New York: Columbia University Press. 2018. xxx, 211 pp. US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-18420-5.
In her book Colonizing Language Christina Yi develops an interesting argument on Korean-authored Japanese-language literature that captures the complexity of identity under colonial rule through the prisms of literature and language. How, she asks, did this literature manage to create distance, rather than unity, between Korean “citizens” and their Japanese audience? She articulates this paradoxical result in the following statement:
And yet it was exactly [colonized] inclusion that threatened to disrupt the seemingly inviolable link between ethnic identity and national polity. The contradictions kokugo presented when spoken in the colonial context could open up alternative avenues of identification, avenues that had been elided in their initial conception but never entirely erased. (2–3)
Contradiction, a term often addressed in studies on Japan’s assimilation policy in Korea, consequently assumes a major theme in Yi’s analysis of this literature penned by Koreans, both during Japanese occupation, and continuing into that assumed by the United States.
The first three chapters focus on the kominka (imperialization) period where Japanese rhetoric preached that Koreans were to be imagined as fellow kokumin (national subjects) alongside their Japanese counterparts. However, within this process of nationalization (here defined as an aim for Koreans “to become one with their metropolitan peers for the sake of the Japanese emperor”) Koreans were “particularized and marginalized,” especially when they made efforts to comply (47). In pointing out kominka’s ultimate purpose as directed more toward utilizing Koreans in the war effort than incorporating them as Japanese, Yi hits on the functional ambition that drove the contradiction underlining Japanese (and other colonial) assimilation policies. A key is in the word’s construction, and particularly the ka (化) suffix of kominka, as well as dōka (assimilation), thus indicating the policy as a process of x becoming y with vague and flexible references to what exactly constituted the y finished product: the colonized successfully recognized as Japanese. Colonizing Language reminds us of the policy’s convenience in drawing distinction and distance between the colonized and the colonizer, as well as between genders, to frustrate advancement toward the very goal that it promoted (42).
The core of this work is concentrated on how these “terrible contradictions” appeared in the colonial-era literature penned by Korean writers. One example that she offers is Kim Saryang’s “Pegasus,” a story that underlines the pressure that Koreans faced to become Japanese imperial subjects, though their efforts to do so went unrecognized by their Japanese colonizers (35–36). The more the Korean protagonist, Genryū, endeavours to “portray himself as a Japanese man, the more he slides into grotesque parody; the more he tries to act as an assimilated Japanese subject, the more his actions become threatening to the metropolitan colonizer” (38). Japanese critics reflect this phenomenon in emphasizing difference by accenting the “Koreanness” in Korean-authored contributions to kokugo (national language) literature. They advertised Kim’s “Into the Light,” a work almost Akutagawa Prize worthy, particularly as a piece of literature that could only emerge from the peninsula (35). A journal decorated Yi Chōngnae’s work with quintessential Korean pictures to accent its ethnic, non-Japanese origins (68–69).
Yi breaks from other colonial-era works by extending her discussion across the 1945 divide to investigate the effect of the new political situation on this literature, particularly the identity of these writers after Koreans had essentially become stateless with the “loss” of their Japanese citizenship. Here the hunt for colonial-era collaborators netted in colonial-era writers who had chosen kokugo as the working language of their writing. Authors such as Yi Kwangsu, who through their writing were deemed “pro-Japanese” (ch’inilp’a), now discovered that fellow Koreans nuanced their Korean identity in a way similar to how colonial-era Japanese had rejected their claims of being Japanese. The language used to identify these Koreans, as kyōryokusha (cooperators) or shinnichiha (pro-Japanese), was confusing. Were the two words synonymous? Kim Sǒkpǒm, for example, questioned: Was it correct to insist that “becoming Japanese” carried the same meaning as cooperating with the colonizers (124)? Yi, however, introduces this question as an example of the complexity it presents rather than to attempt resolution. She explains that her aim is to show “how the wartime and postwar Japanese-language texts … expose the complexly constructed, hybrid, an hyphenated identity of the contested imperial … subject” (140).
Yi’s Colonizing Language overlaps with other recent literature-focused studies of Korea’s colonial period, but she extends her discussion across the “1945 divide” to consider both the wartime and post-liberation dimensions. Her adoption of a commonly employed classification of a colonial-era Korean as a Japanese “citizen,” an identity that they “lost” in 1952 (77), enhances the apparent contradiction in their colonial identity. Regardless of the term’s appropriateness, Koreans of this era hardly enjoyed the benefits of “citizenship,” and evidence presented here (and in other discussions) demonstrates it would have been unacceptable to Japanese of this time. Here, the contradiction can be found in colonial rhetoric which allowed colonizers to manipulate standards should Koreans, seeking to attain equality with the Japanese through literature, approach success, as Yi describes in her careful analysis of Korean efforts to create kokugo literature.
Colonizing Language adds an important and most readable, yet sophisticated discussion to the growing body of colonial and postcolonial studies, and particularly to that in the field of Korean literature of this period. Readers will appreciate the author’s contribution of the literature angle to the often-discussed issues of colonial contradictions that accompany identity formation, verification, and (post-liberation) reformation.
Mark E. Caprio
Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan