Seoul Journal of Korean Studies

Zainichi: Past Memory, Present Action, Future Vision — History, Community, Person —

Scholars, activists, poets, a rapper, and lay persons who research on, advocate with, creatively express about, perform and everyday live Zainichi—the diaspora in Japan with roots on the Chōsen/Joseon (Korean) Peninsula² speak [End Page 365] from the pages of this special issue. The one-year conversation dedicated to "Contemporary Zainichi Experience" showcases a global positioning of Zainichi as an object of research that traverses numerous national boundaries, with collaborations from contributors and reviewers from Japan, the U.S., South Korea, Canada, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Slovenia, Lithuania, England, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Indonesia. Through a "research imagination" that "allows people to consider migration, resist state violence, seek social redress, and design new forms of civic association and collaboration, often across national boundaries" (Appadurai 2001, 6), this special issue is a fusion of voices by and about Zainichi. It demonstrates an inter-disciplinary, inter-area, and inter-regional merging of intellectuals, grassroots social activists, and Alltags actors whose collaboration is essential as a social force centering Zainichi within the realm of a global dialogue on colonial legacies of violence and displacement and postcolonial attempts at reflexivity, positioning, defining, and redefining of former migrants and their descendants. Within this special issue, an international broadening of knowledge production on Zainichi taps into a polyphony of scholarly works pertaining to the social sciences, literature, film, and art. Simultaneously, the short essays and poems contributed especially for this occasion, found in the appendix of this guest editor's introduction, depict as motif Zainichi and its future.³ Alongside the main contributing articles, their voices are an ensemble of Zainichi from first to fourth generation, those of mixed heritage, Japanese, and "newcomer" Koreans. All contributions across multiple disciplines, expertise, life experiences, and backgrounds reveal the urgency of holistic dialogue at a time when, as Appadurai (2001, 14–15) emphasizes, the research subject has acquired international, transnational, or global dimensions of vital interest. Zainichi are indeed gaining recognition as a resilient ethnic minority once formerly colonized by empire, whose diversity and difference are not without steadfast connection to roots and community. The coalescing efforts at archiving their experience recapitulate the past of "origins" manifest in the present action of re-collecting and re-membering to lay hold of a future continuum. It is this critical moment that Zainichi share with diasporic peoples across borders, and this "Contemporary Zainichi Experience" is a way to create new forms of dialogue.

The past—fleeting moments resurrected in memory. The present—unfolding [End Page 366] lived experiences foretelling what is to come. The time spans of past, present, and future are not singular temporal segments but are fluid and flow into each other's spatiotemporal dimensions. Zainichi within contemporary experience stems from the past, is lived in the present, and imagined for the future. Benjamin writes, "For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns[,] threatens to disappear irretrievably" (1968, 255). Zainichi stands at a threshold. It is upon this threshold that a sense of urgency attempts to take hold of a fleeting moment. We revisit Benjamin's proclivity towards the bygone that could never be completely historicized but instead "becomes" through what Khatib (2017) declares as a disruptive constellation of the present and the past. Benjamin, drawing on historian Leopold von Ranke, writes, "To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was'. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger" (1968, 255).

The past for Zainichi meant structural oppression, discrimination, inequality, and suffering both within the main society as well as within the ethnic community itself. But also within this tumultuous history incremental social achievements have been made and are continuously being fought for and achieved. Like a tidal wave the force of which radiates and flows outwards, Zainichi within the...