Abstract: When the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2016 it made a commitment to provide access to education for children with disabilities. Furthermore, DPRK domestic legislation guarantees free compulsory twelve-year education for all children, meaning withholding education from a child is illegal. Currently a network of eleven special (segregated) schools cater to deaf and blind children. Children with other disabilities are supposed to enroll in mainstream schools. We analyze DPRK state media news reports and other publications to assess access to education for children with disabilities in the DPRK. We find that the special school system is well developed but that children educated in special schools lack opportunities to interact with non-disabled children and have achieved worse academically than their mainstream peers. Accessing mainstream education is difficult for some children due to a lack of systematic support combined with cultural and structural barriers. Inclusive education is beginning to emerge but largely depends on the discretion of individual teachers and their willingness to perform additional labor to accommodate a child’s learning needs.

Abstract: A conventional theory of Korean social history asserts that the people of Joseon were divided into distinct social estates: yangban , jungin , pyeongmin , and nobi . Pyeongmin is described as a lower-middle or commoner estate, but its precise meaning warrants reevaluation in light of estate theory, which poses that an estate society must classify individuals into categories on the basis of law. This study examines the usage of the term pyeongmin from the late 18th to the early 20th century in official documents produced by the Joseon government and the Japanese colonial authorities, focusing on how pyeongmin functioned as a marker of personal status. The findings reveal that pyeongmin was used as a broad, catch-all term for those not belonging to a specific group, with its connotations shifting depending on the context. Also, while Joseon identified individuals through their duties to state or occupations, the Japanese colonial regime sought to distinguish the subjects based both on their occupations and their social estate. Contrary to some previous studies that treat pyeongmin as a definitive indicator of social estate, this study strongly suggests that the term offers little to no information about an individual’s estate. The absence of pyeongmin as an independent and recognized social estate is significant because estate societies typically require all individuals to be legally classified into specific estate groups. Unlike medieval Europe, imperial Russia, or Edo Japan, there is scant evidence that traditional Korean society followed such a system. Rather, the notion of an estate-based social structure in Korea may be a product of Japanese rule.

Abstract: About 100 years ago, Bukchon occupied a much larger part of Seoul than today, encompassing neighborhoods north of Cheonggyecheon. It was an area where middle-and upper-class residents lived continuously from the Joseon dynasty and major elite educational institutions were concentrated. This study first looks into the educational institutions of Bukchon from the late 19th to the early 20th century, following the Gabo Reform which abolished the status system. It argues that the middle class and students from the provinces migrated to Gyeongseong to take advantage of the educational institutions located in Bukchon. Next, with data on the location of schools and the students’ residency situation around the 1930s, this study examines the trend of educational migration to Bukchon during the colonial period. The analysis reveals that the educational institutions established in the late 19th century persisted and expanded during the colonial period, which led to the continuous movement to the capital of the middle class and students who desired to reproduce their class and achieve economic stability.

