapples with the modern
historical event, “the problem is indeed not one of method but rather one of
representation,”
268
of how to represent the event without recuperating its myriad
iterations and contradictions in the form of a totalizing narrative. White suggests that,
“The kinds of anti-narrative non-stories produced by literary modernism offer the only
prospect for adequate representations of the kind of ‘unnatural’ events—including the
Holocaust—that mark our era and distinguish it absolutely from all of the ‘history’ that
has come before it.”
269
In this sense, Lee and Izutsu’s Pacchigi! series attempts to have it
both ways: through the use of flashbacks that teleologically link past and present, the
films constitute a reification of the universal victimization narrative extended by zainichi
ideology, while attempting to distance themselves from this same ideology by vacating it

265
Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema,
Television, and the Modernist Event, ed. Vivian Carol Sobchack (London: Routledge,
1996), 19.
266
White, “The Modernist Event,” 21.
267
White, “The Modernist Event,” 22.
268
White, “The Modernist Event,” 31.
269
White, “The Modernist Event,” 32.
169
of political content in favor of a neo-liberal nostalgia that reduces past eras to
caricature—as suggested by the very title “Love & Peace.”

GO and the Murakami Effect

Perhaps no film better captures the spirit of the young zainichi Korean generation
than GO (2001). More specifically, nothing captures the spirit of individualism in a neo-
liberal age better than this film. Released nearly four years prior to Pacchigi!, GO is an
adaptation of the novel of the same name,
270
penned by zainichi author Kaneshiro
Kazuki. The protagonist Sugihara is a 3
rd
generation zainichi teenager and the very
portrait of the rebellious loner. Like Pacchigi!’s executive producer Lee, Sugihara
openly expresses his disdain for all things political. In the opening scene, Sugihara—in
voice-over—lists the following in an alienated monotone:
Race, homeland, nation, unification, patriotism, integration, solidarity,
goodwill—makes me sick. Rule, oppression, slavery—no, servitude?
Aggression, prejudice, discrimination—what the hell is that? Ostracism,
exclusion, elitism, half-blood, pure-blood, unity.
271

Also like Pacchigi!, the centerpiece of the film is a cross-cultural love story between a
Japanese and a zainichi Korean, this time with the genders reversed. Sugihara’s father is
a temperamental former pro boxer and recovering Marxist. Once a card-carrying
member of the North Korean affiliated organization Sōren, he abruptly opts to swap his

270
As the film is a fairly faithful (in terms of narrative and ideology) adaptation of the
novel, this chapter will refer to them interchangeably, making important distinctions
when necessary.
271
GO, directed by Isao Yukisada (2001; Tokyo: Toei, 2002), DVD.
170
Chōsen nationality
272
for South Korean after catching a travel show about Hawaii.
Sugihara takes his father’s advice to “Look at the world around him” to heart and, after
some serious thought, decides to follow his parents by changing his nationality as well,
while opting out of the Hawaii trip. Instead, fed up with the oppressive atmosphere of
chōsen gakkō (North Korea affiliated school), Sugihara channels his energy into applying
for a Japanese high school. His efforts pay off and he’s admitted to a low-level high
school, but his troubles don’t end there as, owing to his outsider status, he finds himself
the target of every other thug in school. Fortunately, thanks to his father’s boxing
lessons, Sugihara is able to dispatch his foes with relative ease.
One fateful night, Sugihara is invited to a birthday party at a lavish club in
Roppongi hosted by one such former foe turned friend, Katō. Sugihara makes a point of
keeping to himself, but is approached by a fetching and mysterious girl named Sakurai
(she refuses to disclose her first name out of embarrassment). The two immediately hit it
off and before long start dating. They bond over art and culture and devote their time
spent together in pursuit of all things “cool” (kakko ii). Sugihara naturally conceals his
zainichi identity, dismissing it as irrelevant while secretly fearing rejection.
Nevertheless, the resounding success of their relationship allows him to forget the need to
confess. The good times are suddenly interrupted, however, when Sugihara’s friend from
junior high days is stabbed to death at a train station while coming to the defense of a
female fellow chōsen gakkō student being threatened by a Japanese high school boy.
Sugihara is devastated. When he finally discloses the source of his grief to Sakurai

272
As Japan has no formal diplomatic relations with North Korea, there is no such thing
as a North Korean passport. Members of the Korean minority are thus either of Chōsen
(the all inclusive nationality for Korea before the division) or South Korean nationality.
171
(omitting the detail of his being Korean), she attempts to comfort him by suggesting they
spend the night together in a hotel. On the verge of making love for the first time,
Sugihara is seized by the sudden guilt of having not fully disclosed his ethnic identity.
He pulls back and confesses to Sakurai, attempting to play coy, but she demurs in
apparent shock, explaining, “When I was a kid, my father would always tell me, ‘Never
go out with a Korean or Chinese boy’…He said their blood is unclean.”
273
Sugihara
leaves the hotel in anger, all but declaring the relationship over.
Heartbroken, Sugihara once again channels his energy into study—this time for
college entrance exams. The next time he hears word from Sakurai is six months later
when he receives an unexpected phone call on Christmas Eve. She implores him to meet
her on the elementary school field where they first spent time together on the night of the
party. Sugihara resolves to go and upon arrival delivers a fierce monologue decrying
discrimination and the meaninglessness of ethnic designations. Sakurai interrupts his
diatribe to declare her long-time crush on him, one she’s held since the day she glimpsed
him playing in a basketball game against her high school team as he proceeded to be
ejected for attempting to fight the entire opposing team. She adds, almost as an
afterthought, that, “I don’t care what ethnicity you are (mō Sugihara ga nanijin date
kamawanai yo).”
274
The novel and film both close with their reconciliation.
Though, as Sugihara insists in the intro, “This is my love story (Kore wa boku no
renai ni kan suru monogatari da),”
275
the main subplot is the ideological gap between the
old and young zainichi generations, as signified by Sugihara and his father. Sugihara’s

273
GO, directed by Isao Yukisada, DVD.
274
Kaneshiro Kazuki, GO (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2000), 239.
275
Kaneshiro, GO, p. 5.
172
father embodies the position of the 1
st
/2
nd
zainichi generation (that of Kim Sokpom)
whose worldview is founded on anti-Japanese resistance and a devotion to the Marxist
ideals of Kim Il-Sung but who have tempered their convictions as the failure of the North
Korean state has become undeniable. Sugihara, on the other hand, embraces the rhetoric
of globalization, dismissing national and cultural divisions as passé by vowing to “smash
all national borders (Itsuka, ore ga kokkyosen o keshite yaru yo).”
276
The cover of the
novel likewise repeats Sugihara’s Spanish phrase (taken from his father), “No soy
coreano, ni soy japonés, yo soy desarraigado (I’m not Korean, nor am I Japanese. I am a
rootless grass),” establishing his identity as a sort of floating signifier that resonates with
both neo-liberal discourse and what Jameson describes as the postmodern condition.
277

