Standing on the Shores of Memory: Listening in to Kim Sijong’s Song of ClementineĬatherine RYU (Michigan State University) Panel 3 – Ethnic “Homeland” and the Cross-Straits Gaze In this way, it illustrates how Kobayashi’s work represents an attempt to counteract romanticized repatriation narratives that were coopted for new nationalist ends at the beginning of the Cold War. The presentation further argues that “Bridge Building” undermines reader identification with the Japanese protagonist by highlighting the protagonist’s insufficient perspective on the history of Japanese colonialism. This paper shows that although Kobayashi depicts Japanese and Korean characters who are united by a common goal and their past experiences of imperial violence, the gap between them remains insurmountable. In this story, Kobayashi portrays an uncomfortable alliance between a young Japanese repatriate and a Zainichi Korean activist involved in radical protest actions in Japan during the Korean War. “Bridge Building” was nominated for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize but has since received little attention in Japan. It concentrates upon Kobayashi’s short story “Bridge Building” (“Kakyō”, 1960).
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This presentation examines how unresolved memories of empire reemerged in the works of Kobayashi Masaru (1927–1971), who was a Japanese author born and raised in colonial Korea. However, writings by and about Japanese repatriates have often called attention to the incomplete nature of postwar Japanese decolonization. While the process of postwar repatriation physically removed Japanese colonists from the former Japanese empire, it also deferred the necessary process of coming to terms with Japan’s imperial past. I offer the first scholarly revised reading of his canonical works (which are frequently employed as Japanese textbooks and authorized by the Japanese government), in light of his other writings, which are critical of colonialism within the race-gendered colonial narrative.Ĭontrapuntal Writing: Kobayashi Masaru’s “Bridge Building” and Japan’s Korean War This approach furthermore demonstrates the similarity of Nakajima’s major and minor works, revealed in the rhetorical choices he makes and his ethical orientation toward others – no previous scholarly work has examined these parallels. I argue that Nakajima Atsushi’s insights about the injustice of colonialism both implicitly and explicitly stood against the Japanese empire’s totalitarian ambitions, even though he served as an agent for the empire. I explore the intersections between Nakajima's depiction of Korean street-prostitutes and censorship in his early short stories on colonial Korea, which he published when he was 20 years old.
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This paper analyzes how the ideological structure of the Japanese empire regulates, fixes, and generates everyday life in colonial Korea. Nakajima Atsushi: More Skeptic than Participant in Empire Select works including epistolary exchanges by minor modernists writing in the shadows of metropolitan centers will be examined in relation to shared impasses of racial passing. Through forging new transpacific methodologies, it aims to connect minoritarian legacies across oceanic and postcolonial divides and across the borderlines of U.S and Japanese empires. This paper puts racialized divisions from colonial Korea and segregated United States in conversation. Langston Hughes and Kim Saryang in Exchange Zainichi Chinese Media and Zainichi Koreans in Early Postwar Osaka
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Panel 1 - Inter-Asian and Transpacific Exchanges