Local Migrations: Between Jeju and Hanshin

• In Event: East Asia in Global Flows

Abstract

The history and cultural production of the zainichi, or resident-in-Japan, Korean community is often understood within the framework of the nation-state. While we cannot ignore the power and influence of state institutions, however, or of national identities, neither should we ignore the local institutions, spaces, and practices that constitute everyday life and the local sensibilities that color it. The island of Jeju and the city of Osaka hold special significance for the zainichi community. Osaka has been home since the colonial era to Japan’s largest community of ethnic Koreans. At the same time, Jejuans have comprised up to thirty percent of zaihan, or resident-in-Osaka, Koreans. This paper calls attention to the locality of the zaihan Jejuan experience as presented in the story “‘Aboji’ o fumu” (Stomping on Aboji, 1997), by one of Japan’s most politically engaged postwar authors, Oda Makoto. Oda’s story recounts the life of the narrator’s father-in-law, who migrated from Jeju to Osaka in the nineteen-thirties, eventually settling in Kobe’s Nagata Ward. He returns to Jeju after the 1995 earthquake that devastated the Hanshin region and dies soon after. The title figure of Oda’s story embodies a rooted, local cosmopolitanism, and his migration and return detail a cross-cultural exchange experienced at an intimate level in a region far from national capitals, suggesting that the migrant experience cannot be understood only within a national order. I argue that Oda’s treatment of this local migration complicates notions of ethnic nationalism from both within and outside.

Author

• Michael Paul Cronin, College of William and Mary