Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan’s East Asian Empire 9780824896270

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PASSING, POSING, PERSUASION

PASSING, POSING, PERSUASION Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan’s East Asian Empire

Edited by Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS Honolulu

​ All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printed, 2023 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Yi, Christina, editor. | Haag, Andre, editor. | Ryu, Catherine, editor. Title: Passing, posing, persuasion : cultural production and coloniality in Japan’s East Asian empire / edited by Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023024866 (print) | LCCN 2023024867 (ebook) | ISBN 9780824895228 (hardback) | ISBN 9780824896300 (paperback) | ISBN 9780824896287 (epub) | ISBN 9780824896294 (kindle edition) | ISBN 9780824896270 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Japanese literature—Shōwa period, 1926–1989—History and criticism. | Ethnicity—Japan—Colonies—History—20th century. | Passing (Identity)—Japan— Colonies—History—20th century. | Literature in propaganda—Japan—History— 20th century. | Propaganda, Japanese—Japan—Colonies—History—20th century. Classification: LCC PL726.82.E84 P37 2023 (print) | LCC PL726.82.E84 (ebook) | DDC 895.609/0044—dc23/eng/20230807 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023024866 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023024867

Cover art: A postcard from the late Meiji period, depicting a sailor and the Japanese flag. Artist unidentified, Japanese. Photograph © 2002 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ­  

vii

CHRISTINA YI, ANDRE HAAG, AND CATHERINE RYU ROBERT TIERNEY KIMBERLY KONO



NAYOUNG AIMEE K WON JOAN E. ERICSON FAYE YUAN KLEEMAN NOBUKO YAMASAKI

v

vi Contents

K ANG YUNI, TRANSLATED BY CINDI TEX TOR

Index

191

Contributors

201

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ­

An edited volume is much more than the sum of its parts. We would like to acknowledge the generous mentorship and support of Sharalyn Orbaugh, who not only played a foundational role in the organizing of the 2019 conference at the University of British Columbia (UBC) out of which this book emerged but also introduced us to the kamishibai play addressed in our introductory chapter. The editors gratefully thank all of the conference participants for their invaluable contributions and discussions. We wish to express our sincere gratitude to Stephanie Chun at the University of Hawai‘i Press, who expertly guided the publication of this volume at every stage, and to Stephen Ullstrom, who prepared the index. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers whose insightful suggestions made this edited volume all the stronger; and the members of the Zainichi Studies Consortium, without whose support and contributions this volume could not exist. The 2019 conference was generously funded by the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at UBC and the UBC Centres for Chinese Research, Japanese Research, and Korean Research, as well as the Asian Studies Center at Michigan State University; the Centers for Korean Studies and Japanese Studies at the University of Hawai‘i– Mānoa; the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Lehigh University; the Global Japanese Studies Cluster at Osaka University; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; and the Toshiba International Foundation. We also acknowledge the financial support provided for this volume by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the UBC Centre for Korean Research, and the UBC Scholarly Public Fund. Finally, we would like to thank our volume contributors, who responded to our numerous requests for revisions with tremendous patience and understanding; and our colleagues and students at Michigan State University, UBC, and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. From you we have learned that collaborative work is both an imperative and an opportunity for finding new and immensely rewarding avenues for research.

vii

1

INTRODUCTION Passing, Posing, and Persuasion in the Japanese Empire CHRISTINA YI, ANDRE HAAG, AND CATHERINE RYU

In 1942, soon after the Empire of Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor initiated what would come to be known as the Greater East Asia War, the Tokyobased National Association for Educational Paper Theater collaborated with the Government-General of Korea to produce a propaganda kamishibai (paper theater) play targeting the Korean masses.1 Titled My Precious Granddaughter (Kawaii mago musume), the play deploys a series of full-color illustrated play cards accompanied by scripted oral narration to relate the misadventures of an elderly Korean man named Kanai Eishoku (Kor.: Yŏngsik), who travels from his farming village to the colonial capital in order to visit his son’s family and settle some pressing business. As soon as he embarks on this trip, however, Eishoku encounters an incomprehensible and disconcerting world overwritten by the so-called “national language” (kokugo, denoting Japanese). Upon arrival at his son’s place, furthermore, he is taken aback to find that his granddaughter Gyokuki (Kor.: Okhŭi), whom he has not seen for about a year, now greets him in fluent Japanese. The play reaches its climax when both Gyokuki and her mother fall gravely ill. As soon as the old man seeks help from the mainland Japanese (naichijin) pharmacist at the local medical clinic, he is once again confronted with a seemingly impassable language barrier. Fortunately, at that very moment, Gyokuhi’s friend Yoshiko happens to walk into the clinic. Able to speak both Japanese and Korean, Yoshiko ends up interpreting for Eishoku. Thanks to her timely bilingual intervention, Gyokuki and her mother finally get the medical attention they need, and Eishoku vows to start learning Japanese. The play ends with a picture of Eishoku on the train, holding in his lap a kokugo primer that Gyokuki has given him. “I have no doubt,” the narrator concludes, “that he will soon become fluent in the national language a fter his return to the village.”2

1

2  Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu

FIGURE 1. Illustrated play card 13 from My Precious Granddaughter, featuring (from left) the pharmacist, Eishoku, and Yoshiko.

The propaganda message of My Precious Granddaughter is clear: assimilation through the “national language” is essential for ensuring the well-being and success of the individual subject, the family, and, in turn, the imperial nation. At the same time, it is important to note how the story’s representation of colonial Korea is also visually underscored through sartorial differentiation. Clad as he is in “traditional” clothes that suggest both his age and his rural origins, Eishoku is marked as distinct from the younger generation—not only from his granddaughter Gyokuki, who wears a localized colonial version of a modern schoolgirl uniform, but also from the young men in the militarized khaki “national dress” (kokumin-fuku) ­ who stand out prominently in nearly all illustrations of the urban landscape.3 In the scene featured here (see Figure 1), an even starker contrast is highlighted through the use of the color white, which both links and subtly contrasts the crisp modern suit of the pharmacist, the long robes of the linguistically ineffectual Eishoku, and finally the Japanese-style schoolgirl uniform worn by Yoshiko. In this scene, both Eishoku and the pharmacist look toward the mediating figure of Yoshiko, whose bilingual fluency facilitates these men’s conversation and is key to saving Eishoku’s family. Most relevant to the concerns of this volume, however, are the ambiguities and questions raised by the character of Yoshiko herself. Introduced by the narrator as “Shirakawa Yoshiko, Gyokuki’s friend,” Yoshiko is—visually, at least— nearly indistinguishable from Gyokuki save for small details on their school

Introduction  3

uniforms. Based on her family name, it would be easy to assume that Yoshiko is mainland Japanese, but given that this play was produced some two years after the promulgation of the sōshi kaimei (lit. “establishing family names and changing given names”) policy in Korea, it is difficult to ascertain Yoshiko’s ethnic origins with any certainty.4 Her facility with both the Japanese and Korean languages would not have been unusual among young, upper-class Korean children educated under the colonial educational system. Yet it is also entirely possible that Yoshiko, whose origins are not explicitly stated and thus remain irresolvable within the kamishibai text, was meant to be read as a character personifying the ideals of “mainland Japan and Korea as one body” (naisen ittai) and “harmony between Japan and Korea” (Nissen yūwa), slogans that were loudly touted by the colonial government at the time. We chose to begin this introductory essay with the above discussion because it renders visible the main issues emphasized in this book: the fundamental role of language, clothing, and other cultural markers in not merely mediating but also producing colonial hierarchies; the intense and intensely tangled motivations that play a part in colonial and postcolonial interactions; and the “overlap and displacement of domains of difference” that make up the Januslike nature of colonial hybridity.5 In other words, cultural artifacts of colonialism such as My Precious Granddaughter remind us that, by definition, empires engender and constitute heterogeneous amalgams that depend upon the accommodation of difference. Along those lines, this edited volume proposes new approaches to understanding the shifting dynamics of sameness and difference in the cultural production of imperial Japan. Here cultural production refers to both the material texts produced within the amorphous boundaries of the Japanese East Asian empire and the ways in which imperialism operated through cultural apparatuses. As indicated in the title, the volume stresses the various negotiations and contestations that occurred when Japanese imperialists attempted to “persuade” colonized subjects to identify with the empire and its projects even while simultaneously maintaining the distinctions that subjugated them as colonial subjects, thus insidiously marking any attempts to self-identify as Japanese as inauthentic, illegitimate forms of “passing” or “posing.” We consider passing and posing together, rather than separately, to delineate not only the porous boundaries that attended the situation coloniale but also the intermingled complexity of identity practices and performances engendered by the paradoxes of empire. PASSING IN AND OUT OF EMPIRE

When Japan acquired Taiwan as its first formal colony in 1895, it became another player in a “race for empire” overwhelmingly dominated by White Western powers. From the outset, then, Japanese officials pursued territorial expansion within a larger global framework of domination, justifying their colonizing enterprises

4  Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu

as a direct response to the threat of Western imperialism even as they drew upon the same legal and discursive models as their Western counterparts.6 By the end of the Meiji period (1868–1912), Japanese imperial control had been established over Hokkaidō, Karafuto, Korea, southern Manchuria, the Ryūkyū Islands, and Taiwan. The rhetoric of sameness—most often articulated as racial and cultural proximity—presented a powerful tool for tying the disparate parts of the East Asian periphery together.7 But over the fifty-year span of Japanese imperial expansion, the articulation of integrative discourses and policies (collectively referred to as dōka, lit. “making the same”) would go through numerous phases and present myriad faces, from vague assertions of rather crude Japanization in the early years of Japanese rule to the interwar visions of cultural pluralism.8 If dōka aimed to bring subject populations into greater conformity with a Japanese standard set by the Yamato Japanese ethnonation, the nationalizing imperatives of such processes at the same time signaled constant redefinition and extension of the category “Japanese” into an imperial umbrella that could subsume other identities such as Korean, Ryūkyūan, or Taiwanese.9 This does not mean that colonial subjects were not racialized. Many terms came to be used in imperial Japan to anthropologically differentiate among groups of people, including jinshu (race), shuzoku (tribe; race), and minzoku (people; ethnic nation; ethnos).10 While some scholars have defined jinshu through biological determinants such as consanguinity and minzoku through sociocultural determinants, the staggering heterogeneity of racialized signifiers and positionings reflected in this volume substantiate Atsuko Ueda’s contention that race, ethnicity, and nationality are “conflated, contaminated, and mutually invasive” notions inextricable from the workings of modernity itself.11 And while minzoku— a word that did not necessarily depend upon biological determinants— eventually came to be favored by Japanese intellectuals by the early twentieth century, this does not mean that it can be disarticulated from race; rather, its “convenient blurring between the cultural and genetic aspects of ethnicity” allowed imperialists to proclaim the inclusiveness of the Japanese Empire while still insisting upon the uniqueness of Japanese blood.12 Sameness-oriented rhetoric and practice reached its apex in the wartime imperialization (kōminka) policies and propaganda campaigns that, from the late 1930s onward, aimed to transform colonial subjects into loyal imperial subjects willing to live and die for the Japanese emperor. As Leo Ching reminds us, kōminka must be understood in both its relation to and difference from previous forms of assimilation. In its emphasis on material practice and selfcultivation, kōminka radically shifted the onus of imperial subjectification onto the colonial subjects themselves. “Cultural representation ­ ­ ­ ­under kōminka,” Ching argues, “therefore displaced the concrete problematic of the social and replaced it with the ontology of the personal.”13 Significantly, the official imperial propaganda of becoming Japanese inside and out via dōka or kōminka side-

Introduction  5

stepped any insinuation that imperialized subjects would be merely posing, let alone passing, as incorporated constituents of greater Japan. Any social parity or equality promised by imperialization was, from the beginning, undermined by the emphatically unequal structures of colonial domination and emergent distinctions between categories of subjects. Perhaps the most important divide within Japan’s East Asian empire was the invisible line separating people who originated in the Japanese Archipelago’s main islands (naichi) from those subjects with roots in territories external to the metropole (the gaichi) and not subject to the Meiji Imperial Constitution of 1889.14 Accordingly, as the empire expanded, the ultimate arbiter for establishing such roots, and thus differentiating colonizer from colonized, would be found in the koseki, or family registry. Instituted during the Meiji period, the family registry system was used to document the registered domicile, births, deaths, marriages, name changes, and other information related to a patrilineal household unit. David Chapman notes that the family register was “an instrument of assimilation with the power to exclude and expel. It also provided layered demarcation by creating external (collectively known as gaichi koseki) territory registers that reflected, but existed apart from, the internal (naichi koseki) register.”15 Legally, mainland Japanese had their family registers housed on the mainland, while colonial subjects were required to keep their family registries in the colonies, regardless of actual residence. In casual, quotidian encounters, however, it was not often feasible to verify the location of one’s family register, and an array of other markers of difference and identity were instead utilized in its place— language, clothing, habitus, and names chief among them. The “differential inclusion” of the family registry system found its most controversial manifestation in the sōshi kaimei legislation of 1940, promulgated in colonial Korea as part of kōminka.16 Literally understood, sōshi kaimei refers to the establishment of a surname (shi) and change of a given name (mei). But it is impor tant to emphasize that shi corresponds specifically to the family name listed in a koseki and all legal ties and responsibilities governed through it. The sōshi part of sōshi kaimei therefore meant the mandatory registration of one’s family unit through a new family registry system in Korea that was more closely aligned to that of mainland Japan.17 Kaimei, in contrast, gave colonial subjects the option of changing their given name for a fee. While Koreans were “encouraged” to choose surnames resembling Japanese ones—which, in many cases, meant adding an extra sinograph to a clan name in order to create a surname with two sinographs, as was common in mainland Japan—this was not necessarily the same as choosing a “Japanese” surname. Again, while registering a surname according to the new family registry system was required, changing one’s given name was not. The latter was in fact discouraged by the GovernmentGeneral and local police forces, so as to preserve a clear difference between colonizer and colonized.18 As the implementation of sōshi kaimei illustrates,

6  Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu

names were central to establishing identity, as well as maintaining clear distinctions among subjects of empire, but—like so many other markers—were far from immutable. Thus, as the chapters in Passing, Posing, Persuasion make clear, it would be a gross misapprehension to accept imperial Japan’s stated aims of eradicating the sense of difference or discrimination that might compel some subjects to conceal the “true” origins of their ancestry. Instead, under imperial rhetorics stressing sameness and assimilation policy, the boundary lines of being and belonging in the empire proved to be multiple and unstable. Such fluidity in turn produced opportunities (or demands) for imperial subjects to assume or discard identities or to wear several mismatched, overlapping identities at once. In some telling instances, the cultural effects generated by these opportunities and demands were strikingly reminiscent of the slippery identity practice known elsewhere as passing. We ask, then, what it means to employ the transplanted topos of passing as a main lens through which to read and reimagine the cultures of the Japanese colonial empire. Passing can be broadly defined as “the crossing of any line that divides social groups,” but it has often referred more specifically to clandestine transgressions of the “social boundary of race” by non-White individuals representing themselves as White.19 Although the term has been adopted to describe crossings in myriad other situations, it must be acknowledged that the concept of passing has been indelibly imprinted by the US Black/White racial context from which it emerged as a legacy of race-based chattel slavery, crystalizing in a color line guarded by severe legal and social discrimination as well as notions of blood quanta and hypodescent.20 Passing is a very familiar concept in North America, where the phenomenon has generated a vast body of cultural production and scholarship. Yet, while the terms “passing” or “to pass” hold special resonance when invoked in the English language, and even in contexts other than that of racial passing, no equivalent term wielding comparable significance can be found within the languages used in imperial Japan. For this reason, to impose the critical frame of passing on this terrain means purposefully using the term against the grain, strategically transplanted and modified but with an awareness of its historical baggage, to open up new vistas for consideration of an East Asian empire beyond historical frameworks such as assimilative imperialization. In this volume we conceptualize passing in the following ways: as a form of ontological identity making; as a practice that emerges in response to systemic inequalities; and as a phenomenon that simultaneously draws upon and disrupts established epistemologies (of race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of identity). In an expansive sense, it is indeed possible to identify acts and situations analogous or adjacent to passing across the territories of the Japanese Empire and in other regions around the globe. Although little transnational scholarship of passing has emerged to integrate these disparate, locally specific iterations, in

Introduction  7

the 1930s the American sociologist Everett Stonequist made an early attempt to capture the worldwide ubiquity of passing beyond the borders of the United States. As Stonequist noted, Passing is found in every race situation where the subordinate race is held in disesteem. It is noted by students of mixed bloods in such varied regions as India, South Africa, the West Indies, and in South America. Among Jews it has long been a problem, in the past leading Gentiles to protect themselves by making regulations which provided for the wearing of a distinctive badge. It is found in the relations of classes and castes. For instance, among the despised class or caste of the Japanese, the Eta, individuals find it essential to conceal their group identity in order to avoid discrimination. Among immigrant groups it is a frequent phenomenon, taking curious forms in local environments. . . . The principle seems to be that of the minority wishing to share the advantages of membership in the majority, or to escape its discriminations and antagonisms.21

It is significant that Stonequist identified passing in 1930s Japan not among external or peripheral colonial subjects from Korea or Taiwan but as a dilemma faced by the eta, an outcast group formalized during the Edo period (1603–1867) who, although racially indistinguishable from other Japanese citizens, were racialized as possessing unclean or even foreign bloodlines. As part of early Meiji-era nation-building efforts, such outcast groups (who came to be collectively referred to as burakumin) were promised inclusion as full Japanese subjects even as they were legally marked as “new commoners,” or shinheimin, to separate them from the majority of “ordinary people,” or futsūmin. Discrimination against the burakumin, and corresponding efforts by individuals to hide their backgrounds in order to pass, were widely acknowledged in texts from that period. The best-known modern Japanese novel of passing, Shimazaki Tōson’s The Broken Commandment (Hakai, 1906) features a protagonist desperately seeking to conceal and escape his eta origins and who at one point offers a reflection on his predicament: “he was loathe to think of himself as an eta. Until now, he had passed as an ordinary person [ futsū no ningen de tōtte kita], and of course wanted to pass as an ordinary person in the future [kore kara saki totemo futsū no ningen de tōritai].”22 Tōson’s explicit inscription of the racialized subject’s drive to pass as an “ordinary” Japanese citizen, here evoked in language reminiscent of Englishlanguage passing discourse (by the use of the verb tōru, to pass), might represent a milestone in the expression of passing in Japan. More than a half century ­later, The Broken Commandment would be frequently alluded to in both the writings of burakumin writers like Nakagami Kenji and the literary production of Japan’s postwar Zainichi (resident; lit. “residing in Japan”) Korean minority, who faced homologous passing predicaments.23 Indeed, the examples of the burakumin

8  Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu

minority and postwar Zainichi Korean community, for whom passing came to be the “default” condition, have tended to dominate social discussions and scholarship on problems involving concealment of “ethnic” origins and transgressive ontological performances in modern and contemporary Japan.24 In Passing, Posing, Persuasion we extend considerations of passing back in time to the prewar and wartime Japanese colonial empire. Doing so can serve as a disruptive framework for charting a space of ambiguity, tension, and play in between the inherited poles of assimilation and discrimination, collaboration and resistance. At the same time, the shifting imperial identities captured in popular culture, theater, film, and literature cannot necessarily be reduced to passing as conventionally defined; the contributions to this volume thus engage with further modification of the category and the possibility that passing acts might be articulated as genuine transformation, mistaken identity, the desired or unintended effects of imperial propaganda and persuasion, or self-conscious and exhibitionist posing. While the terms “passing” and “posing” are sometimes used interchangeably, Linda Williams’ characterization of the distinction between passing and posing is relevant when thinking about the power relations of performance. In Playing the Race Card Williams places posing and passing at the opposite ends of the visuality spectrum, arguing that “where whites who pose as black intentionally exhibit all the artifice of their performance— exaggerated gestures, blackface make-up—blacks who pass as white suppress the obvious artifice of performance. Passing is a performance whose success depends on not overacting.”25 Williams’ formulation identifies both degree and intent as a basis to differentiate posing from passing. That is to say, the distinction between the two acts might be based on the manner in which one performs the codified attributes of a desired identity— either in an exaggerated or understated manner, with an aim of controlling the audience’s perception of, and response to, the assumed identity in the performer’s favor. Put differently, posing renders visible the gap between an assigned identity and an assumed identity, whereas passing makes that gap invisible. Given the intentionally exhibitive nature of posing, the instances of this kind of identity performance are observed most markedly in film and theater, as well as in literary productions that feature a poseur as protagonist. What interests us here are the ways in which posing functioned in parallel with other related identity practices (such as passing) as a driving force behind various forms of entertainment, literature, and propaganda that were produced and consumed by those in mainland Japan and its colonies. It has been argued that passing is not a question of identity so much as it is a question of reading identity through “multiple codes of intelligibility” that cannot be confined to the merely (or all too) visible. ­ ­ 26 In the space of the Japanese colonial empire, whether a given subject was regarded as passing, posing, or genuinely embodying imperial subjecthood could come down to modes and codes of reading that emerged out of imperial

Introduction  9

cultures of persuasion and propaganda. As the chapters in Passing, Posing, Persuasion amply and consistently attest, both passing and posing within this milieu drew upon codes that were simultaneously visible and invisible, spoken and silent, read and misread across ever-shifting boundaries of belonging. CULTURES OF PROPAGANDA AND PERSUASION

A number of essays herein suggest how intimately the phenomena of colonial passing and posing were linked to the unexpected cultural effects and unsteady affects of imperial propaganda, as well as to more subtle persuasion campaigns. In assessing the efforts to make the ideologies of empire appealing to target audiences, the question is not only how to identify “propaganda” or its aims but also how to trace the diffuse cultural reception of imperial tenets of assimilation and inclusion across texts and media. Given that the Japanese imperial order inevitably failed to live up to rhetorical promises of inclusion and impartiality in practice, it would be easy to dismiss the ideologies it propagated as mere affectations of a self-serving strategic pose. As Takashi Fujitani has urged, however, we may look beyond the common “argument of obvious duplicity” leveled at imperial Japanese messaging campaigns in order to appreciate the unexpected or “unintended effects” of official pronouncements that rendered old distinctions moot.27 Intentions aside, the very act of posing as an empire that disavowed discrimination and was committed to integrating subjects regardless of ethnonational origins triggered movements and transformations that, once begun, could not easily be controlled or contained. Furthermore, campaigns to spread the gospels of assimilation and harmony had not only sociopolitical but also affective consequences that were manifest in cultural production that engaged with and shaped the tenets of Japanese imperial ideology. In Passing, Posing, Persuasion we seek to shift the focus from received notions of propaganda as indoctrination to the broader cultural arenas of persuasion—the sites of multilateral negotiation and communication between the state and ideologues, cultural producers, and target audiences. While it is common to draw a line between propaganda (which “appeals to emotion” to shape mass opinion) and persuasion (as a form of “dialogue based on reason that satisfies both parties”), such distinctions are blurred in the realms of Japanese cultural production explored herein.28 The works of art and entertainment that interest this book’s contributors appealed to audiences’ affect as well as their logic, common sense, and self-interest; characteristic of the broader realm of interactive and transactive persuasion, such texts participated in a “continuous and dynamic process of cocreating meaning” aimed at bringing about “voluntary change” in “audience perceptions, cognitions, or behaviors.”29 The transformation most desired from subjects of imperial Japan—the spontaneous welling of ardent devotion to the empire and its goals—would be most meaningful if voluntarily offered and wholly internalized. For cultures of propaganda and

10  Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu

persuasion to be effective, they must be affective, moving people to feel and act in desired ways. Imperial suasion campaigns reflected an awareness that reforms envisioned by imperial ideologies could not be achieved by heavy-handed exhortation or coercion alone, for they required an emotional buy-in from those whom the elites sought to reach and sway; Christopher P. Hanscom and Dennis Washburn aptly point out that “an affect must be present for one to invest in ideology—that is, ideology has to be affectively charged for it to constitute individual experience.”30 To forge new affective ties between peoples and lands, and to flesh out the rather abstract slogans calling for an integrative and inclusive “greater Japan,” imperial boosters elevated certain exemplary figures and cases to present consumers with models illustrating the correct way to feel and act. Popular representations of harmony and oneness naturalized and rendered palatable these reconfigured relationships, often by drawing on familiar metaphors such as that of the extended family or romantic liaisons.31 The old and new media technologies of culture, such as fiction, film, and theater, constituted powerful affective technologies when mobilized for persuasive ends. The overarching objective of these strains of imperial propaganda was to induce audiences to accept their place in a transnational, pan-Asian, Japanese order and also to accept the inclusion of others who had heretofore resided on the other side of national boundaries. It is crucial to underscore that the targets of these persuasive efforts were not limited to colonially occupied populations but also included the insular public of the Japanese inner lands. That significant energy was devoted to selling integration and assimilation to both colonizer and colonized indicates the possibility that these policies would be met with resistance on both sides of the divide. If assimilation and imperialization threatened to erase the distinctive cultural identities of colonized races, these prerogatives at once signaled that the scope of “Japan” and “the Japanese” would be refigured beyond recognition, imperiling the privileged position of mainlanders. Thus, the Yamato Japanese ethnonation also had to be persuaded to overcome narrow national prejudice, racism, xenophobia, and resistance to sharing social space and to recognize Koreans, Taiwanese, and others as new compatriots. It should come as no surprise that domestic publics were also subject to such suasion and propaganda efforts. It was, after all, the inhabitants of the Japanese Archipelago who were first made Japanese through programs of “internal assimilation” or “self-colonization,” as Meiji-era nation building could be reframed.32 With the expansion of the colonial empire, however, these national subjects were asked to transcend insularity and accept enlarged roles in an imagined community that had, somehow, to be made attractive despite proliferating potential for conflict. Although empire writ large proved popular domestically, this support did not necessarily extend to specific policies and the sacrifices demanded. Officials and commentators at times lamented that narrowminded naichijin, particularly colonial settlers, were proving poor models of assimilation. They failed to embody the ideals of the empire when they acted

Introduction  11

arrogantly or abusively toward Korean and Taiwanese compatriots, potentially alienating them in ways that jeopardized the empire’s mission.33 Consequently, it was necessary to show mainland Japanese how to reform themselves into more magnanimous imperial Japanese capable of leading the grand projects of expansion and integration and entice them to do so; imperial tales of heroism (bidan), novels, and films from the era featured scenes showcasing model Japanese who displayed the correct attitudes while chastising insular ethnoracial prejudice and pernicious stereotypes against “new Japanese” compatriots. To return a final time to My Precious Granddaughter, it can be argued that the character of Yoshiko embodies (literally and literarily) the propaganda slogan naisen ittai, or mainland Japan and Korea, as one body; she can be interpreted as someone who has assimilated so perfectly that it is impossible to see the line between “Japan” and “Korea.” That colonial assimilation was meant to prop up the ambitions of the wartime Japanese state goes without saying. But there is also something dangerous or provocative about a colonized body that is indistinguishable from that of her colonizer, as Eishoku’s own initial negative reactions to Yoshiko and the “differential inclusion” of sōshi kaimei make clear. From the perspective of the colonizer, then, the colonial subject must “bear the trace of the local while remaining desirous of becoming imperial” or, in other words, must be made to desire the ( Japanese) imperial while never being allowed to become it.34 What does Yoshiko desire? We cannot know because she does not say. Within the play, the question of whether she is passing, posing, or doing something else entirely is irrelevant; she simply is, as the forces of colonialism have made her. We might instead ask what is at stake in framing representations of colonial identity and belonging through the lens of passing, posing, or persuasion. In the absence of ontological certainty, for example, one cannot ignore the power of the state in determining what constitutes an act of passing and who gets to decide. Furthermore, the borders that engender passing are never stable but constantly shift and warp over time and place and may be recontextualized into other forms after the context of empire has itself passed. While Passing, Posing, Persuasion focuses primarily on the period between the start of Japan’s formal empire and its forcible dissolution following unconditional surrender to the Allied powers, it is our contention that the dynamics of race and racism from that time did not disappear or get “resolved” a fter 1945 but continue to configure (and disfigure) ethnoracial relations in East Asia even today.35 OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS

The chapters collected herein probe the problematics of passing, posing, and persuasion at different junctures in time, at different geographical sites, and through various cultural media. In chapter 2, “A Japanese Othello in Taiwan: Performing Patriarchy, Race, and Empire in Imperial Japan,” Robert Tierney

12  Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu

elucidates the discursive construction of Shakespeare’s Othello on the Japanese stage as an instance of a “different vernacular” Shakespeare, negotiated and produced through a “strategy of mimicry.” Localizing the play to a twentieth-century Japan defined by both its ambivalent relation to the West and its rapport with recently colonized, ethnically diverse Taiwan, Emi Suiin’s translation refigures the Moor of Venice as a Japanese Osero (Othello) named Muro Wajirō, performed in blackface by Kawakami Otojirō (1864–1911). Wajirō, though rumored to be a passing “new commoner,” is dispatched as Governor-General to subjugate the Taiwanese “savages” (seiban). Tierney maintains that this theatrical adaptation can be read as a political melodrama that “performed” the pedagogical purpose of educating audiences about Japan’s newly recognized status as a colonial empire situated within global imperial and racial hierarchies; in that respect, it resembles the educational ethnographic showcases that were contemporaneous with the play. It is significant, furthermore, that the Japanese Othello is associated with the internal, invisible minority of new commoners, reflecting a multilayered displacement of abjection. Turning to the later stages of empire and the popular fiction genre of continental romance, we find Tierney’s disquisition on racial identity and hierarchy echoed and transformed in chapter 3, “Passing and Posing in Colonial Manchuria in Murō Saisei’s Koto of the Continent,” by Kimberly Kono. Through an analysis of the novel’s central character Akiko, a twentysomething protagonist born and raised in Manchuria whose identity becomes the object of deep suspicion among the nationalist Japanese suitors pursuing her, Kono explores the resonance of accusations of passing rather than the act of passing itself. The suitors suspect that Akiko is a woman of mixed race (presumably part Russian) who is furtively passing as Japanese. As Kono’s reading demonstrates, it is Akiko’s nonstandard Japanese, together with her pale complexion and apparent failure to perform the codes of normative Japa neseness, that set her apart as other, a figure of simultaneous desire and anxiety in the eyes of the male characters. Both Tierney’s and Kono’s chapters shed light on the fundamental epistemological aporia of Japanese identity. While Wajirō’s suicide— a complete removal of the racialized other—provides convenient closure to the Japanese play Osero, Saisei’s Koto of the Continent (Tairiku no koto, 1937) resolves the tension around Akiko’s otherness by domesticating it through the power of education back in Japan. The pressures of passing and persuasion within the empire often fell most heavily on its Korean subjects, and particularly those migrants to the metropolitan naichi. Chapter 4, Andre Haag’s “Passing, Paranoia, and the Korea Problem: Cultures of ‘Telling the Difference’ in Imperial Japan,” relates a cultural history of the specter of Korean passing as apprehended by the colonizers, for whom it provoked simmering anxieties about the incorporation of new, potentially unreliable Japanese subjects. The chapter locates unsettled evocations of passing in narratives and images acknowledging the structural possibility that “treacherous Korean malcontents” (futei Senjin), who are visibly indistinguish-

Introduction  13

able from naichi Japanese as well as “good Korean” subjects, would disguise themselves as mainland Japanese. Haag traces how the imperial surveillance regime’s efforts to apprehend and contain the disavowed specter of Korean passing conjured a paranoia about the failure to “tell the difference” that traveled back and forth between periphery and center along with migrating narratives and bodies. Such instabilities culminated most concretely in the so-called Korean Panic of 1923, a genocidal massacre of Koreans by the Japanese, and then shaped postpanic fictional narratives such as Fujimori Seikichi’s proletarian short story “Lieutenant Kusama” (1928), in which “mistaken mainlanders” were subjected to the very racialized fear of passing projected onto futei Senjin. In chapter 5, Nayoung Aimee Kwon’s “Pluralizing Passing and Transpacific Afro-Asian Solidarities: Passings and Impasses across Colonial Korea and the Segregated United States,” these unstable ontologies are explored in a comparative frame that centers the perspective of the marginal literary figures standing on the threshold of the metropolitan literary field. Taking up the case of novelist Kim Saryang, Kwon works to further expand on models of passing under structural racism in a way that can potentially open up new methodological possibilities by ultimately connecting the Japanese Empire to transpacific and transatlantic genealogies of race. Kim Saryang is arguably best known for the celebrated 1939 story “Into the Light” (Hikari no naka ni), which features colonized Korean migrants living at the margins of Tokyo who actively or passively pass as Japanese. By exploring the myriad passings and impasses that marked Kim’s literary life and texts in dialogue with the passing narratives of Langston Hughes, a Black writer from the segregated United States, Kwon’s chapter pierces a conundrum of privilege: passing as a form of special yet limited access to ethnoracially gated spaces offered only to the “exceptional” colonized or minor(ity) subject, who enjoys this mobility via contingencies such as class, gender, education, and language proficiency, as well as skin tone. The result is a preliminary gesture toward a transhemispheric and dialogic ethics of engagement and empathy. The malleability of the empire’s children (sometimes known as the shōkokumin, or “ little national citizens”) made them ideal conduits for propagating imperial ideologies, and it is well established that formal, school-based education was accorded a central role in shaping the next generation of imperial subjects.36 Yet, schooling in kokugo, history, and morals was supplemented (or potentially subverted) outside the classroom in popular cultural media such as children’s magazines and literature. Chapter  6, “Crafting the Colonial ‘Japanese Child,’ ” by Joan E. Ericson, examines the figure of the child in imperial cultural production through a cache of colonial-era children’s journals from Manchuria and Taiwan that were discovered in the attic of a library in Hokkaidō, Japan, in 2004. Ericson’s close reading of this body of children’s literature and commentary interrogates what it meant to be or become a “Japanese child” in the 1930s in light of the journals’ objective to help “culturally inferior” children

14  Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu

on the periphery excel or even “exceed” their counterparts from the Japanese mainland. As such, the chapter illuminates vital elements indispensable to the process of crafting a child as “Japanese” in manners, morals, identity, and aspirations while mapping the constraints of a colonial context that stressed knowing one’s proper place within ethnic and cultural hierarchies. Imperial campaigns adopting the “soft propaganda” of entertainment media to persuade consumers to accept a place in a new Japanese order reached their zenith in the last years of wartime expansion that produced the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The chameleonlike actress Li Xianglan (also known as Ri Kōran, 1920–2014) is the primary subject of two chapters in this volume. Born Yamaguchi Yoshiko to Japanese parents in northeast China, as Li (Ri) she publicly passed as a Chinese actress off-screen and posed on-screen as heroines representing a variety of ethnoracial backgrounds. Her performances breathed life into propaganda films aimed at utilizing the persuasive power and pleasure of cinematic language to further cultural assimilation, harmonization, and co-prosperity in the empire’s occupied territories by modeling how a pliable native woman could overcome her resistance to communion with Japan. In chapter 7, “A Woman for Every Tribe: Li Xianglan and Her Construction of a Pan-Asian Femininity,” Faye Kleeman recovers the versatility and utility of Li’s successful filmic persona as the emblematic figure of pan-A sian femininity capable of portraying such diverse roles as a Korean woman, a Manchurian girl, an Indigenous Taiwanese girl, or even a Russian girl. What is significant here, however, is the gap between what Li has come to embody on-screen and the very absence, or impossibility, of “the original”—that is to say, the ontological being behind that filmic figure. In this sense, Kleeman demonstrates the ways in which Li’s “borderless” (mukokuseki) filmic persona functions as a simulacrum of the Japanese Empire itself. On the other hand, chapter 8, “Ri Kōran: Posing and Passing as a ‘Cultured Native,’ ” by Nobuko Yamasaki, revisits the actress’s life and work from a different angle and cinematic text. The focus here is the production, circulation, and divided reception of Suzhou Nights (Soshū no yoru), the 1941 Japanese and Manchurian joint production that presented at once a gendered geopolitical allegory for Sino-Japanese relations and a veiled challenge to the dominant discourse surrounding the empire’s harmonizing interracial project in Manchukuo and occupied China. Yamasaki’s reading exposes the patently convoluted logic of the film, which abruptly rejects an interracial coupling between a Japanese doctor and a Chinese childcare worker named Meiran (played by Li Xianglan / Ri Kōran) in favor of an endogamous marriage between Meiran and a Chinese man. Yamasaki views this ending as a telling indicator of how the film’s propagandistic objective was compromised by contemporaneous biopolitical anxieties, resulting in its failure to persuade audiences of the sincerity behind the Japanese Empire’s integrative project. Taken together, chapters 7 and 8 throw into relief the extent to which Li’s personal and professional identity practices were deeply

Introduction  15

entrenched in the structure of power and the sociopolitical context of imperial Japan and beyond, even as her star text may have advanced an alternative archetype of expanded “Japanese” subjectivity not bound to a certain kind of ethnoracial body. Chapter 9, “In the Shadow of Sōshi Kaimei: Imposed and Adopted Names in Yū Miri’s The End of August,” by Kang Yuni in collaboration with Cindi Textor, serves as the volume’s epilogue and turns to the long-lasting aftereffects of the era of imperial passing, posing, and persuasion that haunt contemporary narratives of the Zainichi Korean population, historically one of the largest ethnic minority communities in modern Japan and a living legacy of its colonial past. The lives of Zainichi Koreans, moreover, are marked by practices of passing that indicate continuity with the age of empire and assimilation, from the use of a Japanese-style name (tsūmei) for day-to-day convenience to passing passively by disrecognition. Kang discovers a site for postcolonial identity construction and contestation in prominent Zainichi writer Yū Miri’s 2004 novel The End of August (Hachigatsu no hate), which portrays a diverse cast of Korean characters— ethnic nationalists, “collaborators,” and comfort women—navigating the double binds of naming and subjectivity during the colonial era. Although The End of August does not explicitly thematize ethnoracial passing per se, Kang’s analysis highlights the novel’s engagement with the closely linked problematic of naming as a marker of identity in the long shadow of the sōshi kaimei name reform policy, a mechanism of imperial persuasion that, in postcolonial memory, is commonly seen as robbing Korean subjects of their very identities. While The End of August has been regarded as signaling Yū’s awakening to ethnic Korean issues and history in her fiction, Kang is attentive to the text’s critical questioning of schemas that equate the “true name” (honmyō) with a genuine ethnonational subjectivity and treat anything else as capitulation or betrayal. Textor’s commentary, in turn, examines the stakes of translating a discourse as ethically weighty as that of passing across radically different linguistic and cultural contexts. It may be argued that passing, posing, and persuasion are above all else about representation, and that cultural production is the site where the practices and politics of that representation are most forcibly encountered, engaged, and exposed. Taken together, the essays in Passing, Posing, Persuasion reiterate the importance of analyzing the global configurations of race and ethnicity at play in East Asian cultural production. At the same time, they are also attentive to the specificities of people’s experience of empire, and the various rhetorical strategies, historical circumstances, and material capital that cultural producers drew upon in responding to the exigencies of empire. Transference to the realm of “culture” may have a refining, elevating, or palliative effect on the hard edges of imperial geopolitics, essentially laundering the messages of imperial propaganda. Yet, as Edward Said has observed, culture might instead be regarded as “a sort of theater where various political and

16  Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu

ideological causes engage one another. . . . [C]ulture can even be a battleground on which causes expose themselves to the light of day and contend with one another.”37 In this arena of contest, the meanings attached to the markers, signs, and symbols of nation and empire did not remain fixed in the course of reception. The cultural products that engaged with imperial ideologies were as likely to reveal the contradictions or failures of official visions as they were to affirm the values of unity and harmony. Imperial boosters had no absolute monopoly on the arts of persuasion. Imperial skeptics and critics, often associated with leftwing proletarian culture movements, countered authorized propaganda with works of literature, art, and entertainment that endeavored to persuade mass consumers to reject empire’s promises in favor of alternative kinds of bordercrossing solidarity.38 All empires necessarily engender many kinds of border crossings. The essays collected in Passing, Posing, Persuasion showcase how actors (in multiple senses of the word) from all parts of the empire were able to move in and out of different performative identities, simultaneously marking and troubling the ontological boundaries of the empire. These actors passed, they posed, and to a great extent they persuaded, but their stories also help to remind us that imperial heterogeneity requires certain accommodations of difference, even when assimilation is the official goal—ultimately (if inadvertently) providing the very means to unravel the fiction(s) of empire itself. NOTES We are indebted to the insights provided by Sharalyn Orbaugh during the early stages of writing this introduction, and the incisive comments provided by two anonymous reviewers. 1. The National Association for Educational Paper Theater (Nippon kyōiku kamishibai kyōkai) was one of the major publishers of educational and propaganda kamishibai during the 1930s and 1940s. My Precious Granddaughter is attributed to the National Association for Educational Paper Theater in the cover script, with no individual author(s) given. The illustrations were done by Nishihara Hiroshi, and the Korean translation was by Maki Hiroshi (also known as Yi Sŏkhun). For more information on the history of kamishibai and its use as a propaganda vehicle, see Sharalyn Orbaugh, Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen-Year War (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015); Orbaugh also provides an indepth discussion of the different terms used to describe “the war” in 2. anguage future conjured up in the last play card is a clear manifestation of kokugo ideology and the culmination of a journey that had previously been marked by language failures—most notably, Eishoku’s inability to conduct business in the capital due to his complete lack of Japanese language proficiency. ­

Introduction  17

and increased levels of fragmentation within this larger structure” that cannot be reduced to a colonizer/colonized binary but instead emerge out of the complex imbrications of “modernity, industrialization, and the colonial project.”







­

12. Morris-Suzuki, ­ Re-i­nventing Japan, 32. See also Miriam L. Kingsberg, Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), for an extended discussion of the word minzoku, which Kingsberg translates as “race-nation.” 13. Leo Ching, Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 96. ­

18  Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu







18. Mizuno, Sōshi kaimei, 14. ­ ­ ­



21. Everett V. Stonequist, Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 198–199. 22. Shimazaki Tōson, Hakai, in Shimazaki Tōson shū, 1, vol. 13 of Nihon kindai bungaku taikei (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1971), 162, our translation.

Introduction  19

Modern ­Japanese Literature, ­ ­ ­ ed. Rachel Hutchinson and Mark Williams (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007), 127–142. A monograph that rigorously takes up the theme of passing as part of a play with the “fictions of race” in postwar Japanese literary works by Nakagami Kenji and others and identifies allusive affinities with African American passing literature is William Bridges, Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020). ­ ­ ­

25. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 176. 28. Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 4. 32. Komori Yōichi, Posutokoroniaru (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2001), 15–16. 33. The haughty and abusive behavior of mainland Japanese settlers in Korea was of particu lar concern to government officials and civilian commentators alike, and the colonists’ treatment of Korean compatriots was identified as a factor in the outbreak of the March First Movement’s independence uprisings in 1919. See Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 151–153. 34. Theodore Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 59.

­apanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, 1895–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).

­ ­ ­

2

A JAPANESE OTHELLO IN TAIWAN Performing Patriarchy, Race, and Empire in Imperial Japan ROBERT TIERNEY

Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is a crucial work for the historian seeking to chart the genealogy of modern patriarchy, racism, and imperialism. Othello, a Moor, is an outsider in imperial Venice and Iago incites him to murder his wife, Desdemona, by fanning his jealousy and his insecurity as an outsider; Desdemona, in turn, is a victim of a patriarchal order whose taboos she transgresses.1 Since the nineteenth century, the play has been performed in places outside Europe, such as British-ruled India, to keep alive “the myth of English cultural refinement and superiority— a myth that was crucial to the rulers’ political interests in colonial India.” Nevertheless, when a Bengali actor was for the first time cast as Othello in a performance in colonial Calcutta in 1848, he effectively produced “a different, vernacular Shakespeare,” which disrupted rigid categories of difference and aroused anxiety in the largely British audience by a “strategy of mimicry.”2 This chapter considers how a performance of Othello in 1903 Japan produced another vernacular Shakespeare through a different variety of mimicry; in this case, one must speak of imperial rather than colonial mimicry because Japan was a rapidly rising empire at the time. Rather than perform a translation of Othello, the theatrical troupe of Kawakami Otojirō (1864–1911) adapted the work, as Osero, to make it resonate with Japanese audiences. The characters were assigned Japanese names, the temporal context of the play was moved to the turn of the twentieth century, and the settings were shifted to Japan and Taiwan. Unlike the one in Calcutta in 1848, this performance took place in a colonial empire that quite deliberately and self-consciously mimicked and modeled itself on Western empires. The setting of the play in Taiwan, Japan’s earliest formal colony, exemplifies Kawakami’s strategy of appropriation of Shakespeare’s play. In the early twentieth century, many Japanese intellectuals argued that Japan’s racial hetero20

A ­Japanese Othello in Taiwan  21

geneity would facilitate its policies of ruling over its colonies. Because of this discursive context, the Japanese theatrical troupe and audiences alike had no trouble making sense of the work, unlike postwar generations of directors and spectators who found this play much harder to understand. For example, a fter the contemporary theater director Ninagawa Yukio (1935–2016) directed Othello in a 1994 production featuring the Kabuki actor Matsumoto Kōshiro IX as Othello and former Takarazuka star Kuroki Hitomi as Desdemona, he conceded that his attempt to produce the play in Japan failed because “the problem of discrimination in white society and the racial tensions between white and black people make [it] wrong for a Japanese to produce.”3 In short, the 1903 Osero “performed” Japan’s new pose as a colonial empire and its newfound status within global imperial and racial hierarchies. In addition, by casting the Othello character as a member of the former outcast group, Kawakami implicitly criticized the ways that subaltern groups within Japan were mobilized in the imperial project and then callously discarded when things went wrong. My aim here is to explore the social and cultural background of the 1903 performance ­ of Osero and interpret its significance in the context of Japan’s imperial expansion. I first consider the play’s place in Japan’s modern theater history and in the refashioned patriarchy of the early twentieth century. Next, I argue that the play “performs” Japan’s new pose as an imperial power both in relation to Western powers and toward the Taiwanese subjects of colonial rule. For the spectators in the Japanese metropole, the play served the didactic function of educating them about the new roles that Japanese were assigned in a global imperial order as well as teaching them about the appropriate parts that subordinate peoples should play. In this latter respect, it bore a striking resemblance to the ethnographic showcases of Indigenous peoples who were included in the Fifth National Industrial Exposition, which took place in Osaka at the same that Osero was staged. In addition, I consider the question of Othello’s racial identity in the context of imperial passing. The author of Osero transposed Othello’s racial difference by casting him as a member of Japan’s disenfranchised outcast group, a transposition that was overdetermined by the introduction of racial discourse in Japan in the Meiji period (1868–1912). While the outcasts had previously constituted a status group in the Edo period (1600–1868), by the twentieth century they came to occupy a racial category defined by blood and foreign origins. Like other subaltern groups or minorities in Japan, the hero of Osero seeks his fortune and salvation as a military officer in the widening spaces of Japan’s empire. He thereby highlights the crucial role that subaltern groups played in the overall trajectory of imperial expansion which, for them, served primarily as a means to escape from oppression within Japan. Modern Anglo-American audiences have tended to view Othello as the “tragedy of jealousy.” To understand the reasons why Othello murders his wife, however, we need to attend to the explosive context of race, patriarchy, and imperial expansion that propel the play toward its bloody and terrible denouement.

22  Robert Tierney

Indeed, without this context, the tragedy could easily degenerate into a farce, a fact that did not escape the notice of later Japanese dramatists.4 By treating Othello as a play about empire and race in 1903, the director of Osero anticipated late twentieth-century productions of the work. Indeed, the play sheds a critical light on the relation between the mobilization of subaltern populations to serve the agenda of Japanese imperialism and the construction of racial hierarchies within Japan. A MILESTONE IN JAPAN’S MODERN THEATER HISTORY

The 1903 performance of Osero constitutes a crucial event in the history of Japan’s theater reform movement, which had begun in the 1880s. While officials, businessmen, and intellectuals endeavored to make Kabuki the national theater of Japan, political opponents of the Meiji regime, hobbled by censorship laws, created a new form of theater, shinpa (lit., “new school”), to raise the political awareness of the masses.5 Kawakami Otojirō began his career in this antigovernment theater and achieved fame for his 1891 Bugle Ballad (Oppekepebushi), a lampoon of contemporary social and political events.6 By his own count, he was arrested 170 times and imprisoned twenty-four times for his performances. In a biography devoted to Kawakami’s wife, Sadayakko, Lesley Downer calls him “the first Japanese rap star.”7 Although he lacked formal training as an actor, Kawakami later became a central figure in the establishment of Westernized theater in Japan, under the sponsorship of Meiji statesman Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909).8 Kawakami made a major public breakthrough with his ultranationalistic The Wondrous and Magnificent Sino-Japanese War (Sōzetsu kaizetsu Nisshin sensō), performed at the Asakusa Theater shortly after war broke out in 1894. In the early twentieth century, he staged three of Shakespeare’s plays: The Merchant of Venice; The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; and The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. Besides seeking to educate audiences to appreciate Westernized theater, Kawakami saw extratheatrical benefits for using England’s greatest playwright to launch his own brand of theater. Andrew Gerstle astutely notes that “the nineteenth century Japanese elite accepted the genius of Shakespeare long before they knew anything about the works themselves, mainly because of the power of the British navy.”9 By performing Shakespeare on a Japanese stage, Kawakami appropriated his cultural capital to both distinguish his troupe from those of his theatrical rivals and improve the social status of actors, who had been treated as outcasts in the Edo period. As one journalist put it, “He sought by his own powers to make a great reform of the Japanese theater and to bring the actors, previously despised as eta and hinin [ Japanese outcasts], closer to the imperial institution.”10 Kawakami chose a recent translation of Othello by Tozawa Koya (1873– 1955) as the basis for the performance, but he commissioned Emi Suiin (1869–

A ­Japanese Othello in Taiwan  23

1934), a popular writer, to adapt this work to the language and the circumstances of the Meiji period.11 Emi retained the hero’s name in the title of the play (Osero), but he renamed the protagonist Muro Washirō. In choosing the common name Muro, he made a punning reference to Othello as a Moor, but at the same time he sought to rework Othello’s identity by situating him within a Japanese context. In the play, Muro Washirō is a Japanese general of a lowly social status who secretly weds Tomone (Desdemona), the only daughter of Count Fura Banjō (Brabantio). As the two men are about to fight a duel over Washirō’s elopement with Tomone, the Japanese prime minister summons Washirō and asks him to lead an expedition to Taiwan, offering to mediate his dispute with the count, and then to remain as the governor of the new colony. In Taiwan, Iya Gōzō (Iago), a subordinate military officer resentful of his inferior position and aware of Washirō’s checkered past, convinces his commander that his wife is having an affair with the dashing officer Katsu Yoshio (Cassio).12 Falling into Iya’s trap, Washirō murders Tomone in a fit of jealousy and patriarchal rage. At the play’s end, he realizes his mistake and kills himself, but only after Katsu’s soldiers execute Iya on the spot. This 1903 performance exemplified Kawakami’s theatrical ideal of seigeki (straight theater), by which he meant theater modeled after Western drama. But Kawakami also inserted musical interludes and other forms of entertainment into his play to win public favor. A reporter for the newspaper Yomiuri shinbun noted that “in the third act, a huge cast of fifty soldiers came forward to welcome the arrival [of Washirō] in Penghu Island and the banquet scene featured a Taiwan play, a dance by Blacks, and a triumphal dance by the three actresses Sadayakko, Kumehachi, and Shizue, who all wore tortoise masks, and the audience responded with thunderous applause.”13 While reporters speculated that Kawakami added these diversions to enliven the play, I will later argue that these interludes were thematically important and offer a compelling figuration of the contemporary Japanese Empire. It is difficult to determine from press reports exactly how such scenes were performed, but it is evident that the performance of Osero differed greatly from later modern plays, based strictly on the conventions of late nineteenth-century European realism and placing a high value on fidelity to Shakespeare’s text. In her history of the evolution of Japanese actresses, Ayako Kano highlights another important nuance of the term seigeki. It also implied a new politics of gender and, specifically, an alignment of gender with biological sex.14 In the performance, Kawakami’s wife, Sadayakko, played Tomone in counterpoint to her husband’s Washirō, although she initially shared the stage with cross-dressing males (onnagata), traditional in Kabuki, who performed other female roles.15 This division of roles between husband and wife mirrored the emergence of ideologies about the appropriate spheres of gendered activities aligned to biological sex. From the late nineteenth century onward, with the development of a modern patriarchal system in Japan, the ideal woman came to be epitomized by the slogan

24  Robert Tierney

“wise mother, good wife” (ryōsai kenbo) for women of the middle and upper classes, as popularized by the Ministry of Education.16 This feminine ideal was associated with the domestic space of the home and with family duties, whereas men were assigned to the new public spaces established by the modern state. In the play, however, Tomone is portrayed as a headstrong, independent woman who runs away from her father to elope with Washirō, violating the filial piety extolled by the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890) and enshrined in the Japanese Civil Code (1898), which strengthened the position of the father by granting him wide-ranging powers, including the right to approve marriages.17 Tomone not only chooses her own husband without first obtaining her father’s consent but also weds Washirō secretly in a Christian church. Later she confronts her father publicly and defends her actions before the Japanese Diet, which results in her father disowning her. In openly defying her father, Tomone challenges the institution of the family patriarch and more generally sets herself in opposition to the family state (kazoku kokka) ideology in which the emperor became the paterfamilias of the national “family.”18 Accordingly, she sparks deep male anxieties about the threat that independent, modern women constitute to the patriarchal family and political order and its ethics of sexual subordination and the obedience of women. Contemporary audiences may view Desdemona as the innocent victim of her husband’s jealousy and of patriarchal violence generally, but we should not necessarily assume that earlier audiences shared these views. In Shakespeare’s Othello, Iago refers to Desdemona as the “super-subtle Venetian” who is able to deceive Othello through her urban sophistication. By depicting Tomone as a sophisticated Tokyoite, the playwright Emi Suiin encourages his contemporary viewers to regard her with wariness and suspicion. He signals his ambivalence toward his character when he describes her marriage as an expression of free love ( jiyū ren’ai) and as an illegal union (yagō). In a foreshadowing of what is to come, Count Fura, her father, warns Washirō that he had better thoroughly educate his wife, “who has cheated her parents,” so that “she does not cheat her husband.”19 Indeed, Iya Gōzō cites Tomone’s earlier disobedience toward her father as a precedent for her alleged adultery toward Washirō. If Emi treats the character of Tomone with ambivalence, he depicts Biwako (Bianco) as a woman of the pleasure quarters who is ready to “turn [herself] into a snake . . . to cross” to Taiwan in pursuit of the handsome Katsu.20 Iya hands Tomone’s handkerchief to Biwako, and Biwako in turn gives it to Katsu, thereby participating unknowingly in Iya’s strategy to convince Washirō of his wife’s adultery. Through her social background and speech, Biwako is identifiable as a karayukisan, a Japanese woman who travels to the colonies to work as a prostitute. While these women—many of whom came from Kyushu—provided a major source of Japan’s foreign revenue through their remittances to the home country, they were later castigated by the government elite as women of “disreputable morals” and “evil customs” that hurt Japan’s international reputation.