Kawabata Kōhei’s study of the evolution of the zainichi Korean community in
Okayama provides some important links between the erosion of the ethnic enclave and
the character of the “new zainichi” that Sugihara so boldly represents. Kawabata
explains how the principle of “multiculturalism” has been instituted at the level of city
planning in an attempt to advertise Okayama as a “global city” to boost tourism. This
commercial version of multiculturalism is of course multicultural in name only in that it
is more interested in the proliferation of ethnically themed restaurants than in actually

276
Kaneshiro, GO, p. 217.
277
“…in another stage, heightened, a kind of reversal of quantity into quality, reification
penetrates the sign itself and disjoins the signifier from the signified. Now reference and
reality disappear altogether, and even meaning—the signified—is problematized. We are
left with that pure and random play of signifiers that we call postmodernism, which no
longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the
fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production,
in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books,
metatexts which collate bits of other texts—such is the logic of postmodernism in
general…” Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 96.
173
fostering cross-cultural understanding. Kawabata also points out that the overwhelming
departure of the young zainichi generation from the Korean ethnic enclave to integrate
into Japanese society is coeval with the advancement of consumer capitalism and the
discourse of individualism. He links this with former Prime Minister Koizumi
Junichirō’s neo-liberal policy of reducing the government’s welfare and finance programs
(under the slogan “chiisa na seifu,” or “small government”). The result was to increase
the burden of the average citizen, placing responsibility for everything—including
discrimination—at the level of the individual (jiko sekinin).
278

As evidenced by a cover story in the November 26, 2003 Japanese edition of
Newsweek on “Korean-Japanese,” since the release of GO there has been much
discussion regarding the diversity seen in the “new generation” of zainichi. “The ‘new
zainichi’ might naturalize or marry a Japanese citizen but still maintain their ethnic
identity. Many study the Korean language and attempt to revive the fading zainichi
culture. ‘The free-thinking new zainichi has pride in their roots while freeing themselves
from the issues of nationality and lineage that obsessed their parents’ generation. We’re
trying to change the Japanese fixation with the idea of “one nation, one ethnicity,”’ says
Kang.”
279
As this and other articles suggest, unlike former generations, choices related to
marriage, nationality, and name are based on a sense of individualized identity rather than
ideological imperatives. However, it is precisely this sense of individualism that assists

278
Kawabata Kōhei, “Okayama zainichi mongatari—chihō toshi de seikatsu suru zainichi
sansei no renai, kekkon o meguru keiken kara” (An Okayama Zainichi Korean Story—
Experiences of Love and Marriage in 3
rd
Generation Koreans Living in Regional Cities)
in Tabunka shakai no “bunka” o tō: kyōsei comyuniti, media (Interrogating the “Culture”
of Multi-cultural Society: Co-existent Communities and Media), ed. Iwabuchi Kōichi
(Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2010), 122.
279
Deborah Hodgson, “Hyphenating Japan: Nyū zainichi ga nihon o kaeru,” Newsweek
(Japan edition), November 26, 2003, 20.
174
the municipal “multicultural” product. In addition, this so-called individualism has
inevitably contributed to a fragmentation of identity and an almost complete loss of
political influence for ethnic organizations, which have historically been the most
effective means of fighting institutionalized discrimination. The aforementioned
Newsweek article depicts the new zainichi generation in a particularly neo-liberal light,
thereby divorcing the minority community from its historical and political context.
GO’s rebellious Sugihara appears to reinforce the above perception. When he
announces his intention to “smash all national borders,” he does so without any sense of
social connectedness or political praxis. In an episode that is omitted from the film,
Sugihara is approached by another student in his class, who is initially assumed to be yet
another challenger but instead reveals himself as a fellow resident Korean, albeit one who
has never attended Korean school and claims ignorance of Korean language and culture.
He says that he has formed a support group for young zainichi and invites Sugihara to
join. Sugihara rebuffs his invitation, saying, “It’s not an issue of what your group is
doing. In fact, I think that what you’re doing is just and meaningful. It’s just that I’m
trying to do the same thing, without the help of anyone else.”
280
This serves as Sugihara’s
declaration of independence, a way of completely dismissing any group affiliation or
gestures of kinship.
Given the dramatic increase in mixed marriage between resident Koreans and
Japanese and the steady rate of naturalization, oftentimes the assumption is that problems
of discrimination will be naturally resolved through ethnic hybridity. Granted, mixed
marriage—while reducing the number of unadulterated Koreans—has disclosed the

280
Kaneshiro, GO, 219.
175
possibility of multiple ethnic identities
281
and a comfortability in a variety of cultural
settings. But, as Kawabata cautions, naturalization and miscegenation does not translate
to the disappearance of discrimination or the death of ethnic consciousness. Unlike
Sugihara, for many young resident Koreans, a sense of fragmentation brought about by
individualism has rekindled a desire for community (“sense of belonging”) and in recent
years minority organizations have experienced a slight resurgence.
282

Eschewing any “sense of belonging” at the local level, Sugihara attempts to
construct his own version of transnational community cobbled together from cultural
fragments using a pastiche-like logic. Reminiscent of the work of Murakami Haruki,
whom many have called the ultimate postmodern novelist, GO is dominated by cultural
references—many of them to minority artists (Jimi Hendrix, Langston Hughes) and
almost all of them Western. Sugihara’s project seems to be that of constructing a new
international canon of minority artists based on perceived “coolness.” Similarly,
Sugihara and Sakurai’s mode of communication relies on a kind of shorthand built
around cultural references, demonstrated by the following exchange:
“Hey, do you like Clint Eastwood?”
“Sure, Pale Rider was awesome.”
“I love Dirty Harry.”
The two of us rested our arms on the iron bars, swinging back and forth like little
monkeys.
“What kind of music do you listen to?”
“Oh, all kinds of stuff. But not Japanese music so much”
“Why’s that?”

281
Kawabata discards the term “identity” in favor of “sense of belonging” which he
writes in both Japanese (“kizoku kankaku”) and English.
282
Kawabata, “Okayama zainichi mongatari—chihō toshi de seikatsu suru zainichi
sansei no renai, kekkon o meguru keiken kara” (An Okayama Zainichi Korean Story—
Experiences of Love and Marriage in 3
rd
Generation Koreans Living in Regional Cities),
125.
176
“I don’t know. Never thought about it that much. What about you? What kind of
music do you listen to?”
“I listen to all kinds of stuff too. But not Japanese music so much.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. Never thought about it that much.”
“I guess we’re the same, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
283

It is the “nantonaku”-ness (arbitrariness) of this particular scene which pervades
both the novel and its filmic adaptation that evokes a sense of arbitrariness similar to that
found in the work of Murakami. Ōtsuka Eiji notes conservative literary critic Etō Jun’s
lamentation of the “nantonaku” mentality at work in Japanese contemporary literature
(particularly in his favorite target—the other Murakami, novelist Murakami Ryū), which
Etō read as a lack of critical awareness. Ōtsuka adds that, to Etō, this nantonaku attitude
was synonymous with the “artificiality” of postwar Japanese society that has been robbed
of its totality and cultural uniqueness as a result of Japan’s defeat at the hands of the
West.
284
To Ōtsuka and Karatani Kojin, however, Murakami Haruki’s literature in fact
signifies a recapitulation of the desire for totality found in the works of modern Japanese
literature so celebrated by Etō. Karatani reads Murakami’s work as a new iteration of the
“landscape novel” originated by Kunikida Doppō in that it hinges on the same “inversion
of value”—placing something meaningless over something of meaning. Murakami’s
landscape novel is a novel populated with product names and dates, things that fiction
writers have typically sought to avoid, thinking that it inhibits the universality of a work.
Murakami’s landscape, on the other hand, produces a flattening effect by placing
mainstream culture and subculture on the same ontological level and elevating

283
GO, directed by Isao Yukisada, DVD.
284
Ōtsuka Eiji, Sabukarucha bungakuron (Theories of Subculture Literature) (Tokyo:
Asahi Shinbunsha, 2004), 41.
177
meaningless pop-culture trivia over the historical event. The same might be applied to
the work of Kaneshiro and other contemporary authors of the post-Murakami era. Here,
for example, is Sugihara’s (Kaneshiro’s) description of Sakurai as she first steps inside
the club:

A girl entered the club. Thanks to the angle, all I could see was her upper half.
She had hair like Jean Seberg’s in Breathless. I really like Jean Seberg in
Breathless. She had round innocent eyes that sparkled with intelligence like
Winona Ryder from The Age of Innocence. I really like Winona Ryder from The
Age of Innocence.
285

The effect is a commodification of description, much like that found in Murakami, as
if everything can only be described in terms of pre-existing types. As Jameson puts it,
this is based on the assumption that all styles are taken, and thus the new work can only
either imitate the past or resort to solipsism. “Hence, once again, pastiche: in a world in
which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to
speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museums.”
286

In Kaneshiro’s novels, as in the work of Murakami, the world is defined by a state
of arbitrariness in which everything is reduced to “judgments of taste,” thereby
eliminating political content.
287
Michael Seats, while misappropriating Karatani’s
critique, has made a compelling argument for Murakami as the most progressive
Japanese novelist of his generation, citing the latter’s exploration of limits of
representation through the use of shifting perspectives and experimentation with different
styles. However, as Karatani writes, the revolutionary nature of Murakami’s work is in

285
Kaneshiro, GO, 35-36.
286
Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, 7.
287
Karatani Kojin, History and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
178
fact illusory: it only appears to be postmodern while reifying the binary relationships that
uphold the transcendental self on which the Japanese I-novel is founded. Indeed,
Sugihara’s adherence to the rhetoric of individualism implies a similar concept of the
transcendental self through the evacuation of political consciousness. As in Pacchigi!,
the success of Sugihara is enabled by the death of his best friend, Jeong-Il, who, while
not in the same abject position as Jaeduk, nonetheless serves as a meddlesome reminder
of zainichi political circumstances. Sugihara’s vow to smash national boundaries comes
with the implication that the act can only be performed by the solitary individual, though
the action itself is only made possible through an erasure, rather than an acceptance, of
ethnic identity. As Kuraishi observes, this is never more evident than in the final scene of
GO, in which Sakurai interrupts Sugihara’s political diatribe to say that “it doesn’t
matter,” thereby negating the importance of ethnic identity and placing their romance in
the mythological zone of ahistoricity. To once again cite Karatani’s reading of
Murakami, this reconciliation figures as a romantic rejection of historical limitation.
Murakami’s Pinball in the Year 1973 deploys pinball as a metaphor for reality.
Kaneshiro’s literature also imitates the logic of video games (the descendent of pinball)
in that the world is based on an arbitrary set of rules dictated by the transcendental
subject. Once freed of historical contingency, the world comes to resemble the timeless
oblivion of mythology. As Karatani warns, “One should nevertheless be alert to the fact
that the romance (story) close to ‘myth or ritual’ is being brazenly revived in computer
games.”
288

288
Karatani, History and Repetition, 2827.
179
Conclusion: Ao Chong’s Formal Experimentation and Transnational Identity

Both the Murakami-esque spirit of Kaneshiro’s prose and his characters’
relationship with pop culture share a psychic connection with Azuma Hiroki’s model of
database consumption. This new mode of consumption—which, Azuma argues, is
coextensive with postmodernism—employed by otaku (that is, fans of anime and manga)
is characterized as a surface “reading up” of cultural products without any serious
contemplation of their content. With the infiltration of subculture genres into the
mainstream, this mode of consumption has extended to other domains as well and has
arguably come to influence the very process of identity construction. This mode of
consumption also colludes with the urban global village project articulated by Kawabata,
which conceives of multiculturalism in terms of consumerism. The problem then
revolves around the question of the revolutionary potential of database-style
consumption. Does it merely inspire a kind of superficial reading marked by passivity
and fragmentation or, as Azuma has also suggested—with the growth of internet fan
culture—hold potential for increased levels of participation and agency by collapsing
binary divisions between producer and consumer, author and audience? As stated above,
for its leveling effect, the internet might be considered the postmodern medium par
excellence in that it both refuses to privilege one piece of information over another and
places both fact and fiction on the same ontological level to the point of
indistinguishability. For all the egalitarian potential that these qualities connote, they do
not come without their negative ramifications. In some ways, the style of internet
180
discourse has seemed to exacerbate the already fragmentary social relationships both
within the minority community and society at large.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki has observed how the proliferation of media in the internet
age creates a disconnect along with a tendency to regard different media as “self-
contained environments.” The result then is that there is no attempt to reconcile contrary
statements and judgment is suspended, thus severely attenuating the potential for
dialogue. Morris-Suzuki cites Edmund Carpenter who, in an early 1970s study, “was
already suggesting that the proliferation of media had created a world where the young in
particular regarded different media as ‘self-contained environments, having little
correspondence with other realities or environments.’ As a result, they found nothing
incongruous about encountering conflicting reports in the press, radio or TV, and felt no
need to attempt to reconcile or make judgments between contradictory representations of
the past in books and film.”
289
This may explain why Kubozuka Yosuke, the young actor
who played the Sugihara lead in GO, felt no compunction or indeed contradiction in
taking a part in the ultra-nationalist film Ore wa, kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku a few
years later.
290

