Colonizing Language by Christina Yi (introduction)

COLONIZING

LANGUAGE Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea

CHRISTINA YI

INTRODUCTION

I

less than one year after the end of Japan’s long FifteenYear War (1931–1945), the prominent Japanese writer Shiga Naoya (1883–1971) published a controversial essay in which he advocated changing Japan’s national language from Japanese to French.1 The essay, “National Language Issues” (Kokugo mondai), blamed the Japanese language for stunting the country’s cultural growth and hindering the process of postwar reconstruction: “Although we may not fully realize it because we have been habituated to our national language since childhood, there is no language more incomplete and inconvenient than Japan’s national language. When one thinks of how badly the development of our culture has been hindered as a result, one realizes that we must use this opportunity to solve this problem at all costs. If we do not, it is no exaggeration to say that there is no hope that Japan will ever become a truly cultured nation.”2 While admitting that his belief in the inadequacy of the Japanese language was based more on his writer’s intuition than on any concrete linguistic evidence, Shiga also expressed confidence that his radical proposal could and should be adopted. Koreans had been able to “switch” (kirikaeta) to Japanese under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), he noted—so why couldn’t the Japanese people switch to speaking French, the most beautiful and cultured language in the world?

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In the end, Shiga’s arguments were met largely by silence, and the essay had little impact on the language-reform policies that were enacted during the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952). What is striking about the essay, however, is not necessarily its message but the very fact of its existence.

What were the historical and social conditions that could prompt one of Japan’s most well-known novelists to publish such a suggestion, in other words? How and why does language mediate the vertical relationship Shiga draws between Korea (formerly colonized by Japan), Japan (defeated and occupied by the Allied powers), and France (“liberated” and still a colonial power)? And who is included in his references to “we”?

This book seeks to address such questions by examining how Japaneselanguage literature by Korean writers both emerged out of and stood in opposition to discourses of national language, literature, and identity. I begin with a study of the rise of Japanese-language writings by Korean colonial subjects in the 1930s and early 1940s, reassessing the sociopolitical factors involved in the production and consumption of these texts. I then trace how postwar reconstructions of ethnolinguistic nationality contributed to the creation of new literary canons in Japan and Korea, which were now configured along national, instead of imperial, borders. Although many of the Japanese-language works discussed in this book were condemned or suppressed in both countries after the war, these texts continued to be constitutive of the newly reconfigured literary canons precisely through their excision, as a structural aporia that both erased and appropriated the memory of the Japanese language as a language of imperialism.

In this sense, this book presents a discursive history of modern Japaneselanguage literature from Korea and Japan. “Japanese-language literature” (Nihongo bungaku) is a contemporary term, used most often by scholars wishing to move beyond the national literature paradigm. Its origin can be traced back to the self-identified zainichi (resident) Korean author Kim S kp m (b. 1925).3 An outspoken critic of Japan’s colonial amnesia, Kim has argued that the Japanese that he and other zainichi writers employ necessarily differs from that of “native” Japanese speakers because of their acute awareness of Japanese as such and the fraught history that forced that language upon them. Another influential conceptualization has come

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from the comparative literature scholar Nishi Masahiko, who defines the term in relation to the gaichi (“outer territories,” or colonial peripheries) as “literature created by users of Japanese who come into sustained contact with, or adjacency to, languages other than Japanese.” 4 This definition is not limited to nonnative speakers but includes any and all writers who employ Japanese with a conscious awareness of its invented borders or who use it in an environment that makes those borders explicit. As an example Nishi cites Mori gai’s “The Dancing Girl” (Maihime, 1890), a linguistically hybrid text very much preoccupied with national and ethnic hierarchies.

