拠点形成プロジェクト

最終年度 実施・研究成果報告書

Final year results

During the 2023 academic year, with the easing of the coronavirus pandemic, members of the Incubator-Supported Project “An International Collaborative Network for Research on Zainichi Korean Literature” had significant opportunities to collaborate face to face. In July and August of 2023, overseas Project Representative Cindi Textor (University of Utah) visited Osaka as part of an official cross-appointment agreement. During her time at Osaka University, the Incubator-Supported Project was involved in international symposia held in Osaka and South Korea. First, Project Representatives Nicholas Lambrecht (Osaka University) and Cindi Textor and GJS-ERI Associate Director Unoda Shōya visited Dongguk University in Seoul to speak at the co-sponsored symposium “Intersectionality and Being Zainichi”, a bilingual event held in Japanese and Korean. There Textor spoke about the writings of authors Min Jin Lee and Yū Miri, while Lambrecht responded to a presentation on the writer Ri Kaisei (Lee Hoesung).

Next Textor, project member Sakasai Akito (University of Tokyo) and several guests from Japan, South Korea, and the United States gave presentations at the major GJS-ERI international symposium “The Global Contexts of Zainichi Korean Literature”, another bilingual event held in Japanese and English. This event, moderated by Unoda and Lambrecht, was attended by several domestic and overseas members of the GJS-ERI project. Textor’s presentation compared the writings of wartime Zainichi Korean author Kim Saryang with those of the contemporary Japanese-resident Iranian author Shirin Nezammafi, while Sakasai spoke about Min Jin Lee’s popular novel Pachinko. After the symposium, project member Ijichi Noriko (Osaka Metropolitan University) met with speakers from the symposium in Osaka’s Korea Town and led them on a tour of the new Osaka Korea Town Museum (Osaka Korea Town Rekishi Shiryōkan).

At the close of the academic year, members of the project as well as GJS-ERI’s Unoda Shōya submitted publications for inclusion in the April 2024 edition of the South Korean journal Ilbonhak (Journal of Japanology), and several project participants met in person at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference held in Seattle.

Summary of results over the entire research period

Over the three-year period of GJS-ERI support, this collaborative project engaged in the construction and maintenance of an international network for research on “Zainichi” (“Japanese-resident”) Korean literature, an inherently transnational and translingual subject that remains understudied both inside and outside of Japan. Members of the project were affiliated with universities in Japan, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Korea, and Hong Kong, and also included an independent writer engaged in the actual practice of writing Zainichi Korean literature. The project showed success in both promoting academic output on Zainichi Korean literature and strengthening ties between Osaka University and academic institutions inside and outside Japan.

The work of the project reconfirmed the fact that an improved understanding of Zainichi Korean literature is crucial not only for achieving a balanced perspective on the scope of modern literature written in Japanese, but also because the Zainichi Korean experience highlights key topics in contemporary literary and cultural studies worldwide, including issues of diaspora, migration, identity, discrimination, and the memory of empire. Further, locating the project in Osaka yielded benefits not only because of the academic resources of Osaka University, but also because Osaka Prefecture is home to more Zainichi Korean residents than any other prefecture in Japan. Thus the project served to connect advanced researchers who were already focused on learning from the Zainichi Korean experience to the unique historical resources and rich contemporary community found in Osaka.

During the period of immobility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the project conducted online workshops and group meetings where members shared information about their ongoing writing and laid organizational groundwork for future collaboration. More significant online symposia were held in February 2022 (“Research and Resources on ‘Multicultural’ Kansai”) and August 2022 (“Ongoing International Research on Zainichi Korean Literature”). These online, multilingual workshops included the participation of senior faculty, junior faculty, and graduate students. Another key achievement of the project during the COVID-19 pandemic was the ability of domestic and international researchers to share rare and out-of-print documents and records that were publicly available, but located at sites that were inaccessible to certain members of the project due to travel restrictions.

The first opportunity to collaborate in person during the project period came when many members of the project attended a conference at the University of Hawaii and the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Honolulu in March 2022. This presented opportunities to make arrangements for future hybrid and in-person activities, such as a two-day event in January 2023 when the project sponsored a two-day event bringing the well-known writer On Yūjū (Wen Yūjū) to the Osaka University campus for in-depth discussions on the writing career of the Zainichi Korean writer Yi Yang-ji (Lee Yang-ji). This event was facilitated in particular through the assistance of Osaka University GJS-ERI Steering Committee member Watanabe Eri. As the keynote speaker, On Yūjū discussed the effects of Yi Yang-ji’s writing on her own development as a writer and her involvement in the production of a new anthology of Yi Yang-ji’s works which was released in 2022. Project members Catherine Ryu (Michigan State University) and Nobuko Yamasaki (Lehigh University) were among those who gave presentations on the second day of the workshop, and a revised version of On Yūjū’s talk at Osaka University was published in the May 2023 issue of the national literary magazine Subaru.

The following month, project member Jonathan Glade (University of Melbourne) visited Osaka University along with several graduate students for the three-day workshop “Developing and Leading ‘Global Japanese Studies’ in the Asia-Pacific”, making in-depth conversations about future overseas collaborations and publications possible and facilitating the admission of the University of Melbourne to the Consortium for Global Japanese Studies, an organization of which GJS-ERI is also a prominent member.

As noted above, the pace of in-person activities accelerated further during the 2023 academic year, resulting in multiple international symposia, including a hybrid symposium convened at Osaka University’s Minoh Campus which had an attendance of over 100 people. Altogether, the project “An International Collaborative Network for Research on Zainichi Korean Literature” served to illustrate the positive effects that the Global Japanese Studies Education and Research Incubator can have on both research production and domestic and international interdisciplinary research collaboration; these effects will continue to be felt in the years to come.

