“No,” she said abruptly. “You don’t understand. You’re Japanese, and also American. But I’m neither Korean nor Japanese. I’m Zainichi.”
Though Zainichi literally means “to be in Japan,” the term is most commonly used to refer to ethnic Korean residents of Japan. A majority of the population are descendants of those who fled the Korean peninsula before World War II, or those who were brought to Japan against their will and subjected to forced labor. Today, there are about 300,000 ethnic Koreans in Japan. While they have permanent resident status, they are not Japanese citizens, so it would be incorrect to call them Korean Japanese. My friend was right. She was Zainichi; there was no other word to describe her situation and background.
Zainichi Koreans comprise the second largest minority group in Japan, and many have become recognized names in the literary world. One such novelist is Yang Seok-il, who was born in Osaka in 1936 to first-generation Zainichi parents. He began writing in his forties, after losing all his money in a business venture and spending ten years as a taxi driver in Tokyo. One night, he was at a bar telling his friends about some of the outrageous things his customers would do when an editor overheard him and urged him to write about his experiences. The chance encounter led to his debut novel, Taxi Rhapsody (1981), which was later made into a successful film. Since then, Yang has produced numerous novels and essays, making him one of the most prominent and prolific Zainichi authors writing today.
While Yang has tackled a wide range of issues and themes throughout his career, perhaps it is only natural that many of his works focus on the Zainichi experience, of which racial discrimination is an undeniable aspect. For decades, even the most educated Koreans were denied equal access to employment opportunities in Japan, leaving them with no choice but to work in restaurants or pachinko parlors (hence the title of Min Jin Lee’s bestselling novel, Pachinko, which opened the eyes of American readers to the injustices suffered by Zainichi Koreans). In his novel Wagering the Night (1994), Yang explores two topics that illustrate the brutal conditions imposed upon Koreans in postwar Japan: the Apache tribe and the Omura Immigration Center.
The Apache tribe, named after the fearless Native American warriors led by Geronimo, was a group of Zainichi Koreans who stole scrap metal from the remains of the Osaka Arsenal in the late 1950s. The arsenal, once the largest military factory in Asia, had been destroyed by an American air raid one day before the war ended. The Koreans who sneaked into the enormous junkyard each night for sellable material argued that the abandoned site was up for grabs, and that they had no other means of feeding their families. The Japanese police, on the other hand, claimed that the remains were state property, even though the yard and its contents had been neglected by the government for over a decade. The Apache and the police engaged in a months-long battle, resulting in numerous injuries and deaths.
In the novel, an Apache member named Kim is arrested and sent to Omura Immigration Center, a detention center located in Omura, Nagasaki. He is accused of being an illegal immigrant, although he was born and raised in Japan. According to immigration officials, Kim is guilty of leaving the country between 1945 and 1952, a period designated by the newly-signed Alien Registration Law. Kim explains that his father visited the Korean peninsula for a few months during that time, but that he and his mother stayed in Japan. The officials demand that he prove it. Unable to do so, Kim is sent to Omura, where he is tortured and abused on a daily basis without knowing if he will ever get out. He meets dozens of Korean inmates who have been torn away from their families because of a short trip they took to the motherland prior to the enactment of the new law. It is important to know what went on behind the walls of the Omura Immigration Center, not only because of the blatant violation of human rights that took place there in the past—some have referred to it as the Japanese Auschwitz—but because those detained there continue to suffer today. Last June, a Nigerian detainee in his forties died after going on a hunger strike to protest his prolonged incarceration, the length of which had been unspecified.
In 1998, Yang received critical acclaim for Blood and Bones, which won the Yamamoto Shugoro Prize and was nominated for the Naoki Prize. Blood and Bones is a semi-autobiographical novel based on Yang’s relationship with his father, who is portrayed as a violent, absurdly selfish man whose actions can only be described as bizarre. He eats rotten pork and tiger genitals for his health. When he gets drunk, he flies into a rage and destroys the house, hurling furniture out of the second-floor window. He has countless mistresses and continues to reproduce well into his sixties. In an essay titled “Writing About My Father,” Yang recounts the sheer difficulty of expressing such a figure in literary terms:
He was a man who had been taken to the hospital for stabbing himself deep in the stomach—the blade penetrated his large intestine—just to show he was brave. I still remember how he went up against five or six men, all of them black belts in judo or karate. He continued to pick fights even in his sixties; his unflagging stamina was almost comical. When I watched my father walk down the street, I felt there were spirits wrapped around his entire body. That was how abnormal his aura was. There was no way I could depict such a character without making him seem unrealistic. I had to carefully place him against a believable background, one that included details of his relationships and the time in which he lived.
What makes Yang’s works so readable despite their weighty plots is the liveliness of his characters. They swear, they drink, they quarrel, they cheat; they are alive on every page, releasing an energy that is so palpable that you can almost smell their breath as they argue about money, politics, and the fate of their clan. Dialogue is an integral part of Yang’s storytelling, and the often coarse language, accentuated by the Osaka dialect spoken by many of his characters, has a way of illuminating the dire circumstances in which Zainichi Koreans were forced to live. The men and women depicted in Yang’s novels exhibit a certain rawness; they’re too busy living their lives to care about political correctness or social norms. It seems this mentality was instilled in Yang by his practical, no-nonsense mother, whom he also mentions in his essay: “As humans—as animals—our biggest priority is survival. My mother taught me that life always comes first; without it, thought and philosophy mean nothing.”
Over the years, Yang has continued to expand the breadth of his work, addressing various social issues and demonstrating his versatility as a writer. Children of the Dark (2002), arguably his most controversial novel, deals with the issue of human trafficking in Thailand. One of the characters is a ten-year-old girl who was sold into sexual slavery by her parents. When she contracts HIV and is no longer useful to her owner, he puts her in a garbage bag and sends her to the dump. Though she manages to escape and returns home, she is shunned by her family and neighbors, and left to die in a cage out in the yard. Horrified by the outright cruelty of these businesses, I wondered what kind of people ran them. I then learned that the brothel owners had once been street children themselves, and that the life they led was the only one they knew.
Yang’s gaze is unflinching, his descriptions ruthlessly vivid. The sex scenes, in which boys and girls as young as eight years old are raped in unimaginable ways by wealthy pedophiles from around the world, are so graphic that it’s a challenge not to wince or feel nauseated. Equally distressing are the depictions of children who are killed for their organs, and the struggles of human rights activists whose efforts are thwarted by police corruption. Due to its scandalous content, Children of the Dark spurred controversy both at home and abroad. When a movie based on the book was released in 2008, it was invited to screen at the Bangkok International Film Festival, only to be pulled from the lineup by the Tourism Authority of Thailand and other unhappy sponsors.
Another painful yet important book is Awaiting Spring (2010), which chronicles the lives of wartime Korean comfort women in excruciating detail. Based on careful research and survivor testimonies, it tells the story of seventeen-year-old Soonhwa, who is tricked by a man in uniform and taken to a military brothel in Nanjing. There, she is given a kimono and a Japanese name. On her first night in Nanjing, she is raped by approximately fifty Japanese soldiers. When she tries to resist, she is beaten, attacked with a bayonet, and locked in a cell for days without food. With nowhere to run, many of the other comfort women commit suicide or go insane. But Soonhwa accepts her fate. She quickly learns Japanese, and ingratiates herself with the soldiers so that they will bring her food. She has chosen to live.
Over the next eight years, Soonhwa is taken to various comfort stations across Asia and forced to sleep with countless men. She has two children, who are snatched from her arms the moment they are born and never seen again; when her third pregnancy ends in stillbirth, she is told that she can no longer conceive because her uterus has been removed. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, she is subjected to a series of demeaning interrogations by U.S. Army officers, who discredit her statements and tell her she’d have to be a “sex machine” for her claims to be true. In the midst of turmoil, degradation, and inhumanity, Soonhwa holds her head high, navigating her journey with dignity and giving courage to others along the way. Bold, determined, and remarkably resilient, she is the strongest woman I have ever encountered in literature.
Yang’s sensitivity toward minorities and the socially disadvantaged stems, no doubt, from his unique background of being a stranger in his own land. Until only recently, Zainichi Koreans were forced to apply for alien registration cards and required by law to carry them at all times. In Japan, ethnic Koreans are the main target of hate speeches, in which those who have lived in the country for generations are derided as outcasts and told to “go home.” When the friend I mentioned at the beginning of this essay had a baby, the name she and her husband (also Zainichi) had originally had in mind for their daughter was turned down by a city official who explained that, as “foreigners,” they needed to abide by a different set of rules. If Yang is a master at portraying the outsider, it’s because he’s been one his whole life.
Perhaps Yang’s most compelling message is found in the conclusion of Children of the Dark, which author Akira Nagae commends in the afterword as “something only Yang Seok-il can write.” In the final scene, a Japanese journalist tries to convince an NGO worker named Keiko to leave Thailand and return to Japan. When Keiko replies that she has a responsibility to the children she has promised to protect, the journalist says it isn’t her place as a foreigner to try to fix Thai people’s problems. Despite his advice—and frequent gang threats that put her life at risk—Keiko decides to stay in Thailand, choosing not to draw a line between “us” and “them.” Yang’s novels remind us that these lines need to be obliterated, that it’s about time we became more invested in a bigger “us”—the human race. In an increasingly divided world, his is a voice that demands to be heard.