My own use of the term follows largely that of Nishi Masahiko: instead of treating Korea and Japan as separate units of analysis, I employ a more flexible framework centered on language in order to fully explore the ways key texts were produced, received, and circulated during the rise and fall of the Japanese empire. The writers featured in this book represent a range of backgrounds, subject positions, and political orientations—from the proletarian-writer-turned-“collaborator” Chang Hy kchu (1905–1997), who was born and raised in Korea as a colonial subject but who died in Japan as a naturalized Japanese citizen; to the Japanese settler Obi J z (1909–1979), who professed a sincere love for his Korean peers even as his status as colonizer gave him privileges over them; to the zainichi writer Kim Talsu (1919–1997), who vociferously criticized the legacies of Japanese imperialism but could do so only in the language of his former colonizers. However, even in their competing narratives of identity and belonging we can still locate a common anxiety regarding the limits of language itself. Studying such texts illuminates how the assumed confluence of nation, ethnicity, and literature embedded in the term “Japanese (national) literature” (Nihon bungaku or kokubungaku) was never innocent nor inevitable but rather linked from the beginning to the problematics of imperial control.

In exploring the Japanese language and its effects, then, I am concerned not with linguistic data and analysis as such but with language ideology.

Judith Irvine’s succinct definition of language ideology as “the cultural (or subcultural) system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” provides a useful starting point for this book.5 Language ideology is of course by no means

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restricted to colonial contexts—but it can become particularly visible in them, as the seemingly self-evident relationship between language and national identity can no longer be taken for granted. All the writers I consider here—Korean and Japanese—shared a preoccupation with delineating the borders of a Japanese (language) literary canon, in part because the sociopolitical conditions in which they wrote put those borders in question. In their fiction we can see how language use itself was a site of contestation and negotiation, with urgent political ramifications.

Examining Japanese-language texts from the 1930s through the early 1950s thus allows us to explicate in full the interrelated issues of cultural production, nation/empire building, and the formation of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities. As Raymond Williams stresses in Marxism and Literature, literary form is “inevitably a relationship” embedded in and constitutive of processes that are at once social, historical, and material.6 The ideology of the “national language” (kokugo) bound metropole and colony together through a complex system of textbooks and signages, government laws and educational practices, publishing markets and propaganda. The question of who was allowed to lay claim to the national language did not simply reflect but in fact constituted the Japanese empire and all its contradictions, and the answers given for that question would change even as the borders of Japan did. This does not mean that writers were slotted into some preexisting, self-evident category called Japanese literature. Rather, literary canonization in modern Japan was itself the process through which ideologies of (national, imperial, linguistic) identity came to signify, a point I detail in the section below.

A N AT I O N A N D E M P I R E B U I L T THROUGH LANGUAGE In the essay “National Language Issues,” Shiga Naoya cites the linguistic theories of Mori Arinori (1847–1889), who in 1873 proposed that Japan adopt English as a medium of communication. Mori, who served as Japan’s

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first envoy to the United States and later as Japan’s first minister of education for the fledging Meiji government (1868–1912), was concerned primarily with Japan’s precarious position vis-à-vis a dominant West. Mori stressed that his advocation of English was one made out of necessity, rather than desire. Japan’s rapidly expanding role in world affairs had forced “the absolute necessity of mastering the English language,” he argued, and only once Japan yielded to the linguistic “domination” of English would its political independence be secured.7 Mori’s suggestion would later come to be popularly known as the “Proposal to Abolish Japanese” (Nihongo Haishi Ron, or Kokugo Haishi Ron), and Shiga’s essay largely follows the same easy conflation of kokugo with Japanese. It must be pointed out, however, that this is an anachronistic and retrospective reading of Mori, one that could be made only after the intertwined relationship between national polity and language had become thoroughly naturalized. When Mori published his writings, there was as yet no set, unified notion of kokugo—nor any consensus on how to define the contours and borders of the Japanese language. Mori’s proposal was not a total rejection of the Japanese language so much as a declaration that “Japanese” was far from standardized or unified and therefore ill-suited to efficiently respond to the demands of the Western world.

By the 1890s, however, the political and linguistic landscape had changed considerably: Japan had a national army, national education system, and imperial ambitions, all of which necessitated new debate on the role of language in producing and maintaining a strong nation-state. In 1894, linguistic nationalism found its most influential advocate in Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937, also known as Ueda Mannen), a linguist who became the leading architect of national language policy during the Meiji period. In a public lecture called “The National Language and the NationState” (Kokugo to kokka to) given in October 1894, Ueda laid out a number of basic kokugo tenets that would have an immense impact on later Japanese language policy makers. Using a metaphor of blood and the body, Ueda emphasized the organic link between language and the nation and their indispensible relationship to the kokutai (national polity). The Japanese language, Ueda declared, “is the spiritual blood of the Japanese people.

