First, in “The Publicness and Peripherality of Laboring Spaces: Focusing on Kim Dalsu and Kim Saryang,” Heesang Yoon reclassifies these two writers, traditionally identified as the first generation of Zainichi, as “colonialized Zainichi writers” by focusing on the spaces of labor in their works of the early 1940s. In particular, the paper analyzes Kim Dalsu’s adaptation of Gomi, set in a ragpickers’ village, alongside Kim Saryang’s Chigimi and Oyakata Kobuse, which depict coastal civil engineering and construction day laborer communities. In doing so, it repositions the “colonialized Zainichi” as a particular form of subject who occupies a particular form of space: a subcontracted laborer who both sustains and destabilizes the interwar resource reallocation system.

Next, in “Other Tongues: Ikaino as a Multilingual Literary Landscape,” Julia Hansell Clark focuses on the Osaka neighborhood once known as Ikaino, which has had the highest concentration of ethnically Korean residents since the 1920s. While this name was officially erased from maps in 1973, Zainichi authors have continued to use it as a signifier for hybrid forms of identity that resist erasure, assimilation, or monolithic forms of political affiliation. Exploring Ikaino as a site of multilingual writing practices from the 1950s to the present, the paper considers authors such as Won Sooil, Sō Shūgetsu, and Zhong Zhang, whose work captures the hyperlocal dialect of Ikaino, a blend of Osaka-area Japanese and the Jeju dialect of Korean. In doing so, the paper highlights the way in which Sō and Won specifically draw upon the voices of illiterate first-generation Zainichi women as a source for this hybrid literary language, and it shows how texts by all these writers resist the normative structures of nation, gender, and language politics.

Third, in “The Power of Song: Cultural Memory of Zainichi Koreans in Shin'ya Eiko's Solo Performances,” Eun Young Seong turns the space of theatrical performance as a space where personal memory comes into contact with the present. In particular, Seong examines the Japanese actress Shin’ya Eiko’s use of songs to integrate a performance of memory into the narratives of Zainichi Koreans in her solo performances Shinsetaryon, Chogori wo kita hibakusha, and Tsubameyo ano hito ni tsutaeteyo. By analyzing the trilogy's selection, placement, and emotional resonance of Korean songs, the paper interrogates the role of theatrical spaces of performance in consolidating nostalgia into both colonial and postcolonial forms of resistance among the Korean immigrants in Japan.

Finally, in “Relocating Diasporic Memory? Rikidōzan Recalled in Two Koreas,” We Jung Yi re-situates Zainchi culture in its regional context by considering the posthumous return of Korean-born Japanese professional wrestler Rikidōzan to his divided homeland in popular media from both North and South Korea. In particular, Yi shows how, whether celebrated as a “patriotic martyr” in the North or a “global sport star born of Korea” in the South, the diasporic hero’s minority status in the (former) colonial metropole is strategically mobilized to reshape the ethnonational landscape. Yi here argues that the heroic rehabilitation of this figure across the two Koreas – while evoking what Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih call “minor transnationalism” (2015) – hardly breaks from lingering colonial and Cold War anxieties and the ascendant globalization ideology of the 1990s.

Bringing together research on different literary genres and periods by scholars at different stages in their careers, this panel offers new perspectives on the spaces of Zainichi culture and the ways in which this culture has crossed linguistic, generic, and national boundaries. The panel thus allows us to rethink the way in which we position Zainichi culture in its regional context and in the disciplinary spaces of Japanese and Korean Studies. Each presentation will be 12-13 minutes, allowing for sufficient discussion within the allotted 75 minutes.