This book examines Zainichi cinema as practices of producing, curating, exhibiting, viewing, and critiquing film images of Koreans-in-Japan (Zainichi Koreans, often just referred to as Zainichi). Zainichi literally means resident in Japan, but it is important to denaturalise and historicise the term. In this introductory chapter I will explore how three articulations of Zainichi (and one attempt to escape the term) have been historically constituted and contested, including, from the mid-1950s onwards, in cinema.
Today the term Zainichi is most commonly understood to refer to the Koreans who came to Japan during the colonial period, when Korea was a colony of Japan (1910–45), and in the chaotic aftermath of the colonial era leading up to the Korean War (1950–53), as well as the Japan-born descendants of these first generations. Describing a 100-year history of Koreans-in-Japan, I refer to this first definition as the ‘Zainichi century’ position. There were however many ruptures and discontinuities in the apparent Zainichi century. In the wake of Japan’s defeat in 1945, the majority of the 2.4 million Koreans who were in Japan at the end of the war were repatriated to the peninsula. In the ten years that followed, the 600,000 Koreans who remained experienced the stripping away of their legal status. The second definition of Zainichi then refers to a category of post-colonial denizenship which was constructed in a piecemeal fashion between the end of the war in 1945 and the signing of the San Francisco Treaty in 1952. Whereas the Zainichi century position emphasises 1910 as the originating moment, the post-colonial definition marks 1945 as Zainichi year zero. This is Zainichi in the sense of being merely ‘resident’, an alien and a stateless person without any of the rights of citizenship. This legal sense of Zainichi was gradually modified in the decades following the 1965 normalisation of diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea. In this period we can detect a prehistory of Zainichi cinema, which I will briefly summarise in this chapter.
The third definition is Zainichi as an identity formation, which emerged concomitantly with the coming of age of Japan-born generations of Koreans in the 1970s, who recognised that being in Japan as a minority, rather than as an exile or overseas resident, might be a permanent state. This was Zainichi in the literal sense of ‘being in Japan’, an identity formation founded on recognising and confronting Zainichi denizenship, and on demanding representation, both politically and on-screen. It was in this period that the word Zainichi became the standard term to describe Koreans-in-Japan: it was now a noun in its own right, rather than a modifying adjective. The first two definitions of Zainichi (the Zainichi century; ‘resident’ aliens) anticipate this third usage, and we can connect the three together: Zainichi is a term that came to prominence in the 1970s to recognise and confront the denizenship of Koreans in Japan, whose identity was defined in part by the cultural memories and traumas of the colonial period and its immediate aftermath.
Finally, I discuss a post-Zainichi position, first evident in the 1980s, which sought to disrupt the previous articulations. A growing swell of voices argued that the demands for representation made by the Zainichi citizenship movement, although historically necessary, risked creating an essentialised Zainichi identity that occluded the diverse ways of being Korean in Japan. I argue that the increasing pluralism of Korean-in-Japan positions also implies a challenge to the possibility of ‘representation.’ In this book I focus on the period from the mid-1970s onwards, when the poetics and politics of Zainichi identity were being articulated and disrupted, and when film played a constitutive role in these discourses. In the second half of this introductory chapter I will map out the contours of these screen practices.
A Zainichi Century
Between 1910 and 1945 over 2 million Koreans migrated to Japan. Koreans had been coming to Japan since immigration records began, even throughout the closed country period (sakoku jidai), coterminous with the Tokugawa era. The number began to increase after Korean ports were opened up under the terms of an unequal trade agreement in 1876, the new arrivals mainly working as labourers or street vendors in Tokyo. Koreans did not start to arrive in massive numbers, however, until after Japan annexed Korea in 1910. The main cause of this influx was the shortage of labour in Japan in the 1920s. Between 1920 and 1930 the number of Koreans in Japan increased more than tenfold to 419,000 (Lie 2008: 4). The flow of people was not unidirectional. Many Japanese moved throughout the Empire, working as farmers in rural areas, and bureaucrats in urban centres. Seoul (the administrative centre of Korea, known to the Japanese by its colonial name Keijō) saw the largest influx: from 1910 onwards, a quarter of the population was Japanese. 1 The need to conscript Korean labour into industry and the military became urgent following the start of Japan’s war with China in 1937 and the USA in 1941 (Ryang 1997: 6). In preparation for this conscription, a programme of imperialisation (kōminka), that is assimilation as colonial subjects, gathered pace under the slogan of naisen ittai (Japan and Korea together as one). By 1940 Koreans had to take a Japanese name and Korean language was removed from the school curriculum. Between 1939 and the end of the war over 600,000 Korean men were brought to Japan to work in mining, manufacturing, and construction industries, while over 300,000 Korean men were conscripted into the imperial army and navy from 1943 on (Ryang 2000: 3). Many women were also conscripted as labourers. This forced migration (kyōsei renkō) from the Korean peninsula to Japan (and to Japan’s new colonies) accounted for around half of the 2.4 million Koreans who were in Japan by 1945, but has come to stand for the entire movement of Koreans to Japan. Between 80,000 and 200,000 women, many from Korea and China, were forced to work as military prostitutes or ‘comfort women’ (jūgun ianfu), and were sent to front lines throughout the Empire (Conrad 2010: 168). A salient feature of the colonial period was systematic discrimination against Koreans. Alongside the traumas of forced migration and the comfort women, there were many instances of spectacular outbreaks of violence against Koreans in Japan. One paradigmatic instance that resonates through the Zainichi identity formation was the lethal pogrom that led to thousands of Koreans in Tokyo being killed, sparked by a rumour that Koreans were poisoning the water supply in the chaotic aftermath of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake.