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Japan’s national polity is maintained by this spiritual blood, and the Japanese race is united because of this most strong and long-preserved chain.” 8 Ueda’s lecture both promoted and responded to a growing branch of Western (particularly German) linguistics that viewed a unified national language as not a result but the very condition of a unified nation. The diachronic mode of language united its speakers through the continuity of history; the synchronic mode of language united them through the coherence of space.9 Ueda had previously spent three years studying at Berlin University and Leipzig University, during a time when issues surrounding the classification and “purification” of the German language were at the forefront of intellectual debate. Members of the influential German Language Association (Allgemeine Deutsche Sprachverein) in particular argued that the lingering presence of foreign words in the German language constituted a dangerous obstacle in maintaining the integrity of the newly united German Empire.

National language was necessarily a condition of national consciousness and the thread that bound all the disparate parts of the empire together.10 The timing of Ueda’s lecture takes on particular significance when considered against the global system of the nation-state and empire in the nineteenth century. Given two months after the start of the First SinoJapanese War and subsequently printed as part of the essay collection For the National Language (Kokugo no tame) two months after the war’s end, the lecture and its publication bracketed a key moment in history where Japanese nationalism and Japanese imperialism intersected. Japan acquired Taiwan as its first formal colony in 1895 through its victory over China; annexation of Korea followed in 1910. The colonial policies it pursued in both places thereafter would spell out the unspoken corollary to Ueda’s insistence that a strong national language ensured an independent nation— namely, that only independent nations would be given the right to determine and protect a national language.

From the beginning, Japanese policy makers in colonial Korea and Taiwan consistently used the term kokugo (national language) and not Nihongo (Japanese language) to refer to Japanese in official documents and ordinances. Koreans and Taiwanese speaking Japanese, in other words, were said to be speaking the “national language.” The distinction between kokugo

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and Nihongo is an important one, because it reveals one of the ideological lynchpins behind Japan’s colonial strategies. One of the justifications put forth for colonization was the claim that Japan was combating the threat of Western imperialism. In order to set itself apart from Europe and the United States, then, the colonies had to be made both part of and one with Japan, at least at the level of discourse.11 Despite this rhetoric of inclusion, kokugo ideology was in reality more often wielded to maintain the distinction between colonizer and colonized. After the proindependence March First Movement in Korea in 1919, for example, efforts were made by the Government-General of Korea (GGK) to create at least a semblance of social equality in the legal structure on the peninsula. At the time, the public school education system had been divided along ethnic lines. Koreans were forbidden from attending the better-funded and more prestigious primary schools ( jinj sh gakk ) of their Japanese peers; instead, they attended a four-year regular school (futs gakk ). A February 1922 ordinance attempted to address this inequality by raising the amount of primary school education to six years for Koreans and revising the age of admission from eight to six years old, the same as Japanese nationals. The ordinance also struck out all obvious references to ethnic segregation—while still keeping segregation in place, by adopting the phrase kokugo o j y suru mono (those who habitually use the national language). Now only “those who habitually use the national language” were allowed to attend primary schools; those who did not were relegated to the regular schools.12 The start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 saw the full-scale launch of k minka (imperialization, Kr. hwangminhwa) policies in the colonies in an attempt to escalate assimilation efforts. Examples include s shi kaimei (literally, “establishing family names and changing given names”), enforced visits to Shinto shrines, and educational reforms. By the 1930s, Korea had been a colony of Japan for almost three decades, producing a young generation of Koreans who had been educated entirely or almost entirely through the colonial education system. Many of the intellectuals mentioned in this book completed their higher education in Tokyo and read and wrote fluently in Japanese. During the k minka period, the GGK

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encouraged Japanese-language publications by Koreans through sponsored contests, journals, and literary organizations. This push toward the Japanese language was accompanied by a concomitant suppression of Korean, through educational measures restricting and then finally abolishing the teaching of the Korean language in public schools in 1938 and 1941, respectively, and the forced shutdown of a number of Korean-language presses starting in the late 1930s.

