This film delves into the historical experiences of Park Soo-nam, born in colonial-era Japan, retracing the journey and the history of Zainichi Koreans in Japan. Through the lens of two 16mm documentary films shot since 1985 and the restoration of unreleased footage, spanning 100,000 feet, it resurrects the testimonies of witnesses. The film raises questions … [Read More]
Tag: Zainichi
Selected publications
- Hwaji Shin: Being Korean, Becoming Japanese? Nationhood, Citizenship, and Resistance in Japan, University of Hawai'i Press 2024
- Yu Miri: The End of August tr Morgan Giles, Tilted Axis 2023
- Joshua Pilzer: Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of “Korea’s Hiroshima”, Oxford University Press 2022
- Elisa Shua Dusapin: The Pachinko Parlour tr Aneesa Abbas Higgins, Daunt 2022
- Chun Kyung-hyo, Haeran Shin, Kim Heuijeong, Kim Seok-hyang, Lee Hyunuk: North Korean Defectors in Diaspora: Identities, Mobilities, and Resettlements, Lexington Books 2022
- David S Roh: Minor Transpacific: Triangulating American, Japanese, and Korean Fictions, Stanford University Press 2021
- Nobuko Yamasaki: Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire: Fragmenting History, Routledge 2021
- Erik Ropers: Voices of the Korean Minority in Postwar Japan: Histories Against the Grain, Routledge 2020
- Yu Miri: Tokyo Ueno Station tr Morgan Giles, Tilted Axis 2019
- Anthology: Zainichi Literature ed John Lie, Univ of California Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies 2018
- Masaji Ishikawa: A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea tr Martin Brown, Risa Kobayashi, Amazon Crossing 2018
- Min Jin Lee: Pachinko, Apollo 2017
- Kim Myung Ja: The Korean Diaspora in Post War Japan: Geopolitics, Identity and Nation-Building, Bloomsbury, I.B. Tauris 2017
- Oliver Dew: Zainichi Cinema: Korean-in-Japan Film Culture, Palgrave 2016
- Anthology: Critical Readings on the Colonial Period of Korea 1910-1945 (4 vols) ed Hyung-Gu Lynn, Brill 2013
- Anthology: Into the Light: An Anthology of Literature by Koreans in Japan ed Melissa L. Wender, University of Hawai'i Press 2010
- Ken C Kawashima: The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan, Duke University Press 2009
- Anthology: Diaspora without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan ed Sonia Ryang and John Lie, University of California Press 2009
- Tessa Morris-Suzuki: Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War, Rowman + Littlefield 2007
- Melissa Wender: Lamentation as History: Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965-2000, Stanford University Press 2005
- Jackie J Kim: Hidden Treasures: Lives of First-Generation Korean Women in Japan, Rowman + Littlefield 2004
- Anthology: Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin ed Sonia Ryang, Routledge 2000
- Richard E Kim: Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood, University of California Press 1964
SOAS seminar: An Atomic Age Unleashed
This presentation explores the common culture of Cold War scientism and atomic developmentalism in early North and South Korea. While tens of thousands of Koreans were subject to the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, early peninsular analysis of the bombings rarely grappled with the existence of these individuals. The general exclusion of colonial subjects … [Read More]
Soup and Ideology: Yang Yonghi’s exploration of the Jeju 4:3 incident through her own family history
It must be a nightmare living with Yang Yonghi: you are constantly being filmed. Yang’s work focuses on her family history, and she has been collecting footage of her daily life since the mid ’90s. When the individual scenes are filmed – conversations, family meals, seemingly unremarkable incidents – the filming must seem without purpose. … [Read More]
Living Memories – the KCC’s summer season of documentaries
Continuing a summer tradition, the KCC’s film nights for late July and August focus on the documentay genre, in a season developed in collaboration with Birkbeck. Below is the official press release that tells you about the season. All of the films look well worth your time. We’ll be prioritising Im Heung-soon’s award-winning Factory Complex … [Read More]
Documentary screening: Soup and Ideology
After suffering an aneurysm, Yang Yonghi’s mother starts revealing tragic memories of her fleeing Korea during the Jeju incident in 1948. The Japanese-born filmmaker begins to piece together her present and her mother’s past, whom she visits in Osaka every month with her Japanese fiancé. They bond through cooking and tradition, despite their ideological differences … [Read More]
SOAS seminar: The Zainichi Korean Question
SOAS’s second Friday evening seminar of the new year: The Zainichi Korean Question: Decolonization and the Cold War in U.S.-Occupied Japan and Korea Dr Deokhyo Choi (Sheffield University) 24 January 2020, 5:15 – 7:00 PM Alumni Lecture Theatre, Paul Webley Wing (Senate House), SOAS Online registration required via SOAS website Abstract By the end of … [Read More]
Japan Society talk: Escaping to North Korea – with Markus Bell
Apologies for the late notice of tomorrow’s talk organised by the Japan Society, which may by now be fully subscribed. The speaker gave a fascinating talk at SOAS on broadly the same subject a few months ago, so I’d have high hopes of this one too. Escaping to North Korea – with Markus Bell 19 … [Read More]
Guilt, Nostalgia, and Victimhood: Korea in the Japanese Theatrical Imagination
Looks like a very interesting talk at the Japan Foundation on 1 December. Of course, it has to clash with something equally as compelling: a rare screening of Kim Ki-young’s Insect Woman at the KCC. The Japan Foundation hosts: Guilt, Nostalgia, and Victimhood: Korea in the Japanese Theatrical Imagination Speaker: Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei (UCLA) How … [Read More]
Book review: Kim Sok-pom — The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost
Kim Sok-pom: The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost Translated by Cindi Textor Columbia University Press, 2010 (114pp) Originally published in Japanese, 1970. What seems to be new entrant in the Korean literature in translation market is more complicated than it first seems. The author, Kim Sok-pom, is actually a second-generation zainichi Korean resident in Japan, … [Read More]
Film review: Sona, the other myself
The third Asia House Pan-Asian Film Festival offered the opportunity to see an unusual documentary. Yang Yonghi’s Sona, the other myself is a simple portrait of three generations of a family – an elderly ethnic Korean couple living with their daughter (Yang herself) in Osaka, and Yang’s three elder brothers and their children who live … [Read More]
Nineteen Years in South Korea’s Gulag
Suh Sung: Unbroken Spirits – Nineteen Years in South Korea’s Gulag Rowman & Littlefield, 2001 Original Japanese version, (Gokuchû 19 Nen, Nineteen Years in Prison) 1994 We are all familiar with stories reporting the horrors of torture and starvation in North Korean prison camps. What we can forget is that over the past decades South … [Read More]
DPRK Foreign Ministry Spokesman Blasts Anti-Chongryon Campaign in Japan
An interesting prelude to the two talks at Chatham House this week… A spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the DPRK on Sunday issued the statement : Japan has taken harsh actions against Chongryon and Koreans in Japan such as forcible search of its facilities and their houses, assaults and arrests of them … [Read More]