Presented at Association for Asian Studies, Toronto, Ontario, March 16-19.

Abstract:

Contemporaneously with the release of the eighteen volume Collected Works of “Zainichi” Literature (“Zainichi” bungaku zenshū), discussions began to emerge as to whether the end of “Zainichi” literature was nigh, with one elder statesman of the genre claiming that after he died, “Zainichi” literature would cease to exist. Indeed, the very title of the collection—marking it as a “zenshū”—implies a sort of completion or finality.

Central to this discussion and to the discourse surrounding the publication of the collection in general was the refusal of high profile writers of the youngest generation such as Yū Miri to have their work included. Yū’s wholesale rejection of the Zainichi label could perhaps be called “post-Zainichi,” in reference to the “post-racial” discourse of the U.S. in the era of Obama, and with no less irony, given the emboldened nativist sentiments and hate speech campaigns targeted specifically at “Zainichi” Koreans occurring in Japan at the same time.

Given this context, this paper illuminates the tension between Yū Miri’s eschewal of “Zainichi” as political and literary identity and, conversely, the exclusion of Yū Miri by historical conceptualizations of “Zainichi,” namely through its grappling with masculinist nationalism. At stake is the question of agency in the process of cultural identification: which choices are tenable, both politically and within the economy of print media. I argue that just as Yū Miri can never truly break free from an overdetermined “Zainichi” label, she exposes an untenability that has been with “Zainichi” literature from the start.