The existence of a Japanese-language canon in Korea was essential to maintaining the logic of Japanese imperialism, which positioned Korea as part of “Japan” in spirit if not in civic equality. Promoting the Japanese language became increasingly important to the GGK not only for advancing practical goals, such as effectively incorporating Korean volunteer soldiers into the Japanese military, but also for maintaining the ideology of inclusion and imperial benevolence. And yet this ideology could inadvertently turn on itself through the very terms of its logic. Colonial subjects who wielded the Japanese language could claim the same right to belong as a “native” Japanese citizen—though whether or not they would be heeded is another question entirely, one I explore in full in the first three chapters of this book.

The latter half of the book moves to the immediate postwar period in Japan in order to consider how urgent new issues of time (remembering and historicizing Japanese imperialism) and space (redefining national borders in response to the nascent Cold War) affected Japanese literary production. The announcement of Japan’s surrender to the Allied powers in August 1945 signaled not only the end of the Pacific War but also the end of the Japanese empire, as one of the conditions of surrender was the redrawing of borders: according to the Allies, Japan was now to be a nationstate consisting only of “the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine.”13 Meanwhile, Korea, too, found new national borders being imposed on the peninsula, as the intervention of foreign powers led to the creation of the thirty-eighth parallel in August 1945 and the establishment of two competing governments on the Korean peninsula by 1948.

Japan was occupied by the Allied powers from 1945 to 1952, a period that has come to be known as the Occupation period (senry ki). Under the direc-

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tion of General Headquarters/Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, led by General Douglas MacArthur, a new Constitution of Japan was drafted and a series of changes were implemented in the areas of land reform, labor reform, women’s rights, and education. Most relevant to this book are the changes in definitions of citizenship that also occurred during this time.

Even as late as 1947, colonial subjects were still technically counted as Japanese nationals, as they had been during the colonial period. With the Alien Registration Law of 1947, the Koreans who remained in Japan were forced to register as aliens. In 1952, they were stripped of Japanese citizenship and thereby effectively rendered stateless, as Japan did not have diplomatic relations with either North Korea or South Korea at that time. The term zainichi (literally, “residing in Japan”) came to be applied to this Korean diasporic community in Japan, and zainichi Korean literature roughly defined as those texts written in Japanese by ethnically Korean writers living in Japan.

Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allied powers quickly became articulated as a break between a “prewar” and “wartime” history (senzen, sench ) and the “postwar” present (sengo). In Korea, meanwhile, the period between 1945 and 1948—that is, between the formal end of Japanese colonization and the creation of two competing governments on the peninsula— has been referred to as the “liberation space” (haebang konggan). Although Japan’s defeat was celebrated by many in Korea and elsewhere as the end of empire, the swift appearance of Soviet forces in the north and the U.S. military in the south soon belied expectations of full independence. With the partitioning of the peninsula, the very terms used to indicate “national literature” also underwent fragmentation, as Korean-language writings were reconfigured into North Korean literature (Chos n munhak) and South Korean literature (Han’guk munhak).

In recent years, a growing number of scholars have questioned the aforementioned national histories and literary canons that were constructed in the postwar/postliberation periods. The past decade has seen a boom in English-language scholarship on colonial-period literature and the transcultural activities of Japanese and Korean writers in the context of empire.14 New research by Korean scholars has likewise shifted to consider hitherto overlooked texts from the late colonial period, including those that were

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previously dismissed as “collaborationist” in nature.15 Meanwhile, several important studies from North America have examined zainichi texts in relation to one another, situating these texts in the literary milieu of postwar Japan.16 However, there has been little attempt to provide a sustained analysis of the continuities and disruptions of Japanese-language literary production across the 1945 divide. This study addresses this lacuna by focusing on the 1930s through the 1950s, a crucial period in which writers in Korea and Japan were forced to directly confront or rearticulate the relationship between language, literature, and national/imperial belonging. In doing so, it shows how contemporary divisions between Korean and Japanese literatures, colonial and postcolonial history, and resistance and collaboration cannot be understood apart from the ideologies of language that were generated out of the trajectories of Japanese imperialism.