To return to the Deluze and Guattari point in slightly changed form, the larger
question thus becomes whether there is even a place for social activism in postmodern
literature and film and—supposing there is—what form it should take. The erasure of
political content and more tangible expressions of ethnic identity from zainichi literature
mirror the changes within the ethnic Korean community itself—the increased rate of

289
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History (London: Verso,
2005), 221.
290
Izutsu, director of Pacchigi!, publicly criticized Kubozuka for this decision.
181
naturalization and the growing distancing of young people from the ethnic enclave.
Given the normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea
(formally in 1965 but increasingly so since the joint hosting of the World Cup in 2002)
and the failure of the North Korean state, among other socio-economic factors, the
erosion of ideology and discourses of resistance is perhaps inevitable. On the other hand,
as Kawabata reminds us, the adulteration and dispersal of the zainichi community does
not inevitably connect to the disappearance of discrimination. And yet the tendency in
such films as Pacchigi! and GO is to situate discrimination either in the past or as
something of the past, implying that it has already been overcome.
291

In his analysis of the avant-garde films of Ōshima Nagisa, Yomota Inuhiko
provides some insight into potential strategies for realizing a socially engaged film.
Yomota forges a link between formal experimentation and minority identity: for the
marginalized, “imagination (kūsō)” in the form of experimentation is often the final place
of refuge as well as the last mode of resistance against hegemonic authority. This last
resort can also serve as the beginning of activism, however, as through the use of
imagination=experimentation the artist draws the inequities inherent in discrimination to
the forefront of social consciousness.
292
As discussed in Chapter 3, Ōshima employs the
experimental techniques of repetition and fragmentation in Three Resurrected Drunkards
(Kaettekita yopparai, 1968)—the story of three Japanese high school students who are
mistaken for defectors from North Korea after exchanging their school clothes for NK
uniforms found discarded on the beach—to challenge the binarism of Japanese and

291
Another ironic detail from Pacchigi!: Many promotional materials for the film bear
the tagline, “We shall overcome someday!” (in English), while the conclusion to the film
shows the characters en route to achieving their career aspirations with little adversity.
292
Yomota Inuhiko, Oshima Nagisa to Nihon (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 2010), 181-182.
182
Korean identity and explore the interchangeability of oppressor/oppressed,
aggressor/victim.
However, the failure of the New Left to prevent the renewal of the ANPO treaty
in the protests of 1968 brought about a general loss of faith in political movements as a
form of anti-authoritarian resistance. It also signaled the demise of formal
experimentation in cinema, precipitating an artificial separation of form and content and
the renewed dominance of conventional narrative cinema. Nevertheless, there emerged
from the New Left filmmaking movements whose works articulated the revolutionary
potential of new methods of formal experimentation. One such movement was fūkeiron
(landscape theory), which demonstrated the shift from a “centralized mode of thinking
about political resistance and subjectivity” to a semiotic mode in Japanese leftist
filmmaking.
293
Films such as Adachi Masao’s A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969)—inspired by
the trial of real-life serial killer Nagayama Norio who was charged with four accounts of
murder following a killing spree in 1969—eschews the conventional documentary-style
dramatization and instead foregrounds the homogeneous urban landscape as a reflection
of invisible relations of power.
Furuhata Yuriko argues that, with the consolidation of postwar democratic state
capitalism, the state’s position as centralized authority shifted to a secondary source of
oppression through forms of commerce and information. Fūkeiron filmmakers
responded to this dispersal of hegemony by moving away from a centralized mode of
political protest to document both visible and invisible sites of authority manifest in
scenes of the everyday. Rather than staging a dramatic reenactment of Nagayama’s

293
Yuriko Furuhata, “Returning to Actuality: Fūkeiron and the Landscape Film,” Screen
48, no. 3 (2007): 347-348.
183
story, A.K.A. Serial Killer shows shot after shot of anonymous landscapes from cities that
Nagayama visited, suggesting that the oppression brought about by state capitalism
reflected in these scenes was somehow responsible for Nagayama’s crime. This situation
recalls another sensational murder case from a year earlier, the Sumatakyō Incident
committed by a zainichi man, Kim Hiro. After being hounded by yakuza for unpaid
loans, Kim killed two of the gangsters and held eighteen people hostage for four days.
This incident captured the imagination of the Japanese media and deeply shook the
zainichi community. Similar to Adachi’s take on Nagayama, Kim’s defense attorneys
stressed the discrimination imbedded in Japanese imperialism and its descendent, state
capitalism, as the source of Kim’s crimes: “’This case is an “ethnic problem” created by
the crime against Korea by Japanese state and society.’”
294

Zainichi author Kim Sokpom developed an approach to writing that might be
aptly described as the literary analogue of fūkeiron. Possibly owing to his protracted
debates on nationality with fellow zainichi author Ri Kaisei, Kim has been highlighted by
some critics as a strict adherent to zainichi ideology, but this misrepresents his much
more nuanced theory of literature.
295
To return to the theories of Kim, he argues that—
based on Japanese colonial legacy—for the zainichi writer writing in Japanese,
discrimination is not something that is visible, but is inscribed in the Japanese language
itself. Thus, the key to subjectivity is in refusing to accept language as an a priori
system
296
and, instead, to gain awareness of Japanese as a “foreign language” through the

294
Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity,
92-93.
295
As discussed in Chapter 1.
296
Naoki Sakai has made similar observations in a different context.
184
act of writing.
297
In short, Kim’s literary strategy demands turning the Japanese language
against itself to deprive it of its “ethnic” content. In terms of practical application, this
entails a rejection of both the genbun ittchi and shi-shōsetsu systems that constitute
national literature in favor of a creolization (or hybridization) of the Japanese language.
To transpose this critique to film, this might translate as a repudiation of the
heteronormity of conventional narrative cinema toward a more radicalized version of
formal experimentation.
Following the examples delineated by both Kim and fūkeiron, the key to the
representation of minority identity in the postmodern age resides in a hybrid identity that
disavows the local-global binary while engaging in practices that reflect an engagement
in both of these spaces. Shih and Lionnet introduce the term “minor transnationalism”
which they characterize as an act of “creative intervention” by minority cultures, acts that
are too often concealed by the dominant-resistant binary framework.
298
They reference
Edouard Glissant’s theories of relation when they write: “According to his definition of
creolization, within contact zones, the creolization of cultures occurs not because pure
cultural entities have come into contact with each other, but because cultures are always
already hybrid and relational as a result of sometimes unexpected and sometimes violent
processes (Poétique de la relation). Therefore, the transnational is our language to
designate this originary multiplicity or creolization, which foregrounds the formative
experiences of minorities within and beyond nation-states.”
299
Kawabata similarly
emphasizes practices that express multiplicity and hybridity. As an alternative to

