Voices of the Korean Minority in Postwar Japan

Histories Against the Grain

Erik Ropers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429880803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Asie

Shedding new light on how the histories of z ainichi Koreans have been written, consumed, and discussed, this book addresses the roots of postwar debates concerning the wartime experiences of Koreans in Japan.

Providing an overview of the complicated historiography, it explores the experiences of Koreans located at Ground Zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the history and processes that coerced Korean women into military prostitution. These debates and controversies continue to attract attention regionally and globally, and as this book demonstrates, they are deeply embedded in ideas dating back decades earlier. By tracing the roots of these debates in historical writings from local history groups to zainichi and Japanese scholars, we may see how written histories have been used for particular social, political, or cultural purposes, and how they have lent support to certain interpretations and memories of past events across the political spectrum.

Interdisciplinary at its core, Voices of the Korean Minority in Postwar Japan will appeal to audiences including those interested in modern Japanese and Korean history, historiography and methodology, and memory studies.

1 Introduction

Around the time of diplomatic normalization between the Republic of Korea and Japan in 1965, six women came together to form the historical research group Mukuge no kai with the aim of collecting and preserving histories of Koreans resident in Japan (zainichi Koreans). A few years later in March 1968, member Sugama Kimiko wrote a short introduction for the group and its aims in the second issue of the journal Ajia josei kōryūshi kenkyū, which had been recently founded by noted feminist scholar and historian Yamazaki Tomoko. Sugama observed in part that

The truth about zainichi Korean history is that most of it is unfortunately buried in darkness with apparently few documents to speak of. Especially for Korean women who have lived for half their lives in Japan, there is absolutely nothing left behind [in the archive] by which they may come to know truths [about the past].¹

Less than a decade later in 1975, an article in the journal Koria hyōron saw contributor Kishibe Kumi admitting that before the publication of a book, the same year, entitled Hibaku Kankokujin (Koreans Affected by the Atomic Bomb), he “didn’t know there had been any Korean victims.”² This kind of frank admittance is startling on several accounts: thirty-five years of colonial rule over Korea from 1910 to 1945 had resulted in over two million Koreans residing in Japan by mid-1945. Many of these men and women found work, voluntarily or through coercion, in Japan’s vital wartime industries—from mining and forestry in rural areas, to shipyards and munitions factories in urban centers. That Koreans just might reside in Hiroshima or Nagasaki failed to register with Kishibe and many others in Japan, partly due to the overwhelming dominance of ethnicized histories of wartime Japan that for years had failed to recognize the contributions of the Korean minority to the wartime state. Although a majority of Koreans repatriated to the mainland in the months and years following Japan’s surrender, hundreds of thousands would elect to remain in Japan. Despite this, zainichi Koreans would continue to constitute a near-invisible and largely ignored facet of postwar Japanese historical discourse, especially where the wartime period was concerned.

The statements by both these authors, and many others we might point to around the same time, are individually and collectively a recognition of absences in historical research concerning the Korean minority in Japan. Kishibe’s observation speaks strongly to the reasons authors like him expressed in justifying and making sense of the groundswell of works concerning the Korean minority published in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. Likewise, Sugama’s statement is clear about the gaps in received knowledge about the past around the same time. Moreover, she reveals some of the most challenging gaps in the historical archive which, for some time, had impeded historical research about the Korean minority that affected women more acutely than men. Sugama, Kishibe, and others began participating in research, writing, and publishing various histories and testimonies about Korean forced laborers, survivors of the atomic bombings, and so-called “comfort women” precisely to help resolve these and other gaps in historical knowledge.

For those belonging to or associated with the Korean community, these absences were clearly visible and felt. In terms of situating zainichi Korean activism, histories of agitation for equality in the workplace and throughout society, and contemporary literary trends and movements, recent Anglophone scholarship by David Chapman, John Lie, and others have greatly contributed to a broader understanding of the Korean minority’s place in postwar Japan. Nevertheless, the places and contributions of individuals engaged in historical discourses that drive large parts of key social and political debates have received far less attention.³ Such an oversight is odd given that throughout history, historians themselves have been implicated as being at the center of various cultural responses and debates. The critical role that historians and individuals involved in historical scholarship play in ongoing public controversies about the past is cited by Greg Dening who emphasized that “histories are public knowledge of the past that make a present.”⁴ His observation is important for us as readers and scholars in recognizing that historical discourse puts past events and peoples into words, and that historians, perhaps more than anybody else, are implicated in giving life to historical controversy, learning, and debate.⁵

Recovering silenced voices and stories: the theoretical questions

Voices of the Korean Minority in Postwar Japan examines the ways and processes of how histories of Koreans resident in Japan during the wartime period (1937–1945) have been written, consumed, debated, and discussed. Such an examination is important for studies of the Asia-Pacific War given that popular and historical debates often revolve around questions of empirical fact. In the following chapters, I focus on three important and controversial issues that greatly affected the Korean community during the wartime period: the recruitment and use of forced laborers, the histories and experiences of Koreans located at Ground Zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the history and processes that coerced Korean women into military prostitution (the so-called “comfort women”). In examining how different authors, both Japanese and zainichi Koreans, have conceived and written about these topics across the postwar period for audiences in Japan, I illustrate the various contestations, debates, memories, and politics that stakeholders assert in their attempts to narrate the history of Japan’s largest ethnic minority against the grain of Japanese historical writings over the past half-century. As such, the analysis of each topic and individual narrative requires attention to the complexities of language, the historical context in which individual works and the resulting field of work has been produced, and the ways in which writings about each topic have been received beyond those of scholars who study Japan’s colonial and wartime history. In reading and analyzing works concerning zainichi Koreans and wartime Japan, we as readers (and historians) should ask: what key questions have authors focused on? What do reading publics most closely notice and why? And, as Proma Tagore directs us to consider, “What happens when we read perceptively?” by which she means in a way that is attentive both politically and emotionally to the ways and processes in which individuals and narratives are rendered visible or invisible.⁶

