From Across the Genkai Sea: Chang Hyŏk-chu, Japanese Culture, and the Korean War

Dans le cadre de séminaire pluridisciplinaire d’études coréennes, Samuel Perry (Brown University) présente une conférence.

Résumé

Perhaps no country profited more from the Korean War than did Japan, where the booming procurement industry reinvigorated Japan’s broken economy and whose return of independence was negotiated with the US at the very height of Korean War devastation. Long seen as “someone else’s war” in Japan, the Korean War was in fact the object of intense literary and journalistic speculation, comprising an extensive discourse now being reassessed by scholars challenging the myth of a “postwar” Japan. This talk turns on the writings of the Korean-turned-Japanese writer Chang Hyŏk-chu, who like many Koreans in Japan took particular interest in the horrific fratricidal war taking place in his homeland, but stood in a place quite at odds with the majority of Koreans living in Japan. It places Chang’s writings within the literary and historical context of the early 1950s with a focus on how his works about gender and ethnicity helped to naturalize narratives about the Japanese nation that were politically constructed