A ­Japanese Othello in Taiwan  25

The government later sought to prohibit the emigration of such women to the colonies.21 Biwako and Tomone represent the polar opposites—the good wife and the dissolute prostitute—that defined the moral identity of women in the Meiji period. Yet by treating her elopement as a form of illicit love, Emi suggests a hidden affinity between the two. When Washirō ceases to believe in Tomone’s virtue, he flips to the opposite extreme of viewing her as a sexually insatiable prostitute and murders her. Patriarchy played a vital role in the depiction of characters and the plot development of the play, reflecting both changes in law and developments in the theater. I will next focus on the role that imperial posing and racial passing played in the transformation of the original play into Osero. POSING AS AN EMPIRE ON THE MODERN STAGE

Modern Japan was born through a semicolonial collision of a decaying Tokugawa order with Western powers expanding into East Asia in the mid-nineteenth century. Although it avoided direct colonization, Japan was incorporated into the treaty port system until it renegotiated its “unequal treaties” with Western powers in the early twentieth century. In his book The Abacus and the Sword, Peter Duus argues that Japan’s “imperialism, like so many other aspects of Meiji development, was an act of mimesis” and that it was enabled by “their simultaneous mimesis of other aspects of Western ‘wealth and power.’ ”22 Prior to insisting that the colonized people copy themselves, the Japanese mimicked many aspects of the West to ensure national independence at a time of external threat. Although Japan acquired Taiwan a fter the First Sino-Japanese War (1894– 1895), it occupied a marginal position within the international order at the turn of the twentieth century. Not long after the Treaty of Shimonoseki ended the war, France, Germany, and Russia forced Japan to retrocede the Liaodong Peninsula to China, and then proceeded to carve out their own “spheres of influence” in China, sparking a strong revanchism that later contributed to Japanese nationalism. In light of Japan’s military successes, however, the Western powers also acknowledged Japan’s entry into the global system of imperialism. To understand Japan’s empire, one needs to take into account both its interactions with Western powers and its relations with its Asian colonies. For this reason, a triangle is the right figure for picturing its empire. In Osero, Emi interspersed plays within the play that perform the imperial pose of Japan on the stage and educate the audience about its nation’s new position in a global imperial order. In these interludes, Japan is situated between a West from which it seeks recognition and an Asia it seeks to dominate. While these plays within a play take place on the stage, the audience in the theater is interpellated to position itself within this triangular relationship. In the first place, Japanese characters play their new roles as colonizers before Westerners who appear in the play. The West was many things for Japan: a

26  Robert Tierney

menace that threatened Japan’s imperial ambitions, a competitor that worried that Japan would frustrate its own imperial plans, and a potential ally to be won over. In the opening act, the prime minister sends Washirō to Taiwan to confront a foreign power backing “bandits and pirates” there— ostensibly Russia, a nation with which Japan would be at war within a year of the play’s performance. After he crushes the rebellion, Washirō invites members of the Taiwanese elite and Westerners to a banquet to celebrate his accession to the position of GovernorGeneral. In this scene, the drunken Katsu disgraces himself “in front of foreigners” when he picks a fight with a Taiwanese “gentleman,” thereby undercutting the aim of this mise-en-scène of Japan as a stable, civilized colonial power and stakeholder in the imperialist world system.23 Yet a subtler and more intricate figuration of Japan’s pose before this Western other appears in a different scene. In act 2, Washirō returns late from the battlefield after briefing “a group of foreign reporters” on the progress of the battles, an impor tant assignment since “some foreigners even think that the Japanese are a race that loves cruelty, no different from the Turks.”24 In Japan’s first modern war, foreign correspondents were mediators between the nation at home and how it was perceived in Western countries. While they generally presented favorable images of Japan in their reporting,25 they could also blacken Japan’s reputation. In fact, as another character in the play then chimes in, this is precisely what happened during the capture of Port Arthur on the Liaodong Peninsula. James Creelman of the World (the newspaper with the largest circulation in New York City at the time) witnessed the victorious entry of the Japanese army commanded by General Ōyama Iwao into Port Arthur on November 21, 1894. On December 12, 1894, he broke news of a “Japanese massacre” at Port Arthur in a special cable dispatch to the World. The Japanese troops had “massacred practically the entire population in cold blood,” butchering unarmed inhabitants in their homes and then mutilating their bodies. The massacre, which lasted for three days, constituted the “first stain on Japanese civilization” and suggested that “Japan had relapsed into barbarism from which it had awakened a generation ago.”26 This scandal broke at an inopportune moment for the Japanese state, as Japanese diplomats were engaged in delicate treaty renegotiations with the United States, and it harmed Japan’s international reputation. When Washirō fields questions from foreign reporters, he in effect throws into relief Japan’s dependence on Western goodwill and recognition to carry on with its colonial endeavors within an international imperialist system. In these scenes, then, Washirō poses before a Western audience, whether invisible or explicitly figured in the play. Within the same play, however, there are scenes of a different order where Westerners are absent, the Japanese become the spectators and colonized East Asians perform before them as objects of their imperial gaze. Washirō is sent to the Pescadores Islands to pacify the pirates that threaten Japan’s imperial rule.27 Shortly after he returns to Taipei, a group of aborginal Taiwanese—the seiban, or “raw savages,” led by a Chinese

A ­Japanese Othello in Taiwan  27

interpreter—perform before a Japanese soldier guarding the Governor-General’s study. The interpreter explains that the “savages” want to pray facing the sun in order to express their devotion to the Governor- General: “The raw savages [seiban] turn toward the rising sun, prostrate themselves on the ground and start bellowing out a queer incantation in loud voices. They also dance and jump about.” Eventually the guard puts an end to the performance and chases the performers offstage, but he falls into a rage when the Chinese interpreter asks him for a tip: “So you think you can make money putting your savages on display. You still haven’t overcome your Chinese nature. Taiwan is Japanese territory now, so you had better start to behave like the Japanese.”28 The colonized people in this scene reflect divisions in Taiwan’s multiethnic society. The Japanese guard exercises disciplinary power over them when he orders the Chinese interpreter, who speaks in broken Japanese, to behave like a Japanese by learning to speak proper Japanese and following Japanese etiquette. By contrast, the aborigines are depicted as barely human and as producers of inarticulate sounds. After he chases them off stage, the guard mutters, “These savages eat people—they are scarier than malaria.” The association of the aborigines with cannibalism and malaria echoes Washirō’s earlier monologue in which he woos Tomone by recounting his past exploits, which included the taming of cannibals.29 Far from being invited to assimilate, the aborigines are discursively treated as fit for eradication. Like most empires, the Japanese established control over multiethnic Taiwan through a politics of divide and rule. In the introduction to Osero, the Japanese government sends Washirō to Taiwan to put down bandits (tohi), a code term designating ethnic Chinese who resisted Japanese rule in the first years of colonization,30 and Washirō is charged to win elite Taiwanese support for Japanese rule. Accordingly, Taiwanese gentlemen are prominent among the guests in the banquet scene a fter Washirō’s military victory, and they are called surrendered gentlemen (kijun shijin)—that is, former enemies who have abandoned the guerilla struggle and pledged their loyalty to the Japanese colonial regime. Indeed, by 1903 these “bandits” were no longer the archenemy of the colonial government and had been replaced by “savages” residing in the resource-rich interior of the island who were not merely the political enemy of Japanese rule but also the foe of civilization itself. From the early twentieth century onward, Japanese colonial discourse shifted from a focus on suppression of lawlessness to a discourse stressing Japan’s civilizing mission.31 With this discursive shift, the Chinese become potential allies and objects of Japanese policies of assimilation or envelopment—at once invited to banquets and ordered to become more “like the Japanese.” By contrast, the aborigines take their place within the colonial order as abject others. In Osero the Taiwanese “savages” perform before the very seat of the colonial government and ultimately before Japanese spectators of the play. But this play within a play resembles a real event that took place in 1903. When Osero

28  Robert Tierney

was staged in Osaka, it was the only play that managed to draw a large audience because the Fifth National Industrial Exposition, also in Osaka, was in full swing. Unlike earlier expositions held in Japan, the Fifth Exposition reflected new realities of the Japanese Empire by including both a Taiwan pavilion and the Scientific House of Peoples (Gakujutsu jinruikan) that displayed “specimens” of Asian populations in human showcases, including Indigenous Ainu, Okinawans, and Taiwanese. The exposition gave visible form to a new East Asian order in which Japan replaced China as the center of civilization and the peripheral peoples of Asia were organized hierarchically as objects of a Japanese imperial gaze. The House of Peoples was the brainchild of Tsuboi Shōgorō (1863–1913), the founder of the Tokyo Anthropological Association. Tsuboi, who had witnessed human showcases of colonized peoples at the Universal Exposition of 1889 in Paris, viewed this exhibition as a tool to educate Japanese citizenry about the new “distribution of races in different regions of the globe, of the differences in appearance and customs between different races.”32 Once the House of Peoples opened, it elicited vehement protests from Okinawan intellectuals who denounced the display of their fellow citizens in scathing articles published in the Ryūkyū shinbun newspaper.33 Rather than protesting racism per se, they objected to having Okinawans placed on a par with the Ainu and with “Taiwanese savages.” This affair epitomized the complex position that Okinawans occupied in Japan’s imperial hierarchy as at once objects and subjects of discrimination. While Japanese discriminated against them, the Okinawans transferred onto others the social stigma that they suffered in a process that Peter Stallybrass and Allan White call “displaced abjection” whereby “ ‘low’ social groups turn their figurative and actual power, not against those in authority, but against those who are even ‘lower’ ” in the social hierarchy.”34 This theme of “displaced abjection” plays an important, if hidden, role in the story of Washirō, depicted as a racial other who rises to the very summit of the colonial hierarchy only to be precipitated into committing suicide at the end of play. Washirō’s racial otherness is only conveyed to the audience by rumor and innuendo in the play, however. In the next section, I will argue that Washirō “passing” in the empire manifests the domestication of new discourses on racial identity in early twentieth-century Japan. RACIAL PASSING IN OSERO

While Osero was the first adaptation of Othello to be performed on the Japanese stage, it was actually the third adaptation of Othello to be published in Japan. Almost a decade before Osero was staged, two narrative adaptations of the play appeared in which an Othello-like character is described as having an ugly and pockmarked face.35 In 1893, Jōno Denpei (1832–1902) published the novel Pockmarked Denshichirō (Abata Denshichirō) that is set in the city of Edo (the for-

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mer name of Tokyo) in 1853, the year that Admiral Matthew C. Perry used gunboat diplomacy to force the opening of Japan. In his preface to the book, Jōno describes Othello as a “famous Western novel,” suggesting that he was familiar with Mary and Charles Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare (1807), which became the first source for Shakespeare adaptations in Japan after it was translated into Japanese in 1886. The son of a famous doctor whose face is disfigured by smallpox, Denshichirō marries the beautiful Suteko, the only daughter of a high government official. Suteko commits suicide a fter she discovers that her husband suspects that she has been unfaithful to him; a fter realizing his mistake, Denshichirō slits his own throat. The earliest adaptations of Othello had much to do with traditional gender roles and patriarchal ideology. What differentiates the play Osero from these earlier adaptations is a marked emphasis on race. In 1899 Tozawa Koya (1873–1955) published a translation of Othello in the journal Taiyō, which Emi consulted when he was writing his own adaptation. In a short foreword, Tozawa explained that Othello is “of the brown race [kasshoku jinshu] belonging to the same race as the Arabs and Saracen.”36 By contrast, Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), who published a well-known translation in 1911, followed the American custom of portraying Othello as an African. Unlike these early translators, Emi turns his hero into a member of Japan’s outcast class,37 a new racial category that had not existed even a few decades earlier. A surviving photograph of the performance of Osero shows that Kawakami played Washirō with his face painted black, probably in imitation of actors in minstrel shows that he had witnessed while traveling in the United States.38 In the script, Washirō is described as a rough-featured general from Satsuma, but he is also rumored to be a new commoner (shinheimin)—that is, a former outcast. The evil Iya Gōzō conveys this rumor to Rotoriko, the feckless suitor of Tomone, at the start of the play: “Washirō is a dark and rugged man and cannot compare with a talented man of our day and age like you. The two of you are as different as a snowball and a piece of charcoal. What is more, Count Fura comes from a proud bloodline that dates back to the distant past. General Washirō may be a new commoner, or so rumor has it.”39 Iya passes along this hearsay to his interlocutor but offers no evidence to substantiate it, so one might first mistake the comment for mere slander. Later, in a meeting with the Japanese prime minister, Count Fura alludes to Washirō’s lowly status in a revealing slip of the tongue. Describing the general’s position, he pronounces the first syllable of the word shinheimin (shin, “new”), pauses, and then substitutes a less offensive term, “newly . . . appointed commander” (shin . . . shinnin chūshō).40 This expression is a compromise that couches an insult in an apparently neutral appellation. Fura betrays his intention to slander Washirō through his meaningful pause, which allows the audience to discern his real intention through the veil of language. The fact that these rumors are spread by Washirō’s enemies may incline one to dismiss them as false and malicious accusations. In addition, far from being

30  Robert Tierney

conspicuous and obvious, the present-day reader has to parse the text carefully to spot these hints. Nevertheless, critics who attended the first performance of Osero had no difficulty understanding that Washirō was a new commoner and that this status was Emi’s adaptation of Othello’s racial difference. For example, Oka Onitarō writes, “In the original, Othello is a Negro. In the adaptation, he is turned into a dark-skinned man, and furthermore, in order to reflect the racial difference of Othello in the original, he becomes a new commoner—this is a rather clumsy way of adaptation, yet there would be no other way to make the Japanese understand.” 41 To understand the reason why this theater critic found Washirō’s status to be a “clumsy” albeit plausible transposition of racial difference, one needs to consider that how this outcast group, though physically undistinguishable from other Japanese, became a racial designation in the Meiji period. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant note, racial formations “are the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.” 42 During the Edo period, the social status for the outcasts, eta, was buttressed by administrative codes that governed clothing and external behavior of every status group. To make the boundary between the status groups visible, officials prescribed what they were to wear, the places where they were to live, and the customs that regulated their daily lives. In 1871 the Meiji government issued an edict proclaiming abolition of the social distinctions that had hitherto divided Japanese commoners into separate status groups, thereby making outcasts into commoners. As the status system had also sustained many vulnerable people in society, this decree also deprived many of their right to public support. In addition, it did nothing to eliminate discrimination against the outcasts.43 Local functionaries who entered the names of outcasts into family registers marked their continued difference by inserting the character shin (new) in front of the word heimin (commoner), giving rise to the discriminatory neologism shinheimin, a term that entered Japanese popular discourse during the early twentieth ­century.44 Besides being a product of the reconfigured status system of the Meiji period and of administrative sleight of hand, Washirō’s identity stood at the confluence of multiple racial discourses that ascribed new characteristics to the bodies of the shinheimin that differentiated them from other Japanese. As new theories of the origins of the Japanese race were propounded, the new commoners came to be seen as a “domestic” foreign race on the periphery of Japanese society.45 Washirō stands at the point of intersection of three heterogeneous strands of discourse: the discourse of tainted blood, the anthropological speculation on the origins of the Japanese people, and the Meiji politics of emigration. Takahashi Yoshio (1861–1937) was among the earliest to refer to the tainted blood of the new commoners in his 1885 Theory on the Improvement of the ­Japanese Race (Nihon jinshu kairyōron), one of the earliest texts on eugenics in Japan. In addition to promoting changes in diet, clothing, and housing to im-

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prove the Japanese race, he encouraged intermarriage between Japanese and “superior” Westerners, to improve their “inferior” heredity. By the same token, he opposed intermarriage between Japanese and those with “tainted” blood: In the feudal society of the past, when society was divided into the separate castes . . . marriage across caste lines was not easily permitted. . . . Currently, since the eta and hinin of former days have entered the ranks of the commoners, they will engage in ordinary social intercourse with others and their blood will spread widely throughout society. The number of families with the genes for leprosy is not small, especially among the lower orders of society. According to the theories of experts, leprosy will be passed on for five generations until it is eradicated. As long as people continue to get married without giving a thought to the tainted stock and bad heredity of the marriage partner, they must run the risk of polluting not only the blood of their own family group but also that of their relatives and in-laws.46

Besides conflating new commoners with “hereditary” leprosy and other diseases, Takahashi suggested that the abolition of the status system would pollute Japanese blood for generations. In castigating his contemporaries for ignoring the bloodlines of their marital partners, he anticipated later views that marriage with new commoners posed a dire threat to the purity of Japanese blood. In later years the construction of new social barriers based on genetic notions rendered such “pollution” if not impossible then at least increasingly unlikely. In 1903, the year that Osero was staged in Tokyo, a woman in Hiroshima successfully sued her new commoner husband for divorce on the grounds that he had concealed his family origins at the time of marriage. An appeal court later upheld this judicial decision with the argument that the woman would never have consented to marry the man in the first place if she had known that he was a new commoner.47 The eugenicist Takahashi viewed the new commoners as a diseased part of the nation that had to be quarantined from other groups. By contrast, anthropologists argued that the new commoners were a “foreign” race that had emigrated to Japan in the distant past. With the establishment of the Tokyo Anthropological Association in 1884, anthropologists launched investigations into the origins of the Japanese and of the Ainu and Okinawans on the nation’s periphery. The new commoners were another such group, located on the social periphery of the nation, whose racial origins became an object of anthropological curiosity. In an article published in the Journal of the Tokyo Anthropological Society in 1886, Fujii Kansuke wrote, “In general, the people called the eta constitute one part of the Japanese people, although they are particularly subject to persecution. The reason must be that their original ancestors . . . belonged to a foreign race.” Fujii speculated that they were the descendants of Koreans brought to Japan as

32  Robert Tierney

prisoners of war centuries earlier, but he called for scientific investigations into their mysterious origins.48 Torii Ryūzō (1870–1953), a prominent academic anthropologist, drew different conclusions from his anthropometric measurements of new commoners, noting that they were “endowed with a physical constitution resembling that of the Malay race and are very different from the Japanese in whom the Mongoloid element is predominant.” 49 Contrary to Torii’s hypothesis, however, most anthropologists subscribed to Fujii’s view that the new commoners were descendants of Koreans. From the late nineteenth century onward, novelists tended to “construct outcast bodies through a set of tell-tale, visible markings” in their works, thereby creating “a sense of absolute, incommensurable difference between the seen object and the seeing subject.”50 In Shimazaki Tōson’s The Broken Commandment (Hakai, 1906), the most famous novel about the new commoners from the Meiji period, the character Ginnosuke remarks that the members of this group are recognizable by clearly visible marks: “I’ve seen plenty of eta. Their skin is darker than ours—you can tell them at a glance, and being shut out of society has made them terribly warped inside as well.”51 Since the new commoners were racially separate from other Japanese, many writers proposed that they seek their salvation by emigrating overseas in order to escape discrimination and poverty in Japan. Paradoxically, these advocates contradicted the eugenicists’ assertions that members of the group were racially inferior or had tainted blood. Indeed, at a time when the government promoted meat eating among the general population to strengthen Japanese bodies, the new commoners, who traditionally ate meat, were touted as a strong group well suited to serve in the nation’s defense. As Sugiura Jūgō (1855–1924), a prominent intellectual associated with the nationalist Seikyōsha group, wrote, “The society of the new commoners has long practiced meat-eating. . . . In terms of physical strength and character, they are one step closer to the people of Western countries in comparison with other Japanese. . . . [I]s it not a terrible waste that they are not permitted to freely exercise their abilities within the confines of Japanese society?”52 A distinct racial group that possessed both the physical and the character traits required to become pioneers of empire, the new commoners were potential patriots who could be mobilized to serve the expansion of the nation.53 In Sugiura’s short political novel Hankai’s Dream Story (Hankai yume monogatari, 1886), a political orator from the new commoner class proposes that ninety thousand sturdy young men from his community be sent to a place “west of the Pacific, east of the Indian Ocean, south of the China Sea and north of Oceania” and that they establish a Japanese colony there.54 Although this location is not named, it is readily identifiable as the Philippines. After overthrowing the Spanish rulers, the young men w ill liberate the Filipino people from Spanish despotism, solve the problems of the new commoners, extend Japan’s influence to the south, and promote the prosperity of Asia. Yanase Keisuke

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(1868–1896), a Japanese bureaucrat in Taiwan, supported measures that would aid poor new commoners to resettle in Taiwan to rescue them from poverty and to strengthen the nation by fortifying “the southern gate of the nation.”55 In the fiction of the Meiji period, emigration was often proposed as the only feasible solution to social discrimination in Japan. If “new commoner” characters in novels from this period often emigrated to escape oppression,56 Osero portrays a former outcast who escapes from his low-status group by rising within the Japanese military and ascending to the highest position in the new spaces of the Japanese Empire. Washirō confidently attacks Count Fura’s old-fashioned views on family lineage and status: “A man’s skill will be the determining factor in determining his fate in the new world.”57 Unlike the count, he wins his exalted status at the pinnacle of the colonial government by individual effort and ability rather than the accident of birth. As such, Washirō epitomizes the Meiji ethic of individual success in which careers were opened to all men of talent belonging to all classes of society. At the same time, his success as an individual and his personal ambition are linked to the goals of the nation. But Washirō’s career trajectory differs in one crucial respect from that of the typical protagonist of Meiji success stories. In his long soliloquy to Tomone in act 1, Washirō stresses both his mysterious, obscure background (“As a child, I lost both my parents and was raised by one of my grandmothers”) and his feats of courage during the First SinoJapanese War and the subsequent Boxer Rebellion (1899–1900), two major conflicts that tilted the balance of power in East Asia away from once dominant China and toward a newly expansionist Japan. Washirō escapes his inferior position and social discrimination in Japan by making his career in the army, an institution reputed to be open to all talents. In a 1905 book that explained Japan to the West, Baron Suematsu Kenchō characterized the Japanese military as a strictly meritocratic organization: “One can see in the Japanese army or navy the sons of noblemen or rich merchants being commanded and led by an officer who has risen from the lowest class of people. There may even be officers whose origins, if scrutinized minutely, belong to a class vulgarly called ‘new commoners.’ ”58 Just as African Americans enlisted in the US armed forces in World War II as a way to improve their status in a racist society, Washirō seeks to rise within Japan by distinguishing himself on the foreign battlefields of Japan’s first modern wars and pursuing a career in the wider spaces of empire. Emi’s decision to depict Muro Washirō as a new commoner was overdetermined by the ambient discourses in Japanese society at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, his racial identity stands at the very heart of the narrative logic of the play, joining together the different themes of posing and passing that I have considered in this chapter. In the first place, the protagonist of Osero never states that he belongs to a despised group in Japanese society, but we are informed of his status by the circulation of rumor and hearsay. The first scenes of the play, in which he is slandered by Iya and nearly fights a duel with Count

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Fura, highlight his insecure status as an outsider in Tokyo. By contrast, when he is dispatched to Taiwan, Washirō passes as a typical Meiji hero and a selfmade man on an upward trajectory. In Japan, the relationship between majority and minority was sufficiently ambiguous to allow for passing in the majority society, particularly in the colonies. While “passing” was an option of which new commoners could avail themselves, those who tried to do so ran the ominous risk of exposure and having their “true nature” revealed.59 Washirō’s career also illustrates an important fact about the Japanese Empire: subaltern colonizers were essential agents in settling new territories placed under Japanese control. Despite his low status, Washirō avails himself of the opportunities created by Japan’s colonial wars to better his own position in Japan, becomes Governor-General of Taiwan, and marries the daughter of a count. In that respect, his story resembles that of other subordinate groups in Japan, such as Okinawans who were the largest group of colonists in Taiwan and Japanese-ruled Micronesia or Korean settlers in Manchukuo. Comparative insiders within the empire, they fled poverty and structural discrimination to pursue careers in the ever-widening spaces of the Japanese Empire. Through a process of transfer of oppression, they occupied a position of superiority over the Indigenous population and acquired privileges they were denied at home. Just as Okinawans objected to their inclusion in the Fifth Exposition’s Scientific House of Peoples in a “displacement of abjection,” we can find a similar process at work in Washirō, a member of the underclass of Japanese society who “passes” in the empire and even rises to occupy the highest position in colonial Taiwan.60 Osero was staged in Okinawa in 1906, a few years a fter its debut in Tokyo, by an Okinawan theater troupe. Performed in the Okinawan dialect, it garnered favorable reviews and was followed by other performances of Shakespeare’s plays.61 Many Okinawans went to Taiwan in the early years of Japan’s colonization and served within the lower echelons of the colonial hierarchy, often as teachers or policemen.62 Like Washirō, they occupied a subaltern position within Japan, but they raised their status by taking part in Japanese imperial enterprises. As Suzuki Masae observes, there were likely many Okinawan Othellos during the colonial period. For this reason, the Okinawan audience probably responded differently to the play than their counterparts in metropolitan Japan. While evidence of the Okinawan performance is scant, since no script remains, it seems likely that the reception of the play likely varied depending on the audience.63 But there is another, broader, sense in which we may consider this play allegorical. In spite of his lowly status, Washirō’s passing symbolizes the stunning emergence of modern Japan and its identity crisis as a modern but non-Western nation. It mirrors the ascension of his nation from a condition of semicolonial obscurity to that of major world power in a couple of decades. At the same time, Washirō’s liminal status as a new commoner in Japanese society mirrors Japan’s precarious position in the world order, a position that is emphasized in the scenes

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of the play in which Japan is found lacking as an imperial power. Washirō is a racialized other who attempts to pass as a full-fledged Japanese in the empire, but his nation is a racial other in the system of Western-dominated imperialism. He offers one image of Japan at the turn of the century, a country craving recognition from the West by dominating its Asian neighbors. Washirō also offers an exemplary case of displaced abjection. As a new commoner in Japan, he rises to the top of a colonial hierarchy based on the division between the civilized and the savage. When Washirō first hears Iya’s insinuations about Tomone’s adultery, he dismisses them as unfounded, drawing a clear demarcation between himself, a civilized man, and the irrational Taiwanese “savages.” In his final speech, however, he condemns himself for falling to the level of these same “savages” after he kills his wife without reason. “Observe the end of Muro Washirō, who became as ignorant as a raw savage [seiban] because of his unfounded jealousy.”64 Although Washirō is the supreme ruler of Taiwan, he is also a subaltern whose position in the social hierarchy is insecure. In this regard, the dramatist Emi remains faithful to Shakespeare even as he adapts the play to the circumstances of Japan. In the final scene of Shakespeare’s tragedy, Othello is both the noble defender of the state of Venice and the foreign barbarian, the aristocratic Venetian and the contemptible Turk. Yet Emi also makes explicit the colonial context of his adaptation. Internalizing the division between his high position as Governor-General of Taiwan and his liminal membership in a stigmatized minority, Washirō describes his own downfall as that of becoming a seiban who occupies the lowest rung of the colonial hierarchy. In effect, Washirō does not kill himself simply because he feels remorse for murdering his wife, but, to follow his own explanation, he executes the other in himself who has fallen to savagery. Osero can be described as the tragedy of displaced abjection. In addition to killing the savage within himself, he becomes the savage on whom the Japanese audience can project its anxieties about its own position in a global imperial order. By executing himself, Washirō displaces the anxiety of his spectators onto himself and offers himself as a substitute victim, bringing the audience a kind of cathartic relief. They, in turn, constitute themselves as members of a civilized country by expelling this racial other from the body of the nation. Yet there is another scene, absent from Shakespeare, that complicates these interpretations and gives the ending a more ambivalent, even critical cast. In Shakespeare’s original play, Othello receives a letter from the Duke of Venice enjoining him to leave his post in Cyprus and return to Venice, but the duke provides no reason for this order. At the end of Osero, Kurachi, secretary to the prime minister, comes to Taiwan and orders Washirō to return to Japan to face charges for misgovernment and slaughter: Kurachi: It is rumored in Japan that you massacred civilians when you pacified the pirate revolt. All the newspapers are talking about it.

36  Robert Tierney

Washirō: They say I killed civilians? People who say this are shooting us in the back from afar. Rumors start flying because the distance is so great between Japan and Taiwan. Ha, ha, ha . . . Kurachi: The Japanese are an emotional people. They grow envious watching you rise in fame and try to trip you up. Since we live in an island nation, we tend to envy others’ success and lack the continental way of thinking . . . but public opinion is public opinion and since rumors are spreading, we can’t ignore them. That is why I was sent here, but of course, the prime minister has complete faith in you.65 The letter from the prime minister requests that Washirō return to Tokyo to face charges over “rumors” of a massacre of civilians. This reference recalls rumors about Washirō’s identity as a shinheimin, and the reference to a massacre echoes the earlier reference to the Port Arthur massacre during the First SinoJapanese War. Furthermore, Count Fura, Tomone’s father, is one of those on the parliamentary commission advocating Washirō’s recall, a fact that presumably fans the latter’s suspicions about Tomone’s infidelity and precipitates his murder of her. Adding a touch of political melodrama to the tragedy, Emi suggests that Washirō is a victim of the cynical politics of the Meiji state. Subaltern imperialists were mobilized to aid the expansion the Meiji state in colonial territories while escaping poverty and oppression in Japan. In the Japanese colonial empire, Washirō not only makes a career for himself but also rises to a position of paramount authority. Nevertheless, his position is precarious. An outsider among the Tokyo elite, Washirō serves the state during the war and the early establishment of the colony, but he is expendable once the colonial government in Taiwan is stabilized. The fact that he belongs to a despised class makes him the perfect scapegoat. As a marginal figure without powerful backers, he is assigned the blame for the “massacres” that inevitably accompany Japan’s colonial conquests. In this scene, Washirō is trapped between the civilized Japanese colonizers, who use him as their pawn, and the “barbarous” colonized he is accused of massacring. Since this scene precedes the denouement of the play, the spectator is left with the impression that the colonial state— and not merely the villainous Iya— seek to engineer his downfall.66 At the start of Osero, the state empowers Washirō by giving him a vital mission and appointing him as supreme ruler over the colony, notwithstanding his lowly birth. In this added scene, the same state recalls this erstwhile hero presumably to discipline him. Yet, as the reference to the Port Arthur massacre foreshadows, it is also prepared to sacrifice this war hero to save face in the eyes of the West after the newspapers report another massacre. In the end, Osero shows that the fashioning of the Japanese Empire was inseparable from the construction of racial hierarchies and the mobilization of subaltern groups to serve the agenda of Japanese imperialism.

A ­Japanese Othello in Taiwan  37

NOTES An earlier version of this chapter appeared as Robert Tierney, “Othello in Tokyo: Performing Race and Empire in 1903 Japan,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2011): 514–540.







ō

­

38  Robert Tierney



14. Ayako Kano, Acting like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001).



­

­ ­ 20. Ibid., 53–54.

22. Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 423–424. 23. Emi, Osero, 33, 37–38. 24. Ibid., 26.



A ­Japanese Othello in Taiwan  39

161; and Ōtani Tadashi, “Ryojun gyakusatsu jiken no ichi kōsatsu,” Senshu Hōgaku ronshū 45 (1987): 266–267. 27. Wu Peichen notes that the Japanese military had long recognized the strategic significance of the Pescadores. At the time of the Taiwan Expedition of 1871, a punitive mission to punish Indigenous Taiwanese for massacring the crew of an Okinawan fishing vessel, the fleet of Admiral Saigō Tsugumichi anchored in the harbor of the Pescadores. During the First Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese attacked the island of Magong in the Pescadores before going on to occupy Taiwan. When Washirō arrives in the Pescadores, he establishes his temporary headquarters in Magong City and also holds his victory banquet there. See Wu Peichen, “The Peripheral Body of Empire: Shakespeare Adaptations and Taiwan’s Geopolitics,” in Replaying Shakespeare in Asia, ed. Poonam Trivedi and Minami Ryuta (New York: Routledge, 2010), 238. 28. Emi, Osero, 40–41. 29. Washirō tells of “the terrible dangers I faced when I was captured and made prisoner by a tribe of cannibals in Africa”; ibid., 20.

­ 32. Tsuboi Shōgorō, quoted in Itō Mamiko, “Daigokai naikoku kangyō hakuenkai to banpaku kaisai e no mosaku; Taiwankan to Jinruikan,” Nihon Rekishi 686 (2005): 82.

36. Tozawa Koya, Meiji honyaku bungaku zenshū, shinbun zasshihen, vol 3 (Tokyo: Osorasha, 1997), 368.

­

­ ​­ ​­ ​­ ​­ 39. Emi, Osero, 13.

​­

​­

​­ ​­ ​­

​



40  Robert Tierney

1345, notes that the Meiji period decree contained no reference to freedom or liberation from prejudice but simply proclaimed the ending of status designations. Since some outcasts were powerful figures in the Edo period guild system, it is likely that the Meiji period racial hierarchy was much more absolute than the Edo period system. ō 46. Takahashi Yoshio, Nihon jinshu kairyō ron, in Meiji bunka shiryō sōsho, vol. 6, ed. Kaji Ryūichi (Tokyo: Kazama shobō, 1961), 55.

50. Watanabe Naomi, Nihon kindai bungaku to “sabetsu” (Tokyo: Ota shuppansha, 1994), 18. 52. Sugiura Jūgō, quoted in Kō Yonran, “Tekisasu o meguru gensetsuken,” in Disukūru no teikoku, ed. Kaneko Akio, Takahashi Osamu, and Yoshida Morio (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2000), 278.

54. Sugiura Juzō, “Hankai yume monogatari,” reprinted in Yūwa mondai ronsō, ed. Central Assimilation Council (Tokyo: Sekai bunko, 1973), 1–2. 58. Suematsu Kenchō, A Fantasy of Far Japan, or Summer Dream Dialogues (London: Archibald Constable, 1905), 47. ­

A ­Japanese Othello in Taiwan  41

2019). Regarding Okinawans in Taiwan, Christy notes that “Okinawan struggles to deal with discrimination from Japanese and improve their economic lot must be understood within the context of the Japanese Empire, in which being Japanese was the only way to access power” (152). Matsuda stresses the liminality of the Okinawans in the Japanese Empire, which “created the space for the common people” to “make their career in the Japanese colonial empire” (151). 62. Matayoshi Seikiyo, Nihon shokuminchika no Taiwan to Okinawa (Ginowan, Japan: Okinawa akishobō, 1990), 51–94.

6 4. Emi, Osero, 56.

3

PASSING AND POSING IN COLONIAL MANCHURIA IN MURŌ SAISEI’S KOTO OF THE CONTINENT KIMBERLY KONO

US literary representations of passing, ranging from Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) to Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), have depicted the complex experiences of Black subjects who pass as White. In the context of American studies, scholarship on passing often centers around race and explores the ramifications of a subject taking on another identity and, as Elaine K. Ginsberg notes, “escaping the subordination and oppression accompanying one identity and accessing the privileges and status of the other.” As the notion of passing has been expanded to include other identity categories such as gender or class, scholars have continued to analyze how passing foregrounds “the boundaries established between identity categories” and “the individual and cultural anxieties induced by boundary crossing.”1 In the context of Japanese colonial studies, discussions of passing have primarily centered on colonized subjects attempting to pass as Japanese. A number of colonial literary texts portray Korean, Okinawan, or Taiwanese multiracial subjects taking on Japanese identities in order to avoid the discrimination they have faced as colonized subjects.2 Scholarship analyzing these texts has explored the motivations of those who attempt to pass, the effects of passing on both the individuals and their larger communities, and the ramifications of these actions.3 When I first began this project, my aim was to contribute to that body of research through an analysis of the depiction of passing in a novel by Murō Saisei (1889–1962), Koto of the Continent (Tairiku no koto, 1937).4 Set in colonial Manchuria during the late 1930s, Saisei’s novel focuses on a group of Japanese women and men who meet on a ship sailing from Japan to Manchuria. The characters orbit around the beautiful and mysterious Shirasaki Aiko, who is romantically pursued by several male characters, including medical doctor Hyōdō Kan and undercover special services agent Ōuma Sentarō. Born and raised in Manchuria, the twentysomething Aiko is identified from the beginning of the novel 42

Passing and Posing in Colonial Manchuria  43

by several characters as “different” from other Japanese. At one point in the narrative, another character alleges that Aiko has concealed her father’s Russian heritage. Based on the assumption that Aiko was multiracial, I initially aimed to analyze the portrayal of passing in the context of colonial Manchuria. In discussions of this novel, however, scholars hold differing opinions on Aiko’s ethnic background. Kasamori Isamu, Miki Taku, and Nakanishi Tatsuharu have asserted that Aiko’s father was of Russian descent; others, like Yasumoto Takako, view the heritage of Aiko’s father as vague or unconfirmed.5 Even more decisively, Nagayoshi Masao has brought together “evidence” from the novel with additional historical research about the Japanese and Russian populations in Manchuria to conclude that Aiko’s father could only be Japanese and that thus she was not of multiracial background. Nagayoshi further argues that these accusations of having a Russian father were a result of her childhood in Harbin, where she became acculturated to things Russian.6 ­

Consequently, rather than focusing solely on the ramifications of Aiko’s alleged attempts to conceal her heritage, this chapter will explore the different elements involved in the accusation of passing and its function in the novel’s broader commentary on colonial Manchuria. More specifically, I will examine several instances where accusations of passing or posing occur in the novel. All of these scenes center on the character Aiko, whose racial identity and qualifications as a “respectable Japanese woman” are called into question by male characters. While previous scholarship on this novel has attended to Aiko’s character, the present study shifts focus to explore how her male interlocutors imbue the act of passing with meanings that reflect more about the accusers than the accused. In directing

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attention to the accusation itself, this essay attempts to deconstruct the power dynamics of this act and reveal the instability and anxiety underlying the facade of power that bolsters such an allegation. Which factors instigate these charges? What does such an accusation reveal about the assumptions surrounding the involved identities—in both the passing and the “actual” identity? The accusation scenes underscore how authority is centered outside the passing individual. Unless a passing subject reveals their efforts at passing, it is other wise an external accuser, whose judgment supposedly prevails in making an assessment about the identity of the accused. In shifting the focus from the accused to the accuser, other questions emerge: What is at stake for the person making such an allegation? Why do they view themselves as qualified to judge another person? How is the charge framed discursively—as a lie, a betrayal, a masquerade—and what is the significance of such framing? Such questions form the basis of this study, which will focus on the accusations of passing or posing to consider the issues of identity, authority, and authenticity in the context of colonial Manchuria. MURŌ SAISEI AND KOTO OF THE CONTINENT

Murō Saisei began his writing career as a poet of haiku and tanka.8 He eventually moved to prose, producing such work as the autobiographical Childhood (Yōnen jidai, 1919), in which he explored his difficulties as an illegitimate child in Kanazawa. Saisei declared the finality of his shift to prose with the essay “Goodbye Poem, I’m Breaking Up with You” (Shiyo, kimi to owakare suru, 1934). Around the same time, he produced a number of fiction pieces, including ­Brother and ­Sister (Ani imōto, 1934), which won the Bungei Konwakai Award the following year.9 Attesting to his literary contributions to both poetry and prose, a fourteen-volume set of his collected works was published in 1936. In the postwar period, Saisei continued to receive literary recognition with his 1958 novel Apricot Girl (Anzukko), which won the Yomiuri Prize and became the basis of a film by Naruse Mikio, and the 1959 novel Remnants of the Gossamer Diary (Kagerō nikki ibun), which was awarded the Noma Literary Prize. Two years after establishing a poetry prize in his own name, he died in 1962 of lung cancer. Saisei began writing Koto of the Continent while traveling through Manchuria, April 18–May 3, 1937. His experiences on the journey served as the basis for the novel’s portrayal of the environment and lives of Japanese on the continent, but, like his other writing from this period, it is fiction.10 Upon Saisei’s return to Japan, the novel was serialized in the Asahi newspaper from October to December 1937, and eventually published in book form in February 1938 by Shinchōsha. In addition to the novel, during the journey, Saisei also wrote a record of his travels, Going by Camel (Rakuda-yuki), published in 1937, and a collection of poems, Harbin Poems (Harubin shishū), which was not published ­until 1957.11

Passing and Posing in Colonial Manchuria  45

Saisei’s sojourn followed in the footsteps of other Japanese writers, artists, and intellectuals who visited Manchuria and its environs. Unlike many of these travelers, who were invited by the Kwantung Army, the South Manchuria Railway Company, or other Japanese organizations, Saisei organized and funded the visit on his own, a fact noted in his travel record.12 In differentiating the circumstances of his journey from others, he underscored his agency in organizing both his itinerary and the contents of his writing about Manchuria. While this distinction may have served as an effort to declare his trip (and his writing) as unencumbered by the pressures of the sponsored trips of other literati, the choice to travel to this particular location, at the very least, benefited from and thus supported, whether consciously or unconsciously, Japan’s increasing expansion on the continent. Literary scholars and critics have had different responses to Koto of the Continent. Upon its initial publication, for example, the novel was not well received.13 One critic, Sakai Tsuyashi, who had lived in Manchuria for a decade and was active in literary circles there, described Saisei’s novel as being written from the perspective of a tourist and, as such, argued that it should not be considered literature of Manchuria (Manshū bungaku).14 Sakai’s evaluation of the novel highlights one of the important issues in defining the category of literature of Manchuria during this period. In discussions of this category in the 1938 Manchuria Literary Arts Annual (Manshū bungei nenkan), one of the distinctions made by Japanese writers and critics who were based on the continent was the difference between the writing of “tourists” and that of long-term residents.15 The former category, which would have included Saisei’s writing, was based on a writer’s inevitably superficial impressions during a short-term jaunt to the continent. The Japanese government, or organizations that sponsored some of these writers, aimed to promote travel and the colonial project in Manchuria to mainland Japanese, a condition that may have also shaped the content produced from these trips. By contrast, the critics in Manchuria argued, the writing of long-term residents reflected more in-depth knowledge resulting from their lengthier experiences on the continent. For some critics, the writing of residents also possessed a stronger commitment to the project of nation building in Manchuria. The writers in this category contributed to Manchuria-based literary journals, such as Sakubun and A, and participated in debates about the definition and development of Manchurian literature.16 Sakai himself was a contributor to the Dalian-based journal Sakubun, which had been active in Manchuria since 1932, and his critique of Koto of the Continent represents the efforts of Japanese expatriate writers staking their claims on Manchurian literature and defending such literary territory against allegedly superficial treatment by the literary tourism of writers such as Saisei. In the twenty-first century, critics have been more generous toward Saisei’s novel. Miki Taku notes that despite Saisei’s shallow knowledge of life in Manchuria, the text provides important insights into the Japanese fascination with

46  Kimberly Kono

Harbin as an exotic city.17 With its detailed descriptions of different locales, from a concert hall to a Chinese orphanage, the novel conveys the bustling energy of the city described as the “little Paris of the Orient.”18 Through these depictions of Harbin and other cities on the continent, the novel reflected the mainland gaze of Saisei and also contributed to the imagining of empire by readers on the mainland.19 In addition, the work also identifies a wide array of individuals and projects—personal, economic, and political— centered in colonial Manchuria. From young women seeking freedom and adventure on the continent, to sex traffickers exploiting the former’s naivete, to agents in the service of the Japanese military, the novel identifies multiple individual and institutional motivations behind the growing Japanese presence on the continent. Particularly in light of this diverse cast of characters, it is unsurprising that different ideas about what it means to be Japanese circulate in this narrative set in the colonial space of Manchuria. PASSING FOR JAPANESE

In the opening passage of Koto of the Continent, readers encounter Shirasaki Aiko standing on the deck of a ship sailing from Japan to Manchuria. Gazing at two other ships with the dark red setting sun in the background, she is overwhelmed by the elegance of the scene. By introducing Aiko in the first paragraph of the novel, Saisei establishes her importance in the narrative. At the same time, locating the beginning of the novel in the middle of the ocean emphasizes the physical voyage upon which these characters have embarked and also gestures at the possibility of other journeys— emotional as well as political. The liminal state of the ocean voyage, in between national boundaries, also foreshadows the instability and dislocation the characters will experience in Manchuria. Among the different subplots of displacement, Aiko remains central, an almost magnetic force to which other characters are attracted. In the early sections of the novel, Saisei distinguishes Aiko from the other Japanese characters. Takarada Kinji, a pimp who spent much time on the continent, comments to another character about Aiko’s odd (hentekona) ­Japanese, attributing it to her childhood growing up in Manchuria.20 Language usage can be interpreted as a marker of different facets of identity— cultural affiliation, class, gender, hometown, and so on. Consequently, her unusual way of speaking Japanese could be a quaint resonance of her education on the continent and a marker of her expatriate status. On the other hand, the description of her Japanese as “odd” implicitly calls into question her ties to Japan. Her inability to speak “proper” or standard Japanese could be interpreted as an indicator of her inability to fit in or understand Japanese culture. By drawing attention to Aiko’s unconventional way of speaking, Saisei sets her apart from the other Japanese characters and plants a seed of doubt about her Japanese identity. Aiko’s difference from the other characters is also manifest in her appearance. In the same scene, Dr. Hyōdō, one of Aiko’s suitors, describes her unusually

Passing and Posing in Colonial Manchuria  47

pallid complexion as having an “eerie beauty like leukoderma” (shirahata no yōna kimyōna utsukushisa).21 Her pale skin resonates as a sign of her unique beauty, but describing it as “eerie” and likening it to a skin condition also seems to suggest additional, possibly dangerous, resonances to her loveliness. Furthermore, while this otherworldly whiteness initially seems to be a factor distinguishing Aiko’s beauty, the white hue of her skin takes on racial connotations, in light of a number of references to the similarly pale skin of various Russian streetwalkers appearing later in the novel.22 In combination with her upperclass status, these characteristics seem to amplify her mysterious, even exotic, persona. At the same time, however, these qualities distinguish Aiko from other Japanese and eventually build to the questioning of her claim to a Japanese identity. Here it is important to consider what constitutes a Japanese identity. Is “pure blood lineage” sufficient? Or does one need a particular appearance, linguistic fluency, cultural knowledge, patriotic feelings toward Japan, or residency? In the middle of the narrative, a fter Aiko’s various differences have been commented upon, one of the male characters challenges her ethnic heritage. In a conversation with the special services agent Ōuma, Aiko discusses how she feels more comfortable in Harbin than in Japan, and states that she likes the “wild” (yaban), “relaxed” (ochitsuita), and “open” (hirobirotoshita) lifestyle in Harbin. She continues, “For someone like me who was born and raised in Harbin, there is no place easier to live. This is a feeling that only someone born here could understand. Interestingly, in Harbin, the national flag has been changed five times.”23 Ōuma agrees with her observation about the political shifts in Manchuria, and lasciviously comments that various flags have fluttered over her body, implying that, like Manchuria, she too has had affiliations with different entities—in her case, men. She responds that she is not simply “eccentric” (fūgawarina), but perhaps because she descends from parents who worked in this city where so many flags have been flown, she is different from other women. After hearing this admission, Ōuma’s facial expression changes and he asks Aiko if her father is “different” (Anata wa hyottoshitara . . . Shitsureidesuga, otōsama ga ochigai ni nari wa shimasenka?). In other words, he suggests that her father is not Japanese. Aiko blushes but then maintains a calm demeanor as she declares that her father is Japanese. As a rebuttal, she offers to introduce Ōuma to him. Surprisingly, Ōuma retorts with a “forceful energy, as if he were attacking her, ‘Why are you concealing [the truth]?’ ”24 In light of Aiko’s declared affiliation with Harbin rather than Japan and her comment about her parents’ lineage, he questions her ties to a Japanese identity and assumes that she has been trying to pass as Japanese. Aiko’s declared lack of connection to Japan and her positive portrayal of colonial Manchuria were not unusual among the colonialist Japanese, particularly women. Some former “continental brides” cited the freedom from societal pressures and in-laws as one of the motivating factors for their emigration to

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the continent.25 Sata Ineko’s short story “A Marriage Proposal” (Endan, 1941) reinforces this idea with a female protagonist who views life in urban Manchuria as a liberatory space, particularly in contrast to the metropole.26 Left-wing ­ activists, male and female alike, fled the surveillance of mainland Japan for the continent, and for women writers like anarchists Mochizuki Yuriko and Yagi Akiko, Manchuria may have represented an appealing alternative to the intense social and political pressures of the mainland.27 Yet even if colonial Manchuria presented a liberating alternative to mainland Japan, could a subject possess (and retain) their Japanese identity while still preferring life in the colonies to that on the mainland? Furthermore, how might such an affiliation be interpreted in terms of ethnic, political, or cultural loyalties? Many second- and third-generation Japanese settlers, like Aiko, struggled with these questions, grappling with their ties to Japan and their lives in the colonies. In Sakaguchi Reiko’s short story “Spring and Autumn” (Shunjū, 1941), a Japanese couple who has emigrated to Taiwan worry about subsequent generations of settlers and their lack of a hometown in Japan.28 In her memoir Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist, Kazuko Kuramoto describes her conflicted feelings at the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War. She wanted to remain in Manchuria, as a “true citizen of Dairen,” but was told to “return” to Japan, a place that she had never visited. In response, she thought, “I was born here. I am a native of Dairen. The native Chinese didn’t have to leave here when Japan took over Dairen, or when czarist Russia had it before Japan. Why do I have to go? Why?”29 Kuramoto’s lament reveals a fissure in ideas about what it means to be Japanese. While ethnicity, citizenship, residency, and cultural and linguistic fluency were assumed to all cohere in a Japanese identity, multiple affiliations in the colonial context challenged that very assumption. Ethnically Japanese subjects outside the Japanese Archipelago had differential access to Japanese culture and language, with some, like Kuramoto, never having been to their so-called homeland.30 Further complicating matters, colonized subjects in Korea or Taiwan blurred the boundaries of citizenship and ethnic identity by claiming status as Japanese imperial subjects and pushing against the boundaries of Japanese identity. As subjects of the Japanese Empire, colonized subjects acquired linguistic and cultural fluency through assimilation policy and compulsory language education.31 Exemplifying the “imperial paranoia” that Andre Haag discusses in chapter 4 of this volume, some Japanese officials expressed concern that with increased fluency among colonized subjects it would become difficult to distinguish between colonized subjects and ethnic Japanese.32 Notably, fluency in standard Japanese was, in fact, unreliable as a marker of Japanese identity in the colonies, as evidenced by the array of dialects spoken by colonialist Japanese.33 As these and other examples challenged the assumption that linguistic fluency was a qualification for recognition as a Japanese subject, additional questions about

