North Koreans in Japan

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:

Book title: Ryang, Sonia. North Koreans in Japan. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997.

Main points:

- ch. 2 – (chapter title: From performative to performance) - in 1993 Chongryun launched a three-year program of curricular reform. Under the new curricular, subject such as things about the childhood of father Marshall Kim II Sung were abolished.

- this chapter focuses on various changes related to the circular reform and considers its implication for re-adjusting the identity of children as overseas national of north Korea. (51)

- of greatest interest with regard to the new Korean educational  program was the emphasis on teaching the spoken version of Korean. In the new textbook, fourteen out of 28 lessons were dedicated to informal, spoken ending forms. (57)

- some young teaches told the author that the revision of the textbook came at the insistence of the second generation teachers. (58)

- the emphasis on teaching the spoken version of Korean was structured in such a way as to replace the spoken Japanese children use outside the school, thereby encouraging the use of Korean in the after-school hours. Yet when child spoke to teachers, they used the Korean honorific with formal ending. It was unthinkable for teacher to conduct class in informal Koran. (65)

- yet outside school the children switched to Japanese. Children’s knowledge of informal Korean could not extend beyond the classroom. (65)

-pupil were getting better reading Korean, yet their daily language was increasingly distanced form the school-taught Korean language. Children were no longer capable of identify themselves as ‘loyal children’ of Kim Ii Sung. They no longer took such an identity as a point of departure, as the language used to form that identity was no longer imposed on the children. (66)

- ch. 3 – (chapter title: The rise of legitimate identity) - in 1945, the peninsula was divided into American and Soviet occupation zones. In the eyes of many Korean in Japan, events in Southern Korea appeared to take a far less satisfactory turn. The situation was chaotic. Riot and uprising, protesting against the military government occurred in many areas in the south. October 1945 saw the release from prisons of many Korean communist in Japan. On 15 October the League of Korean was formed in Tokyo. (79)

- following Korea’s political and territorial division the League of Korean opted for political conviction at the expenses of regional attachment. Its opposition to the South Korean regime meant that it would abandon repatriation to the south because the majority of Koreans in Japan originally came from the southern provinces; this option was a costly one to them. (81)

- from the outset two different orientations had coexisted with the League of Korean: Communist internationalism and nationalism. According to Ernest Gellner, “Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent”.  In terms applied to the Korean case, those who associate with North Korean regard the latter as the only legitimate state representing the whole Korean nation. (82)

-  in many ways the League could be regarded as the predecessor of Chongryun. (83) The League was dissolved in September 1949. (87) Following the dissolution of the League, in 1951, during the Korean war, the Korean communist and leftist-nationalist in Japan organized the democratic front of Korean – Minjon .  Minjon inherited the factionalism between internationalist and nationalist within the League of Korean. (89)

- among those nationalist who were frustrated by the communist party’s stance was Han Dok-su, chairman of Chongryun. In March 1955 Han denounced the Internationalist. On 25 may, 1955 Minjon was dissolved and Chongryun emerged with Han as the chairman. (90)

- many member of the first-generation support Han because he shifted away from the subjugation to the Japanese Communist party. Elderly Chongryun Koreans believed that Kim II Sung allowed them to live in Japan as North Korean’s ‘overseas nationals’. (92-3)

- the term ‘overseas nationals ’of north Korea, central to Chongryun’s legitimate discourse, occurred frequently in the languages of the first-generation individuals. This identity replaced the identity of colonial subject. (92)

-  what was surprising was that many first –generation Chongryun Koreans’ story regularly jumped from the ‘colonial past’ to the time they became ‘overseas nationals of north Korea’ mediated by the phrase ‘thanks to the love and care and wise guidance of the Great Leader Marshal Kim II Sung. (93)

- Mrs. Kwon, a Korean, usually conducted her life in Japanese. In the earlier part of the conversation with me, she spoke Japanese. As she moved on to talk about the organization and matters related to Chongryun activities and north Korea, she changed to Korean.  Sometime the language was intermingled. But by the time she was telling me about Kim II Sung, her whole sentences were in Korean. It was obvious to me that she was better at Japanese than Korean; indeed she said she learned Korean only after she became a teacher at a Korean high school. I found such regularity in switching language when I talked to other Chongryun related Korean.(97)

- the example could only be explained in terms of institutionalized training whereby the speaker learned to say certain terms and not to say other. In this case, turning the ‘thanks to’ phrases into a norm as an contrast to colonial humiliation. (97)

- such training should also prevent speakers from telling their own stories with their own expression. We can already see a certain type of censorship at work here. Let us turn to the linguist life of adult member, since this control was closely related to the rise of the legitimate identity of Chongryun. (97)

- Juche literally meant ‘subject’ and was often translated as ‘self-reliance’. According to Kim, ‘establishing juche means that the people approach the revolution and construction of their own country as masters’. (97-8)

- “the implementation of Kim II Sung worship strengthened north Korea’s authority over Chongryun. This in turn provided Chongryun with a rationalizing device: by emphasizing that Chongryun activities were in the served of Kim II Sung and the fatherland.” (102)

- “chongryun workers begin their day with a choson shinbo reading session at which they take note of current slogans and aims of the organization’s activity. It is important that they register the set of rhetorical expressions used in the paper.” (103)

- the regular criticism session functioned to maintain Chongryun’s linguistic orthodoxy. The systematic use of fixed terms by cadres would influence the members by exhibiting what was supposed to be ‘good speech’. (105)

-“it became the norm to mention their identity as ‘overseas nationals’ of north Korean in connection to the ‘thanks to’ phrase. In such a process, they reordered their past, remodeled their memory, and reformulate their experience in what is regarded as a ‘proper way’ of speaking. Even Mrs. Kwon represented her adolescence in a well-to-do family as slavery under colonialism.” (106) (c/f using a keyword to describe a period)

“In this sense, it is highly indicative that Chongryun’s official publications hardly refer to pre-Chongryun days, official history begins only after Koreans in Japan came to be benefited by the glories benefactor.”(106)

- two factors were involved: obliteration of nonorthodox identities, such as the well off or docile colonial days; the omission what was regarded as irrelevant including domestic violence and disproportionate personal privilege enjoyed by the top ranks. This was of course censorship. The best censorship was not so much to suppress speaking negative or unusable words but not to give the word at all. In study meetings students were given Korean words related to Chongryun only positively; negative words were used only with reference to ‘enemies’. (106)

- a fundamentalist commitment become a manufactured identity helped by strategies as marking and making, obliteration and omission. Language here again played a decisive role in both forgetting and selecting experience and replacing and displacing memory. (106-7)

- nevertheless, this was not to say that their identity was false. This was not a matter to verify in terms of true-false opposition. By internalizing Chongryun’s discourse, the majority of first-generation Chongryun Korean lost alternative language to represent themselves.  In this process they had indeed become ‘overseas nationals’. (107)

(to be continued)