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朝鮮大学校物語 (Chosen Daigakko Monogatari)
By Yang Yonghi. Tokyo: Kadokawa, 2022. 254 pp.
도꾜 조선대학교 이야기 (Tokkyo Choson Taehakkyo Iyagi)
By Yang Yonghi. Seoul: Maumsanchaek, 2023. 243 pp.
Authors who reach recounting their very own lives or explicit experiences in writing novels current fascinating portraits of their time and place. For instance, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Younger Man is the autobiographical story of a author who questions and turns away from his Irish Catholic upbringing. One other such story is filmmaker Yang Yonghi’s Choson Daigakko Monogatari (A Story of Korea College), a narrative of alienation and love revealed earlier this yr in Korean as Tokkyo Choson Taehakkyo Iyagi.[1]
Yang’s novel, her first, is unspectacular as artwork. Her story lacks such refined literary prospers as magic realism or stream of consciousness, the type of methods discovered within the works of such celebrated novelists as William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Yu Miri. Properly written, nonetheless, Yang’s story is especially noteworthy for introducing to readers the realities of life for pro-Pyongyang Koreans born and raised in Japan.
Yang’s Background
Born in 1964 in Osaka, Japan’s third largest metropolis and the middle of that nation’s Korean neighborhood, Yang Yonghi was the youngest of 4 kids and her dad and mom’ solely daughter. Yang Kong Son (양공선), her father, who was born on Jeju Island off Korea’s southern coast, left for Japan on the age of 15 in 1942 and settled in Osaka. Kang Jong Hui (강종희), her mom, was born in Osaka in 1930 to Korean dad and mom. In 1945, they took her with them to their native Jeju to keep away from the American bombs that have been destroying Osaka and different Japanese cities. In 1948, Kang returned to Osaka after witnessing the horrors of the April 3 Incident, an rebellion that happened in Jeju in April 1948, and its brutal suppression by Korean rightist, police and navy forces whereas the island was beneath US navy administration. The April 3 Incident, the institution of the Democratic Individuals’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) later that yr, and the pervasive discrimination that Koreans suffered in Japan led Yang’s dad and mom to help Pyongyang. Yang Yonghi’s father turned an official of the pro-Pyongyang Basic Affiliation of Korean Residents in Japan (generally recognized in Korean as Chongryon and in Japanese as Chosen Soren). Her mom, following what she witnessed in Jeju, regarded the Republic of Korea (ROK) with even larger antipathy than her husband did.
Regardless of rising up in Osaka in a pro-Pyongyang family, Yang Yonghi suffered an early shock to her religion within the DPRK. Over the course of 1971 and 1972, her father despatched her three brothers to Pyongyang as a part of the Korean “repatriation” venture to the DPRK that Chongryon oversaw in Japan. Her brothers have been by no means free after that to go to their household in Japan, though one obtained permission for a quick return so as to obtain medical care.
Yang attended the pro-Pyongyang Osaka Korean Excessive Faculty, the place college students realized Korean as their “nationwide language.”[2] She then enrolled within the College of Literature at Korea College (KU) in Tokyo–the head of the pro-Pyongyang college system in Japan. After commencement, Yang returned to Osaka Korean Excessive Faculty and taught Korean there for 2 years.
Having misplaced her religion in Chongryon and the DPRK through the years, Yang broke along with her upbringing. She left her put up as a Korean instructor and went to New York Metropolis for a grasp’s diploma in media research on the New Faculty. Subsequently, she made a number of documentaries and a film about her household, the pro-Pyongyang Korean neighborhood in Japan and North Korea; exchanged her DPRK passport for ROK citizenship; and, towards her father’s needs, married a Japanese man.
The Movies and the Novel
In depicting the lives of Koreans in Japan, generally known as zainichi (chaeil kyopo or jaeil gyopo in Korean), Yang Yonghi has created three documentaries about her household. She made her father the main target of the primary documentary, Pricey Pyongyang (ディア・ピョンヤン, 디어 평양, 2005). niece, Son Hwa (선화), who was dwelling in Pyongyang, was on the heart of her second documentary, Sona, the Different Myself (愛しきソナ, 굿바이 평양, 2009). Yang’s mom is the main target in Soup and Ideology (スープとイデオロギー, 수프와 이데올로기, 2021), the third in her household documentary trilogy. Between the second and third documentaries, Yang directed the drama Our Homeland (かぞくのくに, 가족의 나라, 2012), primarily based on the temporary return of one in all her brothers to Japan for medical therapy.