Passing and Posing in Colonial Manchuria  49

how Japanese identity was constituted began to emerge. Even though the arbitrary and constructed nature of this identity becomes apparent in such discussions, the anxiety over Japanese colonial authority ultimately led to further solidification of how a Japanese identity was defined.34 Returning to Saisei’s novel, and specifically to Ōuma’s response to Aiko, we can see his expectations for a Japanese identity that coheres in the categories mentioned above— ethnicity, cultural and linguistic fluency—as well as a preference, or even loyalty, for Japan. When confronted with Aiko, who does not have the linguistic and cultural fluency he expects from a Japanese woman, Ōuma resolves what he sees as inconsistencies by assuming that she is of multiracial descent. It is important to note here that while her differences—her “odd” manner of speaking of Japanese and pale complexion—were charming and even alluring previously, the possibility that she is a mixed-race person who is passing elicits anger. This reaction becomes even more fraught when Ōuma’s profession is taken into consideration. As a special services agent, he works in the service of the Japanese Empire by gathering intelligence for the Kwantung Army.35 His profession necessitates loyalty to the colonial and imperial projects and suspicion against those who may not share those feelings. Thus, his reaction may be about the literal threat that Aiko’s disloyalty could pose. At the individual level, Ōuma’s angry reaction reflects a sense that he has been misled in some way: “Why are you concealing [the truth]?” Where he had previously been asserting his masculine privilege by making remarks about Aiko’s personal life and her sexuality, the possibility that she had deceived him calls into question that authority and elicits an aggressive accusation. At the same time, Ōuma’s anger also reflects a deep anxiety about the instability of Japanese identity in the colonial context. If one cannot rely on such factors as language fluency or appearance, how does one identify whether someone is Japanese? What actually makes someone Japanese in the first place? As cultural critic Kobena Mercer notes, “Identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty.”36 Ōuma’s anxiety results in his policing the boundaries of identity in order to protect the standing of Japanese colonialist subjects in Manchuria. Through his accusation, then, Ōuma attempts to control the borders of Japanese identity and colonialist privilege, as well as assert his own identity as a Japanese man and agent of the Japanese military. Their location in Harbin further exacerbates this anxiety over Japanese identity. This urban space, unlike many other cities in Manchuria, had an ethnically diverse population, with Chinese and Russian majorities joined by émigrés from Armenia, Germany, and Poland, as well as Japanese and Korean subjects.37 Ethnic tensions between Chinese and Russian populations had existed since the 1920s.38 With the establishment of Manchukuo in 1932, such tensions became further complicated by the increased political influence of the Japanese.39

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In light of the long history of these different expatriate communities in this city, it is understandable that Japanese authority may have been particularly unstable and in need of confirmation. Anxiety about the behavior of Japanese expatriates was not limited to Manchuria. In colonial Korea, Japanese officials expressed concern about Japanese colonialists losing their ties to Japanese culture and transforming into yobo (a derogatory term for Koreans in Japanese), a phenomenon described as “yoboization.” Attention was focused particularly on the “Koreanization” of workingclass Japanese in Korea, who failed to serve as “cultural missionaries for unassimilated Koreans.” 40 Significantly, the “civilized” behavior associated with Japanese was defined as cleanliness, “graciousness, chastity, faith, generosity, bravery, and, above all, strong feelings of loyalty.” 41 The fact that these critiques seemed to focus on working-class Japanese also draws attention to the intersectionality of identity and the heterogeneity within the Japanese population. In particular, working-class status could affect a subject’s claims to Japanese identity and its accompanying privileges. POSING AS A RESPECTABLE ­JAPANESE ­WOMAN

In discussing gender and passing, Ginsberg writes that “gender, in the arbitrariness of its cultural prescriptions, is a trope of difference that shares with race (especially in the context of black/white passing) a similar structure of identity categories whose enactments and boundaries are culturally policed.” 42 This section addresses other accusations in the novel that evoke the intersectionality of gender, class, and Japanese identity and contest Aiko’s claims to respectable Japanese womanhood. While her identity as a woman is not questioned, other characters judge whether Aiko is conforming to gender conventions or simply posing as a proper woman and hiding her nonconformity. Similar to how her assertion of a Japanese heritage is challenged, such claims resonate as ways that the accusers assert their own authority and manage their anxiety over how Aiko transgresses and thus challenges expectations for Japanese women. By calling her a “whore” and labeling her as deviant, the male characters attempt to control and manipulate Aiko into fulfilling their desires for her not only as an individual but also as a Japanese woman and a subject of empire. In the same conversation referenced at the beginning of this essay, Ōuma asks Aiko why she does not like spending time in Japan, and she responds that she has bad manners (gyōgi ga warui) and is not good at things like ikebana or the tea ceremony. By lacking these skills, she does not conform to gender and class expectations for upper-class Japanese women at the time. In other words, Aiko is unable to perform what is defined as “respectable” Japanese womanhood in mainland Japan. Instead, labeled by these male characters (and some literary critics) as a femme fatale, Aiko is distinguished from other Japanese women through her alleged relationships with various men. For example, the pimp

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Takarada tells Hyōdō that from his longtime experience working with prostitutes, he can tell by the knowing way Aiko carries herself that she has been intimately involved with men for a long time.43 In voicing his evaluation of Aiko, Takarada asserts his own masculine authority over another female body. His interlocutor, Hyōdō, is discomfited by this topic and asks Takarada to stop talking about Aiko, suggesting how such revelations could potentially disrupt Hyōdō’s interest in this young woman. Takarada is not the only character who attempts to impose his masculine authority onto Aiko. In a later scene, Ishigami Yuzuru, a young man who followed Aiko from Japan to Manchuria, likens her to a prostitute a fter discovering that she is involved with another man.44 In light of the fact that Aiko has repeatedly rejected Ishigami’s advances, this accusation functions as a way to demean her by calling her sexually promiscuous and attempting to define her identity. Ishigami’s assumptions about her sexuality label her as deviant or, at the very least, distance her from the chaste behavior expected of respectable young ­Japanese ­women. While the previous scene reflects an interaction between individual subjects, the concern with Japanese women’s behavior, particularly their sexual activity, in colonial spaces resonated at the state level as well. Bill Mihalopoulos discusses the efforts of Japanese consuls in Singapore to police the behavior of Japanese sex workers, whose activities were seen to undermine Japan’s claims to modern civility and challenge patriarchal authority.45 Despite such efforts, the consuls were unsuccessful in curtailing the migration of Japanese women abroad for sex work, a fact further challenging their authority over these women. Aiko’s refusal to conform to gender expectations, like her divergence from a Japanese identity, becomes associated with the colonial space of Harbin.46 The pimp Takarada talks about encountering Aiko when she was a child, saying, “That kind of girl who was born and raised only in Harbin has qualities that Japanese find difficult to interact with. Aiko’s lifestyle is particularly difficult for me to understand.” 47 His comment suggests that her inability to conform to expectations for Japanese women is based in her childhood in Harbin, outside the boundaries of the metropole (naichi). Notably, similar concerns over the influence of colonial Manchuria on young Japanese women emerged in the colonial media in the form of a debate over the characterization of Japanese women living in Manchuria (zaiman josei) by their male counterparts. Specifically, in 1941, several newspapers reported that young Japanese men in Manchuria were increasingly passing over their female colonial counterparts and instead were looking for Japanese wives in mainland Japan. In these reports, Japanese women from the mainland were viewed as more appealing and more “feminine,” in contrast with the demanding, improper Japanese women of the colonies.48 ­Whether or not these assessments were accurate, the existence of these stereotypes reflected the assumption that Japanese women who grew up in the colonies were overly assertive and too independent due to the absence of such institutions as the

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In Koto of the Continent, similar anxiety about Japanese women’s behavior manifests in the ways that several male characters try to identify Aiko as different, if not deviant. Ōuma’s accusation that she is of mixed race descent contains the suggestion that she is different from other Japanese. Ishigami’s declaration that Aiko is a prostitute is a further assault on her claims to respectable Japanese womanhood.50 Each of these men attempts to label Aiko in order to assert their authority and make her hew to their desires. When she resists these pressures, the men respond by identifying her as aberrant— ethnically (biracial), sexually (a prostitute), and culturally (acclimated only to Manchuria). Yet while their accusations focus their disciplinary gaze upon Aiko, such comments speak to the instability of their own authority and authenticity. In particular, by monitoring and regulating the boundaries of Japanese women, these male characters attempt to assert their patriarchal privilege and place women—in this case, Aiko—in the position of being managed or controlled. The fact that throughout most of the novel she deflects their advances and resists such attempts at management creates further anxiety for these men. Thus, although these male characters may claim colonial authority as Japanese men in the colonies, their anxiety over their inability to control Aiko ultimately gestures at the instability of their positions on the continent. ADOPTING A NEW IDENTITY

At the end of the novel, Saisei resolves the question surrounding Aiko’s identity by having her travel to Japan with Dr. Hyōdō, who asks her to leave Harbin (he literally asks her to distance herself from Harbin) and accompany him back to mainland Japan.51 He says that she is still a child (Anata wa mada kodomo desu) and he will teach her a great deal (Boku ga iroiro oshieteagemasu). She agrees to go and says she will learn from him (Watakushi, nanto oshiete itadakimasuwa).52 In this arrangement, Aiko moves (or is moved) from the marginal colonial space of the gaichi to the imperial center of the naichi in order to be (re)educated. This particular plot point has even deeper nuances because of the doctor’s complicated history on the continent. Hyōdō’s original purpose in visiting Manchuria was to search for the child he fathered and abandoned ten years earlier. Then working in Manchuria as a doctor, Hyōdō became romantically (or at least physically) involved with a biracial Chinese-Manchu woman. He left the woman and their baby behind in Manchuria in favor of continuing his medical career and returning to Japan. Later, after time studying abroad in Germany and then building his own successful medical practice in Japan, Hyōdō feels guilty for abandoning this child

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and thus returns to the continent to find his child. He visits a number of orphanages but is unsuccessful in his search. In the end of the novel, however, he does not return to Japan empty-handed. Instead he convinces Aiko to come with him to Japan. The implications of this denouement seem to be that although Hyōdō is not returning with the actual biological child that he abandoned ten years before, he is bringing back another “orphan of the continent.”53 By substituting Aiko for the multiracial child that he previously abandoned, Hyōdō infantilizes Aiko— a familiar move in colonial literature with respect to colonized subjects. Furthermore, Hyōdō offers to educate her, implying that she needs his assistance. This gesture also echoes colonial discourse in which Japan will educate its colonized subjects. Aiko is able to go to Japan because of this adoptive relationship with Hyōdō, who will teach her. Although the content of this education is not specified, this setup resembles the ways that colonized subjects were exhorted to undergo cultural assimilation, taking on various Japanese cultural practices under the supervision of a knowledgeable Japanese subject. But why is Aiko being treated like a colonized subject? Why would she need to be “educated”? What exactly is Hyōdō going to teach her in Japan that she has not been able to learn in Manchuria? ­

Such distinctions between Japanese subjects in different parts of the empire could have been used to challenge the broader colonial discourse touting Japanese superiority. Japanese officials, however, attributed the difference between Japanese in the metropole and the colonies to the corrupting influence of their colonial surroundings. Consequently, in the case of Japanese living in colonial Korea, for example, officials recommended that returning to the metropole was the only way to “reestablish themselves as ‘true’ Japanese.”56 Notably, within the confines of the metropole, empire can more easily regulate and control that

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which challenges Japanese identity. Therefore, following this line of thinking, by accompanying Aiko to Japan, Hyōdō can extract her from the corrupting colonial space and help her to be a “decent” and “upstanding” Japanese woman in the imperial center. This ending resolves the underlying concerns that emerge from the challenges to Aiko’s identity: the deviation from conventional notions of Japanese womanhood, the instability of Japanese identity, and the challenge to patriarchal authority. First, Aiko’s “return” to Japan indicates the possibility of rehabilitation away from the corrupting influence of the colonial space. By relocating to the metropole, she can “learn” how to be Japanese and ostensibly stabilize her questionable claims to a Japanese identity. Furthermore, her willingness to accompany Hyōdō affirms his Japanese authority and gestures toward a “successful” rehabilitation that will result in her embodiment of respectable Japanese womanhood. In addition, this ending also affirms the authority of the male subject, Hyōdō, by making up for his past misdeed of abandoning his mixed-race biological child years earlier. This reclamation of his past could also be read more broadly as an affirmation of Japanese patriarchal authority, seemingly taking responsibility for its previous neglect or misdeeds in the colonies. TAKE TWO: RECLAIMING THE COLONIAL(IST)

While the serialized version of Saisei’s novel resolves the anxiety over identity by putting Aiko on the path to rehabilitation, the book version published by Shinchōsha in 1938 goes even further to assuage colonial anxieties. As several scholars have noted, Saisei made significant revisions to the novel when it was published in book form.57 In addition to changing the title of one section, he also excised two chapters, “Harbin” (Harubin) and “Separation” (Wakare), and added an additional chapter, “City of Ice” (Kōri no machi), to the end of the novel. Rather than concluding the novel with Hyōdō taking Aiko to Japan, “City of Ice” focuses on military special services agent Ōuma and another female character, Hayase Ichiko, in snowy Qiqihar.58 In the appended conclusion, following Aiko’s departure to Japan with Hyōdō, Ōuma ends up with Ichiko as a romantic partner who willingly follows him to the outskirts of Manchuria, where he will ostensibly continue his “special” work for the Kwantung Army. Ichiko, who grew up in mainland Japan and whose Japanese identity is never questioned throughout the novel, has traveled to Dairen in order to work at her brother’s restaurant, Mihata. Upon her arrival, she discovers that the large Western-style restaurant he had described was actually a small, shabby, and poorly lit venue. Despite her disappointment, Ichiko remains in Dairen working for her brother. In the serialized version, Ichiko eventually returns to Japan on her own, rejecting the attentions of another male character. In the book version, however, the chapter “Separation,” which contains these events, has been deleted, and instead Ichiko follows Ōuma to Qiqihar. With this turn of events, Ichiko replaces the

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In order to understand the different resonances of this new conclusion, it is crucial to acknowledge the context in which Saisei produced both versions of the novel. After Saisei returned to Japan from his trip to the continent, the Kwantung Army engaged in multiple conflicts with Chinese troops, including the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July  1937; the Battle of Shanghai, August– November  1937; and, most notably, the Nanjing Massacre, from December 1937 to January 1938. With these and other events, Saisei must have been aware of the escalation of the war effort on the continent. In light of the heightened military conflict between China and Japan, the character Ōuma, as a special services agent for the Kwantung Army, embodies the Japanese military presence on the continent. Saisei’s choice to give Ichiko a new ending also takes on additional significance in light of the historical moment. A year earlier, in 1936, the Japanese government began the Millions to Manchuria program, promoting emigration to the continent. Since 1932 the Kwantung Army had been recruiting continental brides (tairiku no hanayome) to marry agricultural settlers (ippan kaitakudan) and volunteer army settlers (giyūtai kaitakudan) and support their work in the service of empire in rural Manchuria. With the national attention and advocacy for emigration, however, images of continental brides began appearing more regularly in the Japanese popular media. With her declared desire to follow Ōuma anywhere, Ichiko evokes the image of the continental bride as a young Japanese woman willingly moving to the outskirts of Manchuria to support her male love interest.59 By centering the final focus of the novel upon Ichiko and Ōuma, this added chapter affirms, and even romanticizes, the efforts of the Kwantung Army to further expand its authority on the continent. In addition, instead of just relocating and rehabilitating the ambivalent colonialist subject, as embodied in Aiko, the revised ending reclaims the colonial project and recasts it with a romantic hue by coupling Ōuma with Ichiko. In the end of the book version, the adventures on the continent have not concluded and instead will continue on in the hands of a special agent for the Japanese military and a Japanese woman volunteering to be his helpmate. In closing, it is important to return to the issues of identity and passing that appear throughout Saisei’s novel. As I have noted, other narratives that explore passing challenge the strict boundaries of identity, asking questions about how these definitions are determined and by whom. While the prospect of passing in Koto of the Continent may provoke similar inquiries, the different endings of the novel ultimately function as a means to maintain the boundaries between a

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Despite the efforts to maintain the divide between Japan and its colonial other(s), the fragility of those boundaries is evident in the novel. By devoting attention to the accusations of passing, rather than the accused, this chapter has revealed the way in which such charges emerge from anxiety over imperial authority and the waning power of Japanese (male) subjects. In their denunciation of Aiko’s alleged deviance, the male characters attempt to assert both their own masculine power and the influence of the Japanese presence in Manchuria. It remains to be seen whether such efforts are successful as they ultimately highlight the instability of their status in the colonial context. Within the accusations we can also see a focus on the corrupting influence of the colonial environment and, more implicitly, a call for a continued Japanese presence. Saisei’s novel makes an attempt to contain t hese dangerous effects through rehabilitating the deviant Aiko and staking further claims in the outskirts of Manchuria. Aiko’s successful reeducation would not only affirm the powerful influence of both Hyōdō and the environs of mainland Japan but also assuage any concerns about other Japanese women on the continent. The continued Japanese presence on the continent, emblematized by Ichiko and Ōuma, further bolsters confidence in Japan’s colonial and military projects there. Yet these efforts are not fully realized in the conclusion(s) of the novel and are instead left only as future possibilities. Will the environment of mainland Japan foster the transformation of Aiko into a respectable young woman? What will Ōuma and Ichiko do on the continent? In leaving these questions unanswered, Koto on the Continent allows for even more fissures in the facade of reclamation and domination and perhaps forecasts another kind of passing, the slow death of the Japanese Empire. NOTES

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Other studies on passing include Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Gayle Ward, ­ ­ ­ ed., Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth- Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Julie Cary Nerad, Passing Interest: Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Television and Film, 1990–2010 (New York: New York University Press, 2014); and Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young, eds., Neo-passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018). 2. Colonial literary representations of passing include Yuzurihara Masako’s 1949 short story “Korean Lynching” (Chōsen yaki), which depicts a mixed-race man attempting to pass as Japanese in Karafuto (Sakhalin), and Kim Saryang’s “Into the Light” (Hikari no naka ni, 1939), which has a Korean character and a Japanese-Korean mixed-race character attempting to pass as Japanese. Taiwanese writer Wu Zhuoliu also explores the politics of passing in his work Orphan of Asia (Ajia no koji, 1956). For more on the treatment of passing in “Into the Light,” see Nayoung Aimee Kwon, “Pluralizing Passing and Transpacific Afro-Asian Solidarities: Passings and Impasses across Colonial Korea and the Segregated United States,” chapter 5 in this volume.





6. Nagayoshi Masao, “Murō Saisei no Shōwa jūni-nen zengo: Shōsetsu Tairiku no hanayome o chūshin ni,” Ajia gakka nenpō 9 (2015): 16–17, 21. 7. Phillip Brian Harper, “Passing for What? Racial Masquerade and the Demands of Upward Mobility,” Callaloo 21, no. 2 (1998): 382, notes that “for an instance of passing to register as a challenge to the logic of racial identification, it must disclose itself as an instance

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of passing in the first place, which disclosure typically would also constitute the failure of the act.” Harper’s comment highlights the dilemma of passing as a form of resistance and implicitly suggests the importance of accusation in the identification of an act as passing.

ō 12. Murō Saisei, “Rakuda-yuki,” in Harubin shishū, Tairiku no koto (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2009), 251. Among the writers invited to travel to Manchuria were Kawabata Yasunari, Natsume Sōseki, Yamada Seizaburō, and Yosano Akiko and her husband, Yosano Tekkan. Writings from such journeys were often serialized in newspapers or magazines in mainland Japan and reinforced the importance of Manchuria in the Japanese popular imagination. Annika A. Culver, Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde propaganda in Manchukuko (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 10, notes that t hese works were a form of propaganda that promoted “Japan’s imperialist expansion in, and development of, Asia.”



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2 0. Murō, Tairiku no koto, 51.

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25. Jinno Morimasa, Tairiku no hanayome: “Manshū” ni okurareta onnatachi (Tokyo: Nashi no kisha, 1992). Continental brides were young Japanese women who moved to Manchuria to marry Japanese men working in the service of the Japanese Empire.

29. Kazuko Kuramoto, Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 73.

31. In “Crafting the Colonial ‘Japanese Child,’ ” 6 of this volume, Joan E. Ericson discusses the role of Japanese language education in promoting cultural assimilation in colonial Taiwan. Helen J. S. Lee, “Cultural Assimilation in the Kokugo Classroom: Colonial Korean ­Children’s Tsuzurikata Compositions from the Early 1930s,” Japanese Language and Literature 53, no. 1 (2019): 1–32, also addresses the role of Japanese language education in ­ ­ ­ cultural assimilation in colonial Korea. 32. See Andre Haag “Passing, Paranoia, and the Korean Problem: Cultures of ‘Telling the Difference’ in Imperial Japan,” 4 in this volume.

35. Louis Allen, “Japanese Intelligence Systems,” Journal of Contemporary History 22, no. 4 (1987): 554. For more on the special services agency, see James Llewelyn, “The Imperial Japanese Army’s Tokumu Kikan—Special Service Organisations: Connections between Wartime and Peacetime Intelligence Activities,” Journal of Intelligence History, February 2021, https:/doi.org/10.1080/16161262.2021.1889277. ​ ­ ​­ ​ ­ ​­ ​­ ​­ ​­

39. Mark Gamsa, Harbin: A Cross- Cultural Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 187–188, suggests that Chinese attitudes of resistance toward Russians may have

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shifted after the flooding of Fujiadan in 1932. In the wake of the floods, Japanese authorities provided cholera vaccinations to the general population. Yet Chinese subjects turned instead to Russian doctors, a gesture interpreted by Gamsa as a warming between the two communities in the face of the Japanese presence.

43. Murō, Tairiku no koto, 142.



5 0. Murō, Tairiku no koto, 164. 5 2. Murō, Tairiku no koto, 233. 53. Itō, “Hyōron,”145. 54. Kuramoto, Manchurian Legacy, 8–9.

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4

PASSING, PARANOIA, AND THE ­KOREA PROBLEM ­ Cultures of “Telling the Difference” in Imperial Japan ANDRE HAAG

This chapter seeks to draw meaningful connections between the elusive specter of Korean passing and strains of racialized colonial paranoia that doubled and destabilized imperial visions of Japan’s integrative colonizing projects. Centering paranoid visions of passing in this distinctive cultural context, however, requires a rather idiosyncratic frame. In an examination of the affective economies activated by the contemporary neoimperial “war on terror,” Sara Ahmed proposes that some bodies—namely, those who “could be terrorists,” always implicitly coded as Islamic— engender intensified fear because “they cannot be held in place as objects, and threaten to pass by”; that fear, in turn, creates the effect of communal borders that must be secured against infiltration. Ahmed suggests that “it is the structural possibility that the terrorist may pass us by that justifies the expansion of these forms of intelligence, surveillance and the rights of detention.” In effect, the potential failure to “tell the difference,” thereby allowing the feared, border-threatening body of the could-be terrorist to “pass us by” undetected, “makes every thing possibly fearsome,” thus driving the production of ever more fearful and impotent visions of security and surveillance.1 Ahmed’s reading sheds new light on the terrors that the mere possibility of passing could awaken at the centers of paranoid power in a way that speaks to the problems of contemporary Islamophobia as well as imperial Japanese Koreaphobia. Imperial Japan, I argue, was similarly haunted by phantoms of passing conjured by its incorporation of Korean subjects and the “Korea Problem.” To bring into relief the distorting effects and affects of the paranoid turn in that milieu, I begin with an account of what erupts when empire’s integrative surveillance regime is infiltrated and surveilled by passing figures of anxiety.

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Sometime in 1941, a reporter for Japan’s Chūgai Commercial News ­going by the name Takaishi Toshio attended a cabinet press conference that would prove unexpectedly memorable. Minister of Justice Yanagawa Heisuke was briefing the assembled correspondents when he abruptly went off script. Enumerating the myriad threats to public order and security within the empire, Yanagawa pointed to the usual suspects—unsavory foreigners, Westernized liberals, and communist sympathizers— only to finally admit that the most pernicious agents of subversion were neither wholly foreign nor domestic: “The treacherous Korean malcontents [ futei Senjin] are the real problem. From long ago, the Korean people were repeatedly conquered by foreigners, which has turned them cunning and disobedient. On the surface, they pretend to be submissive, but inwardly [naimen de], they resist. . . . I think that we should adopt Hitler’s policy for the Jews, quarantine all the treacherous Koreans on some island, and castrate the lot of them. That will rid us of the Korean malcontents and ensure that no more appear.”2 What unsettled the minister of justice at this moment was Japan’s Korea Problem ­ (Chōsenjin mondai)—which commonly referred to the linked dilemmas of insurgency, integration, and identification attending Korea’s incorporation within the body of greater Japan. Tellingly, Yanagawa named the menace using the term futei Senjin, a derogatory surveillance category designating disaffected and disloyal Korean terrorists committed to anticolonial revolution. After 1910, when imperial annexation had supposedly resolved the insecurities of Meiji Japan’s Korea Problem, the Korean people were to be integrated into Japan, but would have to be closely watched: the empire constructed a widereaching regime for monitoring the action, thought, and feeling of Korean subjects in order to ascertain whether they were becoming proper Japanese subjects. Colonial epistemologies and ontologies employed in such Korean watching relied on what Ken Kawashima calls a “moralizing binary” that neatly divided monitored populations between “treacherous” ( futei) and “virtuous” (zenryō) Korean subjects, to facilitate the differential integration of the latter while excluding those who insubordinately refused to become Japanese.3 The dilemma openly acknowledged here, however, was that the most critical of differences— in sentiment, ideology, and allegiance—belonged to the inaccessible domain of interiority (naimen). One could not easily know, and certainly not see, the difference between the idealized assimilated subject and a terrorist adopting a submissive pose. Yanagawa’s xenophobic outburst deviated radically from the authorized narratives of late imperial optimism for the state of the union joining Japan and Korea. Slogans and exhortations, aimed at persuading mainland Japanese as well as colonized subjects, stressed that the two peoples were to be fused together in one body (naisen ittai) and that all were equal under the impartial, race-blind gaze of the Emperor (isshi dōjin). The justice minister’s paranoid remarks signaled

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a denial of the possibility of Korean integration, or even a revolt against the spirit of the Japan-Korea Merger (Nikkan heigō) binding the two nations. Tellingly, Yanagawa’s incendiary Korean castration proposal was not printed in contemporary Japanese newspapers. The only record of his utterance is found in the memoir of first-generation Zainichi (resident; lit. “residing in Japan”) Korean writer Ko Chunsŏk, aptly titled Border Crossing (Ekkyō, 1977). As if underscoring the impotence of discriminating surveillance, Ko claimed to have sat facing the justice minister that day, outwardly posing as Japanese reporter Takaishi Toshio, but inwardly fuming, “Yanagawa! There’s a futei Senjin right before your eyes. Just try and castrate me if you think you can!” Following an earlier arrest for left-wing activism, which left him branded a treacherous Korean, Ko Chunsŏk had resolved to camouflage his ethnonational origins by adopting the surname Takaishi and claiming a household registry (koseki) in Osaka.4 In short, Ko had opted to pass as a Japanese mainlander (naichijin). Deceiving even the most discriminating eyes in what amounted to an inversion of the imperial surveillance order, the performance allowed him to illicitly overhear a paranoid outburst that made a mockery of the project of imperial integration. ­

The distinctive structure of imperial paranoia aroused by the Korea Problem might be revealed by tracing the movements of such passing figures of anxiety through the discourses and cultures of Japanese colonialism. In this chapter, I propose reconceptualizing “passing” as an effect produced by paranoid modes of reading—of searching for radical alterity masquerading as identity. I ask how mainland Japanese “Korea watchers” not only apprehended the possibility of Korean passing but conjured it into existence via paranoid scripts of discriminating surveillance. The phenomenon of racial passing has been shown in other contexts to engender considerable dread, suspicion, and even violence: while minoritized passing subjects themselves live with the constant fear of exposure, the “infiltrated” groups similarly confront in its specter “anxieties

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regarding visibility, invisibility, classification and social demarcation.”7 As I will explain, however, the position of Korean subjects within imperial Japan as “Japanese,” but not quite, has presented distinct impediments to sociocultural and scholarly recognition, creating a lacuna around the phenomenon. This has allowed the linked problems of passing and imperial paranoia to escape critical notice, at least relative to the abundant scholarship on colonial assimilation and collaboration. Yet, as Nayoung Aimee Kwon suggests in her reading of Kim Saryang’s story “Into the Light” (Hikari no naka ni, 1939), the “contamination of the colonizers and the colonized by one another, and the impossibility of telling one another apart” were the “shared anxieties” characteristic of this intimate, racially undifferentiated colonial encounter, to the extent that they were taken for granted and could go unmentioned.8 The ruling regime of assimilation, furthermore, demanded from Korean subjects performances of colonial mimicry adjacent—if not superficially identical—to acts of passing. Consequently, it is difficult to identify within the official, popular, or literary texts of imperial Japan anything as explicit or pervasive as the discourse of “passing for white” in North American racial contexts. And yet, Japanese accounts of colonial contact contain traces of the uncanny sense that some subjects were not what or whom they seemed. Colonial officials, metropolitan landlords, and panicked civilian mobs all voiced suspicions that treacherous Korean malcontents might attempt either to disguise themselves as mainland Japanese or camouflage interior difference by fraudulently posing as loyal, law-abiding subjects of Japan. The main instance in which the problem of Korean subjects subversively passing for Japanese mainlanders seized widespread social attention in Japan was in the unsettled days of rumor and panic after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, with notoriously violent consequences. At this moment, ordinary Japanese citizens suddenly confronted, as Robert Tierney writes, the “fear of being unable to distinguish between the Japanese and the Koreans,” which underscored the “uncanny” and “frightening possibility that Koreans might pass themselves off as Japanese.”9 The passing paranoia that exploded in 1923 is illustrative of the dilemmas of imperial integration in the sense that it reflected misgivings about the inclusion of distrusted colonial subjects and testified to the persistence of anti-Korean xenophobia, a cultural “racism without race.”10 Following Sara Ahmed’s lead, however, I hold that the paranoia aroused by Korean passing was less a matter of social reality involving actual colonized bodies and instead the function of a disconcerting structural possibility, attending paired discourses of harmonious integration (yūwa) and insurgency ( futei), that one might fail to “tell the difference” between types of subjects. This meant, essentially, the potential failure to detect dangerously deceptive discrepancies between a surveilled subject’s exterior and internal, essential states. Because this perilous possibility often passed by without explicit acknowledgment in colonial discourse, in this essay I seek

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traces of passing paranoia in the scripts of official and popular surveillance cultures obsessed with devising modes of “telling the difference,” a challenge captured in a range of Japanese terms for discriminating identification, including miwake, kanbetsu, and shikibetsu. ­

THE PERILS OF NOT SEEING PASSING IN AN UNEVENLY INTEGRATED EMPIRE

How was the spectral figure of the passing Korean apprehended, or overlooked, on the distinctive landscape of an unevenly integrated multiethnic empire? Writing about “passing” in the context of imperial Japan’s Korea Problem requires intentionally using the term against the grain. It is debatable to what extent the notion of ethnoracial passing, as conventionally conceptualized, is applicable to a racially undifferentiated colonial situation governed by a regime stressing sameness and assimilation. “Passing,” writes Everett Stonequist, one of the first scholars to consider the phenomenon cross-culturally, “is found in every race situation where the subordinate race is held in disesteem.” Crucially, his analysis situates passing alongside assimilation, implying their kinship as parallel strategies for negotiating inclusion in the dominant culture by those “wishing to share the advantages of membership in the majority, or to escape its discriminations and antagonisms.” Passing, for Stonequist, designates the incomplete and deceptive strategy of social participation adopted “where such assimilation is impossible” due to the severity of racial discrimination and social conflict.11 The incorporation of Korean people within the Japanese Empire, by contrast, was predicated on the oft-reiterated belief that assimilation was not only possible but would inevitably proceed with ease thanks to existing racial and

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cultural affinities. Under Stonequist’s schematization, the notion of passing by Korean subjects should have been unthinkable given the rhetorical emphasis on shared identities and the disavowal of distinction and discrimination. Indeed, as a seminal study by Hatada Takashi has observed, assimilation (dōka), which idealizes the possibility “that Korean people would discard being Korean and become Japanese,” may be considered the “fundamental policy of Japanese rule in Korea” throughout the colonial era.12 The possibility of passing within the empire was further obscured by the rhetorical conceit that subjects from the peninsula could not only become Japanese but in some qualified senses and contexts ­were already ­Japanese by virtue of their inclusion in empire. Consider this exchange from the frequently reprinted colonial guidebook Just What Kind of Place Is Korea? (Chōsen-tte ­ donna toko, 1929), which conveyed basic data about the territory via a lively dialogue between one knowledgeable interlocutor and an ignoramus who usually failed to follow the official script: “So, what’s the population t­ here [in ­Korea]?” “It is now nineteen million.” “And how many Japanese people [Nihonjin] live there?” “I just told you the number of Japanese people.” “Don’t pull my leg, that’s the number of Koreans, right?” “What am I going to do with you? Korean people are Japanese people too, now, are they not? Have you forgotten the Japan-Korea Merger?” “Ah, right, my mistake. So how many mainlander Japanese [naichijin] are there in Korea?”13 What the ill-informed interlocutor has forgotten is that, in the excited outpouring of print heralding Korea’s annexation via “merger” in August 1910, all Korean people had been rechristened “Japanese people” (Nihonjin), and specifically “New Japanese” (shin Nihonjin). Although merger narratives emphasized proximity and resemblance, few believed that this gesture instantly rendered Korea’s “New Japanese” identical to “Old Japanese” from the archipelago in legal status, culture, language, or emotion. Nonetheless, because this rhetorical ruse distended the category Nihonjin beyond its customary, commonsense scope to include Korean people, members of the insular Japanese ethnonation were no longer able to simply pass under that seemingly self-evident label. Instead of Nihonjin, they were obliged to become naichijin, or mainlanders, the key term in a new script of differentiation. As the careless faux pas made by the guidebook interlocutor makes clear, however, imperial terminology collapsed conventional categories, created confusion, and left distorting imprints on the category “Japanese.” My point is that a complex assemblage of conditions, taxonomies, and ideologies complicated attempts to recognize or name Korean acts of passing within

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the empire. If the phenomenon often went unacknowledged, however, and no fixed expression equivalent to the English “passing” was ever coined to identify it, some Korean individuals, in addition to Okinawans, Taiwanese, and the marginalized burakumin class, nonetheless did seek to conceal their origins in order to be read as mainland Japanese, particularly within the empire’s home islands. To my knowledge, one finds little historical sociological data— only scattered anecdotes—on the prevalence of Korean passing for Japanese in imperial Japan.14 But the illicit border-crosser Ko Chunsŏk reflected that there were several reasons that a Korean individual might adopt a Japanese-sounding name, which was often all that was needed to disguise oneself as a mainlander: there were the collaborators “inclined toward Japanese imperialism” who truly “wanted to become Japanese”; migrants to the imperial mainland who falsified identities to “avoid being ridiculed by Japanese”; and, finally, revolutionary activists seeking “to camouflage involvement with resistance movements.”15 It was that last possibility, of course, that tended to most worry the authorities. Yet social realities of identification were considerably less clear-cut than Ko’s typology suggests. How could the surveillance regime tell the difference, from the outside, between the performances of a model colonial subject and the camouflaged rebel? As this suggests, the structural possibility of passing haunted an indeterminate, rarely named space between the simple given of indistinguishability, acts of subversive resistance, and the anticipated fruits of assimilative policies. While the point continues to be vigorously debated, passing is not necessarily a transgressive or disruptive act and “can be fundamentally conservative” to the extent that it “holds larger social hierarchies in place.”16 Within the Japanese Empire, however, where no legitimate reason for Korean passing could be acknowledged, detected or suspected cases were invariably read as antisocial attempts to “camouflage involvement with resistance movements.” Consequently, anxieties were voiced most often in the context of surveillance and boundary policing. With the Japan-Korea Merger, regimes of surveillance emerged first in the colony, and then followed the movement of Korean populations throughout the empire, from the Manchurian frontier to the Japanese metropole, where differential identification of migrants proved especially fraught after the independence demonstrations of the March First Movement (March 1919–March 1920). Divisions of the imperial security apparatus devoted to Korean surveillance fearfully proposed that anti-Japanese malcontents were the most likely to engage in identity fraud. By the late imperial era, guidelines circulated by the metropolitan Special Higher Police drew on decades spent tracking (and losing track of) Korean infiltrators to caution agents that “what you must be aware of is that in general the treacherous Korean by no means presents a ferocious appearance or treacherous visage. He may be very conversant in the Japanese language, and in some cases will assume the disguise of a Japanese or Chinese. Or, it is possible that he may simply pose as an affable, good-natured Korean.”17

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The police typology highlights the need to clarify the terms and typologies of passing or posing—versus integrated becoming—in imperial Japan. The surveillance state acknowledged cases of conventional passing, whereby subjects of Korean descent assumed “mainlander” disguises for nefarious purposes. Yet the thought police also noted the emergent structural possibility of passing as “Japanese” in the expanded imperial sense of feigning reformed allegiances and sensibility by concealing enmity rather than ethnonational origin. Encouraged or enforced cultural assimilation and passing bear an uncanny and uncomfortable resemblance to one another and might be best understood as two structurally related forms—the authorized and improper faces—of colonial mimicry. If mimicry in assimilationist rhetoric and policy articulates, in Homi K. Bhabha’s formulation, “desire for a reformed, recognizable Other—as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite,” the adjacent figure of passing portends mimicry’s return as menace, a disturbance of colonial authority and authenticity that awakens the “twin figures of narcissism and paranoia.” In a color-blind East Asian empire, the specter of passing indicated the possibility of colonial subjects no longer recognizable as Other, nor reliably reformed in interior domains, “in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” As “the sign of the inappropriate,” mimicry’s indeterminacy and the possibility of passing thus “intensifies surveillance” to guard against a threat inherent in the promise of imperial integration.18 It is telling that the Special Higher Police do not provide practical tips for how to identify a Korean subversive posing as a Chinese, Japanese, or obedient Korean subject, but the warning nonetheless conveys the surveillance regime’s palpable distrust of dependence on outward visual signs to detect “treacherous Koreans.” “Surface perceptions were deemed unreliable,” Ann Stoler writes of the agents of European colonial powers in Southeast Asia, who eschewed the “color-based taxonomies” that produced “fictive” Europeans and passing natives and pursued “another kind of knowledge of ‘hidden properties’ of human kinds and interior dispositions” that could calculate “the political consequences of people’s affective and moral states.”19 Surveillance scripts mobilized for the cultural integration of imperial Japan and colonized Korea, where color-based taxonomies were never viable, similarly pursued the knowledge necessary to identify unseen and highly mutable divergences in emotion and ideology. To trace the origins of this disavowed structure of “passing” paranoia, it is necessary to look to the colonial periphery around the moment of the Japan-Korea Merger, where migrating scripts of discriminating Korean surveillance, both official and popular, were developed and deployed to keep track of who was truly whom in a progressively muddled imperial milieu. These discriminating scripts, however, were not practical guides for Korean identification but instead were to be regarded as narrative strategies for coping with the possible failure to tell the difference, which usefully disclosed what differences mattered most in a given context.

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PARANOID SCRIPTS OF SURVEILLANCE ON THE PERIPHERY

On the eve of the long-awaited merger of the two nations in 1910, a Japanese futurological novel, now largely forgotten, looked seventy years into the future to imagine the sights a metropolitan traveler might find on a Korean Peninsula thoroughly incorporated into greater Japan. The novel in question, Itō Gingetsu’s A Future Dream of the Japan-Korea Union (Nikkan gappō mirai no yume), follows a time-displaced old man of the Meiji era, Motono Takeo, as he tours annexed Seoul in the year 1980. During one stroll, Motono is presented with a confounding challenge by his young guide, who says, Among the folks passing by on this street, say sixty percent are Japanese, twenty-five percent are Korean, and fifteen percent are of mixed parentage. Now, honorable elder, can your eyes discern at glance which ones are Japanese, which are Korean, and which are mixed? No, of course not, because they are all the same race. If they cut their hair, wear the same clothing, and speak the same language, then naturally there will be no way to tell them apart on sight. . . . If, however, all these people before our eyes share identical national characteristics and an identical sense of patriotism, we would be assured a glimpse of the harmoniously blended unity existing between them, even if their hairstyles and attire happened to differ like the Japanese and Koreans of old. Don’t you think?20

In surveying this future scene, the guide invokes the language of miwake (telling apart on sight), only to dismiss the utter unreliability of vision. This is a landscape that would certainly frustrate any attempt at identification using the old visible markers of ethnonationality. After seventy years of imperial integration, the most obvious signs of difference—notably, hairstyles, clothing, and even language—have been rendered moot by the tide of Japanification (Nihonka, Nihonjin-ka). ­ Yet the novel betrays hardly a shadow of anxiety, much less “passing” paranoia, about this state of indistinguishability. Rather, every thing in Itō’s forecast reflects imperial optimism about the Japan-Korea Merger and potential for colonial assimilation. On the ethnically intermingled streets of future Seoul, the travelers from the metropole discover that while visually discriminating between Japanese, Korean, and “mixed-blood” subjects is impossible, it should also be unnecessary to make such distinctions, so long as the merger had produced not merely surface resemblances but a “harmoniously blended unity” of hearts and minds. Long before the 1910 annexation, it was common knowledge that people from the Japanese Archipelago and the Korean Peninsula were virtually “the same race” (dōjinshu), as Itō Gingetsu’s novel put it, and thus that the exterior differences separating them were fluid enough to enable crossings in both directions. That knowledge is evidenced by historical and fictional narratives that

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played with the cultural memes and literary tropes of passing long before imperial integration made infiltration an actual social concern. Cross-ethnic masquerades in Korean garb had been a Japanese cultural practice dating to the Tokugawa period (1603–1867), occasioned not by travel to Korea but rather the Chosŏn missions to Edo. During festivals inspired by such visits, urban commoners in the archipelago paraded in the guise of Korean “aliens not constrained by the rules of Japanese society,” as Ronald Toby writes, “but privileged to see, or be seen by, the shogun.”21 By the Meiji period, however, the playful nature of dressing in the clothing of another culture came to be infected by the geopolitical insecurity associated with the Korea Problem. Several novels published in the decades preceding the annexation and set on the Korean Peninsula showcase ethnic Japanese characters who, merely by changing their attire and acquiring requisite linguistic and cultural competencies, were able to pose as Korean people, penetrate the Korean interior undercover, and carry out missions of a personal or political nature. The hero of Nakarai Tōsui’s Wind Blowing Yellow Sand (Kōsa fuku kaze, 1891), who is half Korean by blood, but legally, culturally, and spiritually Japanese, dons such a disguise first to pursue a vendetta against a Korean villain and then to infiltrate the Korean court and forge a pan-Asian alliance among nations. Yosano Tekkan’s short story “The Petite Assassin” (Koshikaku, 1902) similarly features a Japanese youth who traverses Seoul in ethnic Korean drag; his mission is to infiltrate the home of a Korean government minister hostile to Japan and slay the man with a concealed bomb. Fictional acts of mimicry and cross-cultural dressing performed by early agents of Japanese imperialism to deceive the watchful eyes of Korean surveillance should be distinguished from colonial passing. As Anne McClintock notes of the ability of Rudyard Kipling’s hero Kim to pass as a “native” in India, we might see this as “a technique not of colonial subversion, but of surveillance” that “blurs the distinction between colonizer and colonized but only in order to suggest a reformed colonial control.”22 Pre-1910 fictional episodes featuring ethnic Japanese in Korean disguise anticipate the colonial regime’s later use of spies and undercover detectives for surveillance, but, tellingly, the reverse (i.e., Korean agents dressing as Japanese to infiltrate Japanese spaces) did not appear in this era’s popular fiction. Nevertheless, these narratives place both Japaneseness and Koreanness under the microscope and hint at the structural possibility of mutual infiltration. Subsequently, the same recognized resemblances that allowed fictional Japanese figures to pass were incorporated into the foundation narratives of an imperial merger that declared in 1910 that Korean people could become ­Japanese people. Yet telling the difference between kinds of subjects remained crucial even as imperial cultural integration declared the negation of such distinctions. Initially this was a quandary felt most keenly on the periphery. Examining 1911 colonial regulations prohibiting Korean subjects from adopting “names that

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could be confused with naichijin,” Mizuno Naoki detects the emergent surveillance regime’s deep-seated fears that, given the underlying difficulty of distinguishing between peoples on the basis of skin color or facial features, “all clues to tell Japanese and Korean apart might be lost” if their language, clothing, and ultimately even their names were suddenly rendered identical.23 Returning to Itō Gingetsu’s A Future Dream of the Japan-Korea Union, the metropolitan visitors to the outer territory encounter scenes in which “all clues” for differentiation have indeed been lost. The observers are thus forced to look beyond surfaces to ascertain the presence of a “harmoniously blended unity” between the future subjects in critical domains of interiority like national characteristics (kokuminsei) and allegiances (aikokushin). A Future Dream’s tourists ultimately devise a method of penetrating surveillance no more sophisticated than eavesdropping. This old device from lowbrow fiction enables what Satoru Saito calls the “linguistic substitution via auditory means of a visual desire.”24 As if following “the plot of a detective novel” (tantei shōsetsu ni mo arisō na zu), the two men prowl around Japanified Keijō (Seoul), listening in on intimate conversations that might reveal the “hidden secrets” of Japan-Korea fusion. The amateur detectives are moved upon overhearing hybrid colonial youth passionately declare that “Japan and Korea are one, in the New Japan of today” and “Japan is Korea, and Korea is Japan. How could any youth of this generation, boy or girl, hate Japan?” According to this reassuring script of discriminating surveillance, which neutralized paranoia about hidden insurgency, the visitors were able to return to the imperial metropole confident that “the future is exceedingly promising for a Japan that includes Korea.”25 Compared to the confident visions of future fusion imagined from afar by a mainland Japanese writer who had likely never set foot in Korea, the imperial officials charged with maintaining security on the ground in the new colony were less sanguine. Agents of empire who had recent experience with anticolonial insurgency were haunted by the knowledge that many of their newly incorporated subjects were dissatisfied with the terms of the Japan-Korea Merger. Japanese encroachment had been met with fierce Korean national resistance, particularly in the years of guerilla warfare and assassination after 1907, imprinting empire’s elites with the fear and anxiety that shadowed the new union. On the annexed periphery, the differences that mattered most to the regime, and frequently became the fixation of epistemological and ontological anxieties, were not surface markers separating Korean from mainland Japanese subjects but rather the political dispositions distinguishing types of colonized Korean subjects from one another. Slippery colonial surveillance and policing categories were formulated to name the “anti-Japanese” (hainichi) insurgents and conspirators hidden among the masses of Korea’s “good folk” (ryōmin). Lessons gleaned through experience hunting down rebellious and duplicitous Korean bōto (a term for rioters, thugs, and rebels) were recorded in the officially authorized narrative of Japan’s counterinsurgency campaign, Chronicle

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of the Suppression of Korean Insurgents (Chōsen bōto tōbatsu shi, 1913). Articulating dilemmas common to occupations and counterinsurgencies worldwide, the state archivists recalled that “in most cases, the clothing worn by t hese insurgents is of course no different from that of the good folk [ryōmin]. What is more, when it suited their purposes, the insurgents’ tactic was to discard their weapons and pose [ fun suru] as good folk to avoid our reprisals. In the early days of such incidents, the natives tended to sympathize with the insurgents and cover for them. Therefore, based on the above directives, our suppression forces would hold the offending village responsible and impose sanctions, at times taking drastic measures such as razing entire villages.”26 For anticolonial rebels, the best place to hide was among the indistinguishable colonized masses, a tactic that tested the limits of the imperial regime’s capacity for discriminating identification. At first, the military’s indiscriminate, scorched-earth reprisals against entire villages had only counterproductively aroused the enmity (enkon) of survivors, who subsequently joined the insurgents, bolstering their ranks. In response, commanders prohibited the wholesale razing of communities and ordered counterinsurgency forces to “rigorously discriminate between the good and the insurgent” (gen ni ryōhi no kanbetsu shite) to ensure that “jewels” (the precious ryōmin) were not mixed up with “stones” (the rebels).27 Metropolitan cultural commentary, including late Meiji visual satire, also weighed in on the dilemmas of counterinsurgency, proposing more effective scripts of differentiation. One 1907 Tokyo Puck cartoon (see Figure 2) produced during the guerilla insurgency rehearsed a narrative almost identical to that of the Chronicle. Conceding that unrest could not be resolved by military force alone, Puck’s satirists facetiously offered a comic solution: an enormous sieve, shown in the hands of a gigantic Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), who in 1907 was the Japanese resident-general of Korea, should be used to sift through the Korean populace. This would allow the little innocent folk to pass through so that the regime could “summarily dispose of the bigger villains” ( futoi yatsu) caught in its net.28 On the ground, however, imperial counterinsurgency and counterterrorism efforts to discriminate between precious ryōmin and treacherous rebels came to mobilize extensive networks of surveillance and intelligence gathering characteristic of the colonial security state, which rested on detailed record keeping, and the deployment of spies or informants.29 A contemporary American observer succinctly captured the paranoid climate of surveillance on the postmerger Korean Peninsula, where “uniformed gendarmes swarm. . . . Secret police are ubiquitous. Spies attend every meeting of Koreans.”30 The emerging scripts of colonial surveillance proved more effective in spreading generalized ethnonational suspicion than in perfecting discriminating identification, which partially explains the deeply repressive nature of Japanese rule on the peninsula. Because the pursuit of affective knowledge about subjects’ interior dispositions was frequently frustrated, agents turned instead

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FIGURE 2.