Reviewed by: Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics, and Art to Come ed. by Lee Chonghwa Christine L. Marran Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics, and Art to Come edited by Lee Chonghwa. Translation edited by Rebecca Jennison and Brett de Bary. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 222 pp. The essays, artwork, and moving images that comprise Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics and Art to Come express the legacies and shadows of colonial violence in East Asia through aesthetics, bodily images, and a decolonial vision depicting "an Asia yet to come." The "wound" in the title stands for the trans-generational ruptures experienced by women, laborers, and islanders under the Japanese empire. These wounds have yet to heal in the wake of colonial violence and a postwar discursive history that seeks to erase these transgressions and relations formed as a result of these wounds. As one of the editors of the volume, renowned scholar of Asian studies Brett de Bary puts it, the wound expresses past violences, but it also expresses a form of bodily experience and vulnerability. In this volume, the wound is portrayed through a range of material including prose, poetry, photographs, and moving images (attached to the inside cover is a DVD). The essays and artist interviews in particular illustrate how art forms, with their manifold images of bodily experience, can disrupt discursive histories produced by the nation-state. The volume's contributors confront Japan's "fraught contestation over its twentieth-century [End Page 587] national history" (xxxii). At the same time, they express new forms of connection and solidarity outside of the frame of the nation-state. The curious structure of this volume brings together four prefaces and seven chapters. Most of the contributions were originally published in a Japanese volume. They have been expertly translated, with the help of multiple collaborators, by scholars Rebecca Jennison and Brett de Bary, who each wrote an informative preface describing how this volume came to be. The prefaces are essential to understanding the extent of community-building and artist-driven activism that preceded this volume. Prior to the book project, participants had formed an active working group, referred to throughout the book as the "Asia, Politics, Art" project, to address the "pedagogical narratives deployed by the Japanese nation-state, whose assimilative ideology produces and reproduces the unity of the nation by erasing difference" (xxxviii). Meetings in Okinawa and Tokyo, along with other dialogues, led to the Japanese book, Zanshō no oto: 'Ajia, seiji, āto' no mirai e, edited by philosopher and poet Lee Chonghwa. She gathered together Zainichi Korean, Okinawan, and South Korean academics as well as artists whose installations and collaborations have unfolded "on the backstages of East Asian politics and history." The essays and art of this volume feature conversations and confrontations that mourn the past, explore self-identity, and disrupt state discourse. Each chapter is considerably different from the next, but together they produce a sense of how relations of solidarity can be built through art and bodily expression. For example, the third preface features Lee Chonghwa's poetry inspired by poems of Kim Sowol, which is followed by a dialogue with composer Takahashi Yūji on sound and mourning. The question of how to find a way forward while remembering those perished under Japanese colonialism is raised. The dialogue concludes with Lee: "We create art that is a response, and in that sense we might call it a ritual. That's what I'm feeling. And perhaps, that is what I would call 'Asia'" [lxix]. The role of sound in creating connections continues with a chapter by literature scholar Shinjō Ikuo on the music of Takahashi. As Shinjō puts it, "We might say that through Takahashi's music, the Asia, Politics, Art project was able to clearly ascertain its own ideal as an attempt to link the political, social, sexual, economic, ethnic, and racial … divisions that we live in Asia today, within a space-time of collaborative artwork" [8]. Invoking Lee's "politics of supplication," Shinjō emphasizes the need to recall those we have not known and "face the difficulty of reliving those times" [8]. Literature scholar...

Reviewed by: In-Mates dir. by Yuki Iiyama Yasuko Ikeuchi In-Mates directed by Yuki Iiyama. Tokyo: Rice Mountain Film, 2021. 26 minutes, 50 seconds. Rap Performance Seeking Freedom and Liberation The video work In-Mates created by artist Iiyama Yuki was banned by its sponsor, the Japan Foundation, in 2021, and again the following year by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's Human Rights Department, on the grounds that there were "concerns" about the film's reference to the "massacre of Chōsenjin [Koreans] at the time of the Great Kanto Earthquake [1923] as a fact." Iiyama held a press conference in protest on October 28, 2022, together with FUNI, a 2.5 generation Zainichi Korean who was the main performer in the film. Since then, they have continued their protest against censorship. In-Mates is based on the medical records of two Koreans who were committed to Oji Brain Hospital in Tokyo in 1930, where they died in 1940. It includes rap by FUNI in response to their anguish. It is a short film, just over twenty-six minutes long, consisting of five scenes in total. In the introductory scene, Iiyama and FUNI interview historian Tonoyama [End Page 590] Masaru who explains that the movement of Koreans from colonial Korea to the imperial capital of Tokyo began to increase in the 1920s. Expected to work as obedient, cheap labor in accordance with the imperial order, Koreans who rebelled or engaged in independence movements were subject to crackdowns. Tonoyama explained that Japan in the 1920s saw the rise of a relatively free labor and socialist movement. Regarding the massacre of Koreans in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, in the interview, Tonoyama stated, "There is no doubt that the Japanese common people killed quite a few innocent Koreans because the Japanese people were fed false rumors." The Japan Foundation and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's Human Rights Department found this statement problematic and banned the showing of In-Mates. Killings were reported in official historical documents issued by the government of the time as well as in newspaper articles. In addition, there are many testimonies from people who actually witnessed the massacre.1 In-Mates is not a documentary film specifically about this massacre, and yet the denial by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's Human Rights Department of the historian's testimony further elucidates historical revisionism in Japan. Tokyo's present governor, Koike Yuriko, has ceased sending her previously customary condolences to rallies commemorating the massacre since 2017, and the banning of In-Mates by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's Human Rights Department is believed to be in line with the wishes of the governor. To date, the Governor of Tokyo (as well as the Japanese government) continues to deny the historical fact of the massacre of Koreans, Chinese, and socialists during the Great Kanto Earthquake. The introductory scene mentions records of Korean patients frequently performing "hōka" (放歌). The Chinese character for hō in hōka has a strong verbal nuance of "to release, to set free, to liberate." But the medical records do not reveal what kind of songs they were singing. In an interview with Iiyama and FUNI, a psychiatric historian, Suzuki Akihito, points out that a major limitation of the facility was that the doctors and nurses did not understand Korean, the native language of the Korean patients. Thus the "hōka songs" sung by the two Korean patients in their mother tongue were dismissed as completely unintelligible. Of the two Korean patients, one was a day laborer who was poor and disheveled. The other was married with a family in Korea and had a relatively good education; he expressed strong dissatisfaction with his internment and [End Page 591] repeatedly demanded to be set free. They may have been singing hōka as an expression of sinse t'aryŏng 身世打玲, a lively "internal form of dialogue" (Lee 1998, n.p.) that was popular on the Korean peninsula. But in Japan, their hōka fell on deaf ears. Similarly, FUNI explains that his expressive form of rap music was a survival skill that kept him from becoming violent when he felt unable to control his...

