The Noose Among the Cherries: Landscape and the Representation of Resident Koreans in Japanese Film
By Michael Ward
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Philosophy
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
The University of Sydney
2015
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Table of Contents
Introduction: 5
Chapter 1: A Short History of Japan’s Resident Korean Population: 8
Chapter 2: Resident Koreans in Japanese Film: 98
Chapter 3: Landscape Theory: 167
Chapter 4: Death by Hanging: the Creation and Destruction of Ri Chin’ U: 244
Conclusion: 293
Works Cited: 297
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Introduction: Resident Koreans on Film
My interest in the cinematic use and representation of Koreans and Resident
Koreans in Japanese film began in 2004 when I watched Ōshima Nagisa’s 大島渚
(1932-2013) 1983 film Senjō no Merī Kurisumasu (戦場のメリークリスマス, Merry
Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) for the first time. Besides the homoerotic tensions shared between David Bowie and Sakamoto Ryūichi, the scene that made the largest impression on me was one that depicted the brutalization of a Korean soldier serving in the Japanese army by a Japanese sergeant played by Beat Takeshi. After watching this film, I began to search for other Japanese films that contained Korean characters and came across Yukisada Isao’s 行定勲 (1968- ) seminal film Go! (2001), which acted as my introduction to Japan’s Resident Korean community as well as films depicting Resident Koreans. With my general interest firmly in place, my academic interest in these films was ignited when I had the chance to view Ōshima’s film Kōshikei (絞死刑, 1968) in 2006 which introduced me both to a critique of institutionalized racism in Japan towards Resident Koreans and 1960s avant-garde Japanese film. As I worked on other projects, the subject of how Resident Koreans were represented in Japanese films
remained in the back of my head and later developed through my readings of W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Paul Gilroy. However, it was not until I came across Matsuda Masao’s 松田政男 (1933- ) and Adachi Masao’s 足立正生 (1939- ) theory Fûkeiron (風景論 Landscape Theory), detailed below, that I developed a more critical way of understanding how Japanese directors use Resident Korean characters in their films.
Consisting of four chapters, this thesis opens with a short introduction to
pre-colonial and colonial Korean history and prewar and postwar Resident Korean
history.
Chapter two, after giving a brief description of Japanese victim consciousness and how it was spread throughout Japan through melodrama films, delves into the history of late 1950s and early 1960s films created by leftist humanist Japanese directors. These films depict diluted Resident Korean characters whose primary purpose is to reflect the positive qualities of the Japanese characters who appear in the films while more serious aspects of Resident Korean history remain absent.
Concerned with the way in which the leftist humanist directors handled their Resident Korean characters, the third chapter of this thesis takes a close look at Matsuda and Adachi’s theory of landscape and uses it to show how marginalized individuals such as the non-Korean serial killer Nagayama Norio, the original subject for the theory of landscape, and the white-robed Resident Koreans in an early Ōshima Nagisa documentary film are controlled by Japanese political power that manifests itself in homogenous landscape that was an ubiquitous presence throughout late 1960s and early 1970s Japan.
The fourth and final chapter of this thesis concerns itself with the diagram of the microphysics of power which is embedded within Japan’s homogeneous landscape and is responsible for both the creation and death of individuals like the previously mentioned Nagayama Norio and the Resident Korean Ri Chin’ U and his filmic representative R in Ōshima’s Death by Hanging.
In writing this thesis I hope to accomplish two primary goals.
One is to outline a general history of the representation of Resident Koreans in postwar Japanese films until 1970 and show how Japanese directors, both postwar humanist leftist directors and 1960s avant-garde directors used the images of Resident Koreans for their own purposes.
Also, I hope that this thesis helps to show that the theory of landscape is more than an old Japanese film theory that has gained recent academic interest because it is quite useful as a critique in understanding how the Japanese state marginalizes individuals within its own borders while controlling the general populace.
8
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Chapter 1: A Short History of Japan’s
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Conclusion
As a result of Resident Korean characters acting as mirrors to the Japanese, the
Japanese filmic world during the 1960s had yet to receive a fully realized Resident
Korean character.”1025 The images of Japan’s largest minority were limited to
“intellectual works” that did not truly reflect the Resident Korean community in Japan.
However, as I demonstrated in my analysis of Oshima’s works, some directors built on
this use of the Resident Koreans as mirrors in a more sophisticated, self-reflexive way,
and used it as a basis for broader social critique.