“New Policy for Korea,” Tokyo Puck, November 10, 1907.

to stereotyped knowledge of the colonized. Consequently, after 1910 the hypervigilant regime did not simply identify insurgents hiding among the peninsula’s population of “New Japanese”; rather, colonial surveillance generated narratives and scripts of latent insurgency and vast conspiracies invisible to the eye, essentially manufacturing the phantasmal threats that frightened it. Just one year into the merger, the Tokyo Asahi’s correspondent in Korea diagnosed the Japanese colonial administration with a virulent case of “Korea-phobia” (Senjin kyōfubyō). In his analysis, the primary symptom of this debilitating condition was “an almost phantasmal, excessive fear of Korean people’s rebellion against the new administration” that had come to infect every facet of imperial governance on the peninsula.31 Captivated by “phantasmal misapprehensions” (gen’eiteki byūken) of Korean subjects, who according to this journalist actually harbored no will to revolt, the regime had built a military- and police-centered apparatus that counterproductively unsettled public sentiment and provoked resentment. This structure of imperial Koreaphobia was exposed and entrenched by the so-called Korean Conspiracy Case (Chōsen inbō jiken) of 1911–1912. Suspicions

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of a far-reaching conspiracy to assassinate Governor-General Terauchi Masatake, based on dubious rumor and coerced confessions, became the pretext for arresting thousands of alleged plotters across the Korean Peninsula. Observing the grand conspiracy theories, American missionary Arthur Judson Brown depicted a colonial regime jumping at shadows of its own creation when he mused that “it requires some ulterior purpose, or such a panic-stricken imagination . . . to see dangerous assassins in trembling little boys whose very penknives had been taken from them.”32 Government-general officials certainly had “ulterior” incentives to conjure the specter of Korean conspiracy, but the preemptive repression and excessive surveillance of seditious phantoms simultaneously followed the insecure scripts of panic, and specifically a colonial information panic. C. A. Bayly describes the dynamics of the information panic in colonial India, where it incubated in “superabundant conspiracy theories” advanced by nervous colonial agents and “the stereotypes of Thugs, criminal guilds, religious fanatics and well-poisoners” pervasive in British media and literary discourse. Due to greater proximity, the Japanese official or settler might have accumulated more intimate knowledge of the colonized than his English counterpart, but similarly feared a “lack of indigenous knowledge and ignorance of the ‘wiles of the natives.’ ”33 Rather than reflecting imperial mastery, surveillance cultures were marked by deep-seated insecurity, which was occasionally satirized in metropolitan print media, about the pervasive failure to tell the difference between “good Koreans” (who might become Japanese) and anti-Japanese insurgents. Kikuchi Kan’s colonial play The Insurgent Son (Bōto no ko, 1916), which is set after an uprising and massacre in an unspecified colonial setting, places apprehension about the limits of discriminating vision in the mouth of a “native” (dojin) ­woman: ­there is simply no way that the officials from “that country” (the imperial metropole) will be able to “tell the difference” (miwake) between her innocent, wrongfully arrested son and the true rebels, she says. “We all look alike to them,” she asserts, “just like little birds perched on the spine of a paddy ox. They think that the natives are all the same.”34 The inability or unwillingness to tell the difference between categories of subjects gestated paranoia that impeded the regime’s shift from counterinsurgency to integration. STAGING SCRIPTS OF “PASSING” PANIC IN THE IMPERIAL CENTER

Paranoia and panic within the colonial security apparatus were not limited to the periphery, however. Rather, epistemic anxieties and ontological instabilities incubated on the occupied Korean Peninsula crossed back to the metropole with migrant Korean bodies and the surveillance systems, stories, and categories of knowledge that followed them. At both sites, keeping track of who was really whom within the empire relied less on visual identification than the voluminous documentation of official reports, rosters, maps, and taxonomies. To cope with their respective Korea Problems, colonial and metropolitan authorities came to

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share surveillance classifications, such as “anti-Japanese Koreans” and “Koreans requiring surveillance” (yōshisatsu Chōsenjin), as well as anxieties about these categories. From the moment of the Japan-Korea Merger in 1910 onward, metropolitan police forces in Japan proper had been charged with documenting all Korean residents of their precincts, while directing special monitoring at those suspected of harboring anti-Japanese sentiment.35 Monitoring Koreans on the mainland was complicated by the structural possibilities of mistaken identity that stymied the surveillance of a small but rapidly growing migrant minority easily lost among a Japanese naichijin majority. Yet at the heart of surveillance taxonomies at both sites was the affectively saturated category of insubordination and anticolonial treachery labeled futei, which was born within the colonial archive upon annexation but only fully mobilized in response to an imperial crisis. Namely, the colonial uprising long feared by authorities did at last materialize on the peninsula in the unanticipated nationwide demonstrations of the March First Movement. While a number of explanatory frameworks were adopted in Japanese colonial discourse to make sense of the causes of the massive revolt, at the heart of official narratives of the uprising was the notion that a minority of treacherous Korean malcontents had infiltrated the masses and infected them with insubordinate sentiment by spreading insurgent rumors (ryūgen higo). Accordingly, the empire’s military crackdown on the independence protests was declared necessary to “eradicate the treacherous malcontents and save the good people from this state of unrest.”36 After March 1, 1919, however, the problem of colonial insurgency was no longer confined to the peninsula. Barbara Brooks aptly suggests that “an official discourse of fear and hatred, embodied in the government records about the ‘Korean problem’ ­ of futei Senjin, spread from the Korean colony, where discrimination against Koreans was strongest, to the popular language of people throughout the empire.”37 Within the metropole, however, the challenge of increasingly massified Korean surveillance and discriminating identification proved fraught, and the fears of unseen infiltration consequently all the more virulent and deadly. It was in this setting that passing and paranoia were rendered grotesquely visible on a mass level with the tremors of panic after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, then confirmed in the ensuing massacres of unverifiable thousands of Korean migrants. New narratives circulating as rumor in the wake of the disaster articulated the fear that treacherous Korean insurgents, disguised and invisible to the naked eye, were “committing acts of arson everywhere” or had “banded together and are looting, raping, and trying to burn remaining buildings.”38 During the genocidal hysteria that followed, which threatened to rend asunder the Japan-Korea Merger, scenes of surveillance and differential identification from the colony were adapted to the Japanese imperial center and performed by Korean-hunting civilian vigilantes, as well as police and military officers. Various interpretations have been offered to explain the emergence, spread, and effects of the groundless rumors about Korean insurrection that were the

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direct spark for panic, ranging from government orchestration to spontaneous birth out of atavistic xenophobia.39 Yet ultimately these narratives of infiltration and subversion proved credible and violently compelling because they were familiar, echoing already those in circulation, which allowed elite scripts of paranoia and panic to play out on a mass level. Sensational stories in print media and popular literature, featuring treacherous assassinations, bombings, secret societies, and phantasmal conspiracies, had mobilized readers to take part in popular surveillance of suspicious Korean figures, reflecting the mediated “police-ification of the masses” (minshū no keisatsuka) called for by some security officials.40 Widely reported incidents of Korean conspiracy and “treachery” between 1919 and 1923, recounts Miyachi Tadahiko, “blurred the boundaries between the ‘treacherous’ [ futei] and the ‘virtuous’ [zenryō], which demanded that even mainland Korean people previously regarded as zenryō now be vigilantly watched.” 41 After the quake, officials conceded that the public, having previously consumed government releases, lurid press reports, and detective fiction about the hidden peril from the Korean Peninsula, had developed a sense of fear and loathing for the futei Senjin, who, it was assumed, harbored “conspiratorial ambitions” and were just waiting for an “opportunity to rise up in insurrection.” 42 Consequently, when roused by postquake rumors, panicked communities took readily to the role as counterinsurgency militia for which they had been prepared. These civilian agents of surveillance and counterterrorism followed the same scripts and exhibited the same paranoid mentality as imperial security forces on the peninsula. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Agency’s Chronicle of the Great Taishō Earthquake and Fire (Taishō daishinkasai-shi) represents an unreliable yet nonetheless valuable repository of debunked rumors, one complemented by analysis of their effects on the vigilant masses. According to these police historians, while the rumors started every thing, what sustained the violent panic was the failure of vigilante eyes to tell the difference. Given the “great difficulty of distinguishing between mainlanders and Koreans,” panicked observers “saw groups of refugees and hastily concluded that these were bands of insurgents. They saw groups of Korean laborers being taken to work sites by their employers and mistook them for an organized invasion. Seeing the police and military mobilizing as a precautionary measure, the masses assumed that these forces were off to battle the Korean invasion. The masses became agitated and it was not possible to calm them.” 43 Trying to differentiate through “fearful eyes” (kyōfu no me), the account continues, merely conjured “phantasmal misapprehension” (genkaku seru byūken) that in turn gave rise both to new rumors and visions of passing. Most alarmingly, write the police archivists, vigilante mobs even “rebelled against the police and military,” sometimes interrogating or even assaulting uniformed officers of the state, who were rumored to be Korean agents in disguise.44 It is telling that the violent hysteria of September 1923 was commonly referred to at the time as

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the Korean Panic, or Chōsenjin sawagi, a key name that usefully draws attention to the event’s affinities with the phenomenon of panic in other imperial contexts, where it has been linked not only to violent outbursts but rumors that circulate contagiously “as one of the affects of insurgency.” 45 In this flipped script, however, mainland Japanese were cast as the insurgents who, by embracing rumors that reflected misgivings about imperial integration, rebelled against the inability to “tell the difference.” 46 That structural possibility of misrecognition was a preexisting condition of borderless integration that came to be activated in the postquake rumors and panic. Anxious eyes were suddenly seeing signs of perilous passing everywhere, engendering an overproduction of unreliable vision. What Sara Ahmed names “the structural possibility that anybody could be a terrorist” here signified that any stranger could be a Korean insurgent. The terror inspired by the other that comes to be heightened when that body refuses to be legible or visible, Ahmed writes, is intensified because such bodies “cannot be held in place as objects, and threaten to pass by. That is, we may fail to see those forms that have failed to be; it is always possible that we might not be able to ‘tell the difference.’ The present hence becomes preserved by defending the community against the imagined others, who may take form in ways that cannot be anticipated, a ‘notyet-ness’ which means the work of defense is never over.” 47 Defense of the community legitimized violence but also necessitated new scripts of discriminatory identification. Faced with the impossibility of distinguishing “true” from “new” Japanese, vigilantes redoubled their commitment to discriminating identification, or shikibetsu. The absurd paranoia of Korean hunting peaked in street checkpoints that subjected suspicious figures to scrutiny and testing of identity markers: physical features or clothing, Japanese language competence and pronunciation, or demonstrations of authentic cultural knowledge. While imperial military units were officially instructed to hunt down only “treacherous Koreans,” as distinguished from “good Koreans,” accounts of the civilian militias recall a more indiscriminate hunt for Koreans posing as ­Japanese.48 This is captured in the testimony of Korean survivors like exchange student Yu Chunhyŏk, who recalled that “the mobs engaged in Korean hunting, and merely being named a Korean warranted being bludgeoned to death on sight, without heed to distinctions between good and evil, upright and twisted.” 49 To wit, vigilante mobs did not even attempt to perform the kind of discrimination between types of Korean subjects that had frustrated security officials in the colony. Although some migrants attempted to conceal their identities in order to survive, most testimony indicates that passing was not actually an option for laborers who did not speak or understand much Japanese. Yet the social realities of Korean passing mattered less than the structural possibility newly energized by acts of paranoid narration. Self-appointed community watchers devised new tools and tricks of discrimination and identification to hunt Koreans, and not infrequently turned them against fellow mainland Japanese.

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THE MISRECOGNIZED MAINLANDER FORCED TO PASS

The paranoid atmosphere of rumors, vigilante mobs, and absurd scenes of differentiation were set down as the defining features of the Korean Panic in cultural memory for years to come. For some, the paranoid farce of Korean hunting, and its distorting cultural effects, had exposed the ugliness and insecurity of the state of being Japanese in union with Korea. Iconoclastic cartoonist Miyatake Gaikotsu, for example, ridiculed the fanatical lengths to which vigilante groups had gone in the name of telling the difference between mainlander and Korean figures. For example, “If you were questioned and did not respond, you were identified as Korean. If you had a strange surname, you were identified as Korean. If your surname was ordinary, but you had a regional accent, then you were Korean. If you had no accent, but your physical build was unusual, then you were Korean. And even if your build was normal, but your hair was long, you were accused of being Korean. . . . For a time, it seemed that everyone had gone completely mad.”50 Miyatake links this madness directly back to the troubled Japan-Korea union itself by giving his essay the title “Consequences of Japan-Korea Disharmony” (Nissen fuyūwa no kekka), which implicates a bankrupt slogan of imperial integration in the violent panic. On the other hand, the graphic critique of paranoid panic gestures toward the distorting effects of colonial surveillance on metropolitan minds. Any minor deviation from the platonic ideal of the standard Japanese mainlander raised the suspicion that a subject might be a Korean in disguise, necessitating bizarre and extreme attempts to secure identity. Gaikotsu remarks that in some locales, refugees had gone so far as securing certificates from the authorities to prove their ethnonational origins, which is visualized in a caricature of a man wearing a large certificate proclaiming, “This be a Japanese person.” Once passing was openly acknowledged as a possibility, no identity could be taken for granted without first undergoing a process of discriminating surveillance. On this point, Kim Hang has proposed that when the postearthquake panic threw into suspension the self-evident state of “being Japanese” (Nihonjin de aru koto), mainlanders “were only able to become Japanese by undergoing discriminating identification [shikibetsu] in some form or another . . . whether it was on the basis of facial features or the fluency with which someone pronounced the phrase “jūgoen gojissen” [the monetary value of fifteen yen, fifty sen], no one could simply pass as Japanese as they were.”51 As Kim notes, discriminating violence against Korean bodies who failed identity tests was adopted as a means of boundary marking employed to resecure unmoored mainlander identities. Yet the paranoid exercise in differentiation, which twisted the scripts of colonial surveillance, also inflicted damage on naichijin bodies, psyches, and the category of “being Japanese” itself, which Korean hunting had ironically been initiated to defend.

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Indeed, many cultural accounts of the Korean Panic are marked by the terror not of passing Korean insurgents but of misrecognition among those who suddenly found themselves unable to “simply pass as Japanese.” Newspaper publisher Tokutomi Sohō remarked a fter the event that it “wasn’t the Koreans that terrified us, but rather the possibility that we might be misidentified as Korean.”52 Unlike the rumored Korean insurrection, the fear of being mistaken was not groundless, and contemporary newspapers reported tragic cases of mainlanders, Chinese, and Okinawans killed by mistake during the confusion. Many Japanese mainlanders whose identities should have been secure essentially found themselves accused by vigilant compatriots of merely passing for Japanese. The theme of mistaken identity, specifically featuring mainlanders mistaken for colonial malcontents in disguise, haunted literary renderings as one signature trope of panic narratives. The misrecognized mainlander passed through narratives of suspicion, surveillance, and identification where the presence of actual Korean figures was rendered invisible and the very words “Korean person” (Chōsenjin) removed to avoid censorship.53 In postquake literary narratives of panic produced for years to come, the unsettling and even terrifying trope of the misrecognized mainlander, whose stable identity is suspended by colonial suspicion, could be mobilized to evoke critical reflections and ideological transformations within Japanese subjects. Such potentialities are at the center of “Lieutenant Kusama,” a short story by proletarian novelist and playwright Fujimori Seikichi (1892–1977) that was published by the left-wing journal Senki on the fifth anniversary of the earthquake in 1928.54 The eponymous lieutenant, a Japanese Army officer fresh from the countryside, is characterized as an honest and virtuous representative of military authority whose standing as a Japanese imperial subject and an ethnic mainlander should be unimpeachable. While traversing Tokyo’s fractured landscape in his army uniform to provide disaster relief to his stricken compatriots, Lieutenant Kusama overhears reservists excitedly discussing the “Korea Problem.” When they uncritically reproduce the rumors about Korean terrorism, however, the “honest lieutenant’s sense of justice was stirred by this ignorant, fanciful talk.”55 He speaks out to deny the veracity of alleged “plots and atrocities by colonial people” (shokuminchijin) and reminds listeners that it was mainland Japanese who were perpetrating massacres: “ ‘I don’t know what’s come over the Japanese masses . . .’ began the lieutenant. He tried to explain things in a way that might dispel the misunderstandings and illusions of the gathered people. . . . It was the Japanese who had done the killing, and the XX [Koreans] who were the victims. . . . If the Japanese were really a great nation, why couldn’t they stay calm and judge things rationally . . . ?”56 Upstanding Kusama not only denies the rumors and defends the “colonial people” but openly questions whether the volatile Japanese people were “really a great nation.” The role played by the lieutenant in this script of the Korean

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Panic is analogous to that of proletarian writing itself: to talk sense to the misled masses and persuade them to give up imperial illusions, transcend national xenophobia, and forge international ties among the oppressed. The sermon not only falls on deaf ears, however, but ultimately agitates his listeners more, and attracts a growing crowd: “That guy’s one of them, he’s a XX disguised in a Japanese officer’s uniform.” “Right. He was trying to trick us. Why would he take their side if he wasn’t?” ­ “You can tell by his face he’s XX.” The lieutenant looked at the screaming, bloodthirsty mob brandishing clubs and other weapons, and gave a start. Who knew what would happen if they got their hands on him. For a moment, he regretted the pointless admonishment.57

In a flash, the mob has refigured the army lieutenant as a suspect Korean. This is the result not of misreading unreliable ethnonational markers but of an interpretation of his ideologically unreliable speech acts: to their fearful eyes, Kusama simply must be a passing insurgent, his overheard words having given away his true, hidden allegiances. In the same stroke, Kusama’s plight suggests how the charge of being a Korean in disguise, leveled at a mainlander, could serve a role in policing the boundaries of the ethnonational community of sentiment. As can be seen in a number of panic narratives, speaking up in defense of imperial subjects from the colony increases the peril of misidentification and assault from overzealous Korean hunters.58 It is both ironic and fitting that in Fujimori’s proletarian story it is a proud soldier in the service of the emperor who finds himself in the passing position of defending his Japanese-ness. Once suspicions are raised, they infect the crowd, and the rest of the narrative follows the lieutenant’s frantic attempts to escape their hunt. The mob pursuing him expands to comical proportions as seventy or eighty gather, and the police (so-called guardians of the people) prove powerless to protect Kusama, fearing that they, too, will become targets. Forced to seek refuge in an army guardhouse, he finds little protection when the mob surrounds the place, “hurling stones at the guard house . . . and shaking it so much with their battle cries that it seemed another earthquake had come.” This is the farcical scene of an anti-imperial rebellion unfolding in Tokyo, staged by a paranoid mass of mainland Korean hunters against their own terrified military and police. Kusama’s life is ultimately spared only because “the evidence of his identity” was too strong for the vigilantes to counter— essentially, “only his rank had saved him.”59 “The experience of this unanticipated crisis,” the narrator remarks in closing, “taught the lieutenant a good many things.”60 First, he was awakened with

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disgust to the “ignorance and credulity of the Japanese people,” who had fallen right into the trap of national paranoia set by the imperial state. The fleeting experience of passing, and in that moment viewing the imperial nation from the standpoint of the objects of colonial surveillance, has destabilized the identity of Kusama and, collectively, “the Japanese.” This was a moment anticipated by Homi K. Bhabha, paralleling with crucial difference Ko Chunsŏk’s infiltration of Yanagawa’s paranoid presser, when “the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed and ‘partial’ representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence.”61 But here the trope of misrecognition, which turned the paranoid surveillance gaze back onto mainlanders, could open up revolutionary insight. Once Kusama has been “mistakenly mixed together with the hunted” (machigatte hi-tsuikyūsha ­ no naka e magirekonda), in effect transformed into treacherous malcontent, a critical reorientation is set in motion.62 While Kim Hang has argued that it was only by undergoing discriminating identification that mainland subjects could “become Japanese,” thus restoring the assumed congruence of national polity (kokutai), ethnos (minzoku), and the state (kokka), this is not the case for Kusama.63 Instead the narrator’s final words indicate that not long after this, Kusama leaves the army and undergoes a “conversion to socialism,” implying his rejection of nation and empire.64 Notably, “Lieutenant Kusama” appeared in the flagship journal of the proletarian literature movement during a period of reenergized efforts to promote class-based solidarity and transcend the “national question” (minzoku mondai) separating mainland masses and the ethnic Korean workers who made up a growing segment of left-wing movements.65 Fujimori’s story was one of a number of early Shōwa-era proletarian works to return to the 1923 earthquake atrocities, an event that had underscored how strongly the elite’s colonial paranoia had infected the metropolitan working class, in search of clues for reconciling the ethnonational divide. It was the only of such proletarian panic narratives, however, to locate an opportunity for renouncing imperial and national subjectivity in the trope of the mistaken mainlander, “Koreanized” by xenophobic compatriots’ accusations of passing. CODA: READING PAST COLONIAL PASSING ­AFTER THE PANIC

Narratives of the Korean Panic, from initial rumors to later socialist ruminations, illustrate the instabilities that erupted when unreliable scripts of colonial surveillance and telling the difference were transplanted to the metropolitan stage; there the regime of imperial paranoia turned in on itself, with deadly consequences. Although it was only during this fleeting moment that passing’s possibility became visible on a mass level, I have endeavored to establish that “passing” paranoia did not begin (or end) there. Rather, the paranoia structure of feeling and seeing was an endemic feature of an intimate imperial merger and

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an effect of surveillance categories, ideologies, narratives, and bodies moving between center and periphery. The Korean Panic illuminated how the mere recognition of passing’s possibility could imperil imperial agendas and denature national identities accepted as natural. W hether it was the willful blindness of isshi dōjin and imperial harmony, or the parallel framework of socialist internationalism, the massacre’s aftermath demanded scripts for not seeing passing, because merely suspecting it might arouse narcissistic paranoia about infiltration and corruption. Blindness to passing a fter 1923 did not resolve paranoia or the underlying tensions of empire exposed by mass hysteria and massacres, which numerous accounts suggest further deepened mutual fear and distrust between Japanese mainlanders and Korean subjects. When Ko Chunsŏk, who later passed as Takaishi Toshio, crossed to the Japanese islands in 1925, he quickly learned about the massacres of two years earlier, which corroborated his view that Japanese mainlanders were a “frightening race” (kowai jinshu).66 That fear informed his later attraction to resistance movements, decision to temporarily pass for Japanese, and reaction to Yanagawa Heisuke’s castration proposal. Ko’s rare and valuable memoir of infiltration, which would not appear in print until after the fall of the Japanese Empire, reminds us that most narratives of passing have been told from the perspective of the passers themselves— even as the scripts of surveillance and discrimination crucial to passing are produced by the dominant group’s paranoia about infiltration. Perhaps due to the reticence to acknowledge this structural possibility, during the era of imperial integration few works of literary fiction explicitly exploring the fraught territory of Korean passing were written by either naichijin or colonial subjects. Even the best-known Japanophone short story on colonial passing, Kim Saryang’s 1939 “Into the Light,” may not in the final analysis feature passing at all. At its core is the relationship between an elite Korean man in Japan, who allows himself to be misrecognized as a mainlander, and a mixed-race boy who fiercely denies his Korean blood. Yet its narrative and reception suggest how carefully the mere possibility of passing had to be handled even in fiction. First-person narrator Nam must disavow the intent to pass, deny any hostile sentiment toward Japan and Japanese mainlanders, and only gesture obliquely at the underlying issues of discriminatory identification. Rather than willful deception, Nam simply finds himself passively passing under the Japanified reading of his name, “Minami-sensei” (itsu no ma ni ka Minami-sensei de tōteita).67 Consequently, “Into the Light” was not read as a story of passing by the metropolitan Japanese critics who considered it for the Akutagawa Prize. Instead it was lauded for revealing Korean interiority and capturing the “Korea Problem.”68 What was the Korea Problem, however, if not the question of Korean subjects’ disruptive inclusion in empire, and the lacuna where passing could not be seen? For a regime that increasingly stressed the possibility of becoming fully Japanese, it is possible that not recognizing the possibility of passing head-on was the only

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alternative to paranoia, persecution, and violence. This fraught legacy of passing paranoia would come to underpin postwar Japanese society’s “disrecognition” of the Korean presence in its midst following the disintegration of the empire, which made passing an invisible “default” condition within Zainichi Korean life 69 and literature. ­ ­­ NOTES

12. Hatada Takashi, Nihonjin no Chōsen-kan ­ (Tokyo: Keisō, 1969), 6. 13. Takahashi Gentarō, Taiwa mandan Chōsen tte donna toko (Keijō, Korea: Chōsen insatsu, 1929), 2–3. 18. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86–91, emphasis in the original.

20. Itō Gingetsu, Nikkan gappō mirai no yume (Tokyo: Sankyō shobō, 1910), 113–114.

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21. Ronald P. Toby, “Carnival of the Aliens: Korean Embassies in Edo-Period Art and ­Popular Culture,” Monumenta Nipponica 41, no. 4 (1986): 452. 22. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 69–70. 23. Mizuno Naoki, Sōshi kaimei: Nihon no Chōsen shihai no naka de (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2008), 29. 24. Satoru Saito, Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012), 39, emphasis in the original. 25. Itō, Nikkan gappō mirai no yume, 118, 127, 122, 145, 146. 26. Chōsen chūsatsugun shireibu, Chōsen bōto tōbatsu shi (Keijō, Korea: Chōsen sōtoku kanbō sōmukyoku, 1913), 13. 27. Ibid., 13–14. 28. “Kankoku tōchi shinsaku,” Tokyo Puck 3, no. 31, reprint (Tokyo: Ryūkei shosha, 1985), 194. 29. See, for example, the 1912–1915 colonial surveillance reports, Shumaku dansō, discussed in Matsuda Toshiko, Governance and Policing of Colonial Korea: 1904–1919, Nichibunken Monograph Series no. 12 (Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2011), 131–160. 30. Arthur J. Brown, The Korean Conspiracy Case (New York: n.p., 1912), 5. 31. “Sennin sōtoku ron: Senjin kyōfubyō,” Tokyo Asahi, October 3, 1911. 32. Brown, The Korean Conspiracy Case, 5. 33. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 143–149, 171– 178, 6. 34. Kikuchi Kan, Bōto no ko, in Kikuchi Kan zenshū, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1929), 38. 35. See the Home Ministry Security Bureau notices, circulated first in 1910 and 1911, in Pak Kyŏngsik, ed., Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1 (Tokyo: San’ichi shōbo, 1975), 27. 36. Chōsen sōtokufu kanpō, extra, April 10, 1919, quoted in Mizuno Naoki, ed., Chōsen sōtoku yukoku kunji shūsei, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Ryokuin shobō, 2001), 431. 37. Barbara J. Brooks, “Peopling the Japanese Empire: The Koreans in Manchuria and the Rhetoric of Inclusion,” in Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900–1930, ed. Sharon Minichiello (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), 31. 38. These rumors came, respectively, from a Tokyo nichinichi newspaper story from September 3, 1923, and police reports collected in Keishichō, ed., Taishō daishinkasai-shi ­ (Tokyo: Keishichō, 1925), 446. 39. See Matsuo Sh ichi, “Kant daishinsaishi kenky seika to kadai,” in Kant Daishinsai seifu Riku-Kaigun kankei shiryō, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Nihon keizai hyōronsha, 1997), 7–43. 40. See Obinata Sumio, Keisatsu no shakaishi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993), 117. 41. Miyachi Tadahiko, Shinsai to chian chitsujo kōsō: Taishō demokurashī ki no ‘zendō’ shugi o megutte (Tokyo: Kurein, 2012), 89. 42. Keishichō, Taishō daishinkasai shi, 453. 43. The police cata loging and analysis of rumors appears in ibid., 441–456. 44. Ibid., 441, 451. 45. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 200. 46. For a reading of postquake vigilantism as insurgency, see Ohara Hiroyuki, Taishō daishinsai: Bōkyaku sareta dansō (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 2012), 116–123.

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48. Kang Tŏksang, Kantō daishinsai (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1975), 111–112, 123–128. 49. Testimony collected in Kang Tŏksang and Kŭm Pyŏngdong, eds., Gendaishi shiryō, vol. 6, Kantō Daishinsai to Chōsenjin (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1963), 285. 50. Miyatake Gaikotsu, “Nissen fuyūwa no kekka,” Shinsai gahō 3 (1923): 47. 52. Tokutomi Sohō, “Sunzen ankoku” (1924), in Chōsenjin gyakusatsu ni kansuru chishikijin no hannō, vol. 1, ed. Kŭm Pyŏngdong (Tokyo: Ryokuin shobō, 1996), 191.

ū

58. Bates, The Culture of the Quake, 173. ū 63. Kim, Teikoku Nihon no iki, 173–174.

­

eoples. ­ 66. Ko, Ekkyō, 75. 67. Kim Saryang, “Hikari no naka ni,” in Kindai Chōsen bungaku Nihongo sakuhinshū, vol. 1, ed. Ōmura Masuo and Hōtei Toshihiro (Tokyo: Ryokuin shobō, 2001), 55. On Kim Saryang and “Into the Light,” see also Nayoung Aimee Kwon, “Pluralizing Passing and Transpacific Afro-Asian Solidarities: Passings and Impasses across Colonial Korea and the Segregated United States,” 5 in this volume. 69. John Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 19–20, 79–84.

5

PLURALIZING PASSING AND TRANSPACIFIC AFRO-ASIAN ­ SOLIDARITIES Passings and Impasses across Colonial Korea and the Segregated United States NAYOUNG AIMEE K WON

“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” ­ —W. E. B. ­ DuBois

This chapter expands upon my earlier writings on passing in the Japanese Empire to reconsider how the theme might be further pluralized in new directions toward forging transpacific Afro-Asian solidarities.1 Acknowledging the pioneering literary and theoretical contributions in African American literary studies that were foundational to the development of theories on passing, I begin by drawing on prior inquiries from the Japanese Empire and its transpacific connections to transatlantic genealogies of race.2 Alas, this is merely a preliminary foray into connecting disparate stories across hemispheric and other divides, one anticipatory gesture toward creating future connections that might yield further developments. I draw attention to thematic proximities in narratives of passing across other wise apparently remote histories of local and global racial formations that suggest commonly shared predicaments across differently dispossessed communities under structural racism.3 In so doing, this chapter aims to open up new methodological possibilities for forming connections across distances and dispersions. In putting together different kinds of texts—from faraway but parallel contexts of racial inequalities—into one analytical field of vision, I aim to pluralize passing’s transgressive critical possibilities so as to lay out the framework for a transhemispheric and dialogic ethics of engagement and empathy.

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KIM SARYANG’S “LETTER TO MOTHER” AND LANGSTON HUGHES’ “PASSING”

I would like to begin by putting into dialogue shared themes in content and form in the epistolary writings of two authors rarely considered together—Kim Saryang (1914–1950) and Langston Hughes (1902–1967)—though each wrote from different racialized contexts: colonial Korea under Japanese imperialism and the Jim Crow United States, respectively. This chapter builds on a growing body of scholarly works that have expanded our understanding of transpacific connections.4 Notably, there has been an exciting growth in scholarship on making transpacific connections through Hughes’ life and writings, such as the recent works by Jang Wook Huh and Selina Lai Henderson.5 These important works analyze the direct connections to Asia— China, Japan, and Korea—through such themes as Hughes’ travel writings or translations of his writings into various Asian languages. Hughes was the first prominent African American author to travel extensively in the region before the Bandung era, anticipating Afro-Asian connections to come. Drawing parallels to his own experiences as a Black man in America, his writings reveal a deep empathy toward the racial violence he saw meted out to Chinese and Koreans under both Western and Japanese imperialism, for example.6 Building on such prior scholarly engagements linking Afro-Asian solidarities, I attempt herein to expand a transpacific reading method to create productive linkages through shared thematic concerns—in this case, that of racial passing.7 Further, while acknowledging the pioneering work on passing based on the US domestic context of the Black and White color line, the chapter’s pluralizing transborder gesture also aims to go beyond assumptions common even in contemporary race scholarship that racial passing is somehow “quintessentially” exceptional to the US context of slavery and Jim Crow.8 ­

Dear beloved mother . . . on the platform of the train station in Heijō [Kor.: P’yŏngyang] on that bone-chilling windy day in February, I remember how concerned you were about the brewing cold infecting my body as you hurried me onto the morning express, Nozomi [Hope], for

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my journey. . . . A s I pulled myself onto the violently shaking train, my head was filled with so many thoughts. Thinking about the remote possibility of writing in Tokyo, I felt terrified [osoroshii ki ga suru no desu]. On the third-class ferry across the Dark Seas, I was suffering from a severe fever, and in the train from Shimonoseki, I was practically comatose. But I told myself over and over again, from now, I must write what is really true.9

This letter, pregnant with conflict, offers essential clues in our attempt to glimpse the “third-class” minor writer’s literary voyage upstream into the imperial capital. The letter textually and metatextually embodies the linguistic conundrum of a colonized writer on the threshold of imperial recognition. It was written in Japanese, which at first glance may seem neither surprising nor noteworthy considering that at the time of its composition in 1940, Japanese was already the official “paper language” throughout the colony. A closer reading leads to a surprising revelation, however. The letter ends with the following request: “Isn’t Sister coming home soon from the capital city for summer vacation? Would you please ask her to translate this from the Japanese [naichigo] into Korean [Chōsengo] so that you can read it?”10 This ending contradicts itself, confessing its own self-divided impossibility to communicate with its intended recipient and exposing a fundamental impasse: the impossibility of communication and the linguistic incommensurability between the sender and the receiver given the inequities undergirding the imperial encounter. The letter reveals a chasm between mother and son that has become unbridgeable. The opportunities promised to Kim— and other “exceptional” Korean male intellectuals from the new colonial world— distance him further from his own mother and from his mother tongue. Here the imperial language, rather than working as a tool of mediating and enabling communication, instead bars it. In this way, “Letter to Mother” draws attention to an awkward ventriloquism that threatens the very integrity of the epistle and its intended function as intimate liaison between sender and receiver. The imperial language, rather than facilitating communication in the colony, exposes its own divisive nature: it severs the people in the colony from one another by generation, class, and gender. Not everyone in a minority or colonized community has equal access to pass into opportunities usually reserved for the dominant race. In Kim’s works, the theme of passing is often couched as a privileged conundrum that makes access possible into other wise barred or divided spaces via the trope of borderline subjects. I will draw on what I have theorized elsewhere as the conundrum of representation of the “exceptional” colonized or minor(ity) artist’s privileged yet limited entry into the other wise guarded, ethnoracially gated spaces of hegemonic institutions.11 Using the regionally significant but globally little-known case of Kim Saryang, a minor writer from colonial Korea, allows us to explore

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the various impasses he encountered in his voyage in and out of the metropolitan literary field of Tokyo. Kim’s impasses can be put into conversation with a parallel struggle manifest in the writings of another minority writer from the segregated United States: Langston Hughes. It is worth pointing out that both authors were positioned in the broader context of the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire as an exceptional minor(ity) empire among other White-dominant Euro-American empires, as well as the formations of new imperial divisions spearheaded by the rise of the American empire in the global Cold War. This framework draws on historian Takashi Fujitani’s pioneering scholarship, putting the Japanese and American empires and their racialized legacies as pertains to minority soldiers (colonial Korean and African American) into the same analytical framework.12 It is also not insignificant that the rise of Japan as the sole non-White, non-Western imperial power was welcomed by many minority and colonial intellectuals around the world. For example, W. E. B. DuBois and other African American intellectuals, as well as colonial intellectuals in Asia and Africa, celebrated Japan’s rise as an antidote against Western imperialism. In contrast, as Jung Woo Huh points out, Hughes took on a critical stance on the Japanese Empire based on his travels through Korea and Japan, where he witnessed the discriminatory treatment of colonized Koreans and empathized with their plight as similar to that of African Americans in the United States.13 In this moment of transit into the heart of the Japanese Empire of the elite minor(ity) male author’s “passing” into the dominant cultural industry of literary establishment, we see a glimpse of the exorbitant payment extracted in exchange for entry—all of the precious aspects of himself that must be left behind. The invitation extended to this male author presupposes that he disavow certain essential aspects of himself, those most intimate to the very core of his being: his own ethnic language, culture, and even his familial connection to his own mother. It is no coincidence that such a racialized imperial divide further exacerbates preexisting gender and generational gaps within the colony, in direct contradiction to patronizing imperial slogans—past and present—that boast of “saving colonized women” and other oppressed members from their own societies and cultures. This also clearly marks the impassible divide between those exceptional colonized or minoritized subjects who have been coopted with the privilege of passing and others who were marked for absolute alterity—by color, class or ethnonational origin, education, gender, accent, and so on—for whom such a passage would be indefinitely deferred or denied outright. The fundamental impasses that lie at the very heart of the colonial racial divide, so starkly revealed through Kim’s “Letter to Mother,” conjure up yet another racial epistolary impasse by generation and gender—between mother and son. Writing from a faraway yet parallel racialized context, Hughes’ epistolary story “Passing” (1934) offers us an uncannily familiar conundrum that echoes

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that of Kim and of so many others in common predicaments of racist devaluation then and now. The son begins his correspondence with a painful apology: Chicago Sunday, Oct. 10 Dear Ma, I felt like a dog, passing you downtown last night and not speaking to you. You were great, though. Didn’t give me a sign that you even knew me, let alone I was your son. If I hadn’t had the girl with me, Ma, we might have talked. I’m not as scared as I used to be about somebody taking me for colored any more just because I’m seen talking on the street to a Negro. I guess in looks I’m sort of suspect-proof, anyway.14 The narrator then explains the details of the circumstances of why this had to be so—how as a light-skinned biracial man with a White father and a Black mother, he decided to pass as White for a chance to access life’s opportunities. Now he is engaged to a White (German American) woman and has secured a decent job, unlike his darker-skinned siblings who constantly struggle with their uncertain lot and precarious futures— one working at a South Side cabaret and another working in a garage. He ends the letter with a note thanking “Ma” for understanding and supporting his decision while lamenting the resentment expressed by his siblings, Charlie and Gladys, for these choices he felt compelled to make. He shares plans to open a separate post office box so that he might stealthily continue to correspond with “Ma” while still keeping his racial origins secret: Well, Ma, I will close because I promised to take my weakness to the movies this evening. Isn’t she sweet to look at, all blonde and blue-eyed? We’re making plans about our house when we get married. We’re going to take a little apartment on the North Side, in a good neighborhood, out on one of those nice quiet streets where there are trees. I will take a box at the Post Office for your mail. Anyhow, I’m glad there’s nothing to stop letters from crossing the color-line. Even if we can’t meet often, we can write, can’t we, Ma? With love from your son, JACK.15 Uncannily similar to Kim’s letter, this epistolary story written by Kim’s contemporary— Hughes, another exceptional minor(ity) author from a distant place— also exposes deep psychic divides of yet another borderline subject, full of ambivalence and regret. The narrator laments the tragic circumstances that will not allow him to openly acknowledge his own Black mother, as he passes by her while walking with his White fiancée.

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While these two modern authors from far-flung and disparate places— a colonial Korean author from the Japanese Empire, and an African American author from the segregated United States—may appear to have very little in common on the surface, it is sobering to witness their shared experiences of real struggles through their autobiographically inflected writings under differently racialized circumstances. In both sets of letters, it is ironic how they highlight the actual lack of “correspondence” between the sender and receiver. The ultimate impasse between the narrating I and the characters Mother and Ma is palpable in both letters. Each exposes the convoluted nature of these correspondences— necessitating the mediation by the figure of a translator in Kim’s “Letter to Mother” or the opening of a secret post office box in Hughes’ “Passing.” Both epistolary writings expose the cruelty of the racist socioeconomic structures of divides—not biological or ethnoracial essentialism—that forced an existential impasse into the most intimate of life circumstances. The “choice” dealt to the protagonists is an impossible one, between fulfilling their full potential as human beings in their striving for recognition from the outside world and being “authentic” to their communities, families, and their own selves, revealing the painful contradictions undergirding and sustaining structural racism. It is also significant that Kim Saryang begins his recollections of this primal scene of his passing into the Japanese literary establishment on a train ride. In another passage from “Letter to Mother,” he recollects an earlier memory of his passing into the imperial metropolitan center as a student. As he now boards the train from his home in colonial Korea toward the limelight of the imperial capital to attend the awards ceremony, more memories flood back to him. Kim reflects on other parallel journeys he has taken countless times as a student, back and forth between the colony and the metropole. Meanwhile, he reflects on how Mother was not able to attend these milestones of his life in Japan, including graduation ceremonies throughout the years. The train carriage, of course, is also an emblematic site in many famous scenes of African American narratives on racial passing. Perhaps one of the most iconic is the case of Homer Plessy’s transgression of passing in a first-class Whitesonly train carriage that ended up taking him on a legal journey all the way to the US Supreme Court.16 The infamous verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) would ultimately institutionalize legal segregation by cementing the racial division of “separate but equal” as the law of the land.17 This would cast a long and deep shadow on racial jurisprudence that would not be struck down until as late as the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. It is also significant to point out that, in this case, the category of Whiteness itself was determined in terms of the “value” of private property; as Marcia Alesan Dawkins cogently explains, this may have been the first ruling that made a case for and anticipated contemporary debates on “identity theft.”18 Plessy’s passing, the act of taking on White identity, was charged as theft of the privilege

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or property of Whiteness, to which he allegedly had no rightful ownership. Although Plessy was a self-described “octoroon” in the parlance of the time, seven-eighths White and one-eighth Black, the racist calculus of the so-called one-drop rule of hypodescent would identify him as Black with all attendant disenfranchisement. The law was co-opted to institutionalize the selective privilege of Whiteness and the devaluation of Blackness, rendering as illegitimate Plessy’s claim to ownership of his own majority (seven-eighths) White inheritance and its attendant claim to private property rights of White privilege. The judgment that would turn this individual man’s political fight for equal protection under the law (said to be guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment) for legal recognition of his full humanity was reduced to a question of object relations by the custodians of the legal institution itself. The same Fourteenth Amendment that theoretically guaranteed an individual’s equal protection under the law, in fact, worked more effectively to guarantee the “personhood” and rights of corporations above the humanity of Black Americans—barred from being represented in their full personhood based on the dubious distinction of the color of their skin, with human relations reduced to property relations of things. Further, it is no small irony that the train, quintessential emblem of capitalism that was undergirding global modernity, simultaneously served as the very stage for the primal scene that would solidify racial segregation and affirm the abject devaluation of Black humanity in US jurisprudence. On the shiny surface, the locomotive apparently signified technological progress and development, but inside its carriage contained a sinister logic of racial capitalism to turn back the social progress of manumission. This case exemplified how racial capitalism ran on the fuel of segregating and dividing humanity along an arbitrary racialized line—by color or colonization, between those who labor and those who possess and profit from the fruits of that labor. Before we conclude this section of our analysis, it is worth shedding light on the shadowy— almost forgotten—figure of the “Chinaman” that appears in Justice John Marshall Harlan’s minority dissent in the Plessy case. It is disheartening to see that the dissenting voice against the infamous “separate but equal” ruling made a case not based on a fundamental antiracist logic but that resorted to yet another racist logic, one that limited equal protection under the law exclusively for those then defined as citizens of the United States. In contradistinction, Justice Harlan explicitly pointed out the ultimate alterity of the “Chinaman,” who was deemed inassimilable by the court’s prior laws of exclusion (most notably the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882) and therefore could never be permitted to become a citizen of the American body politic.19 The legal bar against citizenship for Asians would not be lifted until as late as 1952, when the US imperial division and subsequent war in Korea necessitated the reluctant passing of a new law permitting the inclusion of war brides of American soldiers, which would eventually set in motion foundational legal challenges to centuries of antimiscegenation laws.

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It is worth pointing out that even in this monumental Supreme Court case that famously enshrined in law the dominant Black-White racial divide of US race relations, we witness a triangulation among multiple racial dynamics that cut across the domestic and international spheres, as well as the national and imperial binary oppositions. Bringing these seemingly distant but parallel journeys of passing into proximity and into the same visual field allows us to see much more clearly how divided histories actually work in tandem. This opens up a space to piece together constructed logics of inclusions and exclusions that undergird both domestic and international racist divides and whose broader global dynamics have historically been rendered invisible.20 ON THE EVE OF THE UPRISING (MANSEJŎN, 1924)

Now tracking our way back again to Kim Saryang’s context in the Japanese Empire, I turn to yet another canonical scene of passing in transit, a “voyage in” between the metropolitan center and colonial periphery, this time from a Korean-language text. In Yŏm Sangsŏp’s (1897–1963) novella On the Eve of the Uprising, we encounter Yi Inha, our protagonist. Like the authors Kim Saryang, Langston Hughes, and Yŏm Sangsŏp themselves, Yi Inha is one of a privileged cohort of male intellectuals. Yi is a university student studying in metropolitan Tokyo who has been urgently called back to his hometown in colonial Korea. Similar to Kim’s “Letter to Mother,” this narrative is triggered by an urgent telegram sent to the protagonist. Inha receives news of the impending death of his wife, urging his immediate return home to the Korean Peninsula.21 He is reluctant to interrupt his university routine, since he hardly has a relationship with this woman; she is a traditional wife in name only, one to whom Inha had been forced into an arranged marriage to appease his family. For Inha, a modern boy studying in the heart of the metropolitan center of progress, his wife is nothing more than a remnant of an old order— and the decaying customs of colonized Korea. Inha long ago left his estranged wife behind in colonial Korea and has been busy pursuing romantic encounters with modern girls more fitting of his own supposedly more progressive tastes. Unable to resist his familial pressures, however, Inha reluctantly makes alternate arrangements for his exams and sets off on his return journey by train and ferry, back into what is described in the story as the “graveyard” that is the colony. The implication here of a forced journey almost backward in time to attend to a dying woman from Inha’s distant past that he would rather have left behind is significant: for Inha, the colony is a decaying and dying place representing a backwardness—in stark contrast to the dynamic, youthful and futureoriented Japan. Inha’s reluctance to “go back” to the colony is seen in his many dalliances along the way. He makes several pitstops at various cities to visit and tarry with

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his numerous lady friends. In the interest of time, we must bypass these colorful encounters and focus on the scene of racial passing that occurs in transit. As a colonized subject, Inha is relegated to the third-class cabin, but he goes to the communal bath carriage, where he finds himself bathing in close enough proximity to a group of Japanese settlers that he is able to overhear them discuss an illicit ruse of human trafficking in the colony. With all of the men stripped down to their birthday suits, and as such unable to distinguish Inha’s colonial identity, the men proudly reveal their lucrative scheme of luring peasants from the Korean countryside as “coolies” to work in deplorable, slave-like conditions. Shocked and speechless among the other naked men, Inha remains invisible and silent, his colonial alterity undetected. To the dismay of Inha and the other men, however, a policeman comes around to the dressing room calling him out by his Korean name and outing him. It is only then that the other men are horrified by the belated recognition that there has been a yobo (a derogatory term for a colonial Korean), hiding among them in plain sight, who has overheard their plots to entrap other Koreans.22 As a privileged student from a wealthy family bankrolling his colonial education abroad at an imperial university, Inha assumed he would not be “outed” as another deplorable yobo as long as he kept his head down and his mouth closed. Yet as he gets closer and closer to his colonized home, characterized in the story as a “graveyard,” these and other colonial encounters in transit make Inha realize to his horror that he will never escape the racist system. These triangulated colonial scenes of racial passing expose to Inha the very limitations of meritocratic assimilation for the colonized: no matter how educated or how affluent he may be, as long as the racialized structure of the colonial divide itself persists, so does the danger of being exposed as just another yobo. PASSING IN “INTO THE LIGHT”

With these dynamics of racial passing in mind, I turn now to the scene of passing within Kim Saryang’s Akutagawa Prize–nominated story “Into the Light” (Hikari no naka ni, 1939), the creative work that first triggered the author’s passing into the limelight of the Japanese literary establishment. The narrative begins as follows: The boy I’m gonna tell you about, Yamada Haruo, was a real strange kid. He seemed too afraid to play with the other children and just hovered around them. Sometimes, the other children bullied him, and then he would turn and try to bully one of the girls or the smaller children. If someone happened to trip up, he made a big ruckus as if he had been waiting for it. Haruo didn’t try to love anyone nor was he loved by the others. He had a thin head of hair and big protruding ears and the prominent whites of his eyes gave him a strange look. He was the most unkempt and dirty

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among the children. It was already late autumn, but he was still wearing thin ragged clothes clearly out of season. Maybe that’s why he gave off that gloomy and creepy feel.23

We are introduced to a troubled boy who confounds easy identification. As the narrative unfolds, we find out that Haruo is hiding something, but the nature of his secret is not apparent to the reader until much later in the story. But readers soon learn that Haruo is not the only one hiding something. The narrator is reluctant to introduce himself until several pages into the story, and even then we are offered only glimpses of his self-identity as a student at the imperial university, a resident at the S commune, and someone who teaches English at the commune a few nights a week to the day laborers in the neighborhood. Neither does he readily reveal his name to the reader, who must wait to overhear it through children calling out to him: “Mr. Minami! Mr. Minami!” Thus identified, Minami must explain himself: Come to think of it, before I knew it, I was passing as “Minami” [南] at the commune. As you know, my last name should be read “Nam” [南] but for various reasons, I was being called in the Japanese way. My colleagues started calling me that and the name did grate on my nerves at first. But I gradually came to believe this was for the best. I mean, in order to play freely with these innocent children. I told myself over and over that this didn’t mean that I was being a hypocrite or a coward. I convinced myself that had there been even one Korean child in the commune, I would have insisted that everyone call me “Nam.”24 ­

It is noteworthy that for some colonial subjects like Minami/Nam, passing seemed to have happened almost by default: “It was my colleagues who started calling me Minami.” All he did was refrain from correcting their mispronunciation of the sinograph for this family name, which conveniently could be read as either Japanese or Korean. As long as he remained silent, everyone would go on assuming he was Japanese. In Zainichi Literature, ­ ­ ­ John Lie writes insightfully

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that, in fact, for Koreans living in Japan, “passing” or “invisibility” were default conditions. Ethnoracially, they— and especially Korean upper-class males, who enjoyed some limited access to colonial education, language attainments, dress, mannerism, and so forth— are indistinguishable from the colonizer. During the colonial era, there was a distinct demarcation between those who could pass (e.g., Minami/Nam) and those who could not (e.g., the lowerclass Yi). For later generations of ethnic Koreans in Japan, “passing” as a default became even more of a generalized experience.26 As the narrative unfolds, we realize that Minami/Nam’s borderline subjectivity is intimately linked to Yamada Haruo. In fact, the narrative develops through the interweaving stories of these two characters, whose identities mirror and, through a series of recognitions and misrecognitions, mutually constitute one another in the story. We find out that each character is internally divided, dependent on the other and unable to stand apart from their mutual relationship. In one crucial scene, for example, Haruo begins to chase after a girl, yelling, “Chōsenjin chabare chabare!” The narrator explains, Chabare means “to grab” in Korean, and this phrase was often picked up by Japanese migrants in Korea. Of course, the girl was not Korean. He was harassing her in order for me to hear. I ran to Yamada, and grabbing his collar, started slapping his cheeks mercilessly. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Yamada became quiet and didn’t let out a word. He just stood frozen like an animal. He didn’t even cry. He merely stared up at me with rounded eyes, exhaling roughly. Suddenly a teardrop squeezed out of his eye. But as if trying to swallow back the tear, he barked in a low voice, “Idiot Chōsenjin!”27

Chōsenjin (Korean) was often used by Japanese colonizers as a derogatory epithet for Koreans; chabare is the pidgin pronunciation of chabara, which is the imperative form of the verb chapta (to grab or to seize). Thus, the words that Haruo utters can be crudely translated as “Get that gook!” The pidgin phrase introduced here as one commonly used by Japanese migrants in Korea exposes not only the quotidian violence of the colonizer’s racism against the colonized but also the infiltration of the colonizer’s speech by the language of the colonized. Andre Haag writes insightfully elsewhere about how the horrific phenomenon of “Korean hunts” (Chōsenjin-gari) ­ were so common at the same time in metropolitan Japan as to warrant a neologism.28 In the case of colonial language policies, a two-tiered education system was implemented to ensure choice opportunities for the imperialists and privileged class of the colonized. The settler population made it a point of not learning the colonized language, which had been demoted and devalued on every level, even censored and forbidden. Nevertheless, as we can see in the example above,

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despite all efforts at a clear segregation, the language of the colonized did seep into everyday parlance, causing deep anxieties.29 The colonial encounter thus is outed as deeply infecting both sides of the colonial divide. The contamination of the colonizer and the colonized by one another becomes more apparent as the story unfolds. Marking the failure of sight to distinguish the colonial other, Minami/Nam continues to misrecognize Haruo. Relying on the divided logic of colonizer versus colonized, he assumes that Haruo must be a Japanese migrant who had grown up in colonial Korea. How else would one explain Haruo’s assertations of racist superiority over colonized Koreans? But several pages later, in another belated moment of recognition, we see that this scene of Haruo’s acting up is not simply a binary encounter between the racist colonizer and the discriminated colonized, as it first appears. The fact that Haruo attacks a Japanese girl and projects onto her a Korean identity already disturbs this clear distinction. Mutual recognition finally comes in a scene mirroring Minami/Nam’s outing, when Haruo’s identity, too, is exposed by Yi. Despite Haruo’s asocial racist behavior, Minami/Nam finds himself somehow drawn to the strange boy and makes efforts to befriend him. One day, as the two are spending time together at the commune, a commotion breaks out, and a wounded woman “covered in blood” is carried into the commune hospital by Yi. Yi explains to Minami/Nam that the woman is a Korean whose Japanese husband had stabbed her in a fit of rage because she had been visiting with Yi’s mother, whose ethnicity is visibly marked by her Korean clothes. Yi then catches sight of Haruo, who has been cowering in the background as if trying to disappear, and shouts, “It’s him! It’s his father!”30 Thus, readers finally see, again belatedly, that Haruo too has been performing all along, trying to pass as a Japanese. As a child of Japanese-Korean intermarriage, Haruo has been performing his father’s Japaneseness, achieved through total repudiation of the Koreanness of his mother. In this scene he cannot even approach his severely wounded mother out of fear of exposing his racial impurity. Haruo’s mother herself tries to protect him from the discrimination she has suffered by hiding the fact that Haruo is her son. She even tries to “pass” in her own way by refusing to speak Korean, although her accented Japanese and foreign name give her away. PASSING/IMPASSES

We can trace a parallel psychic disavowal of Haruo’s mother that is akin to Jack’s bypassing of his Ma and Ma’s own participation in this performative act in Langton Hughes’ story “Passing,” examined above. What is significant here is that racist assumptions of pure and natural identities held by the colonizers or the dominant race have seeped deep into the psyche of the colonized or the subjected race as well. The mother’s denial of herself and Haruo’s overidentification

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with Japaneseness and his denial of his own and his mother’s Koreanness follow the same logic of racial purity that sustains imperial or segregationist projects on both sides of the racial divide. Such racist attitudes have also seeped into the character Yi, who on the surface seems to be most adamantly revolting against colonial discriminatory logic. In reality, Yi mimics the logic of empire in his inability to see beyond Haruo’s contaminated Japanese blood. By conflating Haruo with Haruo’s father, and thereby repudiating the symbol of pure Japaneseness, Yi can safeguard his own sense of selfsame identity as a Korean—an identity threatened by borderline subjects such as Haruo or Minami/Nan, who can pass across the seemingly neat division between the Japanese colonizers and the Korean colonized. The contamination of the colonizers / dominant race and the colonized / subjected race by one another, and the impossibility of distinguishing one another apart, are their shared fears in the racial/colonial encounter. This fear appears at first glance to be unlike Western imperialism, which commonly colonized racially visible others, or the segregated United States, where the emphasis was on the color of one’s skin, whereas the Japanese and the Koreans were, as far as the eye could see, indistinguishable.31 Yet, as can be seen in our transpacific readings across these distances, the impossibility of sustaining the colonial or racial binary and the fears thus triggered are shared in both contexts. Here these fears are brought to the fore in the scene in which Yi accosts Minami/Nam for sympathizing and identifying with Haruo. In a revelation similar to Jack’s disavowal of Ma in Hughes’ “Passing,” Haruo in “Into the Light” has learned to repudiate his own mother in the face of societal racism against her socially devalued ethnoracial status. It is important to point out that these stories are also linked by the recurring trope of domestic violence against women within the family that is itself seen as a concentric rippling effect internal to a minor(ity) community further oppressed externally by the dominant race. Afraid to visit his mother in the hospital because his love for her is tainted by his hatred of what he identifies as his own and his mother’s Koreanness, Haruo has spent the night in Minami/Nam’s room. Discovering this, Yi yells at Minami/Nam, “Even after he calls you ‘Chōsenjin,’ you still insist on protecting him!” The conversation continues as follows: [Nam:] “Yamada’s come to see me through this rainstorm. Even if he wanted to go back home, he has no place to return.” [Yi:] “Who is the one with nowhere to return? That poor woman is the one who has no place to go. That kid can go back to his father. Damn it, go to hell, you bastard!”32 It is unclear whom Yi is damning to hell—Haruo or Haruo’s father. Yi’s inability to distinguish Haruo and Haruo’s father shows how Yi is conflating their complex borderline identities as a symbol of the unified Japanese colonizer. Just

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as colonial racist depictions of colonized and racialized subjects often failed to distinguish individuals from their collectivity, Yi’s reaction shows a similar affliction of the colonized, psychically wounded by the imperial racist system and unable to see differences among the Japanese as a collective whole. From Yi’s perspective, it seems, even a single drop of Japanese blood automatically and naturally marks someone as “Japanese,” to be rejected as an other, defying any possibility of identification or empathy. Such racist attitudes, much like the American apartheid system of the one-drop rule, refuse to recognize borderline characters such as Haruo and Minami/Nam. “WHO’S PASSING FOR WHO?”