The term Zainichi is now commonly extended backwards into the colonial period to refer to colonial Korean subjects. This conception of Zainichi often gives the 1910 annexation of Korea as the foundational moment, and the centenary of that event in 2010 saw a welter of books and films commemorating ‘One hundred years of Zainichi’. 2 Certainly the 1910 annexation is the most commonly cited originating moment in the on-screen expositionary titles with which so many documentaries and dramas open: white text on a black field solemnly announcing the birth of Zainichi.
This notion of continuity between the colonial and post-colonial periods can however elide the upheaval of the immediate post-defeat/-liberation decade. Most obviously, around three-quarters of the Korean population who were in Japan at the end of the war returned to the peninsula; and as I shall explain below, the 600,000 Koreans who remained in Japan experienced a dramatic change in their legal status (Ryang 2000: 4). This discontinuity is reflected in the film world. Of the well-known Korean filmmakers whose careers spanned the colonial and post-colonial periods, only the cinematographer Lee Byoung-woo (Inoue Kan) was able to work regularly in Japan (as well as in South Korea) after the war. Most of the Korean filmmakers whose careers began during the colonial period under the auspices of the Japanese studios, and who received their training in Kyoto or Tokyo, did not work in Japan after the war ended: cinematographer Kim Hak-seong (Japanese name Kanai Seiichi) worked exclusively in Korea after liberation, 3 while director Huh Young (Hinatsu Eitarō), after an apprenticeship in Japan, and making pro-Japanese propaganda films in Korea and Indonesia such as You and I [Kimi to boku] (Hinatsu 1941, only one reel extant), remained living and working in Indonesia after the war. 4 There is a discontinuity then in terms of personnel in the film world, between the partially hybrid yet deeply asymmetrical film culture of the colonial period, which was followed by a post-colonial Korean-in-Japan filmmaking practice that was limited to newsreels and education films produced and distributed by ethnic associations for the first two decades after the war. This discontinuity in personnel, and the absence of both verifiably Korean filmmakers and indeed representations of Koreans from mainstream film distribution channels in the post-war period is a symptom of the complete erasure of legal, social, and civic status of Koreans in Japan in the years immediately following the end of the war.
The Zainichi century position implies that the continuities over this period (the shared experience of being Korean in Japan) outweigh the very different legal statuses of Koreans in Japan before, during, and after the colonial period. This definition of Zainichi is not quite as coherent and inclusive as it might first appear, however. It is about tracing a lineage back to the mass migrations of the colonial period and its immediate aftermath, and hence is reserved for those who came during that period and their descendants. In general, Zainichi does not include ‘newcomers’, itself a slippery term but generally referring to Koreans who came to Japan following the normalisation of diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea in 1965. We can think of Zainichi as being a post-colonial formation, albeit one whose defining traumas extend back into the colonial era, and whose screen articulations are frequently structured by references to this period.
Zainichi as Post-Colonial Denizenship
The first decade after the war encompassed the Allied occupation of Japan (1945–52); the division in 1945 of the Korean peninsula into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North (known in Japanese as Kita-chōsen, or sometimes just Chōsen, the colonial-era designation for the peninsula) and the Republic of Korea in the South (which became known in Japanese as Kankoku, particularly after diplomatic normalisation in 1965), administered by the Soviets and the USA respectively; and the descent into the Korean War.
This period also witnessed the repatriation of three-quarters of the Korean population in Japan, and the piecemeal unpicking of the colonial subjecthood of those who remained in Japan. In December 1945 Koreans lost their voting rights, the Americans and Japanese both fearing they would form a left-leaning voting bloc (Kashiwazaki 2000: 21). In 1947 they had to register as aliens. In 1950 the nationality law excluded Koreans. Finally, they were formally stripped of their Japanese nationality under the terms of the San Francisco Treaty of 1952 (Ryang 1997: 120). Nevertheless, Koreans continued to enter Japan illegally, fleeing the military government of the South and then later the Korean War. The rebellion in 1948 and 1949 on Cheju Island against US military rule alone resulted in 40,000 entering Japan (Ryang 1997: 87). By 1952 the estimated 600,000 Koreans resident in Japan had lost the right to political participation, the right to permanent residence, access to social security, health insurance, income benefits, and national veterans/bereavement pensions, the right to overseas travel, and access to certain educational and occupational opportunities. Koreans in Japan had gone from being (second-class) colonial subjects, to being liberated people, to being stateless. An institution that became one of the most prominent signs of Zainichi disenfranchisement was inaugurated in 1955: the requirement that all Zainichi, as resident aliens, be fingerprinted (Lie 2008: 37). Fingerprinting would not be completely phased out until 1991.
Koreans in Japan would not be able to attain any kind of civil status until Japan’s resumption of diplomatic relations with South Korea in 1965, which gave Zainichi Koreans the possibility of naturalising as South Korean. Zainichi who took South Korean nationality gained the right to remain in Japan, and to travel overseas. By the end of the 1970s, just over half of registered Koreans in Japan had taken South Korean nationality. This proportion would peak at 76 % in 1996. Those who did not take South Korean nationality and retained their (default) affiliation with the North would not have any of the resources of citizenship until well into the 1980s. Although a growing nu...