Lecture
Diasporic Koreans' Decolonization Project in Postwar Japan
- Sayaka Chatani (National University of Singapore)
- Date
- Monday 24 February 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Leiden Lecture Series in Japanese Studies
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.23
How did the "Korean minority" pursue decolonization while remaining in its former colonizer's land, Japan, after August 1945? This talk will introduce the worldview and politics of leftist Koreans, drawn from hundreds of interviews and archival research. An enormous grassroots energy of Korean residents, the hostility of the American and Japanese authorities, and the ideological appeal of North Korea led them to form a small nation within Japan. They were the central force that created a peculiar dynamic in zainichi Korean society and influenced postwar Japanese conservatism. The talk will explain how their decolonization impetus and deepening diaspora-ness were intertwined, and how their strong ethnic confidence affected second-generation Korean youth in the 1960s.
About the speaker
Sayaka Chatani is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. She is a multilingual social historian of the Japanese Empire and its aftermath. Her first book, Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2018), compares the experiences and mindsets of young men under imperial mobilization in the countryside of northern Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Okinawa. She is currently finalizing her second book, A Nation Within: The Decolonization Project of Chongryon Koreans in Japan (under review, Stanford University Press), which delves into the internal dynamics of the pro-North Korean zainichi community and proposes a new perspective for studying postwar Japan.