A similar obsession with racial mixing and crossing besets a group of friends in another literary piece by Langston Hughes. In “Who’s Passing for Who?” (1946), a night out in Harlem ends with an unexpected turn of events. A group of Black bohemian artists run into an acquaintance named Caleb who appears to have “three assorted white folks in tow.” Caleb, according to the loosely autobiographical narrator, is entertaining out-of-town visitors— schoolteachers from Iowa, a woman and two men. Cross-racial interactions— even among those selfproclaimed as “too broad-minded to be bothered with questions of color”— become a site of anxiety and uncertainty during a night out among a mixedrace cohort in the historically Black neighborhood. They are having drinks at a speakeasy when the following scene ensues: The drinks came and every thing was going well, all of us drinking, and we three showing off in a high-brow manner, when suddenly at the table just behind us a man got up and knocked down a woman. He was a brown skinned man. The woman was blonde. As she rose he knocked her down again. Then the red-haired man from Iowa got up and knocked the colored man down. He said, “Keep your hands off that white w ­ oman.” The man got up and said, “She’s not a white ­woman. She’s my wife.” One of the waiters added, “She’s not white, sir, she’s colored.” Whereupon the man from Iowa looked puzzled, dropped his fists, and said, “I’m sorry.” The colored man said, “What are you doing up here in Harlem anyway, interfering with my family affairs?” The white man said, “I thought she was a white w ­ oman.” The woman who had been on the floor rose and said, “Well, I’m not a white woman, I’m colored, and you leave my husband alone.”33

­

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found out to not be White, he immediately backs down and even apologizes for interfering between the man and the woman. Even the battered woman herself seems to take issue with this infiltration into their private concerns, and comes to her battering husband’s defense after picking herself up from the floor. Among the group, a tense discussion ensues a fter they are asked to leave the club for causing a scene: “Why did you say you were sorry,” said the colored painter to the visitor from Iowa, “after you’d hit that man— and then found out it wasn’t a white woman you were defending, but merely a light colored woman who looked white?” “Well,” answered the red-haired Iowan, “I didn’t mean to be butting in if they were all the same race.” “Don’t you think a woman needs defending from a brute, no matter what race she may be?” asked the painter. “Yes, but I think it’s up to you to defend your own women.”34

The question in this case seems to be about who deserves defending and who has the right to protect whom. It appears the issue goes beyond the line of separation between the private and public into that of the color line because the White man clearly felt that he had the right to intervene in a private dispute if the woman had been White. The assumption of what constitutes the borders of one’s own is clearly a racial one. This color line and the question of when it is acceptable to pass through it and when it is not are all but self-evident. The group ultimately cannot come to an agreement with the White man losing his temper and storming out. The remaining members of the group continue the conversation, beginning to discuss the topic of passing: how the light-skinned woman may have been racially passing. And to the surprise of the bohemian Black artists, the White couple from Iowa tell them that they themselves are actually passing as White. Initially shocked, the Black artists soon warm up to the couple— seeing them in a new light, feeling more comfortable among “their own” and letting their guard down. But as the couple step into a taxi at the end of the night, the woman yells out with a grin: “Listen, boys! I hate to confuse you again. But, to tell the truth, my husband and I aren’t really colored at all. We’re white. We just thought we’d kid you by passing for colored a little while—just as you said Negroes sometimes pass for white.”35 ­

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or were not White, in fact, who’s passing for whom? This uncertainty or ambiguity is common in Hughes’ writings on passing. In fact, in “Who’s Passing for Who?” and other stories by Hughes, uncertainty of identity continues to linger at the story’s ending. There is a sustained suspension between knowing and uncertainty in terms of identities, race, and morality. As Juda Bennett writes in her important analysis of passing in Hughes’ writings, Hughes keeps race “ambiguous” through what she calls his “queer sensibility” that constantly questions “a stable and normalized identity.”37 This “queer sensibility” also alludes to the intersectional ambiguity of the closet for Hughes’ transgression of both race and sexuality, often leaving readers without full knowledge or certainty of borderline identities. PSYCHIC IMPASSE

Returning to Kim’s “Into the Light,” there is a parallel moment of racial ambiguity that in this case leads to a psychic impasse for Minami/Nam, who is called to pick a side in the racist binary. Following the heated exchange between Minami/Nam and Yi, Minami/Nam suffers from a psychic breakdown— a complete unraveling of identity that occurs as he literally turns to face and to speak to himself as other: Suddenly I screamed as if possessed. I thought I was going mad. . . . Of course I understood naive Yi because I, too, had passed through such a phase. But then, in the next moment, the full impact of the realization that I was being called “Minami” was ringing like a bell through my five organs. Taken aback, I tried to find excuses as I always did. But it was useless. “Hypocrite, you’re turning into a hypocrite again.” I heard a voice next to me. “I suppose you’ve finally lost your grounding and become a coward, heh?” Shocked, I tried to ignore the voice and said, “Why must I keep yelling out, ‘No, I will not be a coward!’ Doesn’t that in fact push me deeper into the swamp of cowardliness?” I had believed I was an adult. I wasn’t twisted like a child, and I didn’t XX madly like a young man. But wasn’t I lying down comfortably on my belly like a coward? I turned to myself, you said you didn’t want to create a gap between yourself and those innocent children. But what is the difference between you and the Korean man who frequents a bar in order to hide himself? In protest, I accosted myself. What is the difference between yourself and the man who yells out in a moment of sentimentality, “I’m a Korean, I’m a Korean!” There was fundamentally nothing different from Yamada Haruo, yelling that he was not a Korean. I was fed up with my useless one-man act.38

In this moment, Minami/Nam (mis)recognizes himself and begins to address himself in the second-person “you.” He splits once more into an “I/you” caught

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in an accusatory impasse with himself. Tired of his identity performance, he cannot deny being a Korean, but likewise cannot claim himself to be a Korean either. In this dilemma, neither assimilation nor differentiation offers satisfactory answers to the colonized subject who is already contaminated by the colonial system. Minami/Nam sees that he can neither wear nor discard the burden of identity that is pressing upon him from multiple contradictory demands within the colonial system. The character nearly goes mad in the internal impasse engendered by structural racism. In such a contradictory context, Minami/Nam’s dramatic split reaction may have been the only logical outcome. It seems significant that this moment is also the I’s moment of greatest clarity, when Minami/ Nam seems most honest or true to himself. It is also the moment of the I’s identification with other borderline characters—Haruo, Yi, and even the imagined everyman in the bar. In the absence of a coherent, unified I, the fragmented I seeks to form connections with other divided selves by virtue of the shared sense of pain arising from their minoritized or racialized conditions. Such moments offer an opening to imagine new critical possibilities of forging transpacific connections based on empathetic solidarities across disparate contexts of human devaluations. Similar to Langston Hughes’ passing narratives, Kim Saryang’s “Into the Light” does not offer an easy solution to the characters’ racial impasses. Rather, a relational subjectivity, one that is able to find meaning in commiserating with the pain of others, gestures toward a new conception of identity that is neither selfsame nor of an ontological collectivity based on an unquestioned pure ethnoracial bond. Perhaps a similar bond with the other that is expansively defined— linked across vast distances even toward the faraway context of the segregated United States— can be reproduced through transpacific readings of parallel histories of racial passings and impasses from elsewhere, as suggested at the beginning of this chapter. Creating such historical linkages based on common predicaments shared across disparate communities is essential in producing empathetic outlooks against the persistence of imperial and racist divides. Although it is necessary to interrogate illegitimate privileges enjoyed by the colonizers under an apartheid racist system constructed and buttressed by colonialism or segregation, to respond to this rigid binary with yet another divided logic merely replicates the circle of violence with no possible exit from the impasse.39 In fact, in the act of turning toward himself in an address to an other, the I reveals the split within the self and the presence of the other within the I. The predicament of recognizing the foreign within the self is one that is shared by each of the characters in Kim’s story— Minami/Nam, Haruo, Haruo’s mother, and Haruo’s father, who is later revealed to have been born in Korea of a Korean mother. Even Yi and Yi’s mother, who at first sight appear to represent unified Koreanness, instead reveal in their exaggerated performances (Yi’s

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­

It is the paradox of empire that as the borders between its expanding territories open up on unprecedented scales, the imperial center itself also necessarily becomes vulnerable to the influx of colonized others. As Kim’s and Hughes’ works show, the fear that infects both the colonizer and the colonized, or Whites and Blacks, in regard to the increasing difficulty of maintaining and recognizing racial difference— particularly at the contact zones of miscegenating borderlines— also threatens the divisive or segregationist logic underlying the very foundations of imperialism and racism. PASSINGS AND IMPASSES ACROSS DIVIDED LITERARY WORLDS

Before concluding this chapter, I would like to consider the ongoing challenges in excavating divided archives by examining the scattered literary afterlives of Kim Saryang. I aim to offer this not as a conclusion but merely as a preliminary gesture toward pluralizing passing as a transpacific method of suturing historically divided legacies. This is an early foray into developing transpacific connections beyond Asian studies and to American literary studies. Alas, Langston Hughes’ own divided genealogy in American literary studies as a minor(ity) writer encompassing the intersectional epistemology of the closets of race, (homo) sexuality, and radical leftist solidarities across the geopolitical color line of the Cold War would need to be elaborated at a later occasion. Since the twentieth century, what came to be known as the Asia-Pacific or the Indo-Pacific became entangled in the waning of older empires, marked by brute territorial aggrandizement, and the waxing of newer empires marked by Cold War alignments and realignments. During these violent transitions, significant traces of the writer Kim Saryang can be detected inside and outside literary fields that were at times distinct and at other times overlapping: imperial ­Japanese literature, ­ ­­ colonial Korean literature, ­ ­­ ethnic Korean minority litera­ ­ ture, emerging North Korean literature, emerging South Korean literature, postwar Japanese literature, diasporic or ethnic Korean literature (known as Zainichi literature in Japan and Chaoxianzu literature in China), and (post)

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colonial literature encompassing works by (former) subjects of the Japanese Empire from Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, and other peripheries. In each of these fields, Kim occupied a precarious position just off-center. Kim Saryang was never fully at home in any one of these literary fields, as evidenced by the fact that he ended up vanishing from each— albeit to various degrees of obscurity. In other words, despite Kim’s exceptional efforts at various forms of border crossing, his divided literary afterlives register his impasses across the multiple ethnonational borderlines formed and reformed during the long twentieth century. It bears emphasizing again that in South Korea, because Kim went north after 1945, any mention of him was censored in subsequent literary collections until as late as 1988. A no-return policy was imposed while impossible and often violent choices about affiliations were demanded of writers as emerging Cold War literary territories were being carved out. In such geopolitical tumult of the times, Kim apparently disappeared into obscurity, remaining almost unknown in discourses on global literature. Yet beyond the exclusions of censorship and the no-return policy, how might postcolonial readers today understand the significance of Kim’s inability to cross these divided literary worlds in the region, from the colonial to the postcolonial and Cold War orders? Kim’s homelessness in numerous literary abodes (even though he planted feet in each of them) may be understood best as a microcosm of universal mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, or the all-too-human defensive strategy of building borders. His work mirrors the traumas inflicted by geopolitical ruptures, divisions, exclusions, and silencings throughout the long twentieth century and beyond. It seems likely that across these shifting geopolitical conditions, Kim’s exposures would discomfit readers on all sides who therefore might hesitate to claim his writing as their own. Kim’s texts, and especially those conjuring the theme of passing, bring into focus the exclusions usually visible only to those who are situated at the borderlines. In this way, his writerly impasses illustrate the way that authors who were positioned outside or in between are often the ones who dare to push the envelope or interrogate other wise invisible social boundaries that the rest of us either cannot or will not see. In other words, Kim’s rapid rise and fall into and out of one literary field after another—in sometimes overlapping and other times mutually exclusive or oppositional and antagonistic fields—may stem from his works’ ability to expose these blind spots. Perhaps it was precisely because Kim wrestled with and questioned externally imposed territorial and ideological divisions from the front lines that he had to be excised from literary canons in the Asia-Pacific during the postcolonial and post– Cold War periods. Perhaps Kim’s apparent authorial failures became part of the process that allowed such violent and arbitrary border formations to be naturalized and then forgotten. Kim’s forgotten legacies in national, regional, and world literary studies also offer a methodological point of entry for postcolonial or decolonial scholars today. The exceptionally dramatic paths treaded by Kim as he stumbled in and

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out of multiple literary fields and languages have left behind a valuable trail for literary historians, especially offering insight into the moments when impossible choices are being imposed at the margins— choices that are formative for the empire and the nation. In uncovering the logic of inclusion and exclusion that may no longer be visible amid other more gradually formed borderlines, Kim’s case allows us to see such dynamics as a much broader and more persistent problem. Rather than being understood as an exceptional case study of a bygone past and an obscure place, Kim’s experiences of passings and impasses beckon us to reconsider the slippery logic behind the mutually reproducing categories of nation and its others and empire and its others. For postcolonial readers, the process of following Kim’s peregrinations across multiple archives may shed light on aspects of our own persistent blind spots as we attempt to remember categorical borderlines that are taken for granted today as timeless, natural, and fixed. A fuller study of writers such as Kim who similarly embody the fragments of multiple national and ethnoracial literary fields across which their writings have been scattered can clarify the region’s yet-little-known postcolonial and post– Cold War impasses that go beyond the jurisdiction of any one nation-state. In the face of such fragmented and divided legacies in an ongoing coloniality, new methods in the postcolonial and post– Cold War archaeology of transwar or transpacific frameworks and archive excavations may help us navigate inherited borders to suture together histories that have been torn apart in the tumult of the long twentieth century. Likewise, although this is a preliminary study, the fascinating case of Kim Saryang’s literary impasses, as manifested through the theme of racial passing and put into conversation with parallel narratives from a segregated United States— especially shared themes in the writings of Langston Hughes— gives a rare glimpse into how parallel processes of racialized border formations may be put into conversation. This allows us to piece together little-known shared legacies and better understand these parallel histories. The aim is to question provincialisms of local exceptionalism (which some call competition-of-oppression Olympics) and instead work together toward building transborder empathy and strategic solidarities in order to reckon with past injustices. This chapter has offered a preliminary analysis of how distant yet parallel histories of racial inequalities may be put into conversation as a way of highlighting connections that are not self-evident at first glance. I attempt to experiment with a method of minority-to-minority transpacific reading that bypasses the impasses of a more common majority-to-minority dyadic readings of colonial and racial divides. By putting distant yet parallel stories and histories into the same field of vision, I hope to produce a wider, more global frame of reference that may overcome the myopias of a narrowly defined nation-centered decolonial or an­ tiracism project.

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To that end, this chapter builds on a growing body of scholarship that has begun to examine the transpacific connections of Langston Hughes’ writings in a direct engagement with and of Asia, either through travel writings or translations. What I have aimed to do, however, is to extend such readings to experiment with a transpacific methodology that puts distant stories into unexpected conversation with one another, even when there is no direct exchange among the authors in extant historical archives. By focusing on uncanny moments of thematic convergences across literary, legal, and historical archives, I suggest that there are other ways of building empathy and solidarity through alternative transpacific reading and excavation methods. There is much more to be examined in how such methodologies of transpacific readings may be expanded upon by including new textual and archival excavations especially in the face of material limits of minoritized or divided historic archives of others. Kim Saryang and Langston Hughes were writing from disparate and distant places at the precise moment when former imperial boundaries were dissolving and newly formed Cold War ethnonational and imperial borders were solidifying across both the Asia-Pacific and hemispheric divides. Although there is no archival evidence of the two writers ever having directly engaged with one another’s works in their lifetimes, their parallel struggles and concerns are uncannily similar. Connecting these stories beyond myths of provincial exceptionalisms, and beyond traditional regional and scholarly territories of Asian studies and American studies, is an important first step in forging new transhemispheric genealogies. The very act of opening up new archives of transpacific critical terrains may at long last allow access to and recognition of forgotten but overlapping legacies of the long twentieth century’s transhemispheric problem of the color line that W. E. B. DuBois alluded to at the dawn of the century—the planetary extent of which we are just beginning to decipher over a century later. ­ ­ NOTES Epigraph. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 2014), v. This chapter includes substantial revisions of my previous writings on passing in the Japanese Empire; see Nayoung Aimee Kwon, “Translated Encounters and Empire” (PhD diss., University of California–Los Angeles, 2007); and Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). I would like to thank the editors of this volume and the anonymous readers for their incisive feedback during the revision of this chapter. Andre Haag deserves special mention for sharing relevant sources on Langston Hughes and other African American writings on passing at a critical stage of the writing.

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of Cultural Identity (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012). See also María Carla Sánchez and Linda Schlossberg, eds., Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2001).



­ ­ ­



­ ​­ ​­ ​­ ​­ ​ ­ ​­ ​­ ​ azel-v.-carby/the-limits-of-caste. ­ ​ ­ ​ ­​ ­ ​­ ​­ ​­ ​­

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Kim Saryang, “Letter to Mother,” trans. Nayoung Aimee Kwon, in Zainichi Literature: ­ ­ ­ Japanese Writings by Ethnic Koreans, ed. John Lie (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2018), 25–30.

13. Huh, “Beyond Afro-Orientalism.” ­

18. Dawkins, Clearly Invisible, 55–77.



22. Yŏm, “On the Eve of the Uprising,” 37. 23. Kim, “Hikari no naka ni,” in Kim Saryang zenshū (Tokyo: Kawade shobō, 1974), 2; all translations from this work are my own. 25. Ibid., 5–6. ­ ­ ­ 27. Kim, “Hikari no naka ni,” 7. 28. Haag, “The Passing Perils,” 258. 29. Mark Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009). 30. Kim, “Hikari no naka ni,” 10. 31. Ibid., 8.

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32. Ibid., 15. 3 4. Ibid., 164–165. 35. Ibid., 166. 36. Ibid., 166, emphasis in the original. 37. Bennett, “Multiple Passings,” 672.



6

CRAFTING THE COLONIAL “JAPANESE ­ CHILD” JOAN E. ERICSON

This chapter examines the cache of colonial-era children’s magazines and newspapers in Japanese from the colonies— and, notably, Taiwan—that was discovered in 2004 in the attic of Hakodate Central Library in Hokkaidō, Japan.1 Among the written materials were children’s periodicals not seen heretofore in any other library holdings, targeting two audiences: children of Japanese colonizers and colonized children. These publications show how the colonized child subject was taught to identify with their Japanese colonizers through the acquisition of a basic “Japanese” education while still being subjugated as second-class members of their society. As my analysis will show, children’s literature and media invoked and facilitated the integration and subordination of the colonial child.2 Since the 1880s, the Japanese Ministry of Education sought to create mandatory public education taught with the newly constructed “standard Japanese language” (hyōjungo) in order to bring together young speakers of multiple dialects.3 The goal was to promote communication and common cultural and institutional networks throughout the new nation-state. As the empire grew, universal elementary education constructed colonial subjects with a common vocabulary, but a distinct set of place and purpose. In her book Liminality of the Japanese Empire, Hiroko Matsuda discusses the debate on the role of education among the colonized in Taiwan—namely, between those who advocated education for Taiwanese children versus those who did not see the necessity of such a move. The one thing that they agreed upon was developing a strong sense of loyalty to Japan.4 From the late 1910s onward, the earlier neglect of education was discarded in favor of a policy that pushed Japanese language education.5 Yet Japanese children raised in Taiwan and colonized Taiwanese children were segregated into two very distinct school systems: the elementary-level shōgakkō, which attempted to replicate the educational opportunities back in the homeland; and the less rigorous kōgakkō, a six-year elementary school, which was as much formal education as most Taiwanese children received. 110

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The Japanese national language apparatus had become entrenched in colonial Taiwan by the early 1930s. With the establishment of the kōgakkō in 1919, public schooling became available to every child in Taiwan, albeit through the colonizer’s Japanese-language medium called kokugo (national language). Through referring to the language not as Nihongo (“Japanese language”) but as the “national language” of the colonizer, Koreans and Taiwanese were incorporated into the nation but at the same time kept separate.6 The new Rescript on Education in 1922 redefined eligibility for entrance into the two main tracks of elementary school. The kōgakkō was for those who did not speak Japanese, and the shōgakkō was for Japanese-speaking children.7 The success of this program can be seen in the numbers: by 1941, 744,000 primary students were enrolled, with over twenty-three thousand in middle school, high school, and other types of secondary education. Moreover, 57  percent of the population of 5,680,000 could understand Japanese.8 Sophisticated monographs (notably, by Faye Yuan Kleeman and Patricia E. Tsurumi) have documented Japan’s colonial education system in Taiwan and its impact on literary production.9 But these works have not benefited from later recovered artifacts that directly exhibit the fraught, conflicted, subordinate position of the colonial child. An analysis of the children’s magazines from the library in Hakodate uncovers a hitherto unknown means through which young Taiwanese subjects learned how to embrace their colonizer’s language and culture. CONSTRUCTING COLONIAL CHILDHOODS

In 2010, the Hakodate Central Library published an account of the discovery of a cache of colonial-era children’s periodicals in Japanese from Manchuria and Taiwan.10 These publications had been found in its attic when the old library was being rebuilt in another location. They had never before been cata loged. They are not part of the holdings at other major repositories of Japanese children’s literature (notably, the International Institute for Children’s Literature and the National Diet Library’s International Library of Children’s Literature), and no other extant copies have been uncovered in Japan.11 This cache of colonial children’s literature had come about by accident. In 1934, the Hakodate Central Library lost two-thirds of its holdings in a fire, including all fifteen thousand of its volumes for children. Lacking resources to replace them, a call went out throughout the empire for donations of books. Libraries across Japan responded, donating over 124,000 works, but so did the office of the Taiwan Government-General (sōtokufu), which sent thirty-five boxes containing twenty-six thousand items, as well as the Mantetsu Library in Dalian, which sent sixty-two boxes with sixteen thousand items.12 It appears from notations identifying the owner on some of the covers that these materials from the colonies were, at least partly, gathered through donations at shōgakkō and kōgakkō, as well as public libraries, and shipped through a central clearinghouse.

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Copies of the following publications are now part of the special archives in the Hakodate Central Library: • • •

the magazine Taiwan kodomo sekai, issues from September 1925 and February 1926 the magazine Taiwan shōnen kai, issues from December 1931, January 1932, February 1932, and March 1932 the newspaper Tainichi kodomo shinbun, a total of twenty issues, running from the March 1, 1925, inaugural issue through the November 27, 1927, issue (with breaks)

Nearly all of the children’s publications were secondhand, with the names of individual children handwritten on their covers, often with their elementary schools and school addresses. One can only speculate that these colonial artifacts, published on rather flimsy paper with low production value, were considered ephemera not worthy of a formal catalog entry. Still, the librarians did not throw them away. For over sixty-five years, they sat gathering dust in the attic, forgotten.13 What do these publications tell us about how colonial and colonized children should be educated? In comparing the two distinct types of children’s magazines, we can observe a number of things. For Japanese children in Taiwan, • • • •

the magazines try to model normalcy for Japanese children living in the colony and mirror publications back in naichi (the Japanese mainland; lit. “inner lands”) an increasing number from year to year of fictional and historical stories about Taiwan and Manchuria appear in the magazines Japanese writers exoticize Taiwan, with stories of Indigenous communities with backward ways Taiwanese children are presented as needing to accept their secondclass position in society

For Taiwanese children: • • • •

a goal appears to be to create Japanese citizens who know about Japanese history, culture, and—foremost—language (through the kōgakkō) there are lowered expectations for the colonized; a short childhood is normalizing, followed by work in adult society there is an emphasis on moral lessons and knowing one’s place there is a desire to tame the Indigenous practice of headhunters, acknowledging a “savage” history and changing their image to that of civilized subjects

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How might these magazines shed a new perspective on the dynamics of Japanese children’s literature (the use of language, imagery, styles, and tropes), and how might they serve as a lens through which to view perceptions of childhood? How did those low-cost niche magazines connect with or contest mandated educational primers that were the principal means for teaching a standardized, national (i.e., Japanese) language? Here was an opportunity to see how modern identities within the periphery of empire were connected with those of the nation-state. The main objective of the colonial subject parent was to send their children to the new free compulsory education, something which had not previously been available to all. The objective was not primarily or necessarily to “pass” or “pose” as the colonizer but to find a place in the new empire, to assimilate to the colonial project and embrace their “Japanese adjacency.”14 Taiwan had served as a common site for encounters with the savage in Japanese children’s literature. Robert Tierney has surveyed the tropes of the violent headhunters versus the happy primitives in colonial discourse; as he points out, Satō Haruo’s 1923 short story “Demon Bird” (Machō) published in the prestigious (and adult) general-interest magazine Chūō kōron, exemplified the representation of Indigenous people as exotic primitives doomed in their collision with colonial modernity.15 This trope had already been explored in Uno Kōji’s 1915 saccharine children’s story “Memory of a Lullaby” (Yurikago no uta no omoide), which appeared in the teen magazine Shōjo no tomo. Here the language of the bond between mother and child becomes a means for redemption, a way to recover national identity imprinted through the earliest form of culture. In the tale, it is the modern Japanese who are victimized: tribal people attack a Japanese settlement in the early days of colonial rule and, in the fracas, three-year-old Chiyo goes missing. Fifteen years later, the female leader of the wild tribe is caught and is suspected to be the missing Chiyo. But how can this be proved? She claims that she is an aborigine (seibanjin; lit. “raw savage”) and hates the Japanese. Her Japanese mother goes inside a house to sing a lullaby, the same lullaby that she had sung nightly to little Chiyo. Only then does the Indigenous leader break down in tears with the memories of the song and the realization of her true identity. She stops being a cruel aborigine and suddenly, miraculously, transforms into a fellow national, a civilized and attractive eighteen-year-old Japanese woman. This melodramatic tale shows the Japanese audience that little Chiyo had been raised by the natives to pass as one of them, but that her innate Japanese qualities and sensibilities will win out in the end. Yet the vast majority of colonial subjects in Taiwan were not aboriginal, however much the images of savages in “popular orientalism” dominated mass media.16 That trope would be directly contested in a 1932 lead article in Taiwan shōnen kai, a magazine for Taiwanese children. The editor directly addressed his readers on how the term “aboriginal” (seiban) was outdated, “as these people no longer hunt heads and are on the path to becoming Japanese citizens.” He went

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on to acknowledge that “we who live on this island are culturally behind people in the naichi” but that this was because, in his estimate, only “one-tenth [of the island’s residents] are able to read and speak the national language.” The editor remained upbeat about the future, and particularly for his readers: “Our readership is Taiwan’s treasure—poised to lead Taiwanese culture to become better than the naichi [naichi ijō ni hirakete iku].”17 Given the reality of their colonial status, children in Taiwan were being exhorted to support their people and become leaders in Taiwanese society through learning the Japanese language. Achieving such linguistic prowess would enable them to surpass the colonizer, or so they were told. Fujii Shōzō has contrasted two assessments of colonial cultural policies on Taiwanese identity: “oppression and resistance” versus “intentional assimilation.” Instead of resisting the oppressor, however, “what developed under Japanese rule was not a simple relationship of oppressive subjugator and the resisting subjugated, but rather a struggle by the Taiwanese people to form a Taiwanese identity while intentionally assimilating the Japanese ideology imposed upon them.”18 This effort is most prominently realized in the colonial educational system, as has been analyzed by the Taiwanese scholar Chen Peifong: “Taiwanese realized the significance of assimilating civilization and enthusiastically pursued the goal of ‘assimilation leading to civilization’ that was embedded in the Japanese language education system. In a sense, their acceptance of the language education because of their desire for modern civilization subverted Gotō Shimpei’s theory of ‘assimilation equals discrimination’ and functioned to advance the evolution of civilization toward equality. . . . It was the Taiwanese position of ‘acceptance as resistance’ that gave rise to this possibility.”19 Assimilation (dōka) had been articulated by the colonial state as the preeminent means to create “loyal imperial subjects” (chūryōnaru teikoku jinmin) in which the acquisition of the Japanese language was central. Assimilation was both the subject of a complex discourse over identities and the lens through which Taiwan’s (national) trajectory was viewed. I offer a modest qualification to this identity debate. Rather than a national/colonial frame of reference, I find it helpful to view the impact of the state’s cultural complex (bunka sagyō), including education, at least from 1920 to 1937, as constructing Japanese adjacency: subjects who could operate within the Japanese ethos and acquire benefits within the colonial system without ever surmounting persistent barriers to acceptance as equals. Japanese adjacency, set within the hierarchy that ostensibly espoused and constrained assimilation, helps to explain the affective range of what was published in children’s magazines and how childhood during the colonial period came to be remembered. COLONIAL C ­ HILDREN’S MAGAZINES

The Japanese children’s magazines from colonial Taiwan found in the Hakodate Central Library are rather few in number, with distinct audiences and di-

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vergent objectives. Taiwan kodomo sekai was aimed at Japanese children living in Taiwan who were studying a regular Japanese curriculum at the shōgakkō. Taiwan shōnen kai seems to be aimed at local Taiwanese children who were learning Japanese at the kōgakkō. The newspaper supplement Tainichi kodomo shinbun accompanied a Taiwanese daily newspaper, the Taiwan nichinichi shinbun.20 The scholar Yu Peiyun, in her study of children’s culture in Taiwan, ­Children’s Culture of Colonial Taiwan (Shokuminchi Taiwan no jidō bunka), identifies six children’s periodicals published in Taiwan during the colonial period: Kodomo sekai (April 1917–April 1922); ­ Gakuyū (January, 1919–November 1919); Mayako (1925–?), ­ Tainichi kodomo shinbun (March 1925–?); ­ Taiwan shōnenkai (December 1931–?); ­ and Manabi no tomo (July 1935–?, written in the same Chinese characters 学友 as the earlier Gakuyū).21 Yu’s award-winning book was published in 1999, before the discovery of the cache in the Hakodate Central Library. Since only Gakuyū is housed in the Taiwan Central Library, we do not benefit from Yu’s analysis of Tainichi kodomo Shinbun and Taiwan shōnenkai, as well as the new title Taiwan kodomo sekai (extant copies from 1925–26). Yu provides a wide-ranging background on children’s culture in Taiwan. In the first section of her book, she examines the visits and writing of the naichi authors of literature and music for children who journeyed to the colony.22 The second section is devoted to the resident naichi people who contributed to the children’s literary movement—notably, Yoshikawa Seima (d. 1925), who founded the children’s magazines Kodomo sekai and Gakuyū and also a magazine aimed at married women in Taiwan, Fujin to katei. The third section focuses on the young Taiwanese author Kōshi Hōshi (b. 1928), who would become the poster child for kokugo education in Taiwan. In analyzing the magazines discovered in the Hakodate Central Library, it is worth considering Yoshikawa’s role as an early successful model of an editor of magazines not just for children but also for their mothers. In the opening article of the first issue in December 1919 of Fujin to katei, “Concerning the New Publication of Women and the Home” (Fujin to katei hakkan ni tsuite), Yoshikawa revealed his publishing strategy.23 There were many magazines for women and children already on the market, he noted, but they were focused on the naichi and not Taiwan naichijin residents or Taiwanese. Identifying the need for a magazine that dealt specifically with women who lived in a subtropical part of Japan’s new territory, Yoshikawa planned to first create the company Taiwan Kodomo Sekaisha in 1917 through which he would publish childcentered magazines such as Taiwan kodomo sekai and Gakuyū in order to appeal to children and their mothers. Moreover, similar to what we find in the children’s magazines, all of the articles aimed at the mothers in Fujin to katei include furigana, or the pronunciation in hiragana for the sinographs that appear throughout the texts. This reader-friendly approach allowed even women with only a few years of formal Japanese education to enjoy reading from the child-centered magazines with their children and from the pages of Fujin to katei

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for their own self-enrichment. The exhortations to become successful through education and learning kokugo were a common trope in children’s and mothers’ magazines published in Taiwan. In another article in the same inaugural issue of Fujin to katei, Kiyotomo Sei observed that since there were over twenty magazines for children available in Taiwan, it was vitally important to choose ones based on the disposition and development of a child.24 Parents were admonished to pick magazines written in correct language and in which the contents aligned with the school statesanctioned textbooks (including ethics readers) and used furigana, grammar, and wording that corresponded with kokugo readers. Kiyotomo critiqued some children’s magazines, giving specific examples of their inconsistency of the use of katakana furigana. Kokugo was the standard, and mothers needed to be vigilant about what reading material to provide to their children.25 The three children’s periodicals found in the Hakodate Central Library represent just a small fraction of a world that is now lost. We know from Yu and Kiyotomo that a much wider array of publications was produced in colonial Taiwan. The “Hakodate Three” are not to be found at any of the major repositories in Taiwan, such as the National Central Library, the National Taiwan Library, or the library at the National Taiwan University, but the vast majority of a much larger number of periodicals are also entirely absent from these archives. There are several reasons why copies of these other publications have not survived: they were not considered serious or worthy of preservation; the National Taiwan Library was bombed near the end of World War II, and much of its holdings were lost; and the publications were in the language of the “losers,” the former colonizers, whose legacies were harshly rooted out by the Kuomintang. ­

Advertisements are often overlooked by readers, who consider them a nuisance, but they provide valuable clues regarding the target audience of the magazine and which businesses marketed their wares to that particular group of readers. In the front of the issue of Taiwan kodomo sekai we see advertisements for entrance exam study texts published by the same company, Taiwan Kodomo Sekaisha, as well as advertisements for mochi from Taipei (“delicious and good for gift giving [omiyage], too”), crayons, and Suzuki school supplies. There are also a number of smaller advertisements for Japanese stores in Taipei, and for thread, sweets, school supplies, tea stores (two), business cards, and a dentist. It

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is worth noting that the magazine was already in nearly its tenth year of publication, and its closing pages include a series of submissions by its young readers, with editorial appraisals. The stories in the September issue present a variety of subjects and levels of reading difficulty. Themes tend toward filial obligations and lessons on how to succeed drawn from biographies of exemplary individuals or, sometimes, literary characters. But a striking feature of Japan’s colonizing discourse is how attuned it is to the global (Western) frames of reference. The goals of the colonizer may have been to provide enough education to native children to allow them to participate in their designated subordinate place using the Japanese language. In the case of these particular children’s magazines, however, while the issue includes a five-page profile of General Nogi Maresuke (who famously committed suicide, with his wife, upon the death of the Emperor Meiji in 1912, but had served as Governor-General of Taiwan from 1896 to 1898), it also presents a portrait of William Gladstone (the four-time British prime minister in the latter half of the nineteenth century), the continuation of a serial on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (which provides a lesson in using one’s wits), and a short story, “Yuriko-san’s Dream” (Yuriko-san no yume), which was a thinly veiled retelling of Alice in Wonderland. In the short story “Princess Manjū” (Manjū hime), a young woman dances and sings at the Kamakura Tsurugaoka Hachiman shrine in return for the life of her mother, who is held in a cave for having attempted to kill Lord Yoritomo (founder of the Kamakura shogunate in the late twelfth century). This later story exemplifies the merits of a filial daughter: the people watching respond, “Children are worth having” (Aa, motsu beki mono wa ko de aru).26 There are also several poems that invoke Japanese cultural tropes and geographical sites; in one, a woman pines for her missing mother and prepares for Obon, the traditional Japanese summer festival welcoming the spirits of the ancestors. The editor’s opening remarks suggest that contributors have been “teachers” from the children’s schools, but he exhorts more contributions from its readers, since it is the children’s contributions that give “the flowers fragrance” and suggests that contributing to the magazine would also improve a student’s skills and demonstrate their abilities. The closing section includes a discussion of tsuzurikata (learning to write), which had developed into a popular movement beginning in the late 1920s in (naichi) Japan. More formally referred to as “life writing” (seikatsu tsuzurikata), this was a grassroots movement for teaching written expression, which encouraged children to draw upon their own lives and then share their essays with others. The editors of other children’s magazines followed this format and invited their young readers to submit original work with the incentive of possible publication. Submissions by a few lucky young readers were selected to be printed in the back sections of the magazines, along with editorial comments assessing the pieces.27

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The contents of the February 1926 issue of Taiwan kodomo sekai include two curious entries. The first is the continuing serialization of a plot summary of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The inclusion of this particular play might seem baffling, but it was a favorite of Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), the translator of Shakespeare’s complete works, for its presumed support for imperial domination, British or Japanese. His translations were widely read.28 The second is a story, “Ajin’s Garden” (Ajin no nōen), which contrasts an idyllic setting— compared to the garden of Eden—with the protagonist’s frantic state of mind. Even though he has graduated at the top of his elementary class of seven hundred students, Ajin has to discontinue his education in order to work to help support the family. His request to his mother to continue on with middle school is turned down because he has lost his father. We witness a loving mother-andson relationship but also the thwarted aspirations of a deserving child, rather akin to “social problem” tropes that had begun to appear in some socially conscious Taisho period (1912–1926) children’s literature. The story jumps ahead to the success Ajin achieves through his now famous vegetable garden. Due to his hard work, dignitaries from Taipei visit the model farm. The lesson: grow where you are planted. The September 1925 and February 1926 issues of Taiwan kodomo sekai suggest an orientation to those Japanese settler children who attend the shōgakkō: Taiwanese children are able to excel at kokugo, but also need to accept their lower social position. In her 2017 monograph Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan, Sabine Frühstück interrogates the concepts of normalizing and naturalizing children first in playing war to thus cause them to become young citizens who make war.29 Illustrations on the covers and images found within the magazines show the process of youth being socialized into wartime expectations. Similar messages appear on the covers of a number of children’s magazines in Taiwan, with the goal of normalizing children’s view of a military future. For example, the covers of issues of the 1919 children’s magazine Gakuyū each portray one or two children on the cover, much like other magazines in Japan and Taiwan. In the case of a boy, he is more likely to be dressed in a Japanese-style boy’s uniform, with Prussian-influenced dark blue or black jacket and pants with gold buttons, topped off with a cap with a front brim, or in a military uniform with a backdrop of the Rising Sun flag of the Japanese military. The March and May 1919 covers both feature a single Japanese boy dressed in a military uniform; in the case of the March cover, the wartime flag radiates out from the saluting boy. Some of the covers are illustrated with a Japanese-identified boy together with a girl in Chinese dress. For example, the cover of the February 1926 issue of Taiwan kodomo sekai portrays the image of a schoolboy in a black school uniform, the standard issue in Japanese schools, together with the image of a girl with her hair tied in the back of her head, in a Chinese dress, playing the tradi-

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tional Chinese lute, the pipa. (As might be expected, there are no examples of a Japanese-identified girl with a boy in Chinese dress.) The message is that children—at least boys—should become friends with other children, even if they are from different cultures.30 In contrast, the inaugural (December 1931) issue of the magazine Taiwan shōnen kai, with a Taiwanese editor, has a distinctly different look and feel. The cover has a cheaper quality printing; it is evocative, perhaps, but more like an amateur woodblock print, with splotches of color that do not quite fit inside the lines. The artist is identified as Enomoto Masao, a clearly Japanese name. Here we have the image of a boy in a Japanese cap with a girl in what appears to be a Chinese dress. His hand rests on her shoulder. His other hand is held high, and he is looking off in the distance. The girl has a pageboy-style haircut and is facing the reader. Both are smiling. Their portrayal is very similar to the illustrations on the covers of children’s magazines published in Japan, though we presume that the audience is Taiwanese who “present” as Japanese by learning the language through reading this magazine. At the same time, the unexpected blue eye color of the figures on the cover further complicates the notion of nationality. The inaugural issue begins with a message from the first-person voice of the magazine itself, a friendly note to the young readers: To Everyone, ­ I am Taiwan Shōnen Kai, born four or five days ago at Kabayamacho No. 77. Since I am my master’s messenger, I have brought you many amazing, interesting, and useful pretty illustrations and photographs, and things to read. Please enjoy them! And then, please read the letter from my master that is on page four. Taipei City Taipei Kenjisha Hakko31

On page 4, in his greeting to “the lovable young boys and girls of Taiwan” (aisuru Taiwan no shōnen shōjo-tachi ­ e), the editor Yang Tian-Song writes that there are children’s magazines from the naichi, but they are too difficult to read and too expensive.32 On page 8 the editor references contributions that have not been included due to a lack of space, and he adds that the biography of Thomas Edison was written by a “higher school student.” Yang is clearly trying to address and encourage young readers for whom Japanese is a second language. After one of the poetic entries, a note explains that while the poem may be a little difficult, if one reads the prose explanation below it, one can understand it.33 There is a story by a fourth grader who is identified as a Korean student at an “ordinary” school, the equivalent of a Taiwanese kōgakkō. Titled “Tardy” (Chikoku), the large-print essay describes the scenario of a student who has arrived late to school. Commentary following it notes that the essay incorporates

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FIGURE 3. Taiwan shōnen kai magazine cover from the inaugural issue, February 1931. Printed with the kind permission of the Hakodate Central Library.

difficult sinographs and vocabulary. The editor interacts with the young readers by asking if they can read the text, understand it, and then guess the feelings of the young author: “The teacher does not scold the student, but forty friends stare at him. Think deeply about those emotions and the conclusion as you read the essay.” A glossary of words such as dokidoki, handoru, and kaban help explain the vocabulary; the editors must have felt that these terms (an onomatopoeia for a strong beating of the heart, a katakana term for the English “door handle,” and a term for a bag, respectively), all common in Japan even today, needed to

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be highlighted in this different cultural context.34 The underlying encouragement covers over an attempt at rivalry between two colonial groups of children. The message seems to be that if a child in a kokugo school in Korea can craft this essay, so can the reader. The contents of this inaugural issue include other lessons from the lives of great men, such as Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), who served as prime minister of Japan during the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), which resulted in Japan’s acquisition of Taiwan. But here we see a (presumably apocryphal) filial encounter—“Teachings of a Wise Mother” (Kenbo no oshie)—where Itō is taught not to urinate in the garden at night, even though the latrine is inconveniently farther away. The moral of the story is that Itō should neither be afraid of the dark nor do uncouth things.35 Rather more surprising is the short portrait of the French artist Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), emphasizing his humble beginnings (with no mention of the Barbizon school). But the most striking example of global references is in the two-page pictorial spread on the Christmas story, with Santa in front of a Christmas tree offering a gingerbread man to children.36 There are also two of Aesop’s fables (“The Fox and the Crow” and “The Dove and the Ant”) and a story about a German family, “God’s Heart” (Kami no kokoro) that offers the transparent lesson of how to always think of others: one of the children in the family receives an apple and gives it to a sibling, who in turn passes it on to another sibling. There is an array of fun facts to know and tell—adults need eight hours of sleep, while children need ten; termites lay eighty thousand eggs a day—as well as factoids about airplanes, giraffes, ostriches, and fish.37 The February 1932 issue of Taiwan shōnen kai continues in a similar vein. The editor notes that he has received numerous manuscripts from his readers, so many that he plans to publish a forthcoming separate issue with ten of them. But he notes that many of them were plagiarized and that this constitutes robbery; he admonishes his young readers with the simple directive, “Don’t do it!”38 This issue, too, contains profiles of famous men. A key purpose of these profiles is to promote and teach the importance of the character commonly displayed, or at least learned, by these men in their childhoods. They are an integral part of the stories of achieving success in life (shusse), in which the tale of the formative childhood of a great man provides the foundation for his future successes, and they often appear in children’s magazines in the naichi. The lessons they offer are none too subtle: “They all became great because they studied!” and, therefore, “Take good care of your books!” The choice of figures is notably global: other men include Demosthenes, Alexander Hamilton, the early nineteenthcentury Shakespearean actor Edmond Kean, and an incident from the fifteenthcentury Zen monk Ikkyū’s childhood.39 In addition to introducing the young readers to famous men from around the world, there is also a focus on naichi. One article imparts an explanation of New Year’s customs in Japan. Another

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addresses the more politically serious topic of the Manchurian Incident of 1931: “Fighting is a bad thing—of course, you all know that already. Fighting happens when it can’t be helped.” 40 THE ACADEMIC DISCOURSE ON ­CHILDREN’S MAGAZINES

Colonial children’s magazines have received short shrift in contemporary Japanese academic scholarship. Kami Shōichirō, preeminent Japanese scholar of the history of children’s literature, views Taiwan shōnen kai critically in his two-part series “Young People’s Magazines in Taiwan” (Taiwan ni okeru jidō zasshi). He refutes any presumed popularity of the magazine Taiwan shōnen kai by addressing the probable lack of a sufficient Japanese-language readership, combined with a lack of economic means to afford such a publication. Although there are no data or testimonies to back these assertions, Kami makes a comparison between one 1931 issue of both Taiwan shōnen kai and the naichi magazine Shōnen kurabu (which was established in 1914 by the forerunner of the publishing giant Kodansha). He concludes that the Taiwanese publication suffers by comparison. The immensely popular Shōnen kurabu offers many more stories, some of them by well-known authors, and some of which would go on to be published as stand-alone publications.41 It is a bit like comparing apples and oranges, since Shōnen kurabu was backed by a very successful publishing house capable of high production values and with a sophisticated public relations network. Taiwan shōnen kai did not pass muster; it could not pass as authentically, aesthetically “Japanese.” We do not know how long the Taiwanese magazines continued in publication, though Kami posits that there were very few Japanese-language children’s magazines published in Taiwan and their scope and impact were limited. His verdict is that Taiwan shōnen kai was uninteresting, generally of a low quality (including the type of paper used), and too expensive for what one received. He surmises that children from Japan who were living in Taiwan must have continued to read the major children’s magazines published in Japan. Kami suggests that Taiwanese children, too, must have learned sufficient Japanese and thus preferred Japanese magazines. Since there are no extant children’s magazines published in Taiwan after about 1932, he concludes that the next magazines targeted at a child audience appeared in 1949, this time in Chinese. To try to understand this impact and the larger social and kokugo-focused ­ educational context in which young Taiwanese had been raised, I conducted an informal, open-ended survey in Taiwan in 2013 during my tenure as an artist in residence at the Taipei Artist Village, where my husband was writing a play on the shifting nature of national identities in the context of children’s literature. It was a small convenience sample and surely not representative, but, even so, it was revealing. Through afternoon-long, rambling conversations, I interviewed seniors who had gone to school during the Japanese colonial regime.