Discussing Ōshima Nagisa’s film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Masao
Miyoshi writes that the director was “determined to locate himself in the place of the
Other and to look back at himself.”1026 Supporting this statement, Satō Tadao, writing
on Ōshima’s early documentary work The Forgotten Soldiers, states that the short work
is considered a masterpiece among countless television documentaries made during the
1960s because of the manner in which the director filmed the disabled Resident Korean
veterans.1027 Indeed, in this seminal work, the Resident Korean veterans broke the
1025 Yomota, “Nihon eiga to mainoritei no hyōshō,” p.70.
1026 Masao Miyoshi, Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p.185.
1027 Satō, Ōshima Nagisa no sekai, p.130.
294
stereotypes created by leftist-humanist directors of their being happy and content
individuals who were not degraded by their abject poverty by bursting into a violent
fight.1028 Part of Ōshima’s success in being able to film this scene was pure luck, but
Satō believes that the Resident Korean soldiers allowed Ōshima to film their anger
because he shared their sense of anger.1029
Ōshima was supposedly able to “assimilate himself” to the manner in which
Resident Koreans looked at the Japanese populace and then returned this gaze to his
Japanese audiences so that they would better understand themselves through Resident
Korean eyes.1030 Thus Ōshima was able, in some ways, to find the “fissure” that
Resident Koreans like Ri Chin’ U stood in that gave him a “privileged point of view”
which allowed him to understand Japan from both a Japanese and a Resident Korean
perspective.1031 The director possessed a “parallax view” in which he was able to
develop “two different but simultaneous interpretations” while viewing his filmed
subjects through both Japanese and Resident Korean eyes.1032
With his supposed ability to look through “multiple identities” while filming a
subject, Ōshima’s desire to always add a “Korean point of view when we think about
1028 Ibid.
1029 Ibid.
1030 Ibid, p.131.
1031 McKnight, Nakagami, Japan, p.1.
1032 Ibid, p.2.
295
Japanese problems” seems quite profound.1033 Indeed, he believed that since “Koreans
are a mirror to the Japanese,” the Japanese populace could come to a better
understanding of itself.1034 However, one needs to take special care with the manner in
which Ōshima, as well as other leftist intellectuals, used a Korean/Resident Korean
perspective in order “to look back at himself” and the rest of the Japanese population.
For example, the playwright Kinoshita Junji, who wrote a play based on the
Komatsugawa Incident titled Kuchibue ga fuyu no sora ni (口笛が冬の空に A Whistle
in the Winter Sky, 1961), stated that “If something called the zainichi Korean problem
exists, then it is a problem created by the Japanese.”1035 By believing that Resident
Korean issues were totally “created by the Japanese,” many leftist Japanese used them
as a mirror to reflect the aspects of being Japanese and living in Japan that they hated
the most. Ōe Kenzaburō, writing about Ri Chin’ U and how the hardships of the young
factory worker’s life led to his committing violent crimes, writes that “(w)e ourselves
are the ones who committed rape and were hanged for it.” However, because they were
the ones who simply led Ri to his crimes instead of actually committing them, they, the
Japanese, also “belong to the side that placed the rope around his neck.”1036 Going
1033 Satō, “Nihon eiga ni kakareta Kankoku/Chōsenjin,” p.181; Takayanagi, “Nihon eiga no naka Zainichi
korian zō,” p.237; Yomota, “Nihon eiga to mainoritei no hyōshō,” p.55.
1034 Ōshima Nagisa as quoted in Scott, “Invisible Men,” p.95.
1035 Kinoshita Junji as quoted in Scott, “Invisible Men,” p.95.
1036 Ōe Kenzaburō as quoted in Scott, “Invisible Men,” p.95.
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deeper than simply being concerned about the welfare of Resident Koreans, Kinoshita,
Ōe, and, of course, Ōshima use Resident Koreans as “devices and stages to project the
problem of the state called Japan”1037 Deeply concerned with the state of the wretched
state of their own Japaneseness, many Japanese leftists, as the anarchist and critic
Takenaka Rō 竹中労 (1930-1991) wrote, used Resident Koreans, as the “symbol of
alienation,” which was incorporated to reveal such things as “discrimination, a sense of
national greatness, and various other rotten parts [that still] linger[ed] in [the Japanese]
subconscious.”1038
1037 Yang, “Sengo nihon eiga ni okeru “Zainichi” zō wo meguru gensetsu kūkan,” p.84.
1038 Takenaka Rō as quoted in Yomota, “Nihon eiga to mainoritei no hyōshō,” p.70.
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