International audiences likely recognize the name of the zainichi community—ethnic Koreans living in Japan as a result of colonial-era migration—because of Min Jin Lee’s acclaimed 2018 novel Pachinko, a sweeping multi-generational saga about the difficulties and discrimination faced by a zainichi family, or its 2022 Apple TV+ adaptation.
Lee, a Korean American author, first heard about the zainichi when she was a student at Yale University in the 1980s. Before Pachinko, though, zainichi stories were already being published in Japan. And the interplay of Korean, Japanese, and American perspectives means that such narratives can be interpreted as “transpacific cultural mediation,” writes David S. Roh.
In this theoretical framework, “relationship to the homeland is largely imaginative and negotiated through tertiary national spaces,” Roh writes. In particular, he proposes that Japanese author Kaneshiro Kazuki’s 1996 novel GO is “culturally mediated not only through Japanese and Korean ethnonational politics but also through American racial discourse and popular culture.”
That’s as the novel’s protagonist, high school student Sugihara, “must detour through another cultural space—in this case, American cultural and racial discourse—to find the latitude to break free from reified cultural identities that have been thrusted upon him,” he suggests.
Tension in the novel stems from Sugihara’s romance with a Japanese girl, Sakurai. Notably, when he reveals his family background to her, she balks at sexually consummating their relationship. Despite Sugihara’s academic references to the shared ancestry of Japanese and Koreans, Sakurai confesses, “It’s scary…the thought of you inside me is scary,” and calls his blood kitanai or dirty.
Kaneshiro’s novel “dismantles nationality as laughably fluid, particularly in the case of zainichi,” since citizenship is inherited based on the affiliation of zainichi individuals’ parents or grandparents at the time of their liberation from Japanese colonialism at the end of World War II.
To be Korean in GO is a matter neither of lineage nor of citizenship, Roh argues. Rather, “[r]acial formation, which Sugihara belatedly stumbles upon, is the arena in which his subjectivity is both based and contested”—and that can be done only with American intervention. For instance, Sugihara’s self-discovery occurs after his family pays a bribe to switch their citizenship from North Koreans to South Koreans—just so that his parents can visit Hawai‘i.
“Hawai‘i is a fantasy vacation space, a construct of American empire,” Roh writes. And it’s this fantasy American space that marks the dawn of Sugihara’s racial consciousness.
Roh points out that GO is rife with allusions to American culture, ranging from Sugihara’s love for the Godfather film series to a scene where he imagines himself as noir detective Philip Marlowe.
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“It is through popular culture—with the attendant political and racial underpinnings—that Sugihara negotiates a pathway for zainichi subjectivity,” Roh explains.
“[T]he intertextuality goes beyond a simple expression of zainichi anxiety,” he writes. “Sugihara actively adapts American cultural discourse for his own ends”—for example, by changing the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’s song “Born in the USA” to instead express that “I was born in Japan.”
In his musings, Sugihara connects racial discrimination against Native and African Americans with the treatment of Koreans. At other points, he identifies with the mixed-race musician Jimi Hendrix, and frames his response to racism in the context of the philosophy of Black rights icon Malcolm X.
Roh links the status of American culture in GO to the history of Allied-occupied post-war Japan, when the United States was “considered an external tertiary force that may be used to the zainichi population’s advantage when dealing with a discriminatory Japanese government.”
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“I would argue that there is a similar dynamic at play in GO—the use of US intervention in cultural form to liberate the zainichi from the shackles of ethnonational inferiority,” he adds. As such, the novel must be read in light of American racial discourse, even though it is a work of Asian literature.
“GO engages in an interminority and transnational cultural dialogue as a means of rehabilitating a fragmented history, generational alienation, and political absence,” Roh concludes.
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