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­

Although none of them had seen the children’s periodicals found in the Hakodate Central Library (only two were of an age old enough that they might have read them in the early 1930s), they had read other Japanese children’s magazines and literature from the naichi. All had attended the kōgakkō elementary schools for Taiwanese, and not the shōgakkō, though they noted a permeability on who might attend. They had all developed strong affective ties with naichi language and culture that carried over to their lives decades later. One female informant, Lim Gyohong, was introduced to me by her grandson Berndt Bern, an artist at the Taipei Artist Village.42 She related how she had been recognized by her teacher at the kōgakkō as gifted and was one of two students out of her class of seventy who were selected to receive extra Japanese lessons a fter school using the more advanced textbook from the shōgakkō. As a child she had read Shōjo kurabu, Shōjo no tomo, Shōnen kurabu, and Kodansha’s picture books. This mirrored the findings of the scholar Yu Peiyun, who had also interviewed a dozen people in their sixties and seventies who had lived in Taiwan as youth; none of them had read children’s magazines published in Taiwan, instead remembering fondly having read Shōnen kurabu, Shōjo kurabu, and Shōnen shōjo dankai.43 Lim Gyohong’s aunts had read Reijōkai and Fujin kurabu. These choices in reading material paralleled what was being read in the naichi. Lim’s memories of the period were overwhelmingly positive, as is evident in the series of essays she serialized between 2001 and 2005 in the poetry journal Tangara Taiwan. In the first essay, she describes having been born in Taihoku, where she enjoyed a happy childhood immersed in naichi culture. She paints a picture of a mixed community of Taiwanese and naichi people who shared a friendly neighborhood. Her own family apparently adopted naichi customs, such as playing karuta (a traditional Japanese poetry card game) and other Japanese games during the New Year celebrations and floating lanterns down the river on Obon. That said, Lim’s idyllic view of her childhood is tempered in the essay with a more philosophical adult overview of her life. She is possibly overly conscious of the reaction of her Japanese-reading audience and glosses over the negative aspects of being the Taiwanese colonial subject within the naichi culture of her youth: “Our generation lived through two governments. Japanese, Taiwanese, and Chinese cultures are part of us. We experienced discrimination, but what my grand mother and my mother so enthusiastically wanted to relay to their children and grandchildren and people of this young generation was that we needed to tell the story of how the Japanese government

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period eradicated epidemics and made our streets green and flourishing. The strict hygiene management and good government education and other benefits ­were numerous.”  44 ­

By sheer coincidence, a number of those I spoke with grew up to be anticolonial dissidents, but they were specifically against an anti-Chinese (i.e., antiKuomintang) colonialism. Two of the men had spent years as political prisoners on Green Island, off the eastern coast of Taiwan. They told me that when former (and elderly) political prisoners get together, they sing Japanese children’s songs (apparently this was also a common practice during their harsh years of imprisonment, from the 1950s to the 1970s). As a result of my research in Taiwan, one of the male informants attended the public performance of my husband’s play and wholeheartedly joined in the audience participation, singing several Japanese children’s songs. They fondly remembered reading the manga “Norakuro” in Shōnen kurabu and following how the character rose in rank as the war effort grew. By their own account, children’s magazines in Japanese were part of the educational experience in their formative years, though they could only recall naichi magazines. One common experience among this generation was the sharp bifurcation of language. They learned Taiwanese at home and Japanese in school. Colonialera primers from the first grade began with chapters that contained only pictures—which, I was told, the teacher would narrate in Japanese. Only after the first semester, when the students had begun to acquire some familiarity with Japanese vocabulary, was kana added to the stories. In the primers, the images of the children, their clothing, the housing, and the furniture in their homes looked distinctly Taiwanese, as did an image of a young lad being chased by a tiger. There are some elements of Japanese style, with school caps and imperial displays. By the early 1930s the colonial state had constructed a vast array of educational institutions that engaged millions through Japanese, the language of instruction.46 This language was used to construct a realm of literature that Faye Yuan Kleeman divides into two groups: nativists who argued for a strong Taiwanese identity and “imperial-subject” writers who celebrated Japanese colonial influence.47 Literature written for the colonizers often presented an idyllic is-

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land paradise fraught with savage violence. Yet the literature written for or about children tended to present rather prosaic portraits of (modern) normality. Consider the case of Kōshi Hōshi (b. 1928), who could be seen as epitomizing the success of Japanese education in Taiwan. When I was in the early stages of this research, I anticipated finding other such success stories of Taiwanese educated under the Japanese system who rose to literary heights, but that was not the case when it came to children’s literature. Kōshi had written an essay titled “Dumplings” (Odango) for her fourth-grade Japanese homework assignment that caught the attention of the Japanese teacher at her kōgakkō. Mentored by her teacher—Ikeda Toshio, a naichi Japanese who had been influenced by the ethnographer Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962)—Kōshi wrote about everyday life in Taiwan from the perspective of a child. Starting in 1939 Ikeda helped with the publication of her work. Among Kōshi’s subsequent publications was the 1943 book of essays The Girl from Taiwan (Taiwan no shōjo) with a preface by Satō Haruo (1892–1964). Satō had been a prominent figure in the Taisho literary establishment whose works emphasized disenchantment not only with modernity but also with naturalism’s romanticism. In his preface, Satō extols the high level of Japanese ability of this young Taiwanese woman who only had seven or eight years of kokugo education, but he is also careful to place this accomplishment solidly within the goals of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere (Dai tōa kyōeiken). He underscores the success of the implementation of the kokugo language program, which had been in place for less than forty years. Satō’s imprimatur vouched for the reliability and respectability of Kōshi as someone who could provide authentic insight into everyday perspectives of the colonized. Kōshi assimilated not only as a Japanese child in Taiwan but also as a result of being mentored by Ikeda, an attentive Japanese teacher. They married after her graduation from girls’ high school (jogakkō) in 1947, when she was eighteen, and Ikeda took her back to Japan with him the following year.48 Kōshi became widely recognized in Japan for her depiction of the ordinary happenings of urban communities in Taipei; according to Yu, Kōshi’s writing helped to normalize what had previously been the exotic depiction of Japanese writers who wrote travelogues through a filter of exoticism.49 In the chapter titled “National Language” (Kokugo) in her book The Girl from Taiwan, Kōshi elaborates on the circumstances surrounding her family and language and the process of linguistic assimilation that enabled her to surpass the boundaries of language. She attributes her early linguistic ability to her family and relatives, who made a concerted effort to promote Japanese language acquisition, sometimes to the exclusion of Taiwanese: At my mother’s sister-in-law Akihide’s house, from long ago all of them used kokugo as a matter of course and when a child was born into the family

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they never used Taiwanese, only kokugo so that child could not speak Taiwanese at all. Even in the homes of my mother’s classmates from girls school days, if there are no elderly people in the household, there are many homes where they make an effort to speak only in kokugo. About that time my family was still made up of many people, including the elderly, so until I went to kōgakkō I knew mostly Taiwanese. We had to hold back since there were people in my family who could not understand kokugo, and when you used kokugo in front of neighborhood people, not only could they not understand what you were saying, it would seem as though those who spoke using kokugo with each other were saying bad things about the others. Even when my grand mother was still alive, she didn’t like it when my mother used kokugo. The pronunciation of kokugo is softer and feels more comfortable, but compared to Taiwanese there was not much variety in pronunciation and when you used kokugo in a daily setting without getting used to it, it couldn’t help but sound cold and formal. When I entered kōgakkō, there was one classmate who had been raised as a naichi person. I considered that friend to be so blessed not to know any Taiwanese. Someone who did not know Taiwanese was that much closer to being a naichi person and for that very reason became the object of respect in the class and was able to become the class leader. One day Kazu-chan and Miyo-chan, the children of my uncle who had married a naichi woman, came to my house to play. A friend from the kōgakkō who happened to be there saw that those children could only understand kokugo and asked inquisitively what my connection was. “Hōshi-san, you’re lucky. You uncle’s wife is a naichi person,” my friend said enviously.50

The exposure to a kokugo environment, both in and out of school, had a long-lasting impact on the children of this period. Particulars from life stories of these two Taiwanese women help to underscore the importance of their kokugo education. Its effect was deeply felt by both: it drastically changed the life of one of the girls when she married a naichi man and went to live in naichi; the other stayed in Taiwan but later wrote about fond memories of her childhood during the Japanese period. Other naichi symbols became familiar to Taiwanese children. One of my informants in Taiwan mentioned that at the local shōgakkō there was a statue of Ninomiya Sontoku (1787–1856), a common icon at elementary schools in naichi Japan who symbolized dedication to learning (often portrayed reading a book while walking and carrying firewood on his back), while at his kōgakkō ­there was a statue of Kusunoki Masashige (1294–1336), a thirteenth-century retainer of the emperor who symbolized loyalty unto death. These schools had different curricula and textbooks, and the kōgakkō was clearly given fewer resources than

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the shōgakkō. Yet, as I have noted, there were exceptions; Taiwanese children such as Lim were recognized as gifted in kokugo and were awarded the privilege of extra tutoring using a more advanced shōgakkō textbook meant for children fluent in kokugo. The school experiences were often formative for those with whom I spoke: their Japanese language remained fluent and their memories acute. One, for example, recalled reading “Love in the Storm” (Aizen katsura), a story by Kawaguchi Shōtarō serialized in Fujin kurabu in 1937–1938. During the last two years of World War II, most schooling was canceled, although one informant related to me that she had spent her days in a bomb shelter reading Japanese translations of world literature that she had borrowed from a classmate who came from a wealthier family that could afford to buy books for leisure reading. A fter 1945 she would go on to learn a third language, Chinese, well enough to pass the competitive normal school examination to study toward a teaching license. Reflective of the goals of the dōka period, in the 1920s the children’s magazines in the Japanese colonies were primarily teaching about Japanese culture and history, ways in which the colonial child with sufficient language skills could advance toward being closer to Japan. But how does this compare with similar magazines published in Japan for the home market? On the face of it, the format is strikingly similar. The magazine covers for the younger ages typically portray two children, a boy and a girl. As the targeted age of the readership advances, there are more niche magazines with just a girl or a boy on the cover. The image of the colonizer and colonized presents a stark contrast even in these magazines for children. What jumps out is the “real” Japanese versus the native being educated to become a colonial “Japanese child.” The colonized child could absorb the language and cultural markers that mimicked naichi standards, but the expectations were to fit in through work in colonial agriculture or industry that would be recognized and rewarded for its contribution to the empire. It is worth noting, however, that the colonial binary echoed the town-versus-country division within naichi Japan, where the rural child fell short. Even in the children’s magazines in Japan aimed at the youngest age group, there was a move toward creating a unified society based on standards of urbanized Japanese ­children. My research on the history of childhood in Japan has revealed that the definition of childhood varies depending on the social class of the child.51 Children’s magazines were meant to promote a common place for all children in a more genteel society. Of course, this concept is not limited to Japan. For example, the English literary critic Peter Hunt interrogates the Western publishing world where, with the Industrial Revolution, “children’s books for the working-class child seem to be a good deal more authoritarian and harsh than those for the sheltered middle classes; indeed, they scarcely seem to be children’s books at all.”52 Literature for children in Japan had the additional element of reflecting adult literary trends (e.g., romanticism and proletarian forms of 53 liter ­ ­ature). ­

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Though at first glance naichi magazines seem to target both urban and rural Japanese children by including illustrations of a variety of geographical areas of the country, upon closer scrutiny there is a decided bias toward the urban ideal as being what all young Japanese citizens should aspire to. This othering of the rural child can be clearly seen in an illustration in the April 1923 issue of Kodomo asahi in which urban children are setting out for a field trip in the countryside. Urban and rural children are shown together in the same illustration, but they nevertheless appear to inhabit distinct worlds, segregated into two groups: the native rural child versus the civilized urban child. We see the epitome of a quaint, simple, happy, naive, almost primordial environment. A divide clearly exists between the urban and the rural within Japan. The city children tend to be from wealthy families, not the urban poor. They are all dressed in Western clothing, ready for a rural adventure with sun hats and canteens. The rural children, by contrast, are wearing short kimonos and are not protected from the sun. In her book Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies, Sayaka Chatani focuses on a group of youth older than the presumed target of the periodicals found in the Hakodate Central Library.54 Her discussion of village youth associations (seinendan) in Japan and across the empire in Korea and Taiwan shows us that they were surprisingly similar in their implementation of ideological mobilization toward the goal of assimilation and homogenization. The goal of learning to act like an ideal Japanese subject can also be readily seen in the niche magazines aimed at an elementary school readership, an audience that would perhaps grow up to join the seinendan in their respective communities. Both the Japanese farming child and Taiwanese children needed to be “civilized” and brought into the modern sphere of influence. While this was a negotiable target for Japanese rural children, and especially those who would grow up to join the exodus from the countryside to relocate in major Japanese cities, it was a nearly insurmountable task for colonial subjects who were educated to function as second-class citizens. Although there is a record of children’s magazines published in kokugo in Taiwan beginning in 1917, two years prior to the establishment of the kōgakkō system, their numbers declined, and the magazines seem to have disappeared entirely after 1937 u nder the constraints of wartime mobilization. During the imperialization (kōminka) period, naichi children’s magazines replaced what had been previously published in Taiwan, continuing to promote linguistic nationalism through kokugo. With the discovery of a handful of long-forgotten colonialera children’s publications in the Hakodate Central Library, a new window has opened for us to revisit colonial Taiwanese children’s interaction with naichi language and culture. The limited number of periodicals provide a slender reed on which to rest any reassessment of the wider dynamics of empire, and their contents reaffirm commonly held assumptions about the subordinate position of

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the colonial child. Yet they also depart from the broader discourse on assimilation, with its emphasis on national trajectories, highlighting what might be considered the construction of Japanese adjacency—providing the language for those who wished to embrace the Japanese ethos and acquire benefits within the colonial system without ever achieving acceptance as equals. My interviews with seniors reminiscing quite positively about their childhoods during the colonial period similarly echoed the affective experience of Japanese adjacency as they conversed fluently and animatedly in the kokugo that they had learned as children six decades earlier. Institutional structures constructed the context and normalized expectations for the colonial child, yet the embrace of Japanese adjacency also illustrates how negotiating the terrain of collective identities can produce cultural artifacts that reveal complex tensions within the project of assimilation, an example of the affectively charged experiences of colonial hybridity. NOTES







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­





12. Tani, “Hakodate-­shi,” 6.

16. Ibid., 97.

ō

1 8. Fujii, “The Formation of Taiwanese Identity,” 62–77, quotation on 63.

ō



Crafting the Colonial “­Japanese Child”  131



­ ­ ­

­ ­ ­

29. Sabine Frühstück, Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). ō

­

3 3. Taiwan shōnen kai 1 (1931): 13. 34. Ibid., 22–23. 35. Ibid., 16–18. 36. Ibid., 25. 37. Ibid., 37. 38. Taiwan shōnen kai 3 (1932): 15. 39. Ibid., 19, 24. 40. Ibid., 44. 42. Lim Gyohong, interview with the author, Taipei, July 3, 2012. 43. Yu, Shokuminchi Taiwan no jidō bunka,181.

132  Joan E. Ericson

Taiwan Tangara Waka Poetry Group, founded in 1991)(2001): 81. Throughout this chapter, all translations from the Japanese are my own. The author gave me a copy of this issue and told me that she had published essays of memories of her childhood in this magazine between 2000 and 2005.



48. Yu, Shokuminchi Taiwan no jidō bunka, 249. 50. Kōshi Hōshi, Taiwan no shōjo (Tokyo: Tokyo shoseki, 1943), 223–225.

5 2. Peter Hunt, Criticism, Theory, and ­Children’s Literature ­ ­ ­ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 59. 54. Sayaka Chatani, Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018).

7

A ­WOMAN FOR ­EVERY TRIBE Li Xianglan and Her Construction of a Pan-Asian Femininity FAYE YUAN KLEEMAN

In his discussion of the cultural dimensions of the globalization phenomenon, Arjun Appadurai articulates his view of cultural activity (what he calls the “social imaginary”) and delineates five dimensions of global cultural flows: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes, and finanscapes.1 Similarly, as one examines aspects of the intercultural flows between the metropole and the colonies of the Japanese Empire, exploring the patterns and trajectories of knowledge flow and cultural exchanges, I propose a streamlined schema that focuses on three aspects of the exchanges—namely, I identify the movement of people (jinryū),2 the flow of cultural knowledge and ideology (bunryū), and the circulation and transmission of art and material culture (butsuryū), each overlapping with Appadurai’s five areas of social imagination. I hope in this chapter to unpack the abstract, totalizing concept of “colonial modernity” disseminated by Japan to its neighbors in East Asia through the medium of cultural transactions and its impact on individuals, both in the naichi ( Japanese mainland; lit. “inner lands”) and in the gaichi (the colonies). I intend to shift perspective from the grand level of regional geopolitics down to the intimate, personal level in order to illustrate the intertwined and multifarious relationship between the personal and the national, the private and the public, in the grand scheme of the Japanese colonial enterprise by asking certain questions: What did common folk gain from the empire? How were they persuaded to buy into the ideology of Japanese imperialism? What sustained their interest in the project of empire building? This examination of human interaction between the metropole and the colonies, as well as the intracolony cultural interface, proposes that it was not only through the ideologies championed by the state apparatus that people were persuaded to participate in the imperial enterprise. Rather, it was through the lure of desire and pleasure, through their romantic imagination (mediated by the 133

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media technology of film, audio recordings, and popular visual images) that everyday people came to be engaged in the seemingly abstract concept of empire. Simple drives to see the world outside, to better one’s social and financial standing in society, and to experience the vicarious pleasure of information about new and exotic places drew individuals into the narrative of the empire. The lure of the empire for everyday folks was made manifest through writers, painters, musicians, stage actors, movie stars, and dancers who were the main participants in this project of cultural transaction, demonstrating and promoting Japanese performing arts in the gaichi both for local audiences and for Japanese soldiers and expatriates. Moreover, the exchange was not unidirectional. This transnational cultural flow was equally informative for the consumers in the naichi, who through popular culture also participated in creating the collective cultural imagination of the empire.3 Propaganda aside, writers and artists who traveled abroad produced a substantial body of literary and artistic works on the colonies that had not been seen before, and musicians brought back new musical elements from the occupied territories, creating a genre called continental melody (tairiku merodi) that filled the pop charts, while films made in Manchuria and Shanghai with pro-Japanese themes brought the empire back to a curious and enthusiastic metropolitan Japanese audience.4 In comparative colonial studies, one notices the difference in racial discourse between Eurocentric empire studies and studies of the Japanese Empire. In Japan’s East Asian empire, racial differences are submerged under the bifurcated categories of ethnicity and culturalism. In other words, as the only nonWestern (i.e., non-White) empire, skin color was not the primary way to differentiate Japan’s colonial subjects (in and from Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan); rather, the Japanese Empire distinguished Japanese from their imperial subjects through a sanctioned and yet illusory metric, the “degree of civility” (bunmeido). The dominant fiction of biologically grounded, outwardly visible racial differentiation defined in terms of degrees of Blackness and Whiteness that one sees in European colonialism was translated into an imagined ethnocultural orthodoxy that promoted the assimilation process (through language, education, and acculturation in every aspect of daily life) with its official end goal for the natives to “become Japanese.” The assimilation discourse that aspired to make colonial subjects into Japanese citizens was ubiquitous, yet it was not necessarily implemented uniformly throughout the Japanese colonies. Moreover, it was only much later that this ideology spread beyond the echelons of government bureaucrats, scholars, and advocates of colonialism who were in charge of implementing the policy— in particular, when Japan opened new war fronts with China and in the Pacific. A clearly urgent and totalizing implementation of the imperialization movement (kōminka undō, which intensified pressure toward assimilation) began in Korea and Taiwan in the late 1930s and early 1940s, lasting to the end of World War II in 1945. This coincided with the rise of cultural assimilation via popular media,

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and in particular through popular entertainment films produced by Man’ei, the Manchukuo Film Association Corporation. As the “soft power” of the empire disseminated throughout East Asia, a shared cultural sphere emerged. PASSING AS WHAT? ETHNIC IDENTITY: HIDE IT, SHOW IT, OR USE IT?

As one of the most recognizable icons of the Japanese high colonial era, the figure of Li Xianglan (aka Ri Kōran, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, and Shirley Yamaguchi) serves as a case study for understanding the transnational circulation of cultural production throughout the empire and the intraregional consumption of its cultural products.5 As Nobuko Yamasaki details in “Ri Kōran: Posing and Passing as a ‘Cultured Native,’ ” chapter 8 in this volume, Li’s beauty and talent made her a spectacle of the empire, and her agility in the immediate postwar period in transforming and refashioning her many new identities allowed her to fit seamlessly into whatever environment she found herself in at multiple historical junctures. While drawing upon previous studies of Li’s life story, I propose to address the complementary question of how the unrepresentable ethnoracial dimension in Japanese imperial discourse was presented and realized through popular cultural productions and the iconography of Li Xianglan. ­

Li’s case study provides an excellent example through which to examine how fame, desire, and fantasy circulated within the empire and was reinforced

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by popular media. But more than the alluring role she performed as a spectacle of the empire, Li attained a type of fame that lodged her identities deep within the collective East Asian popular imagination. She is inextricably intertwined with modern Japanese colonial history and played a major role in shaping cultural and ethnic perceptions of the empire. As the biggest star of the Man’ei film studio, Li was famous for her muchtalked-about films portraying Chinese women who fall in love with Japanese professional men (physicians, architects, engineers, etc.) and who come to appreciate (sometimes after being converted from previous oppositional positions) and help promote friendly Sino-Japanese relations. The double configurations of colonial gender and ethnic dynamism reflect the Japanese construction of Orientalism, which has been discussed extensively by film historians such as Yomota Inuhiko.7 This familiar type of idealized relationship was most apparent in Li’s earlier work for the studio— namely, the so-called Continental Trilogy (tairiku sanbusaku) in which a clear gender dichotomy pitted an idealistic, highly qualified elite Japanese man (frequently played by the famous actor Hasegawa Kazuo) against a pampered, rich yet naïve Chinese girl portrayed by Li.8 Even Li herself reflected in later days that in those films “Japan is [represented by] a strong man. China is an obedient woman. If China is willing to rely on Japan, Japan will protect China [like the male characters who protect Chinese women in these films]. That is the secret message that is embedded in the Continental Trilogy.”9 Clearly, as entertaining and popular as these Man’ei movies could be, the films were also used to endorse (not so subtly) the official account of “constructive harmony” between China and Japan. One can imagine Li’s early films were not as popular among Chinese audiences as her later films made in Shanghai with a more Chinese nationalist theme. Yet they were extremely popular in Japan, to the extent that Japanese female audiences began imitating Li Xianglan’s makeup and giving themselves three-sinograph names.10 Rather than focusing on Li herself as a star text, or her patterned role in films set in China and Manchuria, I will examine Li’s starring roles in several of the national policy films (kokusaku eiga) made in the first half of the 1940s. In these films she portrays a wide variety of female characters who propagate a Pan–East Asian femininity. Despite her many roles playing naive young Chinese girls who always fall for Japanese men, such as in China Nights (Shina no yoru, 1940), I look into some less-discussed films that reflect an expanded geographical ­ ­ ­ reach and new racial representations, ­ ­ ­ such as films made in Korea ­ with Li cast as a Korean woman—namely, You and Me (Kimi to boku, 1941) and Soldiers (Heitai-san, 1944)— and her portrayal of the Taiwanese Indigenous girl Sayon in The Bell of Sayon (Sayon no kane, 1943). These later films show us that the cultural and ethnic passing and posing not only resonated with the actress Li in her own star text but also spilled over to characters she portrayed on screen.

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POSING AS WHOM? MULTIETHNIC PERFORMATIVITY IN LI’S LATE MAN’EI FILMS

If the Japanese Empire had lasted longer and Man’ei’s productions had not been limited to a short period of less than a decade (1939–1945), films that codified a constructed harmonious discourse in the guise of an affective romantic narrative, like those in the Continental Trilogy, might have continued to be the mainstream productions that circulated throughout the empire. But as the war in China dragged on and new dangers emerged on the Pacific front, film policy adjusted to new geopolitical realities. Japanese colonial policy turned from a bilateral approach (i.e., Japan– China; Japan–Korea) that was attuned to local conditions in each colony to a more totalizing Pan-Asianism that sought a unified colonial cultural policy across the empire. The drive to imperial unification was best exhibited in the conceptual construct of the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere, as will be explained later in this chapter. Consequently, Li’s cinematic roles also evolved from themes of interaction between Chinese and Japanese characters to an embrace of multiethnic (and multilingual) representations of the empire. Li’s later films were produced during the period of total mobilization, when the imperialization movement kicked into high gear. Starting with Korea in 1938 and then moving to Taiwan in 1941, a voluntary military draft system was put into place allowing Korean and Taiwanese subjects for the first time to join the army, thus granting them the “privilege” of shedding their blood for the emperor. Other cultural policies followed, including compulsory name changes, requirements to speak Japanese in public, and promotion of a modern lifestyle by purging traditional local beliefs and customs. Li’s roles during this tense time supported the official policy of promoting a colonial assimilative policy that at once tried to achieve a modern cosmopolitanism while still clinging to a racial and civilizational order that privileged the naichi homeland over gaichi colonies. While in her earlier works Li had portrayed well-off Chinese or Manchurian women who spoke perfect Japanese, which Yamasaki characterizes as the passing pose of a “cultured native” in chapter 8 of this volume, her roles in the later period expanded to portrayals of many different ethnic characters. Despite Li’s prolific filmography in China, she made only two films that were geared toward a Chinese audience. These two films, which were helmed by Chinese directors and featured Chinese-speaking roles, made Li a household name in the Chinesespeaking world. In the semidocumentary film Yellow River (Huanghe, 1942; dir. Zhao Xiaopo), Li portrayed for the first time a poor Chinese peasant girl who fought a flood that had engulfed her village due to the deliberate sabotage of the Kuomintang’s National Revolutionary Army. Another historical epic, A Legend of Ten Thousand Generations (Wanshi liufang, 1944; dir. Zhang Shancun) is based on the historical figure Lin Zexu, who fought in the Opium Wars against British imperialism. The film quickly became the highest-grossing

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Chinese film to that date. Li played a girl selling candy in an opium den who fell for an addict. The film represented Man’ei’s venture into the mainstream Chinese film market through coproduction with Chinese movie studios.11 She got top billing among some of the most famous Chinese actors of the day. Critics see these two films as a turning point for Li, who was evolving from playing the sympathetic ingénue to a true actor.12 She was aware of the potential for growth, later noting, “I was enthusiastic about this film. Since 1938, basically, I had played the role of Chinese girls in Japanese films. My popularity so far was limited to Manchuria and Japan. Therefore, it is significant that my role as a candy-selling girl was my debut in the mainstream Chinese film industry that covered all of China. Moreover, I was tasked with pitting my acting skills against those of the biggest stars of China.”13 Li had previously appeared in the Korean film You and Me, a joint production between Shōchiku Film Studio and the Korea Military Information Bureau (Chōsen gun hōdōbu), and The Bell of Sayon, another joint project, this time between Shōchiku and the Government-General in Taiwan. This pair of films marked a departure from her earlier commercially oriented films made in collaboration with the colonial government. You and Me praised the citizens from Korea who voluntary joined the Japanese Army (who were known as the shiganhei), with Li playing a minor role as an orphan girl whom an old Korean couple claimed to be their long-lost daughter. Even though the film has been lost (twenty-six minutes of remnants have been recovered) and not much research can be done, the biological connection of Li’s character to Korea echoes the sentiment the film tried to promote—that is, that a (quasi)biological link to the emperor validated the Korean subjects’ incorporation into the Japanese Army. In The Bell of Sayon, this biological relationship was not asserted, as Li played an Indigenous girl whose devotion to her Japanese teacher caused her death. Based on a true story involving a mountain tribe in Eastern Taiwan, the film depicts the fate of the girl Sayon, who died trying to help a recently conscripted Japanese teacher carry his luggage across a raging river gorge. Although the historical Sayon’s death was accidental, her example was nevertheless turned into a tale of valor (bidan) that the colonial government promoted heavily by building monuments (including a memorial bell), and inserting the tale into the school curriculum.14 It was not a story of mere persuasion as in the continental films, but was held up as an exemplary tale of how an ignorant, primitive young girl came to symbolize absolute loyalty to the empire, thus representing a glowing triumph of Japan’s civilizing mission. In Japan’s modern territorial expansion, the Indigenous tribes (Takasagozoku) of Taiwan served as a new frontier for its civilizing mission, a contact zone with a cultural other that Japan had not seen since earlier encounters with the Ainu people. In terms of the racial hierarchy in the empire, the tribal girl Sayon was located at the bottom of the totem pole. Although the majority of Taiwan’s population consisted of Han Chinese immigrants from the continent, the

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­

MULTIPLE PERFORMATIVITY AND COLONIAL COSMOPOLITANISM

As the empire expanded and the population had become increasingly diverse, the impulse to create an iconic figure to represent imperial femininity was assigned to a persona that was called Li Xianglan. Through a series of films, Li completed a full cycle, passing as Chinese, posing as the face of all women (within the Pan-Asian empire), and finally becoming a woman for all tribes. Li debuted in her first Man’ei film, The Honeymoon Express (Mitsugetsu ressha), in 1938. It was not until a decade later, when she starred as Yamaguchi Yoshiko in the film The Most Brilliant Day of My Life (Waga shōgai no kagayakeru hi, 1948), that she ended a decade of ethnic passing and reclaimed her Japaneseness. During this decade, Li’s ethnic passing was never discovered and never discussed. Her fluency in both Japanese and Mandarin allowed her to get along with colleagues of both nationalities.15 Considering the fame she achieved and her prolific screen appearances, the fact that tens of thousands, if not millions, of Chinese and Japanese moviegoers, were all in the dark was nothing short of astounding. Here it might be worthwhile to pause for a moment in our consideration of Li’s personae to survey the larger milieu that produced figures such as Li. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, as the Japanese Empire expanded into various parts of Asia and warfare with China intensified, an urgent need arose for a cohesive discourse that could foster the cultural and economic unity of Asians and Pacific Islanders. The conceptual construction aspired to create a selfsufficient bloc of Asian nations that would be free from the rule of Western colonial powers, led instead by the Japanese. The idea was announced in a radio address titled “The International Situation and Japan’s Position” that was delivered by Foreign Minister Arita Hachirō on June 29, 1940. This concept later came to be referred to as the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, a transnational construct disseminated as a rejoinder to the newly inaugurated domestic policy of the New Order Movement initiated by the Second Konoe Cabinet (led by Prime Minister Konoe Fumimarō). The New Order Movement (Shin Taisei Undō) enhanced the emperor-centered fascist orientation under a statist society that Konoe called the New Defense State, in which all political parties

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­

Aligned with the national policy of the New Order Movement domestically, the empire also pushed for a New Order in East Asia externally. This East Asian new order, as represented by the conceptual construct of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, echoed the same historical mission of uniting all of Asia under the “eight directions under one (imperial) roof” ideology (hakkō ichiu). The expansionist vision euphemistically obscured its nationalist and militarist origins by emphasizing a magnanimous message of racial equality and coprosperity and advocating the forging of a universal brotherhood among Asian nations led by a virtuous Japan. Japan’s long-standing frustration with Western racism surfaced at many moments in modern history, including in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, when the Japanese Empire proposed a racial equality clause, only for this amendment to be vetoed by US president Woodrow Wilson. The 1924 Asian Exclusion Act passed by the US Congress was equally defeating for Japan. In 1938 Japan took action to prohibit the expulsion of Jews from the nation and from China and Manchuria in the spirit of racial equality, despite the three nations’ alliance with Nazi Germany. And yet this “universal brotherhood” rhetoric belied a conflicting and contradictory undercurrent of Japan’s desire to conquer the world and to dominate its Asian neighbors. This politicized racial universalism no doubt also spilled into the cultural sphere in the form of a (colonial) cultural universalism. As a result, the colonial cosmopolitanism that circulated within the empire formed a cosmopolitan chain that linked colonial cities from Dalian, Harbin, Seoul, Shanghai, Taipei, and Hong Kong (“the pearl of the crown”) to Saigon (“Paris in the East”) and Singapore.17 This colonial cosmopolitanism, encompassing a wide swath of peoples and cultures, actually subsumed a great degree of variance in people’s responses to the concept, which was reflected in how Chinese and Japanese audiences reacted rather differently to Li’s early Continental Trilogy. Despite differences in perception between various locations, the greater movement of culture and people fostered by the Japanese Empire broke down older national boundaries, both geographically and psychologically. Moreover,

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the shared East Asian culture sphere, embodied in Sinitic scripts and culture, had existed before the empire facilitated a smooth transition to the new colonial context.18 The “greater East Asia” concept quickly gained purchase in the late 1930s with the setting up of a cabinet-level Ministry of Greater East Asia (Daitōashō) in 1942 to supervise many grand projects, such as the Japan-Korea undersea tunnel and the Greater East Asian Railroad Project, which attempted to connect Japan with mainland Asia and Europe. A new commonwealth language, Kyōwago (Xieheyu in Chinese, lit. “harmony language”), which was often referred to as the Greater East Asian language (Daitōago), actually comprised two pidginized languages, one Chinese based and one Japanese based, that were created to accommodate this multiethnic and multilingual sphere. There was inevitably also a need for a fresh cultural façade and new entertainment products that could represent the novel territorial concept and acclimatize its many inhabitants to it.19 The empire required this repre sentation to be fluid and diverse. The word “cosmopolitanism” derives from the Ancient Greek kosmopolitēs, which means “citizen of the world.” It refers to the basic idea that all human beings are (or should be and could be) members of a single community, with justice and universalism as its two pillars. In its simplest manifestation it indicates people of various ethnic, cultural, and/or religious backgrounds living in proximity and interacting with each other harmoniously. In the context of the Japanese Empire, the notion of cosmopolitanism raised critical questions: What geographical regions constitute this community? Who are the members of this community? What are the mutual obligations the members have to each other? How is this community to be presented and represented? Clearly, although Japanese imperial cosmopolitanism emphasized a “universal brotherhood,” its premise of a Japanese emperor– centric stewardship for all Asian nations denied a true universalism. It was a constructed cosmopolitanism that did not emerge spontaneously but rather through a careful calibration and manipulation of moral standards, economic practices, political structures, and/or cultural forms. Japanese colonial cosmopolitanism thus encompassed conflicting values of universalism versus divine rule. This was similar to Japan’s intensified assimilation programs in Korea and Taiwan. The so-called imperialization movement that was being implemented at the same time entailed two incompatible notions: “becoming imperial subjects” through reculturation and shedding blood for the emperor in the war, and the tacit acknowledgment that colonial subjects are always to remain in a subaltern status; this internal contradiction ultimately doomed the movement.20 It was under these doubled political and cultural movements, both simultaneously asserting the equality and sameness of all ethnic groups and claiming singular superiority for one, that artists like Li Xianglan functioned. Li always presented her prewar singing and Man’ei stardom somewhat ambivalently, thus making it all the more necessary to scrutinize the question of her agency, an

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issue I will address further in the following section. For now, focusing on her act of passing can inform us of the zeitgeist. Why passing? What does one gain from the act of passing as another? There is often a utilitarian purpose behind passing, whether it involves passing for another race, gender, or class. Passing leaves the old self behind and assumes a new self that can do something the old self could not. Raised in Manchuria, Li was understandably familiar with the constant refrain extolling “five ethnic groups in harmony,” a mantra that the Manchukuo authority promoted heavily. She may have regarded her own singing and film career as part of this grand multiethnic project. In his discussion of ethnic performance in eighteenth-century Georgian theater, Michael Ragussis delineates how ethnic identities were performed and recognized by the audience. Two popular characters were marked on stage by black skin color (African) and a beard (Jewish), pointing to the role theater played in articulating the issues of ethnic marking and ethnic passing in that “the multiethnic spectacles staged the spectacle of ethnic difference, located the markers of otherness, and caricatured and exposed the ethnic outsider’s attempts at passing.”21 Cinema and theater are similar in that they present before the public eye visual and aural cues of ethnic identity sustained by mutually agreedupon allusions. Li was in a sense destined to play this historical role of “diva of the empire” because of two special features she possessed: her superb language skills enabled her to convince a Chinese audience that she was indeed a “cultured” native speaker of Mandarin Chinese,22 and her extraordinary beauty persuaded the Japanese audience that any Japanese man could fall in love with her. Li’s appearance transcended borders, resulting in an ambiguous, mukokuseki (lit. “stateless”) effect. Li discussed her own appearance in the following terms: No matter which country I go to, people somehow think that I at least share half of the blood of the people of that country. When I was shooting My Nightingale in Harbin, playing the adopted daughter of a Russian opera singer, I was taken as a Russian girl. When I was on location in Taiwan for The Bell of Sayon, they thought I looked exactly like the chief’s daughter and for that I received special treatment. . . . On location shooting the Korea Colonial Government’s project You and Me near Keijō [modernday Seoul], a [Korean] couple insisted that I was their daughter, who had been kidnapped by human traffickers and taken to Manchuria. . . . My face seems to share something in common [kyōtsū] with nations other than Japan.23

In her research on the multiple identities of Li, Kawasaki Kenko points out that the hybrid multiethnicity of Li’s own appearance was interwoven with that of her on-screen fictional characters to form a hybrid, transethnic signifier that “precisely due to its trans-ethnic ambiguity . . . made it fit right into the image of a unified Asian community for political propaganda.”24

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But how was this transethnic ambiguity, which Li herself refers to above as a kind commonality shared with all nations, to manifest in her body? Since there is no obvious ethnic marking between various East Asian ethnic groups, how was this ethnic difference demarcated? The construction of an ethnic type then was not through shared political and cultural values but through the surface representation of such cultural codes as costume, hairstyle, and mannerisms. This is how Li was recognized and categorized on- and off-screen. The audience read Li through the roles she played in accordance with the identity she assumed. She was a pampered, rich Manchu girl in expensive furs in Song of the White Orchid (Hakuran no uta, 1939), a Shanghai merchant’s daughter who turned underground activist in China Nights, then a perky Indigenous girl deep in the Taiwanese mountains in The Bell of Sayon, and then she was speaking Russian to Russian musicians, Mandarin to Chinese, and Japanese to her father’s Japanese friends in My Nightingale. Li’s agile double-ethnicity (or even multiple-ethnicity) performances, acting as Chinese off-screen and multiethnic characters onscreen completed the “illusion” to which Michael Ragussis alludes. This sort of multiethnic performance and the internal contradiction of colonial cosmopolitanism was not limited to Li Xianglan. We see the same kinds of issues in the performances of another famous artist of the empire, the dancer Choi Seunghee. This beautiful and talented artist from colonial Korea went to Japan to study Western-style modern dance with Ishii Baku (1886–1962), who is regarded as the father of modern dance in Japan. Choi quickly became famous and toured not only throughout Japan and its colonies but also in Europe and the United States. In Japan she was known as the Dancer from the Peninsula (Hantō no Maihime), a moniker she gained a fter starring in a film of the same name. Unlike Li, Choi emphasized her Korean origin, and her performances often included Korean dances. Her global accomplishments won an enthusiastic following. When she performed in New York in 1937, the advertisement poster described Choi as a “Korean Dancer,” which angered the Japanese authorities, while the colonial Korean language media, which followed her every move in detail, recounted the incident with pride. The distinction of Japanese versus Korean was explicit within the metropole but became blurred outside Japan. Choi’s open identification as someone from Korea was a double-edged sword: although some Koreans took pride in her accomplishments, other Koreans in the colony or in Japan deemed her a puppet, working as a propaganda tool for the Japanese government. She came to be pigeonholed, with clichéd phrases designating her as the “one and only Korean dancer” or “a blossom from Korea.” Despite her initial goal of studying modern dance techniques with Ishii, she ended up being credited as the sole creator of a modernized version of traditional Korean dance (Chōsen buyō).25 As the colonial East Asian cultural sphere continued to take shape, Choi was tasked with broadening her repertoire to include a new category of dance that she called “Eastern dance” (Tōyō buyō). At the behest of the Japanese cultural

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apparatus, Choi developed many world dance repertoires that included dances inspired by Japanese folk dance, Noh drama dance, Korean folk dance, Indian dance, and classical Chinese dance. Thus, the cosmopolitanism that brought different (world) cultural elements to the metropolis was also reflected in the dance world.26 A new awareness of cosmopolitan diversity could be seen during this period in the popularity and frequent appropriation by modernist dancers of folk dances from all over the world. In a sense, this was a clear manifestation of the Orientalism seen among European choreographers, who frequently used Eastern motifs and music to distinguish themselves from the music and dance forms of classical ballet. These “Oriental” dances were popular around the turn of the twentieth century. For example, various versions of Salome drew big audiences; a version was first staged in Japan in 1926, to great success.27 Other popular subject matter included Egyptian and Indian dances that emphasized acrobatic elements, sexuality, and religious ecstasy.28 These ethnic and folk dances, like Li Xianglan’s incessantly changing characters and costumes, fulfilled the Japanese authorities’ wish to create a cosmopolitan East Asian culture with a Japanese twist that was distinct from other Euro-Americancentered cosmopolitan cultures. Li and Choi were two celebrated stars in wartime Japan. The only other figure who could rival them in the prewar entertainment business was the actress Hara Setsuko (1920–2015), who was often referred to as the Eternal Virgin of Japan. Hara also made many national policy films, always playing young women who were tender yet strong, determined, and patriotic. In 1937, when Choi’s New York concert was causing a stir, the seventeen-year-old Hara visited Nazi Germany. Hara had by then appeared in the popular movie The New Earth (Atarashiki tsuchi, 1937), which was a German-Japanese coproduction and codirected by the German Arnold Fanck (1889–1974) and the Japanese Itami Mansaku (1900–1946), although it was issued in Germany and Japan with different edits. Hara came to be touted as someone who epitomized the quintessential Japanese feminine essence in both countries.29 ­

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to prove that she was indeed a Japanese citizen. Li’s second act in life, after repatriation back to Japan, was as extraordinary as her wartime career and will be discussed further in the next section. Is it fair to denounce Li’s complicity or question Choi’s culpability? I think it is. Yet, in the case of Li Xianglan, the degree to which she was intentionally engaged in the business of the Japanese Empire is uncertain. In her autobiography, Li talks about how she was not even aware that she was being interviewed for a film role at Man’ei when she was suddenly offered parts in one movie after another. She traces the origin of her name, Li Xianglan, to the time her father, Yamaguchi Fumio, “gave” her to his good friend, a Chinese gentleman called Li Jichun.30 Executives at Man’ei liked the exotic name (Xianglan means “fragrant orchid”) and decided to present her as a Chinese singer and actress who was fluent in Japanese. At Man’ei, Li found another quasi–father figure in Amakasu Masahiko, a notorious military officer and spy who had murdered the anarchists Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923) and Itō Noe (1895–1923), as well as their six-year-old nephew, after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. He later left for Manchuria to start the Man’ei Studio.31 Li was still in her teens when all of this happened (World War II and her wartime career ended when she was twentysix years old), and she later recounted her frustration and regret at her inability to resist the demands of this paternalistic higher echelon. As an accidental diva, Li’s act of passing—through impersonation and spectatorship, and her theatrical construction of ethnicity on the silver screen— did make her famous and facilitated her upward mobility, but she spent the following seven decades dealing with her past and reasserting her agency through her own words and deeds. RECONSTITUTING A POSTWAR AGENCY THROUGH SELF- NARRATIVE

In the summer of 1945, Li was arrested by the Nationalist Party government and tried as a “cultural traitor to the Chinese people,” a notorious episode detailed by Yamasaki in chapter 8 of this volume. A last-minute intervention by Li’s friends and family, who produced documents that proved that she was born Japanese, spared her life. She was then able to be repatriated back to Japan in 1946. Throughout her prolific career, Li appeared in as many as forty-four movies, nineteen made in the prewar and war period (1938–1944) and twenty-three in the postwar period (1948–1958). The speed of Li Xianglan’s rehabilitation after the war was astounding, and the variety of roles she played is equally dazzling. She officially abandoned the stage name Li Xianglan / Ri Kōran and starred in the 1950 film Scandal as Yamaguchi Yoshiko. She also acted in two Hollywood movies, American TV dramas, and Broadway musicals as Shirley Yamaguchi. A fter her last film, Tokyo Holiday (Tōkyō no kyūjitsu, 1958), she announced her retirement from the film industry, married the diplomat Ōtaka Hiroshi (1928–2001), and began the last phase of her life under the married

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name Ōtaka Yoshiko. Ōtaka Yoshiko became a TV personality deeply engaged with the Palestine issue, and she was also known for having interviewed the Red Army fugitive Shigenobu Fusako (b. 1945). In 1974, she ran for the Upper House of the Diet and won, thus beginning a political career that lasted until 1993. The reason Li was able to so quickly shed her wartime past and rebuild her postwar career was because she did not shy away from telling her own story over and over again. The film historian Yomota Inuhiko points to the contrast between Li and the aforementioned actress Hara Setsuko, and their postwar articulations of their pasts. Kon Satoshi’s 2001 animated film Millennium Actress (Sennen joyū) is said to be modeled a fter Li and Hara. The film follows the female protagonist Chiyoko’s film career and romantic pursuits. Her career begins in Manchuria, and she later achieves great fame in Japan; the film concludes with Chiyoko’s sudden withdrawal from the public eye, which also echoes Hara’s withdrawal from filmmaking. Li Xianglan as Yamaguchi Yoshiko and later Ōtaka Yoshiko aggressively engaged in her postwar rehabilitation through her acting, her role as a TV personality, and her political life, never hiding from her past.32 The interest in Yamaguchi has only intensified with the passage of time, and publications concerning her have seen an increase since the late 1980s. With her semiwithdrawal from public life, reevaluations of the actress appeared in multiple venues. Her own autobiography (coauthored with Fujiwara Sakuya) started the ball rolling in 1987 with a very detailed treatment of her life up to 1958. In the postscript she indicates that the autobiography is an undertaking to verify the figure called Li Xianglan: “Once I was so determined to bury the name ‘Li Xianglan,’ but even after forty some years she still haunts me from time to time. Certainly, there must be also a part of me that found it difficult to let go of her. I feel that with the end of this process, we are slowly but surely bidding her a firm farewell. From now on, I want to work toward the completion of the many tasks that ‘history’ has bequeathed to me.”33 In this send-off to Li Xianglan, Yamaguchi Yoshiko expresses a clear desire to move forward without the encumbrance of past. Li published four autobiographies,34 which focused mostly on her prewar life, from birth to the immediate postwar era, and responded to countless interviews; later a TV drama was based on her life, Farewell Li Xianglan (Sayonara Ri Kōran, 1988), and a large-scale musical, Ri Kōran, was created by the theater troupe Four Seasons (Shiki). This abundance of self-narration, coupled with a profusion of visual images, shaped the postwar discourse of the Li Xianglan legend. As one decodes this massive narrative, a two-tiered narrative strategy effectively helps exonerate her. First, she apologized profusely for her actions; second, she took the initiative to control how she wanted her narrative to be shaped.35 This narrative strategy functioned on two levels: acknowledging her own complicity while using herself as an agent for reminding the Japanese populace of the evils of war. In general, her narrative contains four major themes: regret

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for youthful indiscretions caused by naivete and ignorance; an admission of Japan’s guilt; a desire for forgiveness from the Chinese people; and an emphasis on international friendship and cooperation. Though admitting her transgressions and apologizing to China as a whole, Li rarely directly criticized any specific Japanese policy or endeavor in Manchuria or China. She was thus able to navigate rather skillfully the perilous fault line of postwar body politics: her apology and regret persuaded the Left, and her avoidance of criticism of the Japanese war in China pleased the Right. By limiting her apology to her own personal actions, Li avoided direct criticism of Japan’s aggression, which saved her from the ire of Japanese rightists and paved her way to a political career as a member of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. Regret and redemption form the core tenor of the early phase of Li Xianglan’s narrative, and the later self-narratives are variations on the same theme. The Li/Yamaguchi paradox is that no matter how hard Yamaguchi tried to escape the identity of Li, it constantly hovered over her like a shadow and defined her. Nevertheless, by controlling who could tell her story and the content and themes of the self-narrative, Li took the initiative in shaping her own myth as she persuaded the Japanese public to accept her again. How can one delineate the precariously blurred lines between self and nation in the life of Li Xianglan? What kind of sociohistorical conditions helped to create a legend, icon, and diva? Should one read Li’s life story as a tragic cautionary tale or as a tale of triumph and redemption? What was the media’s role and Li’s own initiative in creating this myth? In their study of the Japanese diva, Rebecca Copeland and Laura Miller define “diva” in this way: “The diva’s visibility depends on the type of texts and technologies that go into her public construction. Her iconicity needs the TV camera, the venerated history, the movie poster to immortalize her.”36 With four autobiographies, forty-six films, numerous songs, TV dramas, a musical, two manga based on her life, numerous books and scholarly articles, as well as profuse visual images in circulation, Li Xianglan occupies a significant segment of Asian film history. Her life is a text of multiple stories crisscrossing geographical, cultural, and ethnic boundaries. Her face and her body became a site that bore meaning but did not produce meaning. Like a simulacrum of the Japanese Empire, she produced many copies of East Asian femininity without an original, but through her powerful self-narrative, she achieved redemption, transforming the empty, floating signifier of Li Xianglan / Ri Kōran into Yamaguchi Yoshiko, a woman with conviction and subjectivity. NOTES

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10. Yoshioka Aiko, “Saikō Ri Xianglan no shokuminchiteki sutereotaipu: Miwaku no tasha to Nihonjin kankyaku,” Joseigaku nenpō 25 (2004): 47–67.

12. Yomota, Ri Kōran to higashi Ajia, 103–135.

​ ­ ​ ­ ­ e.jp/fujin/rekisi/china/karyu/kouran.htm, ​­ ​­ ​­ ​­ ​­ accessed April 4, 2023.

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8

RI KŌRAN Posing and Passing as a “Cultured Native” NOBUKO YAMASAKI

A beautiful woman who always presents herself as the other. ­ —Yomota Inuhiko My life story? Okay. Which one would you like, the truth or a lie? —Ri ­ Kōran

At the end of the Asia-Pacific War, actress, singer, and future politician Yamaguchi Yoshiko / Ri Kōran / Li Xianglan / Ōtaka Yoshiko (1920–2014) was, according to her autobiographies, arrested and detained by Chinese authorities in Hongkou, Shanghai. By her account, she was charged with treason and collaboration with the Japanese Empire, and she was almost certainly fated to be executed on the assumption that she was Chinese.1 Indeed, Ri’s performance as a Chinese woman was convincing enough to persuade audiences. The veil of her performance was lifted only when her Japanese family registry (koseki) provided legal proof that she was a Japanese national, triggering her release from detention. For China, the revelation of Ri’s racial origin was tantamount to a slap in the face. And this was not the first time that Ri Kōran had left Chinese people reeling from such an emotional sting. Ri Kōran’s film China Nights (Shina no yoru, 1940) roused a particularly injurious pang for Chinese audiences. The film depicts a Japanese man slapping a Chinese woman’s face as a sign of his love for her. In her autobiography, Ri explains that “the slap as an expression of love only made sense within Japanese society,” which would have interpreted the propaganda film as a melodrama. Yet, as Ri was well aware, the film echoed quite differently for Chinese audiences living under Japan’s expanding imperial rule: “Everyday Chinese audiences understood the film symbolically as being concerned with the invaders and the invaded [shinryakusha tai hishinryakusha].”2 Condemned for perpetuating antiChinese attitudes, the film was later used as evidence at Ri Kōran’s criminal case: 151

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she was deemed to have acted as a “Hanjian,” a Chinese who betrayed another Han Chinese during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945).3 This peculiar accusation—of a crime only a Chinese national could commit— speaks eloquently to the fact that Ri posed persuasively enough to pass as Chinese, even in the eyes of Chinese authorities. In her life, as in her films, reality and fiction intersected in a confounding and confounded manner. Ri’s ability to pass as Chinese not only threatened China but also Japan— particularly as anxieties over racial purity intensified during the Asia-Pacific War. Still, the Japanese Empire exploited Ri’s performance to assert its superiority. To understand this, it is crucial to carefully examine how Ri was able to pass as Chinese, and how Ri’s inability to take sides as China and Japan came into conflict was used to benefit the Japanese Empire. I argue that Ri’s performances for Man’ei, the Manchukuo Film Association Corporation (1937–1945), reveal the Japanese Empire’s ideas about “cultured natives” at the frontier of colonialism, as well as its conflicted ideas about interracial marriages as both a tool of colonization and as an impediment to racial purity. These contradictory structures help to clarify, and are themselves clarified by, the strategies Ri used in wartime China to manage her simultaneous identification with two competing cultures. A DOUBLE LIFE AND AN IMPOSED UTOPIAN IDEAL

Fluent in both the Chinese and Japanese languages and cultures, Ri Kōran lived a double life. The first child of a Japanese couple, Yamaguchi Fumio and Yamaguchi Ai, Ri was born Yamaguchi Yoshiko in 1920, in Běiyantai, near Mukden (J.: Hōten), Manchuria. The city, like Ri, possessed a layered identity: originally known by the Chinese name of Fengtian, it was occupied by Russia until 1905 and then by Japan until 1945. The family soon moved to Fushun (J.: Bujun), where her father worked as a Mandarin teacher at the South Manchuria Railway Company (J.: Mantetsu, 1906–1945). He trained his daughter in Mandarin from an early age, emphasizing its dominant pronunciation, as distinct from the dialect used by locals in that region of Manchuria. In 1933, according to Chinese custom, she became the “adopted daughter” (乾女兒) of Li Jichun (1877– 1949?), the president of Shin’yō Bank, a family friend who was later executed for committing the crime of acting as a “Hanjian.” 4 With this ceremony of social bonding, she was given the name Li Xianglan. The combined sounds of Xia and Li later served as the basis for the first part of her Hollywood name, Shirley Yamaguchi.5 Ri Kōran is the Japanese pronunciation of the characters for Li Xianglan, which Ri later employed as her stage name as both an actress and singer. By the time she entered elementary school in Fushun, Ri was already playing the violin, piano, and koto. In 1933 she started formal classical vocal training under Madam Podoresov(a), who was said to have been a dramatic soprano singer for an opera theater under the Russian empire. Madam Podoresov(a)

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established the foundation for Ri’s voice.6 Ri’s work with a Russian voice teacher further accentuated her linguistic, cultural, and racial irreducibility and complexity, as epitomized by Ri’s performance in Russian for the musical My Nightingale (J.: Watashi no uguisu, R.: Мой соловей, 944).7 In 1934 Ri moved to Beijing to study at an all-female Catholic school, Yijiao Girls’ School (翊教女学校), where she was able to polish her Mandarin Chinese—a version spoken by girls from the upper middle class in Beijing. Ri later recalled that their Mandarin sounded “beautifully flowing.”8 But the reality of life at the school was not always so rosy; because of the anti-Japanese climate there, Ri had to conceal her Japanese identity, and so she used the name Pan Shuhua (潘淑華) at school to suggest that she was the adopted daughter of Pan Yugui (潘毓桂, 1884–1961), the former mayor of Tianjin. Ri thus spent her early years in a bourgeois upper-middle-class atmosphere, code-switching between names and linguistic registers to fit in wherever she found herself. By the time she was a teenager, Ri had developed a complicated and conflicted sense of identity, which is perhaps best reflected in an anecdote about an encounter with the anti-Japanese movement during her schooldays. At a political gathering that assumed the guise of a tea party, the leader of an anti-Japanese activist group asked Ri what she would do should the Japanese Army cross the walls of Beijing and attack the Chinese. After a moment of silence—for she found she was unable to take either side—the sixteen-year-old Ri answered, “I will stand still on the wall.” She later explained that at that time she felt she would rather be killed by the Japanese or Chinese bullets than choose one over the other. Despite her origins, Ri figuratively called Japan her ancestors’ country or fatherland (sokoku) while calling China her motherland (bokoku). Ri’s identity and identification were by that time so tightly conjoined that it would be unimaginable for her to take sides.9 Yet Ri was also fully aware that her double life was a performance. When asked about her life during an interview, Ri Kōran once playfully answered, “My life story? Okay. Which one would you like, the truth or a lie?”10 As an actress, Ri mobilized her linguistic and cultural fluency in many films by Man’ei, where she repeatedly played the role of a Chinese woman who at first holds anti-Japanese sentiments but is transformed into a pro-Japanese woman by falling in love with a benevolent Japanese man. These romantic tropes were common in Japanese propagandist cultural production during the period; as Kimberly Kono has observed, “during the first half of the twentieth century, Japanese colonial officials in Korea (1910–1945), Manchuria (1932–1945), and Taiwan (1895–1945) drew upon romantic and familial relations between Japanese and colonized subjects in the service of the colonial project.” Moreover, vis-à-vis the notion of the family state (kazoku kokka), “officials and intellectuals of the Meiji period (1868–1912) rendered the family as a microcosm of the nation and the nation as an extension of the familial.” Thus, propaganda for the Japanese Empire often leveraged “intimate sentiments to mobilize the

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nation.”11 That is, the empire’s colonial framework constructed sentiments of belonging and loyalty by modeling the multiethnic citizenry in the image of family, as Faye Yuan Kleeman also attests in “A Woman for Every Tribe: Li Xianglan and Her Construction of a Pan-Asian Femininity,” chapter 7 in this volume. Ri’s films for Man’ei therefore embodied the Japanese Empire’s ideological slogan in the puppet state of Manchukuo: the “harmony of five races” (gozoku kyōwa), which encouraged racial unity among the Han Chinese, the Japanese, the Manchu people, the Mongolians, and the Koreans.12 Ri’s double identity made her an ideal figure for these roles: though she identified as both Chinese and Japanese, she was ultimately racially privileged as Japanese. It is because of this that, while she performed as “cultured natives” in Man’ei’s films, these performances were insulated from any actual transgressive acts. Since the Manchukuo regime subsidized Man’ei, the film industry fundamentally operated as an arm of government propaganda, promoting Japanese empire building through cinema. Man’ei’s official brochure announced its mission in English, stating that the company “controls the exportation, importation, and distribution of motion picture films and carries on enterprises relating to the production of educational, cultural, and entertainment films with a view to contributing to the exaltation of the national spirit and to the promotion of national education.”13 Man’ei’s films essentially aimed to produce and cultivate an imagined collective Japanese sensibility among its audiences, whether they were Japanese or not.14 As film scholar Michael Baskett states, “Ri Kōran was a powerful tool of propaganda that brought disturbing new life to Japanese Pan-Asianist slogans, for in no uncertain terms she promised the fulfillment of the catchphrase ‘Asia is one.’ ” According to Baskett, the “promise of Pan-Asian unity that Ri Kōran embodied went a long way toward neutralizing the Japanese fear of communicating with alien races.”15 While this may have been true for Japanese audiences, I stress that the reverse was not true; in fact, Ri’s performances as a conveniently tamed Chinese other living happily under the Japanese Empire provoked anger among Chinese audiences during the peak of her popularity. Yet, at the same time, Ri also exemplified the coercive nature of the imposed utopian ideal of racial harmony, a point that best comes through in one of Ri’s lesser-known cinematic works, Suzhou Nights (Soshū no yoru, 1941). WRITING AGAINST THE GRAIN OF COLONIAL PROJ­ECTS

Compared with her famous Continental Trilogy of Song of the White Orchid (Byakuran no uta, 1939), China Nights (Shina no yoru, 1940), and A Vow in the Desert (Nessa no chikai, 1940), which won her boundless popularity among Japanese audiences, many critics have overlooked Ri Kōran’s film Suzhou Nights. It was a collaborative production by Man’ei and the Shōchiku Film Studio in Japan, directed by Nomura Hiromasa (1905–1979), in which Ri performed the