Major research presentations and publications

Many of the major research presentations and publications related to the GJS-ERI project are listed below. This list is not comprehensive; other research results on Zainichi Korean literature were also released by project members during the three-year period, and in some cases the project played an unquantifiable role in the production of this output.

In February 2022, the workshop “Ongoing International Research on Zainichi Korean Literature” was held online as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. At this workshop, Ijichi Noriko presented “On the Construction and Future of the Osaka Korean Research Platform” (大阪コリアン研究プラットフォーム設立の経緯と今後), Unoda Shōya presented “Historically Situating the Anti-Discrimination Student Uprisings” (「一斉糾弾闘争」の歴史的位置), and Yasuoka Ken’ichi (Osaka University) presented on “The Origins of ’Multicultural Coexistence’” (「多文化共生」の源流). That summer, the project hosted the online workshop “Ongoing International Research on Zainichi Korean Literature”, which was run as GJS-ERI’s monthly Global Japanese Studies Research Workshop for August 2022. Following an introduction and project summary by Nicholas Lambrecht, the event included English-language presentations by Jonathan Glade (University of Melbourne) and Cindi Textor. Textor’s presentation was titled “Zainichi Women and Transpacific Feminisms: Yū Miri and the Politics of Global Representation”, and Glade’s presentation was “Yakiniku and Kimchi: Expanding the Possibilities for Ethnic Identity in Zainichi Korean Literature and Film”. Following this presentation Glade published the article “The Korean Restaurant: Beyond Violence in Zainichi Korean Film” in the Seoul Journal of Korean Studies, and he thanked GJS-ERI for its support in his acknowledgments.

The January 2023 event “Rethinking ‘Zainichi’ Literature: Welcoming Author On Yūjū” (「在日」文学再考：作家・温又柔さんを迎えて) included a keynote speech by On Yūjū which was later edited for publication in the literary journal Subaru. Other presenters and discussants included Nobuko Yamasaki, Catherine Ryu, Kang Yuni (Sōka University), Jo Gwanja (Seoul National University), Watanabe Eri, Unoda Shōya, and Nicholas Lambrecht.

The first of two international symposia held in July 2023 was “Intersectionality and Being Zainichi” (インターセクショナリティと在日性 / 상호교차성과 재일성) at Dongguk University. At this conference, project representative Cindi Textor gave an academic talk, and project representative Nicholas Lambrecht and project member So Hye Kim (Korea University / University of Hong Kong) acted as discussants. In addition to faculty affiliated with GJS-ERI, conference presentations were made by participants from Seoul National University, Dongguk University, Hallym University, Konkuk University, and Korea University.

The second international symposium was “The Global Contexts of Zainichi Korean Literature” (在日コリアン文学をグローバルな文脈で読みなおす), held at Osaka University. This symposium included keynote speeches by Kim Hwangi of Dongguk University (“Border-Crossing/Mixed Korean Disaporic Literature”, 越境/混種のコリアン・ディアスポラ文学) and Nayoung Aimee Kwon of Duke University (“Transpacific Archives of Absence: Navigating Silenced Histories Across Japanese and American Empires”). Project representative Cindi Textor gave a research presentation titled “Muslim Migrants to Japan in Local and Global Perspective: From Kim Saryang's ‘Mushi’ (1941) to Shirin Nezammafi's ‘Salam’ (2007)”, and project member Sakasai Akito gave the presentation “Adding Another Layer: On the Use of the Term ‘Korean’ in Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko” (もう一層加える：ミンジン・リー『パチンコ』と「コリアン」という呼称について). Other participants included Hosomi Kazuyuki of Kyoto University, Jo Gwanja, Unoda Shōya, and Nicholas Lambrecht, and members of the GJS-ERI project attended the symposium online.

In 2024, results of the 2023 “Intersectionality and Being Zainichi” symposium resulted in the publication of multiple papers in a special section of Volume 62 of the South Korean publication Ilbonhak (Journal of Japanology). Nicholas Lambrecht and Cindi Textor co-authored the English-language introductory article “On Intersectionality and Being Zainichi”, and Textor also released the Japanese-language article “Transnational Intersectionalities and ‘Zainichi’ in the English-Language Gaze: On Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and Yū Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station” (英語圏から見た「在日」と国境を越えるインターセクショナリティ：ミン・ジン・リー『パチンコ』、柳美里『JR上野駅公園口』をめぐって). Other symposium participants who released articles in this edition of the journal included Shin Jaemin of Dongguk University, who contributed the Korean-language article “Lee Hoesung’s Literary Considerations in the 1980s and the Transition to the 1990s: Focusing on Ethnicity, People, the Third World, and Trans-East Asian Perspectives” (1980년대 이회성의 문학적 고찰과 1990년대로의 이행: 민족, 민중, 제3세계, 트랜스 동아시아적 관점을 중심으로), and GJS-ERI Associate Director Unoda Shōya, who wrote the Japanese-language article “Identity Politics and Intersectionality in the Anti-Discrimination Student Uprisings” (「一斉糾弾闘争」のアイデンティティ・ポリティクスとインターセクショナリティ).

In addition, although not among the direct output of this project, project members including Catherine Ryu, Cindi Textor, Nobuko Yamasaki, Christina Yi (University of British Columbia), and Andre Haag (University of Hawai‘i at Manoa) released the volume Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire via the University of Hawaii Press in November 2023. This volume included multiple chapters discussing cultural production related to the Zainichi Korean community in Japan. It is expected that collaboration among the project members will continue to result in additional publications in the remainder of the 2024 academic year and beyond.