297
Kim Sokpom, Shinpen “zainichi” no shisō (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1981), 162.
298
Lionnet and Shih, Minor Transnationalism, 6.
299
Lionnet and Shih, Minor Transnationalism, 8.
185
neoliberal fragmentation of the so-called “new zainichi” or older modes of rigid group
identification, Kawabata suggests a fluid “sense of belonging” that permits multiple
identifications reinforced in the everyday.
300

While it doesn’t display the formal experimentation exemplified by films of the
Japanese nouvelle vague, zainichi director Lee Sang-Il’s debut feature Ao Chong
constitutes just such a “creative intervention” in the realm of conventional narrative
cinema. The film follows two zainichi friends (Tae-Son and Hyon-ki) enrolled in a
chōsen gakkō high school who serve as captains of the school’s struggling baseball team.
In the film, due to a change in Board of Ed. policy that emphasizes “internationalization,”
ethnic high schools are now allowed to compete against Japanese schools in standard
league play, also giving them a chance to earn a coveted spot in the annual Kōshien
tournament. There’s only one problem: The team is terrible, and their first exhibition
game results in a humiliating 27-0 loss. Tae-Son (their starting pitcher), feeling
thoroughly demoralized, quits the team, leaving the other members in limbo. After some
encouragement from his childhood friend and love interest, Yu Nami, Tae-Son opts to
return to the team right before their first game of the season. The film concludes on an
uncertain but positive note, with a conversation between Tae-Son and Hyon-ki (pitcher
and catcher, respectively) as the latter approaches the mound before the start of the game.
Ao Chong avoids the melodramatic bombast of Pacchigi! and GO in favor of an

300
Kawabata, “Okayama zainichi mongatari—chihō toshi de seikatsu suru zainichi
sansei no renai, kekkon o meguru keiken kara” (An Okayama Zainichi Korean Story—
Experiences of Love and Marriage in 3
rd
Generation Koreans Living in Regional Cities),
141.
186
understated minimalism.
301
Also, in contrast to Pacchigi!, Ao Chong refuses to accept
zainichi identity as a given, and instead explores the two young friends’ groping for a
sense of place both within Japanese society and the zainichi community. The film is
filled with subtle details (the buzz of cicadas, the sight of trains coming and going) that
root the story in a specific suburban Japanese everydayness while creating an impression
of “deterritorialization.” Temporally, these details establish a diegetic present/presence
that emphasizes affect rather than meaning and places the film in real/reel time. While
capturing the deterioration of zainichi ideology, Ao Chong does so without resorting to
the individualistic rhetoric of GO. In the final scene of the film, the two friends have the
following conversation:

Hyon-Ki: Damn, I’ve never felt so Korean in my life.
Tae-Son: So, you wanna stop being Korean?
Hyon-Ki: Are you kidding? Even if I were reborn, being Korean is fine with me.
Tae-Son: Yeah, you’re right. We were born this way, so there’s nothing you can
do, huh?
Hyon-Ki (laughing): Yep, nothing you can do.
Tae-So: Who cares? I am who I am. (Kankei nē yo. Ore wa ore da.)
302

The surface similarities here to Sugihara’s final monologue in GO are initially
quite striking. However, in this case, the “I am who I am” does not signify an evacuation
of the political, but rather an affirmation of hybrid identity along with a rejection of the
zainichi victimization narrative. Through this utterance, Tae-Son accepts the inevitability
of ethnicity, while asserting that ethnic identity is not a given. In so doing, the film
retains the universality (or “collective value”) of minor literature articulated by Deleuze

301
Ao Chong was originally produced as Lee’s graduation project for film school before
being selected for distribution.
302
Ao Chong, directed by Lee Sang-il (2000; Tokyo: Style Jam, 2006), DVD.
187
and Guattari without its overt political content. Unlike GO, the minority figure in Ao
Chong is depicted as profoundly social, a “social machine” (to borrow another Deleuzian
concept) whose relation to the world is not dictated by a preset ideology but by an active
negotiation with multiple ethnic and national discourses.

188
Conclusion

In a recent article, scholar Sonia Ryang, who has devoted countless pages and
volumes to the study of the Korean community in Japan, writes that she “often wonder[s]
why we are still talking about Zainichi.”
303
Ryang explains:

I have written elsewhere that Zainichi Koreans will cease to exist in less
than forty years, given that currently about 400,000 Koreans in Japan hold
the afore- mentioned special permanent residence on the basis of their
colonial past and that currently each year 10,000 to 15,000 Koreans in
Japan are naturalized as Japanese citizens…It is almost twenty years since
my first book, which sought to capture the last years of Chongryun’s
[Soren’s] strengths; since then, numerous Chongryun schools have closed
and Chongryun even lost its headquarters building, while the newspaper
office building that I worked in for three years in the 1980s was sold,
moving journalists to a two-room rented office.
304

Indeed the “new zainichi” described in the 2003 Newsweek article are no longer
new; Kaneshiro Kazuki’s novel GO is now fifteen years old. As Ryang implies using the
above statistics, conventional wisdom would suppose that problems of discrimination
would naturally disappear through the consistently high rate of naturalization and racial
hybridity produced by mixed marriage. However, as Kawabata Kōhei points out,
naturalization does not necessarily lead to an end of either discrimination or ethnic
identity. Rather, he is careful to remind us that the flipside of multiculturalism is neo-
nationalism; that the latter is in fact coterminous with the former, as exemplified by the
neoliberal policy of municipal planning that attempts to reinvent former ethnic enclaves