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role of Meilan, a Chinese woman from Suzhou (J.: Soshū) who worked for an orphanage. Akin to Ri’s characters in the continental trilogy, Meilan at first holds strong anti-Japanese sentiments.16 She overcomes this aversion, however, as she observes the “genuine” benevolence of one Japanese man: Kanō, a handsome Japanese doctor determined to dedicate himself to saving the lives of common Chinese people, especially those in small villages who are abandoned even by Chinese doctors. Kanō was performed by the actor Sano Shūji (1912–1978), who, like Ri, was popular with Japanese audiences.17 In the film, Meilan falls in love with Kanō and develops pro-Japanese feelings that support the dreams of harmonious empire. This is what makes Suzhou Nights singular: it writes against the grain of colonial projects. Even as it addresses typical colonial themes, such as contrasts between modernity (kindai) and the “yet-to-be-modern” (zenkindai) and the link between Japanese language education and cultural indoctrination, the film pulls up short on its central metaphor, unable to see the romantic relationship through to the natural conclusion: marriage. The importance the film places on children suggests powerful anxieties about miscegenation at a time when Japan, as a member of the Axis, was becoming increasingly concerned with racial purity. The film’s rather forced and strange denouement disrupts the imperial message of “the harmony of five races,” undermining the still common scholarly understanding of the Japanese Empire’s interracial harmony projects. MEILAN AS A “CULTURED NATIVE”

As a propaganda film, Suzhou Nights establishes clear contrasts between its Chinese and Japanese characters: the Japanese characters in the film are erudite, cultured, and modern—in contrast with the Chinese characters, who are backward, outdated, and hapless. While the Chinese characters are not necessarily portrayed as evil, they are more emotional and less rational, and it is the Japanese characters who are portrayed as selfless and generous. This is especially true for the figure of Kanō, the altruistic young doctor, who eschews a fortune, a bride, and a respected position in the city of Tokyo to stay in Suzhou and help save rural Chinese communities from the ravages of disease; it is implied that their own Chinese doctors have abandoned them. One way this contrast is established in the film is through linguistic cues. In Suzhou Nights, the Chinese language spoken by everyday Chinese people is usually represented as incomprehensible mumbles, murmurs, or simply meaningless background noises. Japanese subtitles are not provided to translate these sounds, indicating that the Chinese language has no significance. Chinese characters who speak Japanese do so poorly, with thick accents that make them difficult, if not impossible, to understand. By contrast, Japanese characters in the play are highly educated, multilingual, modern figures—they are doctors, trained in Western medicine, who have arrived in China to save suffering locals

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from the ineptitude of Chinese traditional medicine, which is construed as archaic and backward. In a scene that takes place in a concert hall, a European host speaks in German to introduce performers to the audience. This scene implies, without explicitly stating, that the primary audience for culture and art is German; the significance of German (in contrast to Chinese) in the film is reinforced by the fact that Japanese subtitles are provided for the European language. The only Asians in the audience in the concert hall are Japanese: a group of doctors, including Kanō and his colleagues, sit at an all-Japanese table. They understand German because it was mandatory for Japanese doctors to learn German, the primary language for Western medical education in Japan.18 The German language therefore operates as a sign of modernity for the Japanese as cultured, modern subjects. Ironically, however, this scene does not explore the inherent paradox in the way Japan figures itself: as superior to China, but only by dint of its European connections. Japan aligns itself with the West as a way to justify its colonial expansion into Asia, while at the same time trying to present its empire as a harmonious union of Asian races. Against this background moves Ri Kōran in the role of Meilan. Much like Ri herself, Meilan shifts fluidly between linguistic registers. When Meilan speaks Mandarin (the “beautifully flowing” Mandarin of the bourgeois upper middle class, which Ri had learned at the all-girls’ school), the film provides Japanese subtitles for her speech, indicating that her status is significant. As Meilan, Ri performs a racialized Chinese identity without altering her body or physiology; she needs only to draw upon her own vocal authenticity and add the appropriate cultural accoutrement, a Chinese dress, to become the ideal cultured Chinese woman. ­ The proof that Meilan is cultured is also linguistic. Unlike her coworkers, who stumble through Japanese phrases with their thick Chinese accents (and who were played by Chinese actresses), Meilan’s clearly, correctly, and fluently articulated Japanese (Ri’s mother tongue) singles her out as an exceptional figure, the “cultured native,” which bears affinities with the pose of “Pan-Asian femininity” that Faye Yuan Kleeman suggests Ri frequently embodied through her multiethnic roles (see chapter 7 of this volume). Further evidence of Meilan’s refinement (and the equation of Japanese language with evolved and civilized society) is provided when she confesses to Kanō that she studied music in Japan, and that this is how she learned his language. The film makes the most of Ri’s skill set as fluent multilinguist and classically trained singer: in the scene in the concert hall, it is Meilan who is introduced by the German emcee and who performs for a German/Japa nese audience. That her performance is for charity (she is raising funds for the orphanage where she works) only further reinforces Meilan’s status as a paragon of femininity: she is as refined as she is morally good, her efforts as noble as her perfect Japanese.19 These linguistic sleights of hand position Meilan as distant enough from her Japanese conquer-

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ors to be exotic, but close enough to be attractive (and underneath her character, always reassuringly a Japanese woman). Meilan’s performative identity as a “cultured native” attests to the fantasy of an expanding Japanese Empire that could cross linguistic, national, and racial borders in the name of modernity: the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. This is reinforced in scenes of Meilan’s work at the orphanage, where she actively indoctrinates children into empire, again through linguistic means. In her Chinese dress and her perfect Japanese, Meilan the “cultured native” teaches the orphans to speak Japanese as she does. Yet the phrase she is teaching her students in the film is loaded with ideological significance: repeating after Meilan, the orphans chant “Akai asahi,” perfecting their pronunciation as they internalize the concept of the rising sun, hinomaru (i.e., the symbol of the Japanese ­ Empire). It is her complicity with the Japanese imperial project that ultimately renders Meilan the ideal “cultured native.” A conveniently tamed other produced and performed by and for Japan, Meilan exists on the front lines of the empire’s linguistic and cultural assimilation policy. She not only willingly accepts the authority of the rising sun but also gently works it into the psyches of the next generation, the yet-to-be cultured native Chinese children. To be more precise, they are Chinese orphans who symbolically do not have responsible Chinese parents. Meilan’s commitment to the Japanese imperial project is also the root of her moral goodness: much like Kanō, she, too sacrifices her happiness in order to adhere to the shifting needs of empire, although this is where Suzhou Nights’ sudden plot twist reveals simmering anxieties about unstable identities in the expanding empire that undermine the film’s purpose as a propagandistic tool. ANX­I ­E TIES OVER INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE

Ultimately, where the propagandist function of Suzhou Nights breaks down is in its attempts to control and discipline bodies, as the film’s depiction of biopower simultaneously reinforces and resists the goals of imperial Japan.20 Biopower is a technology of power that operates through health. It is a part of governmentality that fosters, maximizes, and enhances life by managing and exercising power over bodies, and by this means enables the management of populations. It is thus an integral tool for communities, modern nation-states, and the empire. Despite biopower’s function as a tool of empire, it would be a mistake to consider it as simply a negative force, because it also nurtures life. In Suzhou Nights, one of the most obvious manifestations of biopower, public health, appears when Kanō educates a Chinese typhoid patient regarding hygiene. Lying on a bed, the patient picks up a piece of food from the floor and tries to eat it. Noticing this act, Kanō immediately runs to the patient, brushes the food away, and prevents the patient from putting it into his mouth, saying, “Food should not be in such a place [i.e., on the floor]” (Konna tokoro ni tabemono

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o oicha ikenai janaika; see Figure 4). Kanō thus introduces everyday Chinese people to a new knowledge of cleanliness to protect their health, guiding them in hygiene and sanitization and further reinforcing the contrast of modern, educated (and European) Japanese with the backward, ignorant Chinese. Kanō’s selfless devotion to improving the lives of Chinese, who have had limited access to doctors trained in Western medicine, is nevertheless a collaboration with empire building. His generous character cannot be divorced from the empire. Just as Meilan indoctrinates Chinese orphans through linguistic education, Kanō expresses the hope that his Chinese patients will grow into men who will truly understand Japan in the future (sono kodomotachi ga yagate Nihon o hontō ni rikai shita seinen ni natte kureru). The Japanese te kureru indicates the undeniable fact that the beneficiary of his devotion is the Japanese Empire. Yet biopower benefits the Chinese characters by improving their health; this makes it harder for them to resist or boycott the help of Japanese doctors, which— despite its positive effects—is nonetheless power saturated with the empire’s ambition. In Suzhou Nights, Chinese patients become dependent on it and incapable of surviving outside the biopower (i.e., medical care) provided by Japanese doctors. Yet the “modern” Japanese concern with sanitization and de-

FIGURE 4.

the floor.

The Japanese doctor, Kanō, stops a Chinese patient from eating the food off

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contamination proves a double-edged sword for the imperial project, as the mixing populations of empire spark anxiety about identity, and slippery, liminal identities like Ri/Meilan’s “cultured native” eventually pose a threat to the essential understanding of empire that the film seeks to promulgate. As I have noted, during the Meiji period the empire was often imagined as a metaphorical family, and intimate familial relationships became the means through which narratives about geopolitics were encoded. In Suzhou Nights, marriage becomes another form of biopower through which bodies are controlled, and where anxieties about contamination and purity take on racial dimensions. Three different potential marriages are figured in Suzhou Nights, with the implication each possesses for future children. As the film weighs the possibilities, a consistent concern about racial mixing emerges, through explicitly encouraged and implicitly avoided forms of racial reproduction. As it is this point, gesturing toward the potential for interracial children, upon which the logic of imperial propaganda breaks down in Suzhou Nights, it is important to locate the film in its cultural and historical context. Produced one year a fter Japan had formally allied with the Axis powers, the film reflects the ideological influences of Nazi Germany—in particular, the Nazis’ notion of racial purity—as imperial Japan moved to align more closely with its ally in Europe. As Takashi Fujitani points out, “the Japanese colonial state’s official promotion of the mixed marriages” had once been so progressive as to counter “global trends, where miscegenation [was] unambiguously condemned and colonial endogamy promoted,” but over time, “the eugenically minded researchers in the Ministry of Health and Welfare worried that the colonial empire’s assimilationist program, necessitated by the war, threatened to obliterate the boundaries around the core Japanese population. They wanted to keep Koreans as workers, but at a safe distance—residentially, socially, culturally, politically, and sexually.”21 Throughout Suzhou Nights, the Japanese are linked to Germany: in the concert hall, a song for (fallen) soldiers plays for a German and Japanese audience, creating an emotional link between the two Axis powers and the fate of their forces on the battlefield. The Japanese doctors who bring “modern” Western medicine to the Chinese received their training in the German language, and so perhaps it is not surprising that biopower in Suzhou Nights not only seeks to sanitize bodies but to protect racial purity as well. This positions the film as both illustrating and challenging Kono’s argument that “romantic and familial relations between the Japanese and colonized subjects serve the colonial object.”22 In the film, marriages represent geopolitical configurations. Kanō initially rejects an arranged marriage with a Japanese woman, Chieko, the daughter of a respected doctor who runs his own clinic in Tokyo. The doctor (honorably referred to as Sensei by Kanō) wants Kanō to marry his daughter and inherit his clinic, but the young Kanō refuses this marriage proposal even though it would provide him with financial comfort and social status in metropolitan Tokyo. In rejecting this proposal Kanō presents himself once again as altruistic: the

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explicit reason given is his determination to dedicate his life to saving the Chinese people via public health. He does not mention, however, that someone else has his affection—namely, the Chinese woman Meilan. If on the surface Kanō chooses his selfless dream in China over an honorable position and financial security in Tokyo, this scene also and equally importantly projects and manifests the modern notion of choice in love. However old-fashioned the arrangement with Chieko may appear, it is presented quite remarkably as “modern,” because Sensei treats the marriage as a choice that should ultimately be decided according to Chieko’s and Kanō’s feelings. They are not forced to accept this proposal out of social duty or obligation, arranged by a social hierarchy; rather, Kanō is given the power to refuse, as is Chieko, and this potential for self-determination emerges as relatively “modern.” ­

Wangmin and Meilan’s sudden and unexpected marriage is represented as old-fashioned and backward by contrast. Wangmin’s father, in Chinese clothes, begs Meilan, in Chinese dress, to marry his son and produce offspring, since having grandchildren is his longtime dream (see Figure 5). In this melodrama, however, the reality is a bit more complicated. Noticing Meilan’s feelings toward Kanō, a jealous Wangmin attempts to shoot and murder Kanō but fails, his gunshot missing dramatically. Yet, Kanō strangely and generously forgives Wangmin’s act of jealous violence, moved by Wangmin’s father’s pleas that he punish him instead of his son. The magnanimous doctor, a fter recognizing the father’s “true love” for his son, decides to forgive Wangmin. At the same time, the film makes it clear that Kanō forgives Wangmin to avoid a maelstrom of emotional ambivalence. Even Kanō appears to be slightly confused, though this does not mean that feelings of fear and anger make it difficult for him to think clearly. Rather, Kanō comes to this conclusion a fter careful deliberation.

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FIGURE 5.

Wangmin’s father begs Meilan to marry his son and bear his grandchildren.

Simultaneously, this scene reinforces Kanō as a man of character, and ultimately it is unsurprising that he should encourage Meilan to marry Wangmin so that father, son, and Meilan can achieve happiness. This image of a selfless Japanese man who chooses to put the happiness of Chinese others before his own satisfaction underscores the geopolitical ideologies of the empire. In the strangely arranged marriage between Wangmin and Meilan, there is no place for choice, unlike the situation with Kanō and Chieko. The modernity characteristic of the latter union is strongly contrasted with the former arrangement, and in fact the Chinese couple’s marriage emerges as an antiquated and backward design in which family is valued and respected more than individual free will. Via this strange plot device the film thereby juxtaposes progressive Japan and regressive China. In effect, Meilan’s marriage posits the superiority of Japan in its empowerment of the individual, as opposed to China, bound by archaic tradition and suppression of individual agency. And yet, this logic is incomplete. It is inconceivable that Kanō comes to be convinced that Meilan will be happy if she marries Wangmin and settles into a family, however caring and filial. If not for Kanō’s generous forgiveness, Wangmin would have become a felon, despite being portrayed as a feeble-minded man. Can Kanō really believe that Wangmin will make a stable and trustworthy husband

162  Nobuko Yamasaki

for Meilan? In another scene that exemplifies this tonal whiplash, Kanō persuades Meilan to marry Wangmin, encouraging the woman he adores to marry someone capable of murder. To account for this contrived and improbable plot, Peter B. High suggests that by “averting a marriage between Sano [Kanō] and Ri [Meilan], the film may be telegraphing a shift in thinking about ‘interracial’ marriages.” And indeed, Suzhou Nights was made in the final month before the Asia-Pacific War, just when Japan was drawing ever closer to Nazi Germany, whose ideology of “racial purity” is eerily echoed in the film’s marriage plot.23 Pushing High’s insight further, I argue that what is denied by avoiding the marriage between Kanō and Meilan is interracial reproduction—that is, producing half- Chinese and half-Japanese progeny. Whereas the colonial project had called for “racial harmony” and “romantic and familial relations between Japanese and colonized subjects,”24 as Kono explains, I contend that Suzhou Nights writes against the grain of this colonial project out of fear of miscegenation. The marriage between Meilan and Wangmin in the grand finale demonstrates that the only proper form of reproduction happens intraracially—in this case, among the Chinese, fulfilling Wangmin’s father’s plea for offspring. The “happy ending” through marriage in this melodrama allows the Japanese Empire to create closure across multiple dimensions: through love for a Japanese man, a Chinese female protagonist comes to admire the Japanese conquerors of her people and still marries a Chinese man, thereby preserving stability of identity and belonging within the imperial hierarchy. This reconciliatory closure is necessary to eliminate threats and bolster Japan’s racial nationalist agenda. The ending speaks to a fear of Chinese female sexuality, and particularly its power to produce interracial children. In order to prevent miscegenation, this dangerous threat needs to be swiftly channeled and shut down by Japanese nationalist ideology. At the wedding, Meilan wears a Chinese wedding dress; her hair is adorned with glittering accessories. Her bridegroom, Wangmin, is also in Chinese attire. This Chinese couple’s marriage visually reiterates that colonial marriage should occur intra- and not interracially, rejecting the coupling of a Japanese man and a Chinese woman. Yet in no shot during the wedding scene do Meilan and Wangmin sit or stand next to each other as a couple, nor do they ever smile at each other. The wedding day is presented in a reserved tone. This detachment between the newlyweds enhances the melodramatic implication that romantic love between Meilan and Kanō is forbidden; simultaneously, it accentuates the message that Chinese marriages are not achieved by the modern concept of choice in love but by backward Chinese customs. This final scene underscores the sense that Kanō sacrifices his romantic life with Meilan in order to pursue a more honorable purpose: saving the Chinese people, who suffer due to a lack of access to modern Western medicine and, in fact, modernity.

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Indeed, the film does not fail to capture Kanō’s face on the day of the wedding: Kanō is full of hope, standing tall and imagining his greater mission as a Japanese doctor, dedicating his life to public health in China. Receding into the background, Meilan silently supports Kanō as a paragon in the shadow of the Japanese Empire. Suzhou Nights does not tolerate interracial marriage or its consequences— specifically, interracial reproduction between Japan and China. Meilan’s marriage to Wangmin, therefore, minimizes the threat of transgressing racial boundaries, evoking the “racial purity” propagated by the contemporaneous Nazi regime and equally articulated by the Japanese colonial framework. Moreover, as a tool of propaganda, the film exploits mass culture to intensify the ideology of Japan’s nationalist discourse. By ultimately pairing Meilan and Wangmin, the film diminishes the danger that miscegenation poses to imperial Japan. The threat to identity that is posed by the liminal subject of the “cultured native” is defused; despite her linguistic fluency and ability to move between peoples, the film reaffirms, at its end, that Meilan is and will always be Chinese. In a stealthy manner, the Japanese Empire capitalizes on the narrative framework of melodrama and the genre’s trope of a marriage as means to create closure to reinforce and energize its racial agenda, and yet in the way that Suzhou Nights illustrates the limits of passing or posing as a cultured native (for Ri Kōran as well as her character Meilan), the film actually undermines the fantasy of a Japanese Empire that crosses linguistic, national, and racial borders and seems to fail the Man’ei project to produce and cultivate an imagined collective Japanese sensibility among its audiences, whether Japanese or not. NOTES



164  Nobuko Yamasaki

meet with Lyuba a fter a long period of separation and silence. Ri learned at this point that Lyuba’s older brother had been killed by Unit 731: Ri’s life cannot be narrated without considering violence on the part of the Japanese Empire. See Yamaguchi, “Ri Kōran” o ikite, 108– 116, 178–183. As a side note, Lyuba Greenetz(a) is a woman and therefore her surname should be spelled in a feminine form, Greenetza, yet Ri calls her Greenetz, thus my placing the final a in parentheses.











13. Michael Baskett, The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press 2008), 29.

Ri Kōran  165

Edge of the Empire,” in Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire: Fragmenting History (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021), 46–67.











22. Kono, Romance, Family, and Nation, 1. 23. Peter B. High, The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Year’s War, 1931–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 2003), 283. 24. Kono, Romance, Family, and Nation, 1.

9

IN THE SHADOW OF SŌSHI KAIMEI Imposed and Adopted Names in Yū Miri’s The End of August K ANG YUNI Translated by CINDI TEX TOR

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

Kang Yuni’s essay on the unruly proliferation of names in a work of contemporary Zainichi (resident Korean; lit. “residing in Japan”) literature, presented here in translation, appears at first glance somewhat far afield from the other wise tightly knit contributions to this volume. The work it discusses, Yū Miri’s magnum opus The End of August (Hachigatsu no hate, 2004), was published nearly six decades after the fall of the Japanese Empire. Furthermore, neither Yū’s novel nor Kang’s analysis thereof places its central focus on passing, posing, or persuasion. That said, the projects of both the novel and the essay are thoroughly rooted in what the editors of this collection have called the “epistemological aporia” of the assimilationist rhetoric of the Japanese Empire, and, notably, its legacies in the present day. My hope, in translating it for this volume, is that when read alongside the preceding essays, Kang’s work can shed light on the ways that the affective impacts of passing and posing continue to be felt today. Her essay gestures not only at the ongoing salience of these issues in the Japanese-language scholarship on the empire and its postcolonial legacies (particularly the Zainichi Korean minority), but also in the lived experience of many practitioners of such scholarship. For that matter, the problem of passing, particularly within the arena of names, has consequences for Yū Miri (b. 1968) herself. Kang discusses Yū’s name in detail herein, pointing out its particular quality of passing as either Japanese or Korean in origin. Yū’s use of similarly ambiguous names for the characters in her early fiction led her to be branded among Zainichi critics as insufficiently interested in ethnic issues. As Kang writes in her own framing of the essay, ethnic engagement has historically been the one and only yardstick for the quality of literary production under the rubric of Zainichi literature. 166

In the Shadow of Sōshi Kaimei  167

Similarly, in the history of Zainichi critical discourse on names, passing, and sōshi kaimei (lit. “establishing family names and changing given names”), the dominant lens on these questions has been that of the ethnonation (minzoku). As such, the whole framework around the use of ethnic names within the Zainichi community— encompassing but extending far beyond the life and career of Yū Miri—is built on an implicit binary of passing versus active ethnic identification. This binary is superimposed onto the morally charged dichotomy of collaboration versus resistance. That is, the use of a tsūmei (lit. “passing name,” understood to be a Japanese name) is read as a form of tacit acquiescence to Japanese rule— either in the colonial past or within present-day Japanese society—while ­ the honmyō sengen (lit. “declaration of one’s real name”) is assumed to be a liberating act of resistance. As Kang argues, the key insight that is missed by both of these oversimplifications is that the value of a name cannot be measured in terms of ethnic consciousness alone. Rather, names function as markers not only of ethnicity but also of a whole set of identities and relations. Indeed, part of what is so brilliant about Kang’s reading is that it unpacks the gendered inequities of Japanese naming policies, from sōshi kaimei to current and historical debates on separate surnames for married couples (fūfu bessei). Entangled as such problems of gender are with the koseki family registry system, they are themselves ethnic issues. In the same way, the ethnonational oppression of the colonial era “robbing of names,” as sōshi kaimei is popularly remembered, was itself inextricable from gender. Moreover, subjects embedded in this complex set of relations— circumstances I am tempted to describe as “intersectional,” though Kang does not write in those terms—were not in actuality faced with an either/or choice of passing or coming out. Instead, as Kang demonstrates, they actively negotiated their assumed and imposed names for multifarious purposes: for withdrawing from the household system from which one is already alienated, as a way of partitioning the self in the face of traumatic experience, or as a means of occupying a translingual or transnational space. Passing and posing, then, are a crucial lens through which to view the issue of names in colonial Korea and its resultant diasporic communities. To grapple with the performative nature of identity is necessarily to question whether a given identity is real or affected, chosen freely or externally enforced—perhaps both at once, or something in between. Kang never explicitly questions what makes the ethnic name “real.” Yet, when read in conversation with the other pieces in this volume, her analysis seems to lead naturally to a questioning of the ethnic essentialist dogma surrounding the real name (honmyō) versus passing name (tsūmei). Then again, it is precisely because this issue lacks reality for me—because it has little or no practical impact on my lived experience—that I can blithely question the “reality” of honmyō in the first place. Kang writes from a far less privileged position. She and many of her readers are embedded in the very

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structures of power with which her essay is concerned. Some aspects of her navigation of these structures are lost in the translation that follows. For instance, what appears bluntly as “Korea” in the English version of Kang’s essay is in the Japanese-language text a delicate negotiation of the contested name(s) of the Korean Peninsula itself. When discussing the scenes of Yū’s novel that take place in present-day South Korea, Kang uses Kankoku, the name for Korea preferred in the south after World War II. On the other hand, she generally refers to colonial-era Korea as Chōsen, its designation under Japanese rule (and, incidentally, the current preferred name in North Korea). Kang also includes a caveat explaining her use of the term Zainichi Chōsenjin to refer to Koreans in Japan. Though she does not mention potential alternatives, there are arguments to be made for more neutral options such as Zainichi Kankoku / Chōsenjin or the Anglophonic Zainichi Korian. In two particular cases, translated herein simply as “Korean surnames” and “Korean language,” respectively, Kang nods to the undecidability of what to call Korea by writing “Kankoku / Chōsen no sei” and “Kankokugo/Chōsengo.” Perhaps especially in reference to language and names, the possession and appropriation of which are so much at issue in this essay, Kang feels the need to be circumspect. In any case, these are all explicitly political decisions from which Kang cannot escape. I can. This additional freedom could be considered an advantage of Englishlanguage translation, though a concealment of the politics at play in the original is hardly ideal. Most certainly a disadvantage is the impossibility of conveying the richness of the original text—not only of Kang’s essay but of the novel she deftly references. The End of August is distinguished by its orthographic and stylistic experimentation. Some portions of the narrative are fairly straightforward, while others take the form of a play, a tarot card reading, or a scrapbook of press clippings. The text is interspersed with snippets of folk songs and poetry, sometimes offset by boldface type. Onomatopoeic representations of heavy breathing break up a stream-of-consciousness style narrative in many of the chapters. As with many works of Zainichi literature, The End of August makes liberal use of glossing, either in parentheses or interlinear ruby characters, to blur the boundaries between the largely Japanese-language text and the Koreanlanguage spaces it sets out to represent. To avoid distraction from Kang’s central argument, I have omitted most of this linguistic play in my translations of her quotations from the novel. Even so, I mention the textual complexity of Yū’s novel here because it reinforces what is, to my mind, the central theme of The End of August: the impossible struggle to represent, within language, the unknowable. For Yū, the unknowable seems to take the form of the inner lives of her recent ancestors, the ethnic homeland from which she has been severed, and, most poignantly, the voices silenced within the violent history of Japanese imperialism. For Kang, perhaps it is the “epistemological aporia” lurking in the shadow of sōshi kaimei, as well as the anxieties surrounding passing left in its wake. For me, it

In the Shadow of Sōshi Kaimei  169

is the humbling acknowledgment of what I do not and cannot know with which I offer this translation. What appears herein might be better described as a rewriting rather than a translation. I have taken many liberties, adding, subtracting, and rearranging material in the hope of allowing Kang’s rich argument to speak more fluidly to the essays in this volume. As noted above, the pertinent questions, assumptions, and politics of the scholarly discourse Kang addresses both overlap with and diverge from those of an English-language readership. In the process of this rewriting, I benefited enormously from a draft translation prepared by Jaylene Laturnas, and from comments by Julia Clark, Andre Haag, Nathaniel Heneghan, Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Nicholas Lambrecht, Catherine Ryu, Koji Toba, Shoya Unoda, Nobuko Ishitate- Okunomiya Yamasaki, and Christina Yi, as well as Kang Yuni herself. Any errors that remain are my own. * * * The End of August (Hachigatsu no hate, 2004) is widely considered an important milestone in the oeuvre of Yū Miri (b. 1968), a towering figure within the contemporary Japanese literary sphere.1 While drawing a large audience across Japan and even in translation, Yū’s work is of particular interest to readers and critics of so-called Zainichi literature, the literary production of the ethnic Korean community in Japan. Although Yū has always been open about her ethnic Korean heritage, it is safe to say that her relationship to Zainichi literature as a genre has been ambivalent throughout her career. The End of August did not bring an end to this ambivalence, but its publication did mark a shift in the reception of Yū’s work, especially within Zainichi literary studies. Critics have called the novel “the work that established Yū as a ‘Zainichi writer,’ ” noting that it was “a turning point in her career, and likewise ushered in a new era of Yū Miri scholarship,” and hailing it as “a watershed in Yū’s career in that it broke her silence on questions of her own lineage and ethnicity.”2 Yet, despite the consensus that The End of August is a groundbreaking work because of its engagement with “lineage and ethnicity,” there has been little scholarship to date that takes up the question of precisely how the novel engages with these issues—in other words, the question of how ethnicity is represented within the text. This essay addresses this problem by examining The End of August through the lens of names, bringing into focus one small piece of the overall picture of how the novel deals with ethnicity. I have chosen to foreground naming in this way because, as with many works of fiction set in Korea during the colonial period, The End of August features sōshi kaimei as a major motif. Sōshi kaimei refers to the Japanese imperial policy of requiring Korean subjects to establish a surname (shi) and allowing them to change their given name (mei), in order to standardize the family register (koseki) system across the Japanese Empire. Despite many complications and inconsistencies in how the policy affected Koreans during the colonial

170  Kang Yuni

period, today the term sōshi kaimei is often used as shorthand for the oppressive practice of forcing Korean subjects to use Japanese names. In this way, the historical weight of sōshi kaimei is also tightly bound to the practice of “passing” for Zainichi Koreans in the present, for whom passing typically takes the form of the use of a Japanese-sounding name (tsūmei; lit. “passing name”). The thematic emphasis that The End of August places on sōshi kaimei has not escaped the attention of previous scholarship. Critics have pointed out that “Yū Miri succeeds in using the form of the novel to breathe life into those who were robbed of their names” and that the frequently occurring naming scenes in the novel “recall the oppressive enforcement of sōshi kaimei by Japan at that time.”3 One scholar even makes explicit the connection between the history of sōshi kaimei and the present-day issue of passing: “When analyzing the web of meanings, particularly the ethnic significance, that ‘real names’ [honmyō] and ‘passing names’ [tsūmei] have held within the history of Koreans in Japan [Zainichi Chōsenjin], it is necessary to acknowledge the origin of this discriminatory structure—that is, sōshi kaimei, being stripped of one’s name. This serves to elaborate symbolically the pain and oppression endured by human beings whose very foundations of existence—their names—were concealed or denied.”4 These observations all apply an implicit binary to their understanding of names and naming, however. In other words, the use of a “real name” (honmyō, in these contexts specifically implying the Korean name) is diametrically opposed to the use of a “passing name,” which is always understood as a legacy of sōshi kaimei.5 Moreover, the moral valence of this binary suggests that the “real name” is a means of resistance to sōshi kaimei as proxy for colonial and postcolonial oppression, whereas anything else represents acquiescence. It is this lack of nuance that I am trying to address here. At the same time, much of the existing scholarship on Yū Miri rests on a similarly simplistic logic, wherein open discussion of ethnicity renders the work properly Zainichi, whereas failure to do so is criticized in ethnic terms. In earlier works such as Full ­House (Furuhausu, 1996) and ­Family Cinema (Kazoku shinema, 1997), Yū actively avoids revealing the family’s heritage, which has led critics to brand her as an author who “does not take up the burden of ethnicity.”6 As a result, discussions of Yū’s identity and her representations of ethnicity have to date remained superficial, though Hara Hitoshi has stressed the need to reevaluate the “Zainichi-ness” of Yū’s work.7 And perhaps because The End of August undermines the dogmatic notion of Yū as someone who is not interested in ethnic issues, its status as a turning point in her career is emphasized over anything else. One even gets the impression that critics do not know what to make of it. My central concern in this essay is the question of what is rendered invisible by these superficial modes of analysis. I will begin by establishing the importance of sōshi kaimei and “real names” in The End of August, contextualizing both within the evolving treatment of names over the course of Yū’s career. Then,

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I will explore some of the non–“real names” (hi-“­ honmyō”) appearing in the novel, unpacking the complexity of how they are adopted or imposed, which cannot be captured by the binary opposition of sōshi kaimei versus “real names.” Through these considerations, I aim to reveal the ways that sōshi kaimei has been regarded as an issue of ethnicity alone, relegating other ideological vectors, particularly gender and familial relations, to the shadows. THE CLICHÉS OF SŌSHI KAIMEI DISCOURSE

The treatment of names in The End of August can best be explored as one aspect of the novel’s larger project. Perhaps it would not be unfair to describe this larger project as a fictionalized exploration of Yū Miri’s heritage, broadly construed. It is an exercise in genealogy, heralded by the four-generation family tree included in the front matter of the bound version. This family tree, which terminates with “Yū Miri,” is centered on Yi Uch’ŏl, a fictionalized version of the author’s grandfather, an Olympic hopeful marathon runner.8 Through Uch’ŏl’s story and the broader family history narrated in the novel, The End of August also traces the history of Korea (and its diaspora in Japan) from the colonial period through the early decades after World War II. Most provocatively, Yū intertwines her own fictionalized heritage with the history of Korean women pressed into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, commonly known as comfort women, whose stories had only recently come to light at the start of her career. At its core, then, the novel is about narration and memory of that which history has failed to capture. The novel’s concern with recovery of the lost voices of the past is underscored by the framing device it employs. The End of August begins and ends with depictions of the character “Yū Miri” taking part in shamanistic rites that put her in contact, via a medium, with her recent ancestors and those close to them. She has returned to her ancestral home of Miryang primarily to reconnect with her grandfather, Yi Uch’ŏl. In the process, she also makes contact with Uch’ŏl’s younger ­ ­brother Ugŭn, who was killed in an anticommunist crackdown in South Korea after the war, and with a childhood acquaintance of Ugŭn, a young woman who is pressed into service as a comfort woman and eventually takes her own life. The novel takes the form of a complex web of narratives, shifting its focus to many different characters, settings, and moments in time, but these three characters tend to be foregrounded throughout. The novel ends as it begins, with another ritual, this time to marry Ugŭn and the young woman posthumously, thereby quelling their justifiably bitter spirits. Notably, before the ceremony can proceed it is first necessary to recover the real name of the young ­woman, Yŏnghŭi, which is elided throughout the novel. In this way, the novel makes visible the deeply rooted connections among colonial history, family, and naming practices, all of which are profoundly intertwined with sōshi kaimei and its legacies.

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Even beyond these opening and closing scenes, The End of August draws attention to the significance of names throughout. For instance, midway through the novel, Uch’ŏl comments directly on the importance of names: “If our family doesn’t call each other by our real names, who will? Yi, our surname, passed down from generation to generation, has been taken by the Japanese. All that’s left to you are the given names your father gave you. If no one says them aloud, those names will die.”9 This passage calls for the preservation of Korean names by saying them aloud. There is a similar sentiment, emphasizing the importance of the actual vocalization of names, in a line from the opening chapter: “It is only songs and names that perish in silence.”10 As if in response to this stance on names, The End of August repeatedly glosses characters’ names with phonetic readings. In other words, the text explicitly marks which language the names are being spoken in. This is quite conspicuous in passages such as the following, excerpted from a scene depicting Uch’ŏl’s days as a schoolboy in colonial Korea. The first line of dialogue is spoken by the teacher, who is Japanese: “In! Kyō! Why won’t you raise your hands? Isn’t there something you can do?” Yun Chŏnghak and Kang Chong’o stood up, their eyes downcast. Pak Sanghŏn, who was sitting next to Yun, quickly muttered, “They helped dig potatoes.” “Don’t talk out of turn!” the teacher yelled, throwing his chalk. The chalk missed Pak, instead striking the boy who was sitting in front of him, Yi Ut’ae, in the forehead, then shattering.11 Although “In” and “Kyō” are written with the same characters as “Yun” and “Kang,” respectively, the glosses in the text make it clear that the Japanese teacher addresses the students with the Japanese readings of their surnames, whereas the narrator calls them by their full Korean names, even in reference to something as trivial as being hit by a piece of chalk. This contrast is indicative of the emphasis the narrative places on Korean names. Moreover, the teacher’s imposition of Japanese readings of the characters’ names, thereby robbing the students of their “real” (Korean) names, conforms to the typical historical understanding of sōshi kaimei as the violent suppression of ethnic names. Indeed, the novel’s tendency to favor the Korean readings of names is only natural when taking this violent history into account. As linguist Tanaka Katsuhiko explains, “with proper nouns, sound is every thing.” Therefore, “linguistically oppressed nations [minzoku]” tend to emphasize the actual voicing of proper names.12 In other words, the pronunciation of names is an ethnically significant issue. For Koreans in Japan (Zainichi Chōsenjin), this desire to preserve ethnic names comes into conflict with the desire to avoid the discrimination and oppression that come with the use of Korean names.13 Ch’oe Ch’anghwa’s

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one-yen lawsuit against the Japanese broadcasting corporation Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK) is one symbolic example of this conflict.14 As Yoon Keun Cha has pointed out, within the Zainichi community, honmyō sengen—coming ­ out as Korean, carried out by declaring the Korean reading of one’s name—“is positioned as the first rite of passage on the way to being ‘Zainichi,’ or even to being human.” Furthermore, the development of antidiscrimination movements, the debate over naturalization, and all sorts of Zainichi political issues are closely tied to the issue of using real names versus passing names.15 For Zainichi Koreans, then, the question of which language to use to pronounce one’s name has practical consequences for one’s lived experience. It is precisely for this reason that using one’s real name has become a sort of initiation into the community. In fact, it is in present-day Zainichi names, rather than the names of the past, that The End of August finds its most fertile ground for exploring the significance of names: specifically, in the name of the character “Yū Miri.” In the first chapter, “Yū Miri” is told by one of the shamans, “Long ago Miryang was called ‘Miri.’ . . . You bear the name of this place.” This opening chapter ends, and the story of the novel begins, with “the sound of the rain growing stronger, like an audience clapping for a curtain call” just as “Yū Miri” “traces her own name on the palm of her hand with her index finger.”16 In keeping with the author’s claim that she “wanted to thematize the process of unravelling the mysteries of one’s own name,”17 her name is the key that unlocks the entire story. In Yū’s previous works, however, ethnic names and their pronunciations are de-emphasized or merely suggested, a far cry from the emphasis they receive in The End of August. For example, in early works such as The Sunflower Coffin (Himawari no hitsugi, 1993) and Festival for the Fish (Uo no matsuri, 1996), Yū gives her characters names that can be read as puns alluding to the family’s Korean surname, but they are nonetheless read in Japanese. The family appearing in Full ­House and Family ­ Cinema has the surname 林 (Im/Hayashi). Much like Yū Miri’s surname, 柳 (Yu/Yanagi), this can be legible as a surname in both Korean and Japanese. There are other cases where this is possible, such as 南 (Nam/ Minami), but such names are by no means common in Korean, suggesting a deliberate choice. Similarly, the protagonist of Gold Rush (Gōrudo rasshu, 1998) is Yuminaga Kazuki (弓長かずき). Yuminaga (弓長) is the result of splitting the character 張 (Chang) into its respective radicals, 弓 and 長, which was an actual method used to produce a Japanese-style name during sōshi kaimei by people with the surname Chang.18 Whereas the protagonist’s origins are suggested by this surname, his given name is written in hiragana, the Japanese syllabary. Because the rest of his family’s given names are written in sinographs, the protagonist’s given name can likely also be rendered in sinographs, but they never appear in the text. Others have suggested that the hiragana name symbolizes Kazuki’s alienation from the family and its system of rules.19 Yet, since sinographic names can be “ethnicized” by reading them in Korean, one could argue

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that writing his name in hiragana serves the purpose of precluding this choice. Even as his ethnic origins are implied, he is cut off from his ethnic name. Given Yū Miri’s history of treating names in this way, her emphasis on the pronunciation of names in The End of August represents a significant departure, and indeed, an impor tant part of what makes the novel so groundbreaking within the arc of her career. From a historical vantage point, the shift in Yū’s approach to characters’ names and their representation can be read as analogous to the very process of reclaiming one’s ethnic name, as in honmyō sengen. Yet the sonic quality of names is not the only defining characteristic to which The End of August draws attention. The novel also speaks to the “heaviness” of names, which serve as tokens not only of heritage but also of existence itself. Uch’ŏl states as much explicitly in the opening chapter: “People’s names are heavy [omoi]. Even more than the living, the names of the dead are heavy. There is nothing heavier than names.” In the context of remembering—or erasing— colonial violence, later in the novel he ties names even more closely to the notion of proof of life, or proof of having lived. “When the Japs [wejŏk] kill dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people, as long as they’re Koreans or Chinese, it doesn’t count as killing. But even if they make it so we weren’t killed, they can’t make it so we were never born. They can’t erase our names.”20 At the same time, it is clear that Uch’ŏl views names not only as proof of existence but as proof of connection to a given family lineage. As Uch’ŏl asserts later in the book, “People only have one name. A surname passed on from their ancestors, and a given name from their parents. It is the only thing people take with them to the grave. In this life, it’s our shortest and longest story. In this life, it’s our most important word. But the Japs [waenom] have tossed aside Koreans’ names like so many weeds.”21 Here Uch’ŏl demonstrates an awareness of both aspects—the hereditary and the historical—that lend “heaviness” to names, particularly those of the dead. This understanding of names is shared by many characters, those both central and peripheral to the story. Inamori Kiwa, a midwife who attends to Uch’ŏl’s mother, reveals the weight she places on names while talking about a grandchild in Japan who is expecting a baby. She says, “Even if my greatgrandchild who will be born next month will probably never remember me, I can at least leave behind the name ‘Inamori Kiwa.’ After all, names are an important keepsake left behind for later generations.” Similarly, a comfort woman named Emiko reveals that she and a lover had each other’s names tattooed on their bodies, the revelation of her real name functioning as a memento. Emiko notes, “It was the first time I told my lover my real name, the one given to me by my ­father.” Moreover, when the war ends and most of the women are fleeing the comfort station, they urge Emiko to join them. She refuses on the grounds that her name, now a part of her lover’s body, has died with him in battle. Without a name, she feels she has no home to return to: “Run away? But where would I

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go? Without a name, there’s nowhere to return to. I’m fine staying here. After all, I’m just a leftover life [amarimono mitai na inochi].”22 As with Uch’ŏl, these women seem to understand names as something “passed on from . . . ancestors.” Yet it is clear that they also see names as proof of life or existence, from the fact that Kiwa says she can “leave behind” her name in lieu of actual memories, and that Emiko sees her own life as “leftover” now that her name has died. Given all of the above, I would argue that names in The End of August do function as a kind of evidence of existence, though not so much as something belonging to the individual, but rather as something located within the traditions of one’s family or ancestors. This view on names is shared by both Koreans (who possess strong Confucian values) and Japanese (whose Confucian connections are relatively weaker), and acts as a thread that runs throughout the entire novel. This notion of positioning a name within the traditions of one’s ancestors can be understood as a reaction to the pain of having one’s name stolen— along with, by proxy, the traditions it represents. Essentially, it becomes impossible to think about names as signs of individual identity or existence without considering the weight of family, history, and perhaps even the ethnonation bearing down upon them. Yet one key question remains: How should we approach names other than “real names”? How should we treat names that are adopted or imposed later in life, in contrast to those given by parents at birth or passed down from ancestors? Despite its overall emphasis on real names and their ethnic significance, The End of August also includes many examples of non–“real names,” the complexity of which is irreducible to a clichéd notion of sōshi kaimei as the origin of all passing names. In the following sections, I take up two of the most prominent cases of such names. First, I analyze the name Yi Ch’unshik, a gō adopted by Yi Ugŭn. The term gō refers to a pseudonym adopted largely for professional use, along the lines of nom de guerre or nom de plume. For Ugŭn, his gō, Yi Ch’unshik, becomes the name by which he is known as a distance runner and leftist activist to all but the members of his family. It is in this sense a kind of passing name, yet is adopted expressly for the purpose of resisting sōshi kaimei. Second, I take up the name Namiko, the genjina given to the comfort woman character. Genjina is a specifically gendered term used to refer to the pseudonyms of hostesses, prostitutes, and other primarily female entertainers. The power dynamics at play in these two cases of non–“real names” could hardly be farther apart, but both serve to illustrate the various routes aside from sōshi kaimei by which a person might arrive at the use of a name other than that given at birth. Furthermore, as the analysis that follows will show, it is impossible to trace these routes without first understanding sōshi kaimei as more than simply an issue of ethnicity. It should go without saying that any consideration of sōshi kaimei must be grounded in an adequate recognition of the pain inflicted on the colonized

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through the violence it entailed, as well as the affective attachment to real names that is an inevitable consequence thereof. Yet, following Takada Chinami’s model in Surnames and Sex: Names and Gender in Modern Literature (Sei to sei: Kindai bungaku ni okeru namae to jendā, 2013), I argue that a basic moral dichotomy is insufficient for understanding the use of names, even within such oppressive circumstances. That is, Takada notes a gendered asymmetry in the way names are represented in modern Japanese literature, with female characters’ names rarely appearing with surnames attached. Rather than settling for the surface reading of this trend as an objectification of women, Takada critiques “the simplistic binary of ‘surnames represented = liberatory, no surnames = ​ oppressive,’ ” showing that many women consciously rejected the use of a surname as a means of breaking free from “the traditions of the household system, which simultaneously alienated women from their surnames and confined them within a given household surname.”23 In the same way, it is crucial to shed light on that which has been rendered invisible by the “simplistic binary” of “recovering one’s real name = good, sōshi kaimei = bad.” In the analysis that follows, I go beyond this clichéd understanding of sōshi kaimei in order to think through the use of non–“real names.” GŌ AS DOUBLE WITHDRAWAL: YI UGŬN / KUNIMOTO UKON / YI CH’UNSHIK

One of the most conspicuous instances of non–“real names” in The End of August is Yi Ugŭn’s gō, a pseudonym that he adopts by choice. Nevertheless, this name maintains a connection to the patriarchal authority of the family. Uch’ŏl’s younger ­ brother, ­ Ugŭn, is an active participant in the struggle against colonialism, in stark contrast to Uch’ŏl, who stands by passively. It is in the context of Ugŭn’s desire to resist imperial rule that he adopts the gō Yi Ch’unshik, as depicted in the following conversation with Uch’ŏl: “There’s just one thing I want to ask of you. Brother, you told me you thought of lots of different names for me when I was born, right?” “Oh, sure. You were born in spring, so I thought up lots of names with the character for spring, Ch’un [春]. Ch’unjae, Ch’unik, Ch’unsŏn, Ch’unil, Ch’unshik, Ch’unun, Ch’unhaeng. But in the end we went with Ugŭn, the one Father came up with.” “I think I’ll use ‘Ch’unshik’ as my gō if that’s all right.” “A gō? What do you need a gō for?” “On our family register [koseki], it says I am Kunimoto Ukon, a slave of the Japs [waenom]. So as a sign that they haven’t yet conquered my heart and soul, I want to break away from my Jap family register. There’s no way I can use the name Kunimoto Ukon, which is covered in shame. I need a new name as a fortress from which

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to resist, to stand up to them, to fight them. From today forward, I will be known as Yi Ch’unshik.”24 As seen here, Ugŭn adopts the gō Yi Ch’unshik with the goal of breaking free from the family register. As is clear even from a surface reading, this is a form of resistance to sōshi kaimei and colonial occupation. But he has yet another motivation for choosing this name. Right after he adopts this gō, Ugŭn recalls his mother on her deathbed: “ ‘Uch’ŏl, hold mama’s hand. Uch’ŏl, look your mother in the eyes.’ Mother had mistaken me for my older brother. It was my eyes she met in her dying moment, but she died thinking it was Uch’ŏl looking after her. . . . Ugŭn tensed every muscle in his body and shut out every thing around him, as if he were standing at the starting line. Representing South Kyŏngsang Province, number 229, Yi Ch’unshik. On your mark, get set, bang!”25 From this passage it is clear that Uch’ŏl, the firstborn, who has become the patriarch in place of his dead father, is seen as the primary son by his mother. Ugŭn, the second son, fills only a secondary role within the Yi family. As if to break free from this family dynamic, he commits himself to larger narratives at the level of the nation, such as track and field competitions geared toward reaching the Olympics and anti-Japanese protests. Thus, for Ugŭn, the name Ch’unshik is also a means of breaking away from the family in which he could never be the primary figure. Although it is unlikely that he could have actually competed in a national track and field event under a pseudonym, the name Yi Ch’unshik ringing out in his head in this context suggests the starting line of his process of withdrawal from the household. In fact, this constitutes a double withdrawal: just as the name Yi Ch’unshik represents Ugŭn’s ­wholesale rejection of his Japanized name even at the expense of the “real name” from which his sōshi kaimei name is derived, it also represents a rejection of the household system that renders him, as second son, subordinate to the patriarchal authority of his father and, later, his brother. The key point to focus on here is the power dynamic involved in the act of naming someone. Deguchi Akira has argued that “the act of naming is fundamentally an act of authority, but also an act of violence, as the person being named cannot voice their consent.” He adds that “this act also forces the person naming into submission,” because both the namer and the named “are configured within the web of power relations we call social conventions, which serve to bind members of society.”26 In other words, naming is a process by which social and cultural norms come to exert power on those within their purview. In the case of Yi Ch’unshik, rather than choosing the name on his own, Ugŭn receives the name from Uch’ŏl—now both older brother and patriarch of the family. Uch’ŏl himself even makes this dynamic explicit: “Your brother thought up your name, as if he were a father, greeting the birth of his own firstborn son.” He even goes so far as to express an actual intention to behave as a father, saying, “Father has died. Starting today, I am your father.”27 Thus, the

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power relations between the two brothers—which is to say that of dependent and guardian (as father, as patriarch)— are at work in the name Ch’unshik. Nevertheless, Ugŭn formulates his own interpretation of the name Ch’unshik: Ah yes, I suppose I should explain the origins of the name “Ch’unshik.” It was different from the kind of gō artists adopt to avoid using their real names. . . . Seeds are planted [shik] in the spring [ch’un], then they sprout, then grow bigger and bigger until they become enormous trees. Ch’unshik said his name was imbued with hope that one day we could all meet again under such a tree after achieving true peace, having toppled the ruling class through communist revolution and freed ourselves from all manner of exploitation, oppression, class discrimination, and class conflict. . . . He became a communist that day, at age eighteen, when he changed his name to Ch’unshik.28

This passage comes from a chapter that takes the form of the testimony offered by Ch’unshik’s friends, who are rounded up in the crackdown on communism that takes place in postwar South Korea. In it we can see that Ch’unshik puts his own personal spin on the name he chose randomly from the list of “spring” names his brother suggested, connecting it to the ideology of communist revolution. The name becomes a signifier of his communist beliefs, drawing on the superficial meaning Uch’ŏl (the “parent” who names him) attached to the name: “Seeds sprout, then stretch higher and higher and grow into big trees.”29 By attaching an ideological meaning to this name, he can escape the power dynamics of the household at work in his brother’s act of naming him. Ch’unshik, who achieves some renown as a communist, is eventually arrested and buried alive. Just before his death, the narrator refers to him once again as Ugŭn: “The last thing Ugŭn heard was the sound of his skull caving in.” Somewhat counterintuitively, I would argue that this return to the “real name” in fact serves to distance him further from the hierarchy of the household. At the moment of Ugŭn’s death, the only living member of the Yi household that renders him second (and secondary) son is Uch’ŏl. As Uch’ŏl himself says, “As far as his family goes, there was only me, his brother.”30 As his new father and head of the family, Uch’ŏl gives Ugŭn the name Ch’unshik. By this logic, by calling him Ugŭn rather than Ch’unshik, the narrative actually severs him from Uch’ŏl’s patriarchal authority. The name Yi Ch’unshik, thus freed from the bonds of the household, is the name that remains in people’s memories, wherein he is known as “in a word, a hero.” As Uch’ŏl reminisces, “Walking around Pusan asking about my younger brother, nobody knew the name Yi Ugŭn. But I couldn’t find a soul who didn’t know the name Yi Ch’unshik.” It is fitting that Yi Ch’unshik, the name of a “hero,” should be tinged with communist ideology. It can be seen as a limitation on Ugŭn’s part that he removes himself from the authority of the household

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only to end up within the authority of yet another ideology. But it is easy to imagine that Ugŭn, who is marginalized within the household system, is attracted to communist discourse, which holds that he “should be reborn as a proletarian, breaking free of the family system of the past.”31 As seen above, the gō Yi Ch’unshik can be read as a double resistance to both colonial occupation and the authority of the household system. In this instance at least, it is precisely the use of a non–“real name” that constitutes resistance, undermining the superficial understanding of real names as the primary avenue for standing against the oppression of sōshi kaimei. In the next section, I consider yet another type of non–“real name.” GENJINA AS MEANS OF SELF- PARTITIONING: KIM YŎNGHŬI / KANEMOTO EIKO / NAMIKO

The character who bears the three names Kim Yŏnghŭi, Kanemoto Eiko, and Namiko is generally called by her sōshi kaimei name, Eiko. Despite the aforementioned preference for Korean names in The End of August, she is never referred to as Yŏnghŭi. How are we to interpret this decision? As with Ugŭn, it is essential to consider the relationship between names and one’s positioning, both officially and affectively, within a family. When discussing Korean women’s names in particular, one cannot ignore the tradition of chokbo (genealogy books) that record a family’s lineage. Because women’s names are not recorded in chokbo—or in the rare instances they are, they are only recorded under their father’s or husband’s surname—the chokbo is a clear example of the masculinism inherent in traditional household systems. By contrast, when surnames were assigned under sōshi kaimei as a means of designating belonging to a certain household, they were assigned to women as well as men. On this point, Mizuno Naoki argues that forcing the surname of the household or husband onto Korean women, who typically kept their maiden names, served to increase their subordination.32 To be sure, Mizuno’s references demonstrate that some educated women at the time reacted to this policy negatively, experiencing the use of married names as a loss of individuality and identity. But the same collection of responses in the January  1940 issue of Chogwang that Mizuno relies on also includes women who reacted relatively positively to the policy. “After a period of years, this too will become its own sort of tradition,” said one woman, while another argued that the ability to change one’s surname twice or more was a “special privilege” granted to women.33 Moreover, many of the responses show no preference either way. In fact, within this magazine issue that Mizuno cites only in fragments, the positive or neutral reactions outnumber the negative ones. ­

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­

Yet my particular focus with regard to the girl called Eiko is the way her name shifts over time within the narrative. In one such shift, the novel changes its way of referring to her just before she boards the train that will take her to the comfort station. At the train station, she is referred to as Eiko: “Eiko looked at the sunburnt limbs of the boys at the station and remembered that it was summer vacation.” She feels a tinge of uneasiness as she thinks about leaving without saying goodbye to her family: “This is serious. . . . If I’m going to turn back, it’s got to be now.” Immediately thereafter, the narrative starts referring to her as “the girl” (shōjo): “The girl looked up at the mountains surrounding the platform, Muhŭlsan, Manŏsan, and Ch’ŏnt’aesan. What was it? The scenery, the clouds, the air all seemed to be standing still.”35 The description of the scenery as vaguely unsettling, foreshadowing her tragic fate, occurs at the same moment the text shifts to calling her by a common noun, “the girl,” rather than a proper name. Calling her “the girl” allows her journey, which is given more pages in The End of August than that of any other character, to be superimposed onto the stories of the many survivors of wartime ­ sexual violence. ­ This use of a common noun would seem at first glance to contradict the general emphasis on names in The End of August. Yet the more the “heaviness” of names is underscored in the rest of the novel, the more the use of a common noun stands out by comparison, paradoxically emphasizing the existence of the many women who could not appear in history other than as nameless figures. Thus, this change in the character’s name simultaneously suggests the difficulty of narrating the stories of such women by name while also attempting to inscribe the traces of these nameless women onto the narrative. The End of August is at once preoccupied with names and skeptical of names as the basis on which to assert one’s existence. Moreover, this character’s name changes once again later in the novel, this time to a genjina, which is essentially a brand name assigned to her as a sexual commodity: Hearing furious knocking at the door, the girl clung to the body of the woman lying next to her. “Namiko, Kohana, wake up! If you don’t come outside right now, you’ll get a beating.” It was a woman’s voice.