Abstract: As a memory place that exemplifies contemporary Zainichi experiences, the Utoro district in Kyoto, Japan, entails stories of Japan's colonial exploitation and postcolonial oppression, yet simultaneously reveals human hope, cooperation, and solidarity. First formed for the Korean workers and their families mobilized for the construction of a military airport during World War II, Utoro was left abandoned for decades in postwar Japan. Its Korean residents have suffered from continuous eviction suits, harassment, and violence including the most recent arson attack in 2022. At the same time, these intricacies of colonial origin and postcolonial controversy also invited networked grassroots efforts among the Japanese and Koreans to remember and reconstruct the place's sociohistorical meanings, resulting in the construction of the Utoro Peace Memorial Museum in 2022. This paper highlights the significance of Zainichi experiences with/in Utoro through an analysis of identity, discourse, and representation of the place. Drawing upon collective memory scholarship and adopting a theoretical framework of re-collection, the paper unravels complex meanings of a site in relation to human acts of remembering, making sense of, and finding significance to our past experiences with/in it. By situating visual and discursive voices of the Utoro community (Zainichi in Utoro ), such as its former residents' oral testimonies and museum displays, this study elucidates the significance of Utoro in Zainichi history. This paper argues that Utoro projects contradictory positionalities of Korean subjects as both integral and excess in the history of colonial and postcolonial socio-politics of ethno-racial Other in Japan.

Abstract: Zainichi Korean literature, which addresses questions concerning the Zainichi Korean minority, can be considered as one among many postcolonial literatures. By examining works of Sagisawa Megumu, Kaneshiro Kazuki, and Kim Masumi as case studies, I position contemporary Zainichi Korean literature within the broader context of postcolonial global history. Sagisawa's novel Saihate no futari (Two persons at the margins, 1999) narrates the relationship between a Japanese woman, whose father is an American GI, and a Zainichi Korean man. After the man succumbs to leukemia, the woman discovers that his mother was a survivor of the atomic bomb. The silencing of his mother's voice can be analyzed using Spivak's concept of the subaltern. Kaneshiro's novel GO (2000) addresses Korea's division as a consequence of imperialism and the Cold War. Furthermore, it draws connections between African Americans in the United States and the Zainichi Korean minority, which can be interpreted as an allusion to Bhabha's concept of mimicry. In Kim Masumi's novel Nason no sora (The sky of Nason, 2001), a Zainichi Korean woman residing in the United States engages with both the Japanese expatriate community and Asian Americans, contending with essentialist concepts of ethnicity. I argue that in the selected novels both the literary negotiations of Zainichi Korean postcoloniality and its entanglement with global history as well as the references to other diasporas, namely, the Asian and African diasporas in the United States, contribute to a subversive reframing of some prevailing narratives concerning the Zainichi Korean minority in Japan.