303
Young Min Moon and Sonia Ryang, "Citizenship and North Korea in the Zainichi
Korean Imagination: The Art of Insook Kim," The Asia Pacific Journal 13, no. 5.3 (Feb.
2, 2015).
304
Ibid.
189
(Ikaino, Okayama) as “global villages” that promote commerce and cultural tourism. As
an extension of research for this project, I have often visited the neighborhood formerly
known as Ikaino (now Ikuno) that surrounds Tsuruhashi station in Osaka. While it
remains popular as a tourist destination, gone is the sense of Ikaino as a vibrant living
organism or a lively transnational marketplace so engagingly depicted in the novels of
Won-Soo-il. Instead, current day Ikaino has the feeling of a historical relic, frozen in
time, that—like the Japanese countryside—has witnessed the mass exodus of its youth
and is now populated largely by the elderly. But, as Kawabata’s research on young
zainichi Koreans attests, the move to the urban center and assimilation into mainstream
Japanese society is often accompanied by a renewed desire to “reconnect” with other
ethnic Koreans, a pattern that confounds any naturalization-resistance binary.
Nevertheless, recent years have seen a neo-nationalist turn in Japanese politics,
sparking intense debates around issues of war responsibility and colonial legacy. In May
2015 an open letter signed by a prodigious list of prominent Japanese studies scholars
(dated 5/4/15) was circulated expressing concern over the (re)writing of World War II
and colonial history. This letter is intended as a not-so-veiled response to the ongoing
ideological battle over the “comfort women” issue and attempts on the part of the Abe
administration and neo-nationalists to whitewash historical accounts of Japanese wartime
atrocity. While conceding varying accounts of the comfort women problem, the letter
cites the overwhelming amount of evidence of a systematic and widespread system of
exploitation overseen by the Japanese military. The letter reads:
This issue has become so distorted by nationalist invective in Japan as
well as in Korea and China that many scholars, along with journalists and
politicians, have lost sight of the fundamental goal of historical inquiry,
190
which should be to understand the human condition and aspire to improve
it…Employing legalistic arguments focused on particular terms or isolated
documents to challenge the victims’ testimony both misses the
fundamental issue of their brutalization and ignores the larger context of
the inhumane system that exploited them.
305

The above statement is consistent with the work of Kim Sokpom and Won
Soo-il discussed for this project that stress the retention of colonial memory as a
basis for the formation of minority subjectivity. As in many of the works
analyzed here, at the level of praxis this demands a systematic creolization
embedded in the very language or cinematic grammar that works to defamiliarize
the Japanese language and conventional modes of cinematic representation while
mining the collective consciousness of the zainichi Korean community. The
urgency of this open letter thus attests to the continuing relevance of Kim
Sokpom’s thought—that while assimilation does not necessarily entail an end to
ethnic identity, the failure to contest revisionist discourses of historical oblivion
can only contribute to further exploitation at the hands of the state.
As if to reaffirm Kawabata’s notion of the reciprocal nature of nationalism
and multiculturalism, coeval with the neo-conservative push for historical
revisionism there has been a burgeoning interest in the small but growing
multiethnic population in Japan. Recent works, particularly in the cinematic
medium, explore new conceptions of visibility and subjectivity among Japanese
mixed-race, as in the film Hafu (2014), which takes it’s title for the popular
Japanese neologism used to designate a person of mixed-race. The schizophrenic

305
Daniel Aldrich, et al. “Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan,” May 5, 2015.
PDF.
191
public opinion over the vision of a multiracial Japan was perhaps most
dramatically symbolized in the recent crowning of Ariana Miyamoto, a biracial
woman whose father is African-American, as the winner of the 2015 Miss
Universe Japan competition. Miyamoto has used her victory as an opportunity to
“challenge the definition of being Japanese”
306
and raise awareness about the
discrimination experienced by mixed-race citizens. This proclamation once again
contains an echo of the pedagogical mission of recent zainichi writers and
directors who seek to facilitate cultural understanding by educating the Japanese
public about the zainichi Korean experience.
One might wonder, however, how applicable these new models are for
zainichi Koreans, who—unlike Miyamoto—display no outward traces of ethnic
difference. If zainichi are indeed “almost Japanese but not quite,” what makes
their situation unique is that this “not-quiteness” is not visible at the surface level.
Thus, for the zainichi individual in Japanese society, the problem is one not just of
visibility but legibility—how to break the pattern of disrecognition in a way that
does not initiate one’s own self-destruction. This is why I have chosen to read the
works for this project in terms of a creolization that emphasizes the doubleness
that permeates zainichi Korean identity and revolves around issues of visibility
and invisibility, absence and excess. It is thus younger artists such as Lee Sang-il
(Ao Chong) and Yang Yong-hi (Dear Pyongyang, Our Homeland) working in the
cinematic medium—whose formal properties are best equipped to address these
tropes—that have been the most successful in exploring new modes of minority

306
Martin Fackler, "Biracial Beauty Queen Challenges Japan's Self-Image," The New
York Times May 29, 2015.
192
subjectivity and activism without fully abnegating the political element from
which the older generation derived its radicalism. While old binaries of
assimilation-resistance are no longer valid (if they ever were), what these films
acknowledge is that modes of (neo)-colonialism evolve alongside modes of ethnic
identity, much as acts of political subversion are often recuperated and neutralized
by the dominant culture. As acts of protest and terrorism alike are organized
through social media and activism is increasing sublimated to the digital realm,
the inclusion of an IC chip in the new Japanese “Residence Card” speaks to the
shift to a digital form of surveillance, even further complicating notions of
visibility. It is therefore clear that as long as Japan maintains a jus sanguinis
policy toward citizenship, one that enables the persistence of nihonjinron and
Japanese mono-ethnic discourse, the necessity to keep talking about zainichi will
remain. In fact there may be no better time than the present.