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Namiko? Kohana? The old man’s voice from before rang in her ears. You know Takeo and Namiko? From now on you’ ll be Namiko. And you? You’ ll be Kohana. Namiko turned away from Kohana.36

The moment the narrator switches to calling her Namiko, she becomes distinct from the countless nameless “girls” who became comfort women. Her ordeal is then vividly narrated as the story of an individual comfort woman, Namiko. The character now known as Namiko comes to terms with this name, saying, “What use is there for real names in this place? . . . I am Namiko, . . . and all I can do is die under the name Namiko.” As soon as she accepts this name, a soldier comes in: “The moment the fabric curtain rose, a voice slipped out of Namiko’s throat. Irasshaimase. Soko ni okake kudasai. [Welcome. Please have a seat.]”37 She is thus able to recite smoothly the Japanese-language greetings she is supposed to use as a comfort woman. It is possible to read this not only as a process of becoming a comfort woman through the acceptance of her genjina but also as her attempt to protect her true self (and real name) by partitioning it off from her traumatic experience by using a substitute name. ­

Eventually, however, the “real name,” Yŏnghŭi, from which she has been severed, begins to weigh on her. From the depths of despair, she plans to commit suicide, thinking, “If I hang myself, I’ll die for sure.”38 Looking for something with which to hang herself, she realizes, “Ah yes, an obi should work.”39 The “obi” is stressed in boldface type in the original text, and should be interpreted in the context of an earlier passage that states, “A name is like an obi. If you don’t tie your kimono with an obi, it will slip off. And if you don’t bind your life to yourself with a name, it will be stripped from you. Whether Korean or Japanese, nobody can live without a name.” 40 These lines are in reference to the importance of naming a baby immediately upon birth.41 Based on this idea, the obi that she thinks of using to facilitate her suicide also contains a hint of the name her parents gave her. In fact, she screams this name desperately just before her death: Kim Yŏnghŭi! Namiko screamed her own name. Father! If nothing else, the name you gave me has never been raped. Mother! No one has laid a finger on the name you called me. Kim Yŏnghŭi! The name of a thirteen-year-old

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virgin. Namiko clung to the name Kim Yŏnghŭi. Kim Yŏnghŭi! Namiko cried, throwing herself into the sea. No one saw it. No one heard it. The wind blew, the clouds parted, and the sun shone down on the spot where Namiko had been standing.42

When she feels the need to preserve the name Kim Yŏnghŭi as “the name of a thirteen-year-old virgin” for the sake of her parents, she is probably conscious of the fact that her parents would no longer accept the version of her that has become a comfort woman. In Korean tradition, which places a strong social emphasis on chastity, women who die before marriage are considered unconditionally chaste, but their ghosts are among the most feared due to the bitterness they possess for having failed to fulfill their roles as women—marriage and childbirth.43 In other words, the very idea of an unchaste unmarried woman was culturally unthinkable. Having become Namiko, the girl has already lost the chastity which is the prerequisite for being included in a household as a daughter. It is for this reason that she screams the name Kim Yŏnghŭi as a relic of her past self—“a thirteenyear-old virgin.” Yet, as this name is nothing more than an object for her to “cling to,” she has been thoroughly estranged from it by this point. Thus, the name Kim Yŏnghŭi, the “obi” given to her by her parents, is what forces her to realize that “all I can do is die under the name Namiko,” and is itself tied closely to her death. In the passage depicting her death, the narrator refers to her as Namiko. Upon first reading, calling her by her genjina at the moment of her death appears cold, even violent. But as demonstrated above, this is actually in line with the position she herself has taken, having no choice but to “die under the name Namiko,” torn from her previous name. It is important to her that the name Kim Yŏnghŭi remain in the past, partitioned off from the present moment. In fact, not once does the narrator call her Yŏnghŭi. Aside from the death scene, it is only in the penultimate chapter, titled “Posthumous Wedding” (Shigo kekkonshiki, glossed as Sahu kyŏlhonshik) and written in the form of a play, that this character utters her “real name.” The “posthumous wedding” here is intended to marry the deceased Ugŭn and the comfort woman, thereby calming their spirits. In this chapter, the girl’s spirit possesses the body of “Yū Miri” and says to Ugŭn (whose spirit is possessing that of a shaman), “I will tell you my name, but only you,” then whispers into the ear of the shaman, “Kim Yŏnghŭi.” 44 Even a fter her death, she does not wish to speak her name out loud. The wedding ceremony is ultimately unsuccessful, however. The final step in the ritual is to place two dolls made to look like the bride and groom on a miniature palanquin and float them down a river. But when this is attempted, “the bride’s doll tipped over, scattering bits of red paper into the river” and “the palanquin sank into the water.” The image of her doll falling into the river

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exposes the fraudulent nature of the wedding ceremony, carried out in spite of the fact that her existence as a comfort woman is unthinkable and unacknowledged, and despite chastity being a condition of marriage that precludes her participation, as she herself notes at the ceremony: “I cannot marry anyone.” 45 Moreover, just as the comfort woman Emiko asks, “Run away? But where would I go?,” this failed attempt to mourn these women who have been denied a household to return to, as symbolized by the loss of their “real names,” incisively asks whether such mourning is even possible. As feminist scholar Oka Mari has stated, “A name is something I possess, but at the same time, is something possessed by the other who calls me by my name.” 46 This reasoning does not apply in The End of August, however—at least not in terms of “real names.” I say this because the comfort woman is alienated from the name Kim Yŏnghŭi, and even she is unable to “possess” her name, to say nothing of the “other” who might call her by it. That is, the name Kim Yŏnghŭi only serves to highlight her exclusion from the household system and to underscore the irrecoverability of the name of a “thirteen-year-old virgin.” Whereas at first glance the shifts from “Eiko” to “the girl” to “Namiko” appear to be arbitrary, they in fact shed light on the structures of oppression and erasure surrounding this character, and, more broadly, the Korean women who were subject to wartime sexual violence. In the preceding analysis of these two characters’ non–“real names” in The End of August, I have worked to reject simplistic binaries such as “real names = good, sōshi kaimei = bad” or “real names = good, genjina = bad.” Moreover, I have attempted to expose uncritical attitudes toward the oppressive power dynamics of the household system inherent therein.47 In the next section, I will further elaborate on the ways that names in The End of August deviate from and complicate such binaries by examining the name “Yū Miri.” THE NAME “YŪ MIRI”

As we have seen thus far, in The End of August, the ways the narrative refers to characters is at times aligned with and at times contradicts the ways the characters refer to themselves, a departure from the conventional logic surrounding names. The ambivalence that exists between self-adopted and externally imposed names comes to the fore especially in the name “Yū Miri.” Within the text, the pronunciation of the characters 柳美里 (Yū Miri) is never marked (with one exception), in contrast to the text’s repetitive glossing of other characters’ names. The one place where the pronunciation is glossed is in the passage where Uch’ŏl names her, whispering “Miri . . . Miryang . . .” 48 Given what we have seen so far, a natural interpretation of this is that the name “Yū Miri” is meant to tie this character to her ancestors and that the gloss here is meant to closely associate both the sound (Miri) and the meaning (beautiful village) of the name with the ancestral hometown, Miryang.

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Yet the ruby characters glossing the pronunciation are only attached to the given name, Miri. In the case of the name 柳美里, the question is really whether to pronounce the surname in Japanese, as “Yanagi,” or in Korean, as “Yu.” The only place that her full name appears glossed is not within the main text, but in the family tree included in the front of the book. Here it is glossed as “Yū Miri,” the reading that the author herself has consistently used. As Yū herself writes in The Cradle on the Shore (Mizube no yurikago, 1997), a genre-bending work resting between autobiography and fiction, “ ‘You can’t have two names. You have to pick one. Are you Yanagi, or are you Yū?’ . . . I thought he must have misheard the Korean reading of my real name [Kankoku-yomi no honmyō] as ‘Yū Miri’ rather than ‘Yu Miri,’ but I actually liked the sound of it so I didn’t feel like correcting him. So I said, ‘I’ll go with Yū,’ and that’s the name I’ve used ever since.” 49 As is evident from this quote, the name “Yū Miri” is neither a real name nor a passing name, but rather was chosen as a name that exists in the space between. Yet, as noted above, within the text of the novel the pronunciation of 柳美里 is almost never indicated. Whereas most character names in The End of August have a certain pronunciation enforced by the glosses appearing in each scene, the name 柳美里 does not receive this kind of restrictive treatment. In other words, at least three options—the Japanese reading “Yanagi”; the author’s preferred “Yū”; and even her “real” Korean name, “Yu”—are all legitimate possibilities. This freedom afforded to the reading of 柳美里 in the text dovetails with the author’s own casual reasons for choosing the non–real name “Yū Miri” simply because she “liked the sound of it.” Here, the novel’s general preoccupation with real names and how they sound disappears. ­

“Yu Miri,” as written in katakana, does not have the same level of ambiguity as the sinographs 柳美里. It must be pronounced with what the author calls “the Korean reading of my real name.” From another perspective, the freedom assured to readers of the Japanese text to read 柳美里 in a number of different ways is denied to Koreans, who are limited to the “correct” pronunciation of the name. The Seoul Marathon chapter is narrated by “Yū Miri” herself, so perhaps we could read her sensitivity to the “correct” Korean pronunciation of “Yu Miri” as an awareness of her own estrangement from the sound of “the Korean reading of my real name.” “Could I speak to the people of this country in the language of this country? Probably not,” she says to herself.51 This confirms that “Yū

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Miri”—for whom “the language of this country” is not a first language, nor has she acquired it—would find it difficult to pronounce her own name “correctly” in the strict sense of the word. This struggle stands out all the more due to the complexity of Korean consonants and vowels from the perspective of native speakers of Japanese. The frustration “Yū Miri” feels here is emblematic of the struggles faced by many contemporary Zainichi Koreans. That is, even as they are alienated from their ethnic heritage, as symbolized by the difficulty they face in pronouncing their own names “correctly,” within the context of Japan they are burdened with an either/or choice of real name versus passing name, which is seen as defining one’s entire way of life. At some level, it becomes impossible not to “pass,” if the standard for nonpassing is “correct” pronunciation of one’s “real” (Korean) name. Of course, for those who wish to live openly as Zainichi Koreans, going by one’s “real name” would appear to be the natural choice. But the moment Zainichi Koreans make this decision, they are faced not only with the difficulty of pronouncing their names correctly themselves but also with feelings of uncanniness when being called by the “correct” pronunciation. Moreover, to go by one’s real name in Japan is to expose oneself to ongoing discrimination and misunderstanding. On the other hand, using a Japanese-style name can make it difficult to be recognized as Korean—its own form of misunderstanding. In short, the issue of names for Zainichi Koreans raises an overwhelming, intractable set of problems. Within this context, the positioning of real names in binary opposition to sōshi kaimei, as the presumptively “good” choice between real names and passing names, is an oppressive burden to place on those who confront these issues. The uncanniness that “Yū Miri” feels when hearing her “real name,” elucidated in the Seoul Marathon chapter, serves to relativize the emphasis placed on real names in the chapters of the narrative set in the colonial period. In other words, it draws attention to a kind of historical gap. “Yū Miri” is living with the legacy of sōshi kaimei, as opposed to sōshi kaimei itself. And, in many ways, the memory of sōshi kaimei is fairly removed from the actual policies it enacted in its historical moment. This distinction also brings forward the issues surrounding Zainichi Koreans’ names, which would inevitably fade into the background with the focus solely on real names. Looking at it from this angle, it is even possible to argue that Yū Miri’s decision to go by “Yū” rather than “Yanagi” or “Yu” at the beginning of her artistic career—thereby overcoming the binary of real name versus passing name—laid the groundwork for raising these issues in The End of August. As I argued in the context of Ugŭn’s gō and Yŏnghŭi’s genjina, the gap that emerges between imposed and adopted names in The End of August undermines the simplistic understanding of real names and sōshi kaimei that is often relied upon when considering the history of colonial occupation. At the same time, when focusing on “Yū Miri,” that same gap between given names and chosen

186  Kang Yuni

names also functions as commentary on the problems surrounding names within the Zainichi Korean community. I conclude by situating these observations within the context of Yū Miri’s overall career and within the study of Zainichi literature ­ ­ ­ as a whole. ­ The multifarious quality of names in The End of August may be the key to unraveling the established view of the novel—namely, that it demonstrates Yū Miri’s newfound interest in ethnicity, based solely on the fact that it is set in colonial Korea, without any concrete examination of its modes of narration and representation. Perhaps it is the important position occupied by a character bearing the same name as the author within the story that has lent support to this standard reading. To be sure, the character “Yū Miri” occupies a privileged position within the story, from which she can listen to the voices of the dead and narrate them in turn. In the chapters depicting shamanistic rituals, she is even possessed by the comfort woman and speaks in her voice. Previous scholarship has taken this as a sign of the synchronicity established between Yū and the comfort woman character and as the genesis of Yū’s engagement with her own ethnic identity.52 But reading the novel through the lens of names reveals that this kind of superficial correspondence between author and character is not the focal point. To return to Oka Mari’s theory of names, the name “Yū Miri” seems to be adopted by the author precisely as “something possessed by the other who calls me by my name,” since she chooses to go by a friend’s mispronunciation of her “real name.”53 One crucial aspect of the relationality between Yū Miri and the comfort woman character is that Yū’s name is chosen in this way, whereas the comfort woman cannot possess her own name, nor can it be possessed by others. In sum, all of the examples cited herein—Yū Miri’s choice to go by a name that lies in between a real name and a passing name (and the reflection thereof in the character “Yū Miri”), as well as the various fluctuations among the names of Ugŭn/Ch’unshik and Eiko / “the girl” / Namiko—attempt to dismantle standard notions of the relationship between names and ethnicity. This is accomplished first by exposing the exclusions and oppressions of the household system inherent in “real names,” and second by pointing out the various complications imposed on Zainichi Koreans by the continued emphasis on real names. Both of these observations are only possible through careful consideration of non– “real names” from outside the simplistic schema of “real names = good, sōshi kaimei = bad” and “real names = good, genjina = bad.” Viewed in this way, it is possible to conclude that The End of August constitutes a turning point in Yū Miri’s career, not because of an uncomplicated shift from avoiding to engaging ethnic issues but rather because it breaks down this clichéd understanding of Korean ethnicity and history. Yū’s attempts to subvert the dichotomy of “real names” versus sōshi kaimei both historically and within the contemporary Zainichi community are worthy of attention.

In the Shadow of Sōshi Kaimei  187

Moreover, Yū’s endeavors shed light on the reductive nature of frameworks of Zainichi Korean literature (and the study thereof) that have emphasized the author’s nationality, pen name, ethnic origins, and the question of whether or not they represent ethnonational struggles as the central determinants of the work’s value. As long as these frameworks continue to dominate, there can be no escape from the binary questions of whether or not the author is truly a “Zainichi writer” or whether or not she is sufficiently engaged with ethnic issues as the means of evaluating an author or work. In this sense, by unearthing the problematic assumptions operating invisibly within our understandings of ethnicity and history, The End of August demands a critical rethinking of Zainichi literature and the frameworks through which we read it. NOTES An earlier version of this chapter appeared under the title “Yū Miri Hachigatsu no hate ni ­ okeru hi-“honmyō,” Shōwa bungaku kenkyū 74 (2017): 157–171.





­



ō

188  Kang Yuni

and phonetic representations of Korean words or lines of dialogue to challenge the limits of the Japanese language. Although this linguistic complexity is crucial to understanding the novel as a whole, for the sake of clarity, here and throughout the chapter I have left much of it out of my translations of Kang’s quotations from the novel, except where she engages directly with questions of orthography and textuality. 10. Yū, Hachigatsu no hate, 8. 12. Tanaka Katsuhiko, Hōtei ni tatsu gengo (Tokyo: Iwanami gendai bunko, 2002), 182, emphasis in the original. 13. I use Zainichi Chōsenjin to refer to people who have roots in the Korean Peninsula during the colonial period, and Zainichi as an abbreviation thereof.

16. Yū, Hachigatsu no hate, 34, 45. 18. Kim Yŏngdal, Sōshi kaimei no hōseido to rekishi, ed. Ijichi Noriko (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 2002), 130. Similar examples include the name 朴 (Pak) becoming 木下 (Kinoshita) and 崔 (Ch’oe) becoming 佳山 (Kayama). 20. Yū, Hachigatsu no hate, 10, 382, emphasis added. ū 23. Takada Chinami, Sei to sei: Kindai bungaku ni okeru namae to jendā (Tokyo: Kanrin shobō, 2013), 338. 24. Yū, Hachigatsu no hate, 467. 26. Deguchi Akira, Namae no arukeorojī (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 1995), 232–234. ū 28. Ibid., 676–677. 29. Ibid., 108. 30. Ibid., 703, 733. 31. Ibid., 730, 733, 685. 32. Mizuno Naoki, Sōshi kaimei: Nihon no Chōsen shihai no naka de (Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho, 2008), 187–192. 33. “Namp’yŏn ŭi sŏng ŭl ttarŭmyŏn: Yŏryu chessi,” Chogwang, January 1940, 382–383. 3 4. Itagaki Ry ūta and Mizuno Naoki, “Sōshi kaimei jidai no zokufu: Fukei shusshin shūdan no taiō ni chūmoku shite,” Kankoku Chōsen bunka kenkyū 11 (2012): 61. 35. Yū, Hachigatsu no hate, 483, 484. 38. Yū, Hachigatsu no hate, 569.

In the Shadow of Sōshi Kaimei  189

39. Ibid. Translator’s note: This is by no means an isolated use of boldface text within The End of August. As has been noted, the text is quite experimental, and boldface type is often used to indicate emphasis, shifts in temporality, allusions to poetry and songs, and so on. 40. Yū, Hachigatsu no hate, 212.

42. Yū, Hachigatsu no hate, 642–643; boldface in the original. 43. Ch’oe Kilsŏng, Han no jinruigaku, trans. Manabe Yūko (Tokyo: Hirakawa shuppansha, 1994). 4 4. Yū, Hachigatsu no hate, 817. 45. Ibid., 822, 812. 46. Oka Mari, Kanojo no “tadashii” namae to wa nani ka: Daisan sekai feminizumu no shisō (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2000), 35.

48. Yū, Hachigatsu no hate, 776. 49. Yū Miri, Mizube no yurikago (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1997), 227–228. 50. Yū, Hachigatsu no hate, 64. 53. Oka, Kanojo no “tadashii” namae to wa nani ka, 35.

INDEX

Figures indicated by page numbers in bold accusations, of passing, 12, 43–44, 56, 57n7 adoption, of relatives or family friends, 152, 164n4 African Americans, 33, 42, 89, 91–93. See also Hughes, Langston; transpacific Afro-Asian solidarities Ahmed, Sara, 61, 64, 77 Amakasu Masahiko, 145 Appadurai, Arjun, 133 archives, for minor(ity) histories, 104–105, 106, 107n7 Arita Hachirō, 139 assimilation (dōka), 4, 9–11, 17n8, 65–66, 68, 114, 134–135. See also cultural integration; imperialization (kōminka) movement bandits (tohi), 27, 39n30 Baskett, Michael, 154 Bayly, C. A., 74 Bell of Sayon, The (Sayon no kane; film), 136, 138–139, 143, 148n14 Bennett, Juda, 101, 107n8 Bhabha, Homi K., 18n16, 68, 81 biopower, 157–159, 165n20 Black Americans, 33, 42, 89, 91–93. See also Hughes, Langston; transpacific Afro-Asian solidarities blackface, 8, 29, 39n38 Brooks, Barbara, 75 Brown, Arthur Judson, 74

burakumin (eta) outcast group, 7–8, 22, 30, 67. See also shinheimin (new commoners) Chapman, David, 5 Chatani, Sayaka, 17n9, 128 Chen Peifong, 114 children’s magazines and newspapers: about, 13–14, 110, 111, 113, 128–129; audience and content, 116–122, 124–125, 131n25; author’s informal survey, 122–123, 124, 129; colonized vs. naichi markets, 127–128; decline, 128; educational goals for Japanese vs. Taiwanese children, 112, 114; at Hakodate Central Library, 110, 111–112, 130n11, 130n13; scholarship on, 115, 122; in Taiwan, 111–112, 114–116, 130n20. See also education China: Li Xianglan (Ri Kōran) and, 136, 137–138, 144–145, 151–152, 153; Suzhou Nights (film) and, 155–157, 157–159, 158, 162–163; Western depictions, 38n25 “Chinaman” figure, 92 China Nights (Shina no yoru; film), 136, 143, 148n8, 151–152, 153 Ching, Leo, 4 Ch’oe Ch’anghwa, 172–173, 188n14 Choi Seunghee (Choe Sŭnghŭi, Sai Shōki), 135, 143–144, 145

191

192 Index

Chronicle of the Suppression of Korean Insurgents (Chōsen bōto tōbatsu shi), 71–72 class, 127–128, 132n51 clothing, 2, 16n3, 70, 97 colonialism: anxiety over colonialist women, 51–52, 60n49; assimilation (dōka), 4, 9–11, 17n8, 65–66, 68, 114, 134–135; colonized (subaltern) subjects, 11, 17n7, 21–22, 34, 36, 48–49, 53; cosmopolitanism and, 133–135, 137, 140–144; cultural production and, 3, 9–11, 15–16; education and, 110–111; engagement with everyday people, 133–134; family registry (koseki) and, 5, 108n19, 169, 176–177; by Japan, 3–4; Japanese settlers, 10–11, 19n33, 47–48, 49–50, 51–52, 55, 60n49, 60n55, 96–97; kōminka (imperialization) movement, 4–5, 128, 134–135, 137, 139, 140, 141. See also children’s magazines and newspapers; education; Korea; Manchuria; paranoia, passing, and Korea Problem; Taiwan comfort women, 171, 174–175, 180–183, 186, 189n47 communist labor union movements, 85n65 continental brides (tairiku no hanayome), 47–48, 55, 59n25 continental melody (tairiku merodi), 134, 148n4 Continental Trilogy (tairiku sanbusaku), 136, 140, 148n8, 154 Copeland, Rebecca, 147 cosmopolitanism, 133–135, 137, 140–144 Creelman, James, 26 cultural integration (bunka tōgō), 63, 68, 70, 83n6. See also assimilation; imperialization (kōminka) movement cultural production, 3, 9–11, 15–16. See also cosmopolitanism dances, “Oriental,” 144, 149n28 Dawkins, Marcia Alesan, 91 Deguchi Akira, 177

Deleuze, Gilles, 18n16, 108n11 differential inclusion, 5, 11, 18n16 displaced abjection, 28, 35 diva, 147. See also Ri Kōran dōka (assimilation), 4, 9–11, 17n8, 65–66, 68, 114, 134–135. See also cultural integration; kōminka (imperialization) movement domestic violence, 98 Downer, Lesley, 22 DuBois, W. E. B., 86, 89, 106 Duus, Peter, 25 East Asian cultural sphere, 28, 140–141, 143–144. See also Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere Edo period, 7, 21, 30, 39n43, 40n53 education: class and, 132n51; colonial parents’ objectives, 113; New Order Movement and, 140; in Taiwan, 110–111, 114, 123, 124, 126–127, 129n7, 132nn45–46, 132n51. See also children’s magazines and newspapers emigration, 25, 33, 40n53, 47–48, 55 Emi Suiin, 22–23, 24, 25, 29, 33, 35, 36, 38n11. See also Osero (Othello adaptation) End of August, The (Hachigatsu no hate; Yū): about, 15, 166, 169, 170–171, 175, 186–187; gō (pseudonym) as double withdrawal, 175, 176–179; on impossibility of representing the unknowable, 168–169; and names (sōshi kaimei and “real names”), 169–170, 171–172, 173, 174–175, 185, 187n5; names and comfort women, 174–175, 180–183, 186, 189n47; and names as obi, 181–182, 189n41; publication, 187n1; textual complexity of, 168, 187n9, 189n39; “Yū Miri” character and name, 183–186, 187n8 Ericson, Joan E., 122–123, 130n10, 132n51 eta (burakumin) outcast group, 7–8, 22, 30, 67. See also shinheimin (new commoners) ethnicity, 4, 15. See also race

Index  193

family registry (koseki), 5, 30, 40n44, 108n19, 151, 167, 169, 176–177 family state (kazoku kokka) ideology, 24, 38n18, 153–154, 159 Fifth National Industrial Exposition, 21, 28, 34 film: for Japanese audiences, 134, 148n3; Man’ei (Manchukuo Film Association Corporation), 135, 136, 137–138, 145, 148n11, 153–154, 163; national policy films (kokusaku eiga), 136, 144. See also Ri Kōran; Suzhou Nights (film) First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), 25, 33, 38n25, 39n27. See also Port Arthur massacre Frühstück, Sabine, 118 Fujii Kansuke, 31–32 Fujii Shōzō, 114 Fujimori Seikichi: “Lieutenant Kusama,” 13, 79–81, 85n56 Fujin to katei (magazine), 115–116 Fujitani, Takashi, 9, 89, 159, 165n21 Gakuyū (magazine), 115, 118, 130n21, 131n25 gender: Japanese Orientalism and, 136; names (sōshi kaimei) and, 167, 176; Osero (Othello) and, 23–25, 29; passing and, 50. See also women genjina (pseudonym of hostesses, prostitutes, and other female entertainers), 175, 180–181, 182, 183 Germany, Nazi, 140, 144, 149n29, 159, 162, 163, 165n21 Gerstle, Andrew, 22 Ginsberg, Elaine K., 42, 50 gō (pseudonym), 175, 176–179 Gotō Shimpei, 114 Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, 125, 137, 139, 140, 149n19, 157. See also East Asian cultural sphere Greenetz(a), Lyuba, 163n3 Guattari, Félix, 18n16, 108n11 Haag, Andre, 48, 96 Hanscom, Christopher P., 10

Hara Hitoshi, 170 Hara Setsuko, 144, 146, 149n29 Harbin, 46, 47, 49–50, 51, 59n39 Harlan, John Marshall, 92 Hatada Takashi, 66 Henderson, Selina Lai, 87 High, Peter B., 162 household registration. See family registry (koseki) Hughes, Langston: about, 13, 87, 89, 105, 106; archives and divided genealogy, 103, 107n7; “Passing,” 89–91, 97–98; queer sensibility, 101; “Who’s Passing for Who?,” 99–101 Huh, Jang Wook, 87, 89 Hunt, Peter, 127 identity: colonized subjects and Japanese identity, 48–49; divide between mainland Japanese (naichi) and colonies (gaichi), 5, 17n14, 52, 53–54; Korea-Japan Merger and, 66; language and, 46, 48, 59n34; settlers and Japanese identity, 47–48, 49–50, 51–52. See also passing Ikeda Toshio, 125 immigration. See emigration imperialization (kōminka) movement, 4–5, 128, 134–135, 137, 139, 140, 141. See also assimilation; cultural integration Indigenous Peoples, in Taiwan, 17n7, 26–27, 39n31, 112, 113–114, 138–139 Itō Gingetsu: A Future Dream of the Japan-Korea Union (Nikkan gappō mirai no yume), 69, 71 Itō Hirobumi, 22, 72, 121 Japan: assimilation (dōka), 4, 9–11, 17n8, 65–66, 68, 114, 134–135; background, 25; colonial and minority intellectuals on, 89; colonial enterprises, 3–4; colonial (subaltern) subjects, 11, 17n7, 21–22, 34, 36, 48–49, 53; cosmopolitanism, 133–135, 137, 140–144; cultural production, 3, 9–11, 15–16;

194 Index

Japan (cont.)

jinryū (people), 133, 148n2 jinshu (race), 4 Jōno Denpei: Pockmarked Denshichirō (Abata Denshichirō), 28–29, 39n35 Just What Kind of Place Is Korea? (Chōsen-tte donna toko) guidebook, 66 kamishibai (paper theatre): My Precious Granddaughter (Kawaii mago musume) play, 1–3, 2, 11, 16nn1–2, 17n4; publishers of, 16n1 Kami Shōichirō, 122 Kano, Ayako, 23 Kasamori Isamu, 43 Kawaguchi Shōtarō: “Love in the Storm” (Aizen katsura), 127 Kawakami Otojirō, 20, 21, 22–23, 29, 37n4, 37n8. See also Osero (Othello adaptation) Kawasaki Kenko, 142

Kawashima, Ken, 62, 83n14 Kawashima Yoshiko (Aisin Goro Xinyu), 60n46 Kawashima Yoshiko (Jin Bihui), 135 kazoku kokka (family state) ideology, 24, 38n18, 153–154, 159 Kikuchi Kan: The Insurgent Son (Bōto no ko), 74 Kim Hang, 78, 81 Kim Saryang: about, 13, 88–89, 103, 106; archives and literary afterlives, 103–105, 107n7; “Into the Light” (Hikari no naka ni), 57n2, 64, 82, 94–97, 97–99, 101–103, 109n38; “Letter to Mother” (Haha e no tegami), 87–88, 89, 91; on passing, 88 Kiyotomo Sei, 116 Kleeman, Faye Yuan, 111, 124, 132n45, 154, 156 Ko Chunsŏk (Takaishi Toshio), 62, 63, 67, 81, 82 Kodomo asahi (magazine), 128 Kodomo no Manshū (magazine), 130n13 Kodomo sekai (periodical), 115 Komagome Takeshi, 17n8, 83n6 kōminka (imperialization) movement, 4–5, 128, 134–135, 137, 139, 140, 141. See also cultural integration; dōka (assimilation) Kono, Kimberly, 153, 159 Konoe Fumimarō, 139–140 Kon Satoshi: Millennium Actress (Sennen joyū), 146 Korea: clothing, 2, 16n3; colonial language policies, 96–97; Japanese posing as Koreans, 70; Japanese settlers in, 19n33, 50; Japan-Korea Merger, 66, 67, 69, 71, 75; Korean settlers in Manchukuo, 34; March First Movement, 19n33, 67, 75; My Precious Granddaughter (kamishibai play) and, 1–3, 2, 11, 16nn1–2, 17n4; terminology for, 168. See also The End of August (Yū); paranoia, passing, and Korea Problem; sōshi kaimei (establishing family names and

Index  195

changing given names); Zainichi Korean community koseki (family registry), 5, 30, 40n44, 108n19, 151, 167, 169, 176–177 Kōshi Hōshi, 115, 125–126, 132n49 Koto of the Continent (Tairiku no koto; Murō): about, 12, 42–44, 55–56; accusations of passing and, 12, 43–44, 56; Aiko’s ethnic background and difference, 43, 46–47, 50–51; anxiety over Japanese identity and womanhood, 47, 49–50, 52; background, 44–45; changes between serialized and book versions, 54–55; critical reactions to, 45–46; depiction of Manchuria, 46, 58n19; Ōuma’s profession, 58n23; reclaiming colonial enterprise, 54–55; “return” to Japan and adoption of new identity, 52–53, 54 Kuramoto, Kazuko, 48, 53 Kwantung Army, 55, 60n46, 60n58 Kwon, Nayoung Aimee, 64 Kyōdo Manshū (magazine), 130n13 language: association between German language and Western medicine, 156, 165n18; in colonial Korea, 96–97; in colonial Taiwan, 110–111, 124, 125, 126; as identity marker, 46, 48, 59n34; Kyōwago (harmony language (Daitōago, Greater East Asian language)), 141; in “Letter to Mother” (Kim), 88; in My Precious Granddaughter (kamishibai play), 1–2, 16n2; regional dialects in Japan, 59n30; “standard Japanese language” (hyōjungo), 110; in Suzhou Nights (film), 155–156 Legend of Ten Thousand Generations, A (Wanshi liufang; film), 137–138 Lie, John, 95–96 Lim Gyohong, 123–124, 127, 131n44 literature: Manchurian, 45, 58n12, 58n15; proletarian, 81; Zainichi, 166, 168, 169, 186–187. See also children’s magazines and newspapers; The End of August

(Yū); Hughes, Langston; Kim Saryang; Koto of the Continent (Murō); Yū Miri Li Xianglan. See Ri Kōran Manabi no tomo (periodical), 115 Manchukuo, 18n16, 34, 49, 142, 154 Manchuria, 44–46, 47–48, 49–50, 51–52, 55, 58n12, 58n15 Man’ei (Manchukuo Film Association Corporation), 135, 136, 137–138, 145, 148n11, 153–154, 163 March First Movement (1919), 19n33, 67, 75 marriage, 24, 38n17, 159–163 Masuda Tarokaja: New Othello (Shin Osero), 37n4 Matsuda, Hiroko, 40n60, 110 Mayako (periodical), 115 McClintock, Anne, 70 McDonald, Kate, 59n34 Meiji period. See Japan Mihalopoulos, Bill, 51 Miki Taku, 43, 45–46, 57n5 Millennium Actress (Sennen joyū; film), 146 Miller, Laura, 147 minor writer, 88, 108n11 minzoku (people, ethnic nation, ethnos), 4, 17n12, 81, 167 miwake (telling apart on sight), 65, 69, 74 Miyachi Tadahiko, 76 Miyatake Gaikotsu, 78 Mizuno Naoki, 71, 179 Mochizuki Yuriko, 48 modernity, colonial, 133. See also cosmopolitanism Mukden, 152 Murō Saisei, 44–45, 55. See also Koto of the Continent (Murō) music: continental melody (tairiku merodi), 134, 148n4 My Nightingale (Watakushi no uguisu; film), 142, 143, 149n23, 153 My Precious Granddaughter (Kawaii mago musume; kamishibai (paper theatre) play), 1–3, 2, 11, 16nn1–2, 17n4

196 Index

Nagayoshi Masao, 43 naisen ittai (“mainland Japan and Korea as one body” slogan), 3, 11, 62 Nakagami Kenji, 7 Nakanishi Tatsuharu, 43 Nakarai Tōsui: Wind Blowing Yellow Sand (Kōsa fuku kaze), 70 names: comfort women and, 174–175, 180–183, 186, 189n47; The End of August (Yū) and, 169–170, 171–172, 173, 174–175, 185, 187n5; genjina (pseudonym of hostesses, prostitutes, and other female entertainers), 175, 180–181, 182, 183; gō (pseudonym) as double withdrawal, 175, 176–179; as located within traditions of one’s ancestors, 175; obi and, 181–182, 189n41; power and, 177–178; in Yū Miri’s earlier works, 173–174; Zainichi Korean community and, 167, 169–170, 172–173, 185. See also sōshi kaimei (establishing family names and changing given names) Nashimoto Masako (Yi Pangja), 135 National Association for Educational Paper Theater (Nippon kyōiku kamishibai kyōkai), 1, 16n1 national policy films (kokusaku eiga), 136, 144. See also Ri Kōran Nazi Germany, 140, 144, 149n29, 159, 162, 163, 165n21 new commoners (shinheimin), 7, 29–33, 34–35, 40n53 New Defense State, 139–140 New Earth, The (Atarashiki tsuchi; film), 144 New Order Movement (Shin Taisei Undō), 139–140 New Othello (Shin Osero; play), 37n4 Ninagawa Yukio, 21 Nomura Hiromasa, 154. See also Suzhou Nights (film) obi, and names, 181–182, 189n41 Oka Mari, 183, 186 Oka Onitarō, 30

Okinawans, 28, 34, 40n60 Omi, Michael, 30 Orientalism, 136, 144 Osero (Othello adaptation): about, 11–12, 20–22; adaptation and synopsis, 22–23; characters’ names, 38n12; comparison to other Japanese adaptations of Othello, 21, 28–29, 37n4; displaced abjection and, 28, 35; and gender and patriarchy, 23–25, 38n15; Iago’s motivation, 41n66; Okinawan performance, 34; passing in, 34–35; Pescadores Islands and, 26, 39n27; posing as empire in, 25–28, 39n29; seigeki (straight theater) and, 23; shinheimin (new commoners) and, 29–30, 33–34; subaltern colonizers and, 34, 35–36 Ōtaka Yoshiko. See Ri Kōran Othello (Shakespeare): about, 20; Iago’s motivation, 41n66; Japanese adaptations, 21, 28–29, 37n4; performance in colonial Calcutta, 20, 37n2; Western views, 21. See also Osero (Othello adaptation) paranoia, passing, and Korea Problem: about, 12–13, 61, 63–65, 81–83; inability to recognize passing, 65–67; against Koreans in mainland Japan (Korean Panic), 74–77, 78, 81–82; misrecognized mainland Japanese, 78–81; surveillance in Korea, 67–68, 70–74; Yanagawa’s outburst, 62–63 Paris Peace Conference (1919), 140 passing: about, 6–9, 11, 15, 42, 142; accusations of, 12, 43–44, 56, 57n7; American exceptionalism and, 107n8; assimilation and, 65; in colonial Japanese literature, 57n2; On the Eve of the Uprising (Yŏm) and, 93–94, 108n21; gender and, 50; impasses generated by, 88–91; “Into the Light” (Kim) and, 82, 94–97, 97–99, 101–103, 109n38; in Kim Saryang’s work, 88; Koto of the Continent (Saisei)

Index  197

and, 42–44, 47, 49, 55–56; “Letter to Mother” (Kim) and, 87–88, 89, 91; Li Xianglan’s multiethnic passing, 137–139, 142–143, 151–152; Osero (Othello adaptation) and, 34–35; “Passing” (Hughes) and, 89–91, 97–98; Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and, 91–93; racial ambiguity and, 99–101, 101–102; racial mixing and, 97–99; relational subjectivity and, 102–103; “Who’s Passing for Who?” (Hughes) and, 99–101; Zainichi Korean community and, 7–8, 15, 83, 95–96, 166–167, 170. See also paranoia, passing, and Korea Problem patriarchy, 24, 25, 52, 54, 177–178 persuasion, 9–11, 15 Pescadores Islands, 26, 39n27 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 91–93, 108n16 Podoresov(a), Madam, 152–153, 164n6 Port Arthur massacre, 26, 36, 38n26 posing, 8–9, 15. See also passing propaganda, 9–11 prostitutes, 24–25, 51, 175. See also comfort women Qiqihar, 54–55, 60n58 race: conflation with ethnicity and nationality, 4; contemporary impacts, 11; differential inclusion and, 18n16; impasse from racial ambiguity, 99–101, 101–102; in Japanese Empire, 20–21, 39n43, 134; Manchukuo’s “harmony of five races,” 154, 155; Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and, 91–93, 108n16; racial equality, 140; racial purity, 97–99, 152, 155, 159, 162, 163; shinheimin (new commoners) and, 7, 29–33, 34, 40n53; Suzhou Nights (film) and miscegenation, 155, 159, 162–163; use of term, 164n12, 164n14; Whiteness, 47, 91–92; “Yamato race” (Yamato minzoku), 165n21. See also passing Ragussis, Michael, 142, 143

Richards, Thomas, 63 Ri Kōran (Li Xianglan, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Shirley Yamaguchi, Ōtaka Yoshiko): about, 14–15, 135–136, 147, 152; agency and complicity, 141–142, 145; arrest in postwar China, 144–145, 151–152, 163n1, 163n3; author’s meeting with, 149n22; autobiographies and self-exonerating narrative strategy, 146–147, 150nn34–35; background and double identity, 152–153; Continental Trilogy (tairiku sanbusaku), 136, 140, 154; film career, 145; multiethnic passing, 137–139, 142–143, 151–152; name, 145, 148n5, 150n30, 152, 164n5, 164n10; postwar career in Japan, 145–146, 150n32; propagandistic and romantic roles played by, 136, 153–154; in Suzhou Nights, 156–157, 160–163, 161 Saga Hiroko (Aishinkakura Hiro), 135 Said, Edward, 15–16 Saito, Satoru 71 Sakaguchi Reiko: “Spring and Autumn” (Shunjū), 48 Sakai Tsuyashi, 45 Sano Shūji, 155 Sata Ineko: “A Marriage Proposal” (Endan), 48 Satō Haruo, 125; “Demon Bird” (Machō), 113 seigeki (straight theater), 23 settlers, Japanese: anxieties over settler women, 51–52, 60n49; continental brides, 47–48, 55, 59n25; emigration to Manchuria, 55; identity anxieties, 49–50, 60n55; language and, 96–97; propaganda for, 10–11; relations with Koreans, 19n33 Shakespeare, William, 22, 29, 38n11. See also Osero (Othello adaptation); Othello (Shakespeare) Shimazaki Tōson: The Broken Commandment (Hakai), 7, 32, 40n56 Shimizu Hiroshi, 139

198 Index

shinheimin (new commoners), 7, 29–33, 34–35, 40n53 shinpa (new school) theater, 22, 37n5 Shōnen kurabu (magazine), 122, 124 shuzoku (tribe, race), 4 social imaginary, 133 Song of the White Orchid (Hakuran no uta; film), 143, 148n8, 154 sōshi kaimei (establishing family names and changing given names): about, 18n17, 169–170, 170–171, 175–176; as differential inclusion, 5–6, 11; The End of August (Yū) and, 172, 177, 179; gender and, 167, 179; memory of, 185; production of Japanese-style names, 173, 188n18; resistance to, 177, 179; simplistic binary of “real names” vs., 176, 185, 186, 189n47 Stallybrass, Peter, 28 Stoler, Ann, 68 Stonequist, Everett, 7, 65 Suematsu Kenchō, 33 Sugiura Jūgō, 32; Hankai’s Dream Story (Hankai yume monogatari), 32 surveillance. See paranoia, passing, and Korea Problem Suzhou Nights (film): about, 154–155, 163; biopower and, 157–159; language as cultural cue, 155–156; marriage and interracial fears, 159–163, 161; Meilan as cultured native, 156–157; music in, 165n19; public health and, 157–159, 158 Suzuki Masae, 34 Tainichi kodomo shinbun (newspaper), 112, 115 Taisho period, 118 Taiwan: about, 25; assimilation and resistance, 114; children’s magazines and newspapers, 111–112, 114–116, 130n20; educational goals for Japanese vs. Taiwanese children, 112, 114; education system, 110–111, 114, 123, 124, 126–127, 129n7, 132nn45–46, 132n51; Indigenous Peoples and

tropes, 17n7, 26–27, 39n31, 112, 113–114, 138–139; Japanese language in, 110–111, 124, 125, 126; Kōshi Hōshi’s experience, 125–126; lost colonial-era periodicals, 116; memories of colonial era, 123–124, 129; names policy and, 18n16; Osero (Othello adaptation) and, 26–28 Taiwan Expedition (1871), 39n27 Taiwan kodomo sekai (magazine), 112, 115, 116–119 Taiwan shōnen kai (magazine), 112, 113–114, 115, 119–122, 120, 131n32, 132n46 Taiwan shōnenkai (periodical), 115 Takada Chinami, 176 Takahashi Yoshio, 30–31 Tanaka Katsuhiko, 172 theater: kamishibai (paper theatre), 16n1; modern/Westernized theater, 22, 37n8; seigeki (straight theater), 23; shinpa (new school), 22, 37n5. See also My Precious Granddaughter (kamishibai (paper theatre) play); Osero (Othello adaptation) Tierney, Robert, 64, 113, 131n28 Toby, Ronald, 70 Tokugawa period, 70 Tokutomi Kenjirō: The Cuckoo (Hototogisu), 188n36 Tokutomi Sohō, 79 Tokyo Metropolitan Police Agency: Chronicle of the Great Taishō Earthquake and Fire ( Taishō daishinkasai-shi), 76 Tokyo Puck (magazine), 72, 73 Torii Ryūzō, 32 Tozawa Koya, 22, 29, 38n11, 131n28 trains, 91–92 transpacific Afro-Asian solidarities: about, 13, 86, 105–106; and archives and literary afterlives, 103–105, 107n7; passing impasses and, 88–91; racial ambiguity and, 99–101, 101–102; racial mixing and, 97–99; relational subjectivity and, 102–103; scholarship on, 87

Index  199

Tsuboi Shōgorō, 28 Tsubouchi Shōyō, 29, 118 Tsurumi, Patricia E., 111 Udagawa Bunkai: Bandō Warriors (Bandō musha), 39n35 Ueda, Atsuko, 4 United States of America: African Americans, 33, 42, 89; anti-Asian racism, 140; Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 91–93, 108n16. See also Hughes, Langston; transpacific Afro-Asian solidarities Uno Kōji: “Memory of a Lullaby” (Yurikago no uta no omoide), 113 Washburn, Dennis, 10 White, Allan, 28 Whiteness, 47, 91–92 Williams, Linda, 8 Wilson, Woodrow, 140 Winant, Howard, 30 women: anxiety over Japanese settler women, 51–52, 60n49; comfort women, 171, 174–175, 180–183, 186, 189n47; continental brides, 47–48, 55, 59n25; domestic violence against, 98; iconic female figures, 135; prostitutes, 24–25, 51, 175; sōshi kaimei surname policy and, 179–180. See also gender; Ri Kōran Wu Zhuoliu: Orphan of Asia (Ajia no koji), 57n2 Yagi Akiko, 48 Yamaguchi Fumio, 145, 152 Yamaguchi Yoshiko (Shirley Yamaguchi). See Ri Kōran Yamasaki, Nobuko, 135, 137

“Yamato race” (Yamato minzoku), 165n21 Yanagawa Heisuke, 62–63, 82 Yanagita Kunio, 125 Yanase Keisuke, 32–33 Yang Tian-Song, 119 Yasumoto Takako, 43 Yellow River (Huanghe; film), 137 Yomota Inuhiko, 136, 146, 151 Yŏm Sangsŏp: On the Eve of the Uprising (Mansejŏn), 93–94, 108n21 Yoon Keun Cha, 173 Yosano Tekkan, 58n12; “The Petite Assassin” (Koshikaku), 70 Yoshikawa Seima, 115–116, 130n23 You and Me (Kimi to boku; film), 136, 138, 142 Yu Chunhyŏk, 77 Yū Miri, 166, 169, 170, 173–174, 184; The Cradle on the Shore (Mizube no yurikago), 184; Family Cinema (Kazoku shinema), 170, 173; Festival for the Fish (Uo no matsuri), 173; Full House (Furuhausu), 170, 173; Gold Rush (Gōrudo rasshu), 173–174; The Sunflower Coffin (Himawari no hitsugi), 173. See also The End of August (Yū) Yu Peiyun, 115, 116, 123, 125, 130n23 Yuzurihara Masako: “Korean Lynching” (Chōsen yaki), 57n2 Zainichi Korean community: literature, 166, 168, 169, 186–187; names and, 167, 169–170, 172–173, 185; passing and, 7–8, 15, 83, 95–96, 166–167, 170; racism and violence against, 96; use of term, 168, 188n13. See also The End of August (Yū) Ziomek, Kirsten, 17n7

CONTRIBUTORS

JOAN E. ERICSON is a professor of Japanese in the Department of Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, and Russian Studies at Colorado College. The author of a variety of works, including Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese ­Women’s Literature ­ ­ ­ (1997), editor of Manga Botchan (2011), and cotranslator of tanka by survivors of the March 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami in northeastern Japan in The Sky Unchanged: Tears and Smiles (2014), she is currently working on a book-length manuscript on the history of Japanese children’s literature. She has served the profession as the president of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese and a member of the Northeast Asia Council (NEAC). ANDRE HA AG is an assistant professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Hawai‘i–Mānoa. He received his PhD in Japanese literature from Stanford University. Haag’s research explores how the insecurities and terrors of colonialism attendant to the annexation of Korea and internalization of the “Korea Problem” were inscribed within the literature, culture, and vocabularies that circulated within the Japanese imperial metropole. Haag is completing a book manuscript on this topic titled “Fear and Loathing in Imperial Japan: Colonial Integration, Insurgency, and the Cultures of Korean Peril.” K ANG YUNI is an assistant professor in the Student Performance Acceleration Center at Soka University. She received her PhD from Waseda University in 2020. Her research focuses on contemporary Zainichi literature and criticism. Most recently, she coedited Watashi mo jidai no ichibu desu: Kawasaki Sakuramoto harumonitachi ga tsuzutta seikatsushi (2019). FAYE YUAN KLEEMAN is professor emerita of Japanese studies at the University of Colorado. She specializes in modern and contemporary Japanese literature, culture, and film, with a focus on gender, visual culture, and colonial and Japanophone literature. Her publications include the books Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South (2003); Dai-Nihon teikoku no kureōru (2007); Diguode taiyanxia (2009): and In Transit: Formation of an East 201

202 Contributors

Asian Cultural Sphere (2014). Recent articles include “Chain Reactions— Japanese Colonialism and Global Cosmopolitanism in East Asia” (2015); “Here, There, and ‘Beyond’—Japanese Views on the Afterlife” (2018); and “The Unbearable, Endless Anxiety of Eating: Food Consumption in Japan after 3/11” (2018). KIMBERLY KONO is a professor of Japanese language and literature at Smith College and the author of Romance, Family and Nation in Japanese Colonial Literature ­ ­ (2010). Her essay on imperialist motherhood appeared in Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, Critique (2012). Kono has also published articles on colonial literary production in the Journal of Japanese Studies, Japanese Language and Literature, ­ ­ ­ and the U.S.-Japan ­ ­Women’s Journal. Her current research focuses on images of Japanese women in colonial Manchuria. NAYOUNG AIMEE KWON is an associate professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Program in Cinematic Arts, and Program in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, at Duke University. She is the founding director of Duke’s Asian American and Diaspora Studies Program and codirector of the Duke Games and Culture Humanities Lab, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her publications include Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan (2015), Theorizing Colonial Cinema: Reframing Production, Circulation, and Consumption of Film in Asia (2022, coedited with Takushi Odagiri and Moonim Baek), and “Transcolonial Film Coproductions in the Japanese Empire: Antinomies in the Colonial Archive,” a special issue of Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (2013, coedited with Takashi Fujitani). CATHERINE RYU is an associate professor of Japanese literature and culture and the director of the Japanese Studies Program at Michigan State University. She received her PhD at the University of Michigan, and her teaching and research interests include classical Japanese, Heian women’s narratives, Japanese culture and literature, ­ ­ ­ Korean literature, ­ ­ ­ Zainichi literature, ­ ­ ­ game studies, translation studies, children’s literature, digital humanities, and global studies. Her current project focuses on ethnic Korean authors in China and their writings in the 1980s. CINDI TEXTOR is an assistant professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Utah. She is the author of articles on colonial and Zainichi Korean literature, and her book manuscript in progress is tentatively titled “Anatomies of Incoherence: Zainichi Literature and the Intersectional Politics of Speech.” ROBERT TIERNEY is a professor of modern Japanese literature in the Department of East Asian Literature and Culture at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. His major publications include Monster of the Twentieth Century:

Contributors  203

Kōtoku Shūsui and Japan’s First Anti-Imperialist Movement (2015), and Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (2010). He is currently translating Nakae Chōmin’s One Year and a Half and writing a monograph on death writings in the Meiji period. NOBUKO ISHITATE- OKUNOMIYA YAMASAKI is an associate professor of Japanese in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, as well as the Program of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, at Lehigh University. With a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Washington and an interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic approach, her research focuses on gender, sexuality, race, class, affect, and temporality as represented in literature, film, and art. She is the author of Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire: Fragmenting History (2021). CHRISTINA YI is an associate professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of British Columbia. She is a specialist in modern Japanese-language literature and culture, with a particular focus on issues of postcoloniality, language ideology, genre, and cultural studies. Her first monograph, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea, was published in 2018. She was also the coeditor for a special feature on Zainichi Korean literature ­ ­­ and film for Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture (2019).