T H E I R O N I E S O F “ R E S I D E N T ” K O R E A N S TAT U S In order to illustrate the central role language ideology plays in formations of colonial and postcolonial literatures, here I wish to briefly introduce Yuhi (1988), a novella written by the zainichi Korean writer Yi Yangji (1955–1992).17 Since winning the Akutagawa Prize in 1989, Yuhi has been regularly held up by critics as a notable example of Japanese-language fiction because of its attention to the role of language in identity politics.

Through the course of a single evening in Seoul, the unnamed Korean narrator delves into six months’ worth of memories of her friendship with the eponymous Yuhi, the zainichi Korean woman at the heart of the novel.

Like a “small, restless knot,” Yuhi exists in the narrator’s recollections as someone who is paradoxically both inscrutable and transparent; present in memory although physically absent; impossibly childish, and impossibly mature.18 The dichotomies of her personality, in turn, reflect the dichotomy of her split nationality. Although Yuhi struggles to find a balance between the two words that make up her identity—zainichi and Korean—

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she ultimately fails. She flees back to Japan, unable to carve a niche for herself in Seoul, and the bereft narrator is left to wonder why.

In one flashback, the narrator recalls how she and Yuhi fell into a discussion about the merits of the colonial-period writer Yi Sang (born Kim Haegy ng, 1910–1937). Yuhi confesses that although she admires Yi Sang, she is much more drawn to Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950?): “Students are biased against [Yi Kwangsu] because they say he was a pup-

pet of the Japanese empire, but my feelings on the subject are more complicated.”

Yuhi’s voice dropped. She had probably never told her classmates

that she admired Yi Kwangsu.

I said, “Yi Sang and Yi Kwangsu are completely different, aren’t they?”

“Yes, but I just can’t stop thinking about Yi Kwangsu,” Yuhi replied,

her eyes boring into mine again.

(412)

Although widely considered to be a pioneer of modern Korean literature, Yi Kwangsu’s writings from the k minka period led to his later denigration as a pro-Japanese collaborator. In contrast, Yi Sang has been hailed for his “resistance” against colonialism, as perhaps most emblemized in his choosing a pen name that satirically appropriated a Japanese coworker’s mistaken address to “Ri-san” (Mr. Yi).19 The narrator makes no comment on the reputations of these authors at the time, but the significance of Yuhi’s reading preferences becomes increasingly clear as the story progresses. To the unnamed narrator, Yuhi’s inability to adapt to life in Seoul and her lack of progress in learning the Korean language are taken as proof that “in the end, zainichi Koreans are all Japanese.”20 Instead of “making this language and this country her own, she did the exact opposite: she turned back to the Japanese language. She revealed her true self through the Japanese she wrote” (427). In the end, what separates the narrator from Yuhi is not the physical distance between Japan and Korea but the linguistic gap opened up by the Japanese language itself.

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The narrator’s comment that zainichi Koreans “are all Japanese” ironically echoes the k minka essays of Yi Kwangsu, whose self-declared desire to “become Japanese” later came under attack in postliberation Korea.21 In Yuhi, however, the dividing lines between the colonial and the postcolonial, collaboration and resistance, and even Korea and Japan fall apart the moment they are brought into contact with the character of Yuhi, who is embodied by the Japanese writing she leaves behind. It is suggestive that neither the narrator nor Yuhi directly addresses the fact that both Yi Sang and Yi Kwangsu wrote in Japanese as well as in Korean. Only once the memory of their Japanese writings has been suppressed can Yi Sang and Yi Kwangsu stand as polar opposites in the collaboration-resistance binary.

Introducing the Japanese language back into this binary exposes it as a false dichotomy.

The language of the novella—which is narrated in Japanese by a Korean narrator who supposedly knows no Japanese—ironically underscores this point: it is the Japanese language that makes up the narration, but this fact can never be gestured to by the narrator herself; instead, the Japanese language is meant to act as a transparent translation through which the reader can access the Korean narrator’s thoughts. However, the fiction of transparency is constantly undercut by the Korean words, alphabet, and phrases that litter the text. These material signs of difference work to remind the reader of the artificiality of the novel’s linguistic structure and call attention to how language constitutes subjectivity, through complex and sometimes self-contradictory narratives irreducible to national borders.

The reference to Yi Sang and Yi Kwangsu also raises another issue that is crucial to this book—namely, the historical reordering of time and space following the end of the Fifteen-Year War. Because Yi Sang died in 1937, he could be regarded by post-1945 Korean literary critics as someone untainted by the controversies left behind by k minka, whereas the later condemnation of Yi Kwangsu has been defined through nothing but his activities and writings from 1937 to 1945. The acceptance of August 1945 (the date when Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan to the Allied powers) as the end of the Japanese empire also had profound consequences for the reconfiguration of the Japanese literary canon as a national,

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instead of imperial, one. K minka was seen as something that had happened “elsewhere,” and the Japanese-language texts produced by colonial writers were similarly purged. But as texts such as Yuhi reveal, the continued marginalization of former colonial subjects in Japan ensured that no easy divide could be made between the postcolonial outside Japan and the postcolonial within it.22

O R G A N I Z AT I O N O F T H E B O O K Colonizing Language contains six chapters presented in roughly chronological order, with each chapter centered on key debates that arose around the functions and forms of national/imperial literature. This organization is a strategy of expedience, as it allows me to contextualize the texts within historical contingencies that may not be familiar to all readers, and should not be taken as an exhaustive survey or an assumption of teleology. The histories on view and at stake in this book do not exist a priori to the texts that (re-)present them and should be understood as deeply mediated by the narrative codes of the present. By shifting regularly between close readings and broader intertextual considerations, I hope to maintain the possibilities of plurality—to “stay with heterogeneities,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty has written, “without seeking to reduce them to any overarching principle that speaks for an already given whole.”23 Chapter 1 explores the impact the Manchurian Incident and subsequent war against China had on Japanese-language literary production in the Japanese empire. Renewed metropolitan interest in the colonies led to publishing opportunities for Koreans who aspired to write in Japanese, even as Korean-language venues were being restricted and shut down. The careers of Chang Hy kchu and Kim S ngmin (1915–1969), two Korean writers who garnered fame for their Japanese-language publications, are important examples. After discussing Chang and Kim, I move on to consider how k minka influenced both the quantity and tenor of Japanese cultural production on the peninsula through a comparison of Kim S ngmin’s

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Praise for

COLONIZING

LANGUAGE

“Christina Yi’s Colonizing Language provides a wide-ranging overview of the emergence and development of Japanese-language writings by Korean writers from the colonial through postcolonial periods. Based on meticulous archival research of Korean, Japanese, and English-language sources, and effectively weaving together historical analysis with close

—SEIJI M. LIPPIT, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES “Yi’s fascinating book narrates the prehistory of the popular Japanese-language literary works written by ethnically Korean writers today. Yi’s careful readings show how the linguistic dilemmas faced by Japan’s colonial subjects became an inheritance that could not be simply returned despite the collapse of empire. A must-read for

—JANET POOLE, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO “Yi’s nuanced analysis of primary texts proves her prowess as a literary scholar.

She expertly unearths traces of the colonial past lurking in literary texts to question the dominant idea of ‘national language’ in Japan and South Korea, which is indispensable

—SERK-BAE SUH, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE “By probing into Japanese-language cultural productions by ethnic Koreans and diasporic Japanese across the 1945 divide, Colonizing Language reveals and deconstructs the multiple borders that have become naturalized and interiorized in the formation of national language and national literary canons in both Japan and Korea. The book is essential to our rethinking of ‘Japanese’ and ‘Korean’ languages and literatures, and its theoretical

—JIN-KYUNG LEE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

C O LU M B I A U N I V ER S ITY PR ES S / N EW YORK cup.columbia.edu Printed in the U.S.A.