193
Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006
Arai, Haruhiko. "2005 Nihon Eiga Besuto Ten, Waasuto Ten." Eiga Geijutsu 56, no. 1
(2006): 10-44.
Armstrong, Charles K. The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2003.
Ashcroft, Bill. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.
Azuma, Hiroki. Dōbutsukasuru Posutomodan: Otaku Kara Mita Nihon Shakai. Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 2001.
Barlow, Tani E. Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1997.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Blackwell, 2000.
Bernabe, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant. In Praise of Creoleness.
Paris: Gallimard, 1989.
Bernards, Brian. "Beyond Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Recuperating Creolization in
Postcolonial Sinophone Malaysian Literature." Postcolonial Studies 15, no. 3
(2012): 311-329.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Bourdaghs, Michael. The Dawn that Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese
Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Chen, Tina. Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and
Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Ching, Leo. Becoming "Japanese": Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity
Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Chua, Beng Huat and Kōichi Iwabuchi. East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean
Wave. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008.
194
Chuh, Kandice. Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Tomlinson, Hugh and
Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
———. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Tomlinson, Hugh and Robert Galeta.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
———. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Patton, Paul. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Derrida, Jacques. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, edited by Kamuf, Peggy. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
———. Writing and Difference. Translated by Bass, Alan. London: Routledge, 1978.
Fackler, Martin. “Biracial Beauty Queen Challenges Japan's Self-Image," The New York
Times (May 29, 2015).
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Markmann, Charles Lam. New
York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967.
Field, Norma. "Beyond Envy, Boredom, and Suffering: Toward an Emancipatory Politics
for Resident Koreans and Other Japanese." Positions: East Asia Culture Critiques 1,
no. 3 (1993): 640-670.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Friedrich, Otto. "The Computer Moves in." Time (Jan. 3, 1983).
Furuhata, Yuriko. "Returning to Actuality: Fukeiron and the Landscape Film." Screen 48,
no. 3 (2007): 345-362.
Hodgson, Deborah. "Hyphenating Japan: Nyu Zainichi Ga Nihon o Kaeru." Newsweek
(Japan Edition) (26 Nov. 2003, 2003): 18-22.
Igarashi, Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture,
1945-1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Inoue, Hisashi, Yōichi Komori, Sokpom Kim, and Yuha Pak. Zadankai Shōwa
Bungakushi. Vol. 5. Tokyo: Shūeisha, 2004.
195
Isogai, Jirō. "Zainichi" Bungakuron. Tokyo: Shinchosha, 2004.
Itō, Kimio. Manga no Naka no "Tasha". Bijuaru Bunka shirīzu. Kyoto: Rinsen Shoten,
2008.
Iwabuchi, Kōichi. "Political Correctness, Postcoloniality, and the Self-Representation of
"Koreanness" in Japan." In Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin,
edited by Ryang, Sonia, 55-73. London: Routledge, 2000.
Iwabuchi, Kōichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese
Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
Izutsu, Kazuyuki and Bong-ou Lee. Ai Heiwa Pacchigi. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2007.
Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998.
London: Verso, 1998.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991.
Kaneshiro, Kazuki. Go. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2000.
Kaneshiro, Kazuki and Eiji Oguma. "Sorede Boku Wa 'Shiteiseki' o Kowasu Tame Ni
GO o Kaita." Chūo Koron (December, 2001): 324-336.
Karatani, Kōjin. History and Repetition [Rekishi to hanpuku.]. Translated by Lippit, Seiji
M. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
———. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature [Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen.].
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.
Kawabata, Kōhei. "Okayama Zainichi mongatari—Chihō Toshi De Sekatsu Suru
Zainichi Sansei no Renai, Kekkon o Meguru Keiken Kara." In Tabunka Shakai no
“Bunka” o Tō: Kyōsei Comyuniti, Media, edited by Iwabuchi, Kōichi, 116-145.
Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2010.
Kawamura, Minato. "Kureōru Toshite no Nihongo." In Kankoku, Chōsen, Zainichi o
Yomu. Tokyo: Impact, 2003.
———. Umaretara Soko Ga Furusato: Zainichi Chōsenjin Bungakuron. Tokyo:
Heibonsha, 1999.
Kawashima, Ken C. The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
196
Kim, Hakyon. "Kogoeru Kuchi." In Kogoeru Kuchi: Kim Hakyon Sakuhin Shu, 13-103.
Tokyo: Kurein, 2004.
Kim, Kyung Hyun. The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2004.
Kim, Sokpom. The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost. Translated by Textor, Cindi L.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
———. Karasu no Shi. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1985.
———. Kim Sokpom "Kazanto" Shōsetsu Sekai o Kataru!—Cheju-do Yon-San
Jiken/Zainichi to Nihonjin/Seiji to Bungaku o Meguru Monogatari. Tokyo: Yubun
Shoin, 2010.
———. Kotoba no Jubaku: "Zainichi Chōsenjin Bungaku" to Nihongo. Tokyo: Chikuma
Shobō, 1972.
———. Shinpen "Zainichi" no Shisō. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1981.
Kim, Sokpom and Shi-jong Kim. Naze Kakitsuzuke Kita Ka, Naze Chinmoku Shite Kita
Ka: Cheju-do Yon-San Jiken no Kioku to Bungaku. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001.
Kim, Sokpom, Kaisei Ri, and Kenzaburo Oe. "Nihongo De Kaku Koto Ni Tsuite."
Bungaku 38, no. 11 (1970): 1-27.
Kim, Tal-su. "In the Shadow of Mount Fuji." In Into the Light: An Anthology of
Literature by Koreans in Japan. Translated by Orbaugh, Sharalyn. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2011.
Kitamura, Iwao. "Won Soo-Il." In Zainichi Bungaku Zenshu, edited by Isogai, Jirō and
Kazuo Kuroko. Vol. 12. Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2006.
Ko, Mika. Japanese Cinema and Otherness: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and the
Problem of Japaneseness. London: Routledge, 2010.
Kobayashi, Hideo. "Discourse on Literature of the Self (Watakushi Shōsetsuron)." In
Literature of the Lost Home : Kobayashi Hideo--Literary Criticism, 1924-1939.
Translated by Anderer, Paul. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Koschmann, J. Victor. Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader, edited by Moi, Toril. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986.
197
Kuraishi, Ichiro. "Pacchigi! and Go: Representing Zainichi in Recent Cinema." In
Diaspora without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan, edited by Ryang, Sonia and
John Lie, 107-120: Berkeley, 2009.
Kyo, Nobuko. Goku Futsu no Zainichi Kankokujin. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1987.
———. "Kono Yo no Dokonimo Nai Kotoba o Sagashitai." In Tsuki Wa Docchi Ni
Deteiru o Meguru 2, 3 no Hanashi, 175-193. Tokyo: Shakai Hyōronsha, 1994.
LaMarre, Thomas. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
———. Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Junʼichirō on Cinema and "Oriental"
Aesthetics. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Lee, Bong-ou. Pacchigi!-Teki: Sekai Wa Eiga De Kaerareru. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,
2007.
Lee, Bong-ou and Inuhiko Yomota. Patchigi! Taidanhen: Kenka, Eiga, Kazoku, Soshite
Kankoku. Asahi Sensho. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2005.
Lie, John. Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Lionnet, Françoise and Shu-mei Shih. "Introduction: The Creolization of Theory." In The
Creolization of Theory, edited by Lionnet, Françoise and Shu-mei Shih, 1-33.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
———. Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Lionnet, Françoise and Shu-mei Shih. The Creolization of Theory. Durham N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2011.
Lippit, Seiji M. Topographies of Japanese Modernism. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
Matsuyama, Takeshi. Shonen M no Imujin Gawa. Tokyo: Kirakusha, 2002.
Moon, Young Min and Sonia Ryang. "Citizenship and North Korea in the Zainichi
Korean Imagination: The Art of Insook Kim." The Asia Pacific Journal 13, no. 5.3
(Feb. 2, 2015).
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. The Past within Us: Media, Memory, History. London: Verso,
2005.
198
Nornes, Markus. Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007.
———. Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Ono, Teijiro. Sonzai no Genki: Kim Sokpom Bungaku. Tokyo: Shinkansha, 1998.
Ōshima, Nagisa. Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima,
1956-1978. Translated by Michelson, Annette. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Ōshima, Nagisa. Ōshima Nagisa 1968. Tokyo: Seidosha, 2004.
Ōtsuka, Eiji. Murakami Haruki Ron: Sabukaruchā to Rinri. Tokyo: Wakakusa Shobō,
2006.
———. Sabukaruchā Bungakuron. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2004.
Ri, Kaisei. Kanōsei Toshite no "Zainichi". Tokyo: Kodansha, 2002.
———. Kinuta o Utsu Onnna. Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 1972.
Robinson, Michael E. Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2007.
Rosenblatt, Roger. "A New World Dawns." Time (Jan. 3, 1983).
Ryang, Sonia. "Dead-End in a Korean Ghetto: Reading a Complex Identity in Gen
Getsu's Akutagawa-Winning Novel Where the Shadows Reside." Japanese Studies
22, no. 1 (2002): 5-18.
———. "Introduction: Between the Nations--Diaspora and Koreans in Japan." In
Diaspora without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan, edited by Ryang, Sonia and
John Lie. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
———. "The North Korean Homeland of Koreans in Japan." In Koreans in Japan:
Critical Voices from the Margin, edited by Ryang, Sonia. London: Routledge, 2000.
———. Writing Selves in Diaspora: Ethnography of Autobiographics of Korean Women
in Japan and the United States. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008.
Sagisawa, Megumu. Kimi Wa Kono Kuni o Suki Ka. Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1997.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1978.
199
Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Scott, Christopher. "Invisible Men: The Zainichi Korean Presence in Postwar Japanese
Culture." PhD, Stanford University, 2006.
Seats, Michael. Murakami Haruki: The Simulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture.
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006.
Sherif, Ann. Japan's Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009.
Shih, Shu-mei. "Introduction." In Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013.
Shimazaki, Tōson. Hakai. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1971.
Shimazu, Naoko. Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919.
London: Routledge, 1998.
Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1966.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Other Asias. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008.
Standish, Isolde. A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film. New
York: Continuum, 2005.
———. Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and
1970s. New York: Continuum, 2011.
Suh, Serk-Bae. Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in
Korea and Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2013.
Suzuki, Tomi. Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997.
Takeda, Seiji. "Zainichi" to Iu Konkyo. Tokyo: Chikuma Gakugei Bunko, 1995.
Turim, Maureen Cheryn. The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
200
Ueda, Atsuko. "'Moji' to Iu Kotoba--Yi Yang-Ji 'Yuhi' o Megutte." Nihon Kindai
Bungaku no. 62 (May, 2000): 128-143.
Weiner, Michael. Japan's Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity. 2nd ed. London:
Routledge, 2009.
Wender, Melissa L. Lamentation as History: Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965-
2000. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
White, Hayden. "The Modernist Event." In The Persistence of History: Cinema,
Television, and the Modern Event, edited by Sobchack, Vivian Carol. London:
Routledge, 1996.
Won, Soo-il. AV Odyssey. Tokyo: Shinkansha, 1997.
———. "Posuto Koroniaru Toshite no Zainichi Bungaku Kureoru Ka no Suiryu.” In
Posuto Koroniaru Bungaku no Kenkyu, edited by Niwa, Ryoji. Suita-shi: Kansai
Daigaku Shuppanbu, 2001.
Won, Soo-il. Ikaino Monogatari: Chejudo Kara Kita Onnatachi. Tokyo: Sofukan, 1987.
Yi, Yang-ji. Koku. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2010.
Yi, Yang-ji. Yuhi. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1989.
Yomota, Inuhiko. Ōshima Nagisa to Nihon. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2010.
Yū, Miri. Furu Hausu. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 1996.
———. Kazoku Shinema. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation project interrogates concepts of Japanese literature through the textual analysis of notable postwar works of literature, film, and other visual media from the ethnic Korean minority (zainichi kankokujin). My project contends that, as a result of Japanese colonial policy and the persistence of systems of discrimination, members of the Korean minority suffer from a split subjectivity that is manifest in literary tropes of doubleness and invisibility. I examine the deployment of these tropes by zainichi authors Kim Sokpom, Won Soo‐il, and Kaneshiro Kazuki in their cultural texts that are often marked by creolization (the use of multiple languages and dialects in a single text) and formal experimentation. In so doing, this project demonstrates how these representations enable multiple affiliations, while articulating how notions of Korean ethnic identity have evolved since the end of WWII—from the homeland (i.e. Korea)‐bound postcolonial subject to a neoliberal individualism with a desire for transnationalism.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Alice in evasion: adapting Lewis Carroll in Japan

