INTRODUCTION
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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