Guest Editor’s Introduction Jackie J. Kim-Wachutka (bio) Zainichi. A reference that has become autonomous. Freestanding on its own. Once second-class citizens of a colony, residing in the metropole of the Imperial Other. Bound to tumultuous turns of history, torn between the hopes of liberation and the uncertainties of a dawn of “freedom.” By some cosmic fate, like floating seed, they took root in rocky soil. Seed dispersed by wind is said to enroot even stronger and deeper into place. The first generation now becoming the fourth, fifth and more. Generations forged lives, facing the challenges of each era. Postwar loss of Japanese citizenship and becoming stateless, having to register as “aliens.” Repatriation or stay in place was everyone’s big question. Some went back to an “independent” homeland to find disease and famine and returned secretly on illegal boats. Turmoil of political uprising and ideological division, government massacre of innocent villagers causing trauma scorched into memories of newly fleeing Cheju Islanders, mostly headed to Osaka. Transported island rituals and Gyeongsang-do tradition, in the hustle and bustle of the Osaka enclave. Multiple dialects and local language, hybrid, creolized vernacular, viscerally invocated for everyday survival. Witnessing from afar, civil war painfully halving motherland into North and South. Even on borrowed soil, pitted against one another in the Cold War division. Pledging allegiance to one, mistrusting each other. Becoming South Koreans or choosing to remain stateless. [End Page 1] “Exodus” to a said “homeland” never before seen but only imagined, dividing families and loved ones permanently. Those deciding to stay put searched for ways, legal or not, to feed the family. Blood and sweat of labor for pennies. Poverty and stigma, laden with the pungent sensory that knew no escape. Diplomatic relations between the once colonizer and the colonized. Changing “stateless” to South Korea for the right of “Special Permanent Residence.” Some choosing to remain stateless to send a message. Opting for South for the sake of convenience, but rejecting becoming Japanese just for a passport. Naturalizing as a matter of fact or for the sake of their children’s future. Fighting for a rightful place for the children to learn. Ethnic minzoku education and maintaining “our” language. Pride and turmoil of claiming “true” names, abandoning passing names. Saying no to state demands of fingerprints and alien registration. A collective movement attracting 1.8 million signatures of domestic and international support and attention. Demanding equal employment and right to work regardless of revealing root of identity. Marrying a Japanese spouse and raising children with dual heritage. Wearing the jeogori (ethnic dress) school-uniform despite anonymous knife slit of hate crime on its skirt. Excluded from the pension system and fighting to gain it for the aging first generation. Seeking education equity and accreditation of ethnic schools. Women encountering their own internal problems, struggling with oppressive traditions of strict patriarchy. Preparing endless side-dishes for numerous ancestor worship ceremonies (jesa) or finding voice to contest it and say no. Family problems, hushing domestic abuse, gathering courage to talk about it and seek help. Praying to mountain or water gods, rubbing palms in prayer to the beat of a “famous” shaman. Looking for solace in temples, the Sōka Gakkai Buddhist sect, Christianity, or alternative other. Bearing burdens and dilemmas as minority women in mainstream society and androcentric ethnic community. Seeking knowledge and raising awareness in the realm of the law to fight discrimination. Zainichi1 has evolved. From hiding for basic survival, to revealing to actually [End Page 2] live, and emphasizing identity to revert the injustice of unrecognition. Zainichi, a descriptor that encompasses the intricate interweaving of histories and biographies across nations, transnations, transborders, and now joining a global discussion. Talk of ikoku, a foreign land, or takoku, an other’s land, becoming “furusato,” a place of birth and nostalgic memories. The reference to “homeland” becoming a thing of the past, now it is about evoking “home.” But this home, the land of birth of colonial legacy that is Zainichi, inflicts pain with shouts of exclusion and expulsion to “go back.” But where should Zainichi go? Across the sea, a homeland to the first generation who came long ago...