Translational Nation: Politics and Re-presentation at the Independence Hall of Korea

This article develops a theory of nation form as translational, referring to the praxis of re-presenting and thus rendering sensible the nation through an examination of the Tongnip Kinyŏmkwan (Independence Hall of Korea), a national museum designed to commemorate Korea’s anticolonial resistance efforts and its independence from the Japanese Empire in 1945. Translation in the context of this article alludes to the praxis of re-presenting and thus reconstituting the nation through what Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible.” The Hall, in other words, suggests that the nation does not matter unto itself but rather that it is in such moments of articulation and sensibility that the nation is hailed into existence. This article makes the argument that the interactional outcomes between visitors and the Independence Hall direct us toward an interpretation of the Hall as a space of enactment of the translational nation, which refers to a re-formation of nation through translation across interrelated matrices including text, trauma, and time. This translational praxis, understood in the context of the interplay between state-sponsored zeal and popular anemia, centers on the translation of communicative text into theatrical text, somber tragedy into diluted play, and discrete historical events into a posthistorical genealogy.

“We Go on Our Own Boats!”: Korean Migrants and the Politics of Transportation Infrastructure in the Japanese Empire

This paper examines transportation infrastructure in the Japanese empire and its role in positioning Korean migrants in the labor markets of the metropole. To do so, it focuses on the Pusan–Shimonoseki ferry which, between 1905 and 1945, transferred over 30 million people between Japan and Korea. During this time, the ships that comprised this ferry line helped articulate new borders between the metropole and its annexed colony. In this capacity, the vessels helped constitute and control the flow of a new class of colonial migrants as they entered the labor markets of Japan. Historically, transportation networks have been looked on as modes of conveyance or as symbols of political amalgamation. Colonial era descriptions of the Pusan-Shimonoseki ferry commonly maintained this view. However, rather than stress the spatial integration brought by the line, this paper highlights its function as a source of delineation. The ferries connecting Japan to its closest colony not only served as a conduit for Korean workers, but also introduced forms of constraint and contingency that shaped their ability to sell their labor in Japan. Transportation thus became an issue of political contestation and resistance. Korean workers and union activists employed an array of tactics to undermine the borders imposed through the regulation of transportation. Doing so was part of an attempt to assert greater control over the migrant's position in regional markets and mitigate the unevenness of the colonial system.

Melancholia is (geo)political! Postcolonial geography in the Wednesday Demonstration in Seoul

This article examines how melancholia constitutes a psycho-geopolitical space interweaving Korean subjects’ psychic and political lives with the dynamics of the (post) Cold War alliance between Japan and the US. The Wednesday Demonstration is the weekly protest in Seoul that calls for an official apology and legal compensation from the Japanese government for comfort women who worked in the sexual slavery system under the Japanese Empire during WWII. The fact that the weekly protests have continued for 30 years since 1992 signifies that the comfort women issue has remained an unresolved (geo)political issue between South Korea and Japan for three decades, despite apologies and monetary compensations by the Japanese government. This article offers a psychoanalytic-geopolitical rationale for the endless grief of Korean postcolonial subjects who cannot accept the measures of the Japanese government regarding the comfort women issue. Based on 1-year’s participant observations and in-depth interviews with Korean activists who engaged in the Wednesday Demonstration from September 2019 to August 2020, this article aims to accomplish three goals. Firstly, this article shows how Korean postcolonial subjects were/are haunted by colonial past. Secondly, I examine why Koreans cannot complete mourning for comfort women in the context of ROK-US-Japan geopolitical relations. Lastly, this article interrogates how ethno-nationalists intervene to turn melancholia into a motivation for ethnic solidarity and how their attempt might have failed by exploring a Korean postcolonial subject’s psychic lives. In doing so, I argue that the wounds of Koreans related to the comfort women issue are not simply from colonial history, but they are postcolonial wounds that have not healed ‘appropriately’ under the (US-sponsored) South Korean/Japanese (post-)Cold War security arrangement.

Comparative Ethnolinguistics on Metaphorical Interpretations in Japanese Kotowaza and Malay Proverbs

This paper examines the comparison between Japanese kotowaza and Malay proverbs via the lens of ethnolinguistics. The rich cultural exchanges between the Japanese empire and Malay civilisation since the 15th century must be based on mutual values that both parties can agree upon. One such aspect is the sociocultural values apparent in proverbs and idioms. This aspect is integral in ethnolinguistics. Therefore, this paper has three objectives: 1) To compare and contrast the entities and the conventionalised metaphorical interpretations made in the proverbs of the two languages; 2) to conduct a comprehensive discourse analysis on the proverbs based on ethnolinguistic approaches; and 3) to trailblaze the opportunities for ethnolinguists to consider expanding the research in paremiology. This research is motivated due to the very scarce resource in Japanese-Malay comparative proverbs study. The methods used are library research and Cornell note-taking technique. There are 10 proverbs respectively in Japanese and Malay for similarity and 5 respective proverbs for the difference, totalling to 30 proverbs in both languages. The findings show that the proverbs in the two different languages can both reach the same interpretation despite different extensive backgrounds. However, opposing or dissimilar outcomes also occur despite the same referents or symbols used in the metaphors. This paper concludes with the limitations and suggestions for linguists to consider in their research on proverbs.

Following in the Footsteps of Isabella Bird?

Alma Karlin (1889–1950), a round-the-world traveller, intellectual, and writer from Celje, Slovenia, arrived in Japan and lived in Tokyo in the early 1920s, an era which historians consider to be an interim period between the initial expansion of the Japanese Empire to mainland Asia and its end in 1945. The writer’s fascination with the land can be inferred, among other things, from a 35-page description of Japan and the Japanese in her most famous book, Einsame Weltreise. Die Tragödie einer Frau (The Odyssey of a Lonely Woman), and passages in Reiseskizzen (Travel Sketches), an earlier work. The article aims to place these travel accounts in the historical and ideological contexts of their time while highlighting some similarities and differences between the representations of the land and its people by Karlin and those by Isabella Bird (1831–1904). Although Karlin makes no explicit reference to the famous British traveller in her writing on Japan, the article demonstrates that she must have known about Bird’s book Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. It is, above all, her decision to introduce her (German) readers to topoi that were typical of Victorian women’s travel writing which suggests that Karlin partly based her image of Japan, if not even the itinerary of her journey there, on Bird’s bestselling work. Nevertheless, Karlin does not seem to have conformed to the then dominant orientalist discourses on Japan, her representations generally showing none of the Western arrogance that was so typical of her fellow travellers of both sexes.

The “Yellow Peril” and the Asia-Pacific War

This chapter explores the history of racialized threats and fears of Asia in the Western imagination. It shows that the discourse of the “yellow peril” can be understood as a process of world-making of “Asian” alterity through ideas of threat and insecurity; it is a discourse of anxiety wherein the global racial imaginary is seen as being in crisis and what potentially replaces it is a world of disorder and violence. The second section of the chapter then examines how both the Japanese and the Americans engaged in the racialization of each other: first, in terms of how the Japanese empire itself internalized its own version of racial order in response to the global racial imaginary; second, for the United States, as a way of intensifying the violence against a racial other, which can be traced back to the settler colonial plans of the nineteenth century. I conclude the chapter by showing how the global racial imaginary functioned within the United States during the early Cold War period by representing the Soviet Union as the Asiatic other.