Quickly after the discharge of Our Homeland, the Japanese publishing firm Kadokawa approached her to write down a novel. Yang, accepting the proposal, wrote a narrative of affection and alienation a couple of younger zainichi Korean girl named Pak Mi-yong (박미영). The story flashes again to her years at Korea College (KU), with every of the guide’s 4 chapters protecting an episode in annually of her life as a scholar there from 1983 to 1987. Though enrolled within the KU College of Literature, Mi-yong has no need to comply with the everyday profession path for her main of instructing Korean in a pro-Pyongyang college and dislikes the college’s many restrictions and its ideology. All KU college students are required to stick to the next guidelines by which they need to: stay on campus, converse solely Korean, attend class in uniform, not watch tv, and solely learn the books and magazines that the college permits. At college, Mi-yong encounters a zainichi Korean actor who makes use of his precise Korean identify slightly than searching for to flee discrimination by assuming a Japanese id.[3] Impressed, Mi-yong finally begins to make use of her Korean identify in personal.
Mi-yong continues to face anti-Korean sentiments in her time at KU, cautious of working into classmates who could report her to the KU authorities, visiting a relative who was banished from Pyongyang as punishment for not adhering to DPRK requirements, and at one level navigating her household being put beneath surveillance. By the top of college, Mi-yong, who has turn into deeply alienated by this time, rejects the order by KU to return to Osaka. On the commencement ceremony, she storms out of the auditorium, leaving her neighborhood.
Love and Alienation in Tokyo
I believe that A Story of Korea College stands by itself as a novel of a younger girl’s formative faculty years. Yang Yonghi writes fluidly of Mi-yong’s love of artwork as she explores the world of movie and theater, a drive that takes her past the partitions of Korea College and into the broader world. Exterior the bounds of her college and neighborhood can be the place she discovers love with a Japanese man.
The novel is as a lot a story of alienation as it’s a love story. Mi-yong finds herself an outsider. She rebels towards her college’s restrictions, rejects its propaganda, and turns into an uncomfortable witness to the truth of North Korea. In the course of a Chongryon rally, watching an adulatory movie on the chief, Kim Il Sung, Mi-yong finds its type disturbingly just like the movies of the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Handled as a foreigner in Japan, the nation of her beginning, Mi-yong is handled the identical within the DPRK as effectively, the place she takes the practice to Sinuiju in a cushty first-class carriage reserved for overseas guests.
What struck me about this novel is how Yang Yonghi offers so many actual particulars about Japan’s pro-Pyongyang Koreans and North Korea. Yang reveals the reader Korea College and North Korea within the Nineteen Eighties. She introduces the thought of an “organizational life” (組織生活, 조직생활), which is the submission of the person to collective management and steerage, through the KU Committee, Chongryon, and the DPRK beneath the management of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. She refers back to the mysterious emergence of Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang media because the unnamed “Social gathering Heart.”[4] She informs readers that the League of Korean College students in Japan (留学同, 류학동), which is for pro-Pyongyang college students attending college exterior Korea College, exists. From the point of view of ethnic Koreans touring to the Fatherland, we study that Pyongyang attaches officers of the Bureau of Abroad Compatriot Affairs to observe and care for them throughout their keep.[5]
In evaluating the novel in Japanese to its Korean model, I used to be to see factors of divergence in a translation that was largely true to the unique. When Mi-yong and others converse Korean within the unique, the phrases seem in transliterated surtitles above the Japanese textual content; whereas within the Korean translation, these surtitles, that are pointless for a Korean reader, disappear. As the unique textual content has an occasional clarification of Korean gadgets, such because the chima chogori (치마저고리) that feminine KU college students put on to class, the Korean translation has added remarks to clarify such issues, like what Japan’s Korean excessive faculties are, what’s the “grasp” of a Japanese bar is, and who Nineteen Eighties Japanese pop star Matsuda Seiko was. In a translation that appeared to stick intently to the unique, the one passage that appeared to fall brief was the purpose the place Mi-yong mirrored on how impressed she was with the 半島人の大陸的なスキンシップ (“continental skinship of individuals of the [Korean] peninsula”) (230), contrasting the heat of individuals all through the Korean Peninsula with the reserve of the island-dwelling Japanese. Within the Korean translation, the passage turns into 한국인의 뜨거운스킨십 (“the affectionate skinship of [South] Koreans”) (226). This translation reduces all of the peninsula’s folks to these of the ROK alone and eliminates the distinction between continental heat and insular reserve.
Yang Yonghi’s novel is price studying each as literature and as a information to the pro-Pyongyang zainichi Korean neighborhood in Japan. I hope that this story seems at some point in English, because it deserves a wider viewers.
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