Across space and time, historical works have been used for particular social, political, or cultural purposes; to lend support to or challenge certain interpretations or memories of past events. Dening underscores the criticality of reflecting on histories in this way, providing a lucid explanation about how historical writings broadly reflect struggles for cultural authority. He writes, “the transformation of the past…is always made in social circumstances” and urges us to more closely consider that

“scientific history” or “academic history” is as cultural and as social as a dinner-table story or scripture or a political parable. The rhetoric about these logical systems of “academic histories” and the declatory definition of what they are and are not sometimes hide what disciplines share with everyday cultural phenomena. Indeed the vested interest in making them seem different and above culture is the very quality that makes them the same.⁷

He concludes that the job of the historian is to both facilitate and question constructions of the past. Even when authors writing on complex historical subjects claim objectivity based in fact, the reality is far more opaque and difficult to ascertain. The seemingly endless politicization of histories concerning “forced recruitment” (kyōsei renkō), zainichi Korean hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bomb), and the so-called “comfort women” issue (jūgun ianfu mondai) all call for such perceptive questioning. Histories against the Grain identifies and charts the critical vocabularies necessary for understanding the development and contestation of zainichi Korean history in postwar Japan. The works analyzed in subsequent chapters individually and collectively express the vital importance of memory and attentiveness to testimony and other forms of evidence for historical writing for the zainichi Korean community. Although Korea was Japan’s largest colony in terms of population, and zainichi Koreans constitute Japan’s largest minority group today, historical topics like these have often been cosigned to the margins of many Japanese-language histories of the wartime era. Ranging across and between historical narratives, oral histories, memoir, and literature, the works examined in subsequent chapters are largely representative of the particular ways in which authors have made significant interventions in zainichi Korean history in terms of how it has been conceived, expressed, and consumed in postwar Japan.

The texts analyzed in each part of this study are particular examinations of controversies in the history of Japanese colonialism and wartime violence. When taken together, they collectively underscore the connections between each topic, and the extent to which the writing of history is a conversation between authors and audiences. In interrogating the varied approaches to writing and remembering three of the most significant and arguably unresolved wartime issues for the zainichi Korean community arising out of the ashes of war-torn Japan, and by considering the ways and methods that readers and scholars consume these works, we may come to better understand the ways and ultimately the importance of how authors, through their writing, shape (purposely or inadvertently) understandings of the past. In analyzing the various historical works in the following chapters, we are able to view the process of historical writing as a back-and-forth engagement between author and archive, author and author, and author and audience. We will also see how the act of reader engagement (both scholarly and popular) with historical writing is key. If reading publics have “become involved in and understand the stakes in historical representation…and see themselves not only as spectators of history but also as participants in and adjudicators of it,” the implications for those working on these and other subjects—both past and present—are significant.⁸ In short, we will see how the writing and telling of history is socially implicated and performs certain functions. For groups like Mukuge no kai, overcoming the silences of the archive and historical scholarship to share the history of Korean women in Japan was vital. In more recent decades, we have seen a growing number of cases globally where historians, activists, politicians, and others “turn to the past and confront cases of injustice sometimes decades after they have occurred,” often to inform scholarship, activism, or politics in the present.⁹ Doing so satisfies the needs of many to establish “a connection between contemporary issues and the past” by “develop[ing] new framework[s] for talking about the past.”¹⁰

Such engagements with and uses of the past for the present continue to play an important role in the ways in which history is written. Some of the key challenges for many zainichi Koreans have been to overcome common discriminatory tendencies, to assert an identity apart from ordinary Japanese, and to agitate for rights as “full citizens” of Japan.¹¹ The authors I focus on in subsequent chapters are faced with the broad challenge of writing against the grain of existing Japanese histories and narratives, as well as looking to assert claims of authority and authenticity for their scholarship which are not necessarily shared widely in Japanese popular consciousness. Examining public controversies and debates generated by divergent historical interpretations is both valuable and necessary for scholars today. In doing so, we are better able to see how individual works and interventions position themselves as carriers of historical (counter)memory and, in the case of Voices of the Korean Minority in Postwar Japan, advocate for the inclusion of the Korean minority’s wartime experiences in Japanese written histories and narratives. Yet as each section makes abundantly clear, advocacy and positioning of narratives do not in and of itself guarantee success: scholars and activists struggled initially to make a significant mark on public conversations and knowledge with their foundational works from the 1960s and 1970s. In some cases, such as those authored by Japanese journalist Senda Kakō in the 1970s, wartime rape and sexual violence, while seen to be abhorrent, were viewed more as a matter for the consideration and reflection in the private sphere rather than the public sphere. Hence upon finishing his lengthy work examining the history of enforced military prostitution, most readers “gave a deep sigh and put it away at the back of their bookshelves” rather than press for action on behalf of the survivors and deceased victims.¹²

Following the challenges authors faced then and now, I identify and engage with the limitations of scholarly depictions of historical issues and events for these three topics of inquiry.¹³ Adapting historian John Ernest’s ideas, we may ask questions such as: what did these texts accomplish at the time they were published? How were they received,...