PDF

Exploring late Ming Taizhou philosophies within Ueda Akinari’s Ugetsu monogatari: a comparative study of two contemporaneous “heresies” in early modern Japanese and late imperial Chinese intellec...

PDF

Liminal visibility: exploring ambiguities of time and space in transnational Korean hallyu cinema

PDF

The space of Japanese science fiction: illustration, subculture, and the body in SF Magazine

PDF

Testimonial emotions: witnessing and feeling the 1990s in South Korean women's literature and film

PDF

Language, soundscape, and identity formation in Shanghai fangyan literature and culture

PDF

Buddhist literature and gender in Korea: a preliminary survey and science fictional explorations

PDF

Horrific environments: confronting the nonhuman in Korean and Japanese Ecomedia

PDF

Choreographing the Sinophone body: martial movements and embodied languages in Hong Kong media

PDF

The anxiety of interrupted kinship: Transpacific cultures of Korean historical trauma

PDF

Dreaming of peace: an exploration of Japan's international relations and understanding of peace through superheroes

PDF

The Seoul of Los Angeles: contested identities and transnationalism in immigrant space

PDF

Radiant mushrooms of postwar Japanese media

PDF

Jin Yong's chivalry: gender and ethnicity in wuxia fiction, film, and television

PDF

The new generation on screen: youth cinema and youth culture in South Korea since the 1990s

PDF

Antipodes of Asian American literature: heterolingualism and the Asian Americas

PDF

The role of social media in the evolution of the male homosexual community in modern China

PDF

Radical crossings: from peasant rebellions to internationalist multiracial labor organizing among Japanese immigrant communities in Hawaii and California, 1885–1935

PDF

Gastropoetics: Cultural figurations of eating in modern Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba

PDF

Networks of space and identity: origin narratives and manifestations of the Itsukushima deity

Asset Metadata

Creator Heneghan, Nathaniel (author)

Core Title Floating signifiers: tracing zainichi Korean identity in postcolonial literature and visual media

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program East Asian Languages and Cultures

Publication Date 10/05/2016

Defense Date 06/02/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag creolization,Japanese film,Japanese literature,OAI-PMH Harvest,transnationalism,zainichi Koreans

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira (committee chair), Bernards, Brian (committee member), Mack, Ted (committee member), Park, Sunyoung (committee member), Shimazaki, Satoko (committee member)

Creator Email n8_heneghan@hotmail.com,nhenegha@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-189224

Unique identifier UC11278480

Identifier etd-HeneghanNa-3968.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-189224 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HeneghanNa-3968.pdf

Dmrecord 189224

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Heneghan, Nathaniel

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA