コラム

Christina YI (Associate Professor, University of British Columbia), Andre HAAG (Associate Professor, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa), and Catherine RYU (Associate Professor, Michigan State University)

“How would one say ‘to pass’ in Japanese?”

It was the last day of the inaugural Zainichi Literature Workshop 2017, held that year at Lehigh University and co-organized by Nobuko Yamasaki, Christina Yi, and Catherine Ryu.¹ We had just concluded two stimulating days of presentations on Zainichi (lit. “residing in Japan”; resident) Korean cultural production, and were wrapping up the workshop with an open discussion on the shared themes and connections that had emerged among everyone’s papers. It was Andre Haag who pointed out to us that passing—that is, the act of Koreans attempting to pass as Japanese—had come up again and again in the literary texts and films introduced at the workshop. Haag had earlier presented his research on the pioneering colonial-era Korean novelist Tei Zenkei (Chŏng Yŏn-kyu, 1899-1979) and his writings on the so-called 1923 “Korean hunts” (Chōsen-gari), in which as many as 6,000 Koreans (and some misidentified Japanese) were massacred by Japanese vigilantes in the wake of the Great Kantō Earthquake. Passing is particularly relevant when considering that tragedy, which was precipitated by mass paranoia about acts of terror and sabotage by concealed Korean malcontents. As Haag would later argue in an article published in 2019, “the difficulty of distinguishing between ethnic Korean and Japanese individuals in this time of crisis further contributed to the sense of menace underlying the Korean Hunts by directing anxious attention to the porousness of boundaries separating ruler and ruled.”²

The porousness of racial and ethnic boundaries had indeed been everywhere in the papers presented at the Zainichi Literature Workshop, but none of us had thought to frame it in such a way until Haag suggested it. That passing was the “default condition”³ of life for Zainichi Koreans was starkly clear, and yet we immediately ran into the problem of how to articulate the shared theoretical, narratological, or aesthetic dynamics of passing as Japanese in Japanese—that is, through the language and worldview offered by the Zainichi writers themselves. Responding to the question of how to say “to pass” in Japanese, Unoda Shōya made the astute observation that while it was easy enough to provide a direct translation (e.g. “Nihonjin to shite tōru”), the word that most often cropped up in Zainichi literature was not a verb but a noun: tsūmei (lit. “passing name”), referring to the still-common practice of adopting a Japanese-sounding alias in order to pass as Japanese. That it was not any perceived visible, biological markers of race but instead an invisible, linguistic marker of ethnic naming upon which passing pivoted for Zainichi Koreans was a phenomenon that profoundly interested all of us, and so in 2018 we followed up the workshop with a symposium at Michigan State University entitled “The Poetics of Passing: Interrogating Self-Fashioning as the Other in Zainichi Cultural Production” (co-organized by Catherine Ryu, Jonathan Glade, and Christina Yi); and, in 2019, an international conference at UBC entitled “Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Modern Japan” (co-organized by Christina Yi, Sharalyn Orbaugh, and Catherine Ryu).⁴

It is that last conference that became the seed for the edited volume Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan’s East Asian Empire, which was co-edited by Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu and which came out through the University of Hawai’i Press at the end of 2023. One thing that had become apparent to us in the course of organizing and participating in these events was how discourses around passing by (post-)colonial subjects went hand in hand with both accusations of deception and acts of posing by their colonizers, and how none of this could be disentangled from the larger structures of imperial control. As one way of justifying the expansion of the Japanese empire, propagandists argued that the racial and cultural similarities between Japan and its neighbors would facilitate integration. As Japan’s colonization attempts progressed, however, the discourse of racial/ethnic similarity was increasingly haunted by its own internal contradictions. In Korea, for example, Japanese officials used phrases such as naisen ittai (an abbreviation for “Japan and Korea as one body”) to encourage integration even while enacting a series of discriminatory laws and ordinances designed to keep Koreans subordinated to mainland Japanese. Meanwhile, some colonial subjects vociferously insisted on equating imperial identity with civil equality. If “imperial subject” and “Japanese” were one and the same, the argument went, then Koreans and Taiwanese were entitled to the same rights as ethnic Japanese subjects in the metropole. In short, Japanese imperialists were threatened by the possibility of their own success.

As its blurb description indicates, Passing, Posing, Persuasion is a work that emphasizes the plurality and heterogeneity of empire, together with the contradictions and tensions of its ideologies of race, nation, and ethnicity.⁵ The paradoxes of passing, posing, and persuasion opened up unique opportunities for colonial contestation and negotiation in the arenas of cultural production, including theater, fiction, film, magazines, and other media of entertainment and propaganda consumed by audiences in mainland Japan and its colonies. From Meiji adaptations of Shakespeare and interwar mass media and colonial fiction to wartime propaganda films, competing narratives sought to shape how ambiguous identities were performed and read. All empires necessarily engender multiple kinds of border crossings and transgressions; in the case of Japan, the policing and blurring of boundaries often pivoted on the rather changeable outer markers of ethno-national identification such as language, clothing, habitus, and especially names. Our book showcases 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, thus troubling that empire’s ontological boundaries. As we write in the introduction of the volume:

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.⁶

In July 2024, the editors were invited to Osaka University by Unoda Shōya and other members of the Global Japanese Studies Research and Education Incubator to speak about Passing, Posing, Persuasion. It was a wonderful opportunity to reflect back on the long journey that led us to the project, especially considering that Unoda had been a key participant in the inaugural Zainichi Literature Workshop and subsequent meetings, and had first pointed us in the direction of the tsūmei. One question we were asked during the Q&A was about the title, and more specifically the designation of “Japan’s East Asian Empire.” Although by 1945 the Japanese empire spanned a wide swath of territory in the Pacific, including Southeast Asia and the South Seas, due to practical limitations of time and space we decided to keep our scope to East Asia given the shared structural features found in Japan’s colonies there. However, we recognize that the dynamics of passing, posing, and persuasion discussed in our volume depended upon a discourse of racial similarity and assimilation that proved untenable in places such as South Seas or with the Indigenous populations in Taiwan (as astutely suggested by the chapter contributions from Robert Tierney and Joan Ericson).⁷ We hope in future projects to explore in more depth the question of how to approach the problematics of not passing (the conditions and consequences of being unable or unwilling to cross perceived social boundaries), as well as what Kimberly Kono calls “the accusation of passing.”⁸ We also wish one day to follow up on the conclusions made by Nobuko Yamasaki and Faye Yuan Kleeman about the various kinds of suasion campaigns that acknowledged difference as an inextricable part of any empire.

Another area for further scholarship lies in our postcolonial present, and the ways that the legacies of the Japanese empire continue to constitute ethnoracial boundaries today. The volume’s last chapter contribution by Kang Yuni addresses this issue by considering the lasting effects of Japan’s infamous sōshi kaimei (lit. “establishing family names and changing given names”) policy in colonial Korea through the lenses of gender and ethnonational subjectivity, through an extended discussion of Zainichi Korean writer Yū Miri’s magnus opus Hachigatsu no hate (The End of August, 2004). We do believe that there remains much more to be said on the subject of passing as the “default condition” for Zainichi Koreans and other ethnic minorities in Japan. Inspired by the chapter by Nayoung Aimee Kwon, who provides a comparative reading of the writings of Kim Saryang and Langston Hughes in order to forge transpacific Afro-Asian solidarities, we think it would also be fruitful to seek out more connections with other literary canons. Overall, we hope that our volume can help spark such conversations in the future and contribute to ongoing research on empire studies and the workings of Japanese(-language) cultural production.

¹ The website for the workshop can be accessed as follows: https://3pconferenceubc2019.wixsite.com/2017
² Andre Haag, “The Passing Perils of Korean Hunting: Zainichi Literature Remembers the Kantō Earthquake Korean Massacres,” Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture 12 (2019): 266.
³ John Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan) (University of California Press, 2008), 20.
⁴ The MSU symposium website can be found at https://3pconferenceubc2019.wixsite.com/symposium and the UBC conference website at https://3pconferenceubc2019.wixsite.com/march. The MSU symposium resulted in a special issue on the poetics of passing in Zainichi cultural production coedited by Christina Yi and Jonathan Glade and published in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture 12 (2019).
⁵ https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/passing-posing-persuasion-cultural-production-and-coloniality-in-japans-east-asian-empire/
⁶ Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan’s East Asian Empire ed. Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023), 15.
⁷ Kirsten Ziomek provides illuminating examples of when ethnoracial difference, rather than similarity, were emphasized by Japanese imperialists in her monograph Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan’s Colonial Peoples (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019).
⁸ Kimberly Kono, “Passing and Posing in Colonial Manchuria in Murō Saisei’s Koto of the Continent,” in Passing, Posing, Persuasion, 43.

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

1. Introduction: Passing, Posing, and Persuasion in the Japanese Empire
   Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu
2. A Japanese Othello in Taiwan: Performing Patriarchy, Race, and Empire in Imperial Japan
   Robert Tierney
3. Passing and Posing in Colonial Manchuria in Murō Saisei’s Koto of the Continent
   Kimberly Kono
4. Passing, Paranoia, and the Korean Problem: Cultures of “Telling the Difference” in Imperial Japan
   Andre Haag
5. Pluralizing Passing and Transpacific Afro-Asian Solidarities: Passings and Impasses across Colonial Korea and the Segregated United States
   Nayoung Aimee Kwon
6. Crafting the Colonial “Japanese Child”
   Joan E. Ericson
7. A Woman for Every Tribe: Li Xianglan and Her Construction of a Pan-Asian Femininity
   Faye Yuan Kleeman
8. Ri Kōran: Posing and Passing as a “Cultured Native”
   Nobuko Yamasaki
9. In the Shadow of Sōshi Kaimei: Imposed and Adopted Names in Yū Miri’s The End of August
   Kang Yuni and Cindi Textor