뉴스레터

The 6th Historical Cinema Symposium was held under the title 'Transnational Cinema Symposium 2014' on July 19, 2014 at Rikkyo University in Japan. This is the second Transnational Cinema Symposium, after the first one last year, that has been co-hosted with the College of Intercultural Communication at Rikkyo University. The purpose of this year's symposium was to criticize and reflect on historical perception in East Asia by rediscovering 'new Korean-Japanese films,' or films that break down borders between nations. And the symposium addressed the topic of 'The Historical Perception of the Youth Living in Japan and Korea, Countries Moving Toward a Symbiotic Society,' in an effort to understand the multi-identity of the Korean-Japanese youth in connection with the stories of youths growing up in multi-cultural families in Korea.

“Patriotism is not the same as exclusive nationalism”

The 2014 symposium opened with the screening of the film Tese (directed by Kang Seong-myeong, 2011), followed by the talk session with the film's director. Tese is a documentary film about the Korean-Japanese soccer player Chong Tese, who divides his time between in Japan, North Korea, Germany, Britain, and South Korea. A graduate of Korea University in Tokyo, Japan, Chong Tese feels most comfortable when he speaks Japanese among other languages, and feels free when he arrives at the Haneda Airport after a long trip. Nevertheless, however, what he calls 'my country' is Korea, either North or South. To fulfil the wish of his beloved mother and grandmother, he played for Team North Korea in a World Cup. But this part of his career works against his life in Korea. The film Tese plainly shows the growing pains of Chong Tese as his free soul is frustrated sometimes when faced with the 'country' as an exclusive boundary and the wall of 'nationality.'

The ensuing talk session was conducted by director Kang Seong-myeong, a graduate of an ethnic Korean school and Waseda University in Japan, professor Mori Yoshitaka at Tokyo University of the Arts, and Dr. Lee Won-woo at the Northeast Asian History Foundation. In this session, director Kang said that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Koreans living in Japan, like himself, had various experiences and multiple identities, and that patriotism is not the same as groundless racial discrimination or exclusive nationalism.

If Tese dealt with the present day of the Korean-Japanese with multiple identities, The Flower Lady in the first session of the afternoon program was about the story of 'comfort women' as remembered by the first generation of the Korean-Japanese, like Chong Tese's grandmother. A picture book featuring the life of the late Shim Dal-yeon, who, at the tender age of thirteen, had been forced to live as a sex slave for the Japanese military in battlefield, was presented and read aloud page by page in Japanese by six students and professors of Rikkyo University. The original Korean text had been translated by five students of the Korean class at Rikkyo University and distributed as an information package. After the reading, the students presented their thoughts and opinions and the professors described how the publication of the storybook The Flower Lady as a joint initiative of Korea, China, and Japan had been thwarted in Japan and presented their studies on the life of the late Shim Dal-yeon, the main character of the book.

A right-wing newspaper in Japan had run an article extremely critical of Hiroshima University where a documentary on 'comfort women' had been shown during class recently and of the responsible professor. and the Japanese academia had started a signature-collecting campaign in protest. Against this backdrop, we had to be careful with the reading of The Flower Lady but we intended it to show that the trauma of the late Ms. Shim Dal-yeon whose youth had been lost to nationalism shared the same historical root as the exclusive nationalism experienced by Chong Tese, and it resonated with many people in the audience.

In Search of Identity beyond Countries and Borders

The latter half of the afternoon program consisted of the screening of the film Wandeugi (directed by Lee Han, 2011) and the talk session by Jasmine Lee, the member of the National Assembly who appeared in the film. Unlike in Tese or The Flower Lady, the characters and episodes featured in Wandeugi, such as foreign workers, marriage migrants, and disabled people, and the discrimination and alienation experienced by their families, are fictitious. Some Korean movies these days have such minority characters as foreign workers, marriage migrants, North Korean defectors, or ethnic Koreans living in China portrayed much worse than they actually are. But the Korean Japanese find no place even in Korean popular movies. The first reason why Wandeugi had been chosen by the Historical Cinema Symposium this year was that it was a well-made commercial movie with elements that were appealing and familiar to the public. From the planning stage, the Symposium had intended to involve as many high school students as possible in the event. Wandeugi also had a theme that spoke to Japanese high school students because it featured a main character born to a Korean father with physical disabilities and a Filipino mother and his search for his identity. Jasmine Lee, one of the cast of the movie, also talked about Filipino 'comfort women.'

As they watched Tese in a plain tone, the sad Flower Lady video, and the happy Wandeugi, quite a few students, including a dozen students of Kanto International Senior High School attending the event with their teachers from the morning, nodded and laughed to the dramatic flow and caught the feelings hidden between the lines of the subtitles. The event was concluded with a reflection on the histories of Korea and Japan and the reality of racial discrimination from the perspective of women in suffering, like the Filipino mother in Wandeugi, Chong Tese's mother and grandmother in Tese, and Ms. Shim Dal-yeon in The Flower Lady.

Young ethnic Koreans living in Japan, despite the media environment steeped in increasingly blatant racial discrimination, social hostility, and abusive language against them, value the roots of their cultural diversity and seek a new identity beyond the borders between the two societies. At the same time, they develop their passion and love for the society in which they live. This symposium showed movies that featured the lives of the Korean Japanese living in Korean and Japanese society and of others with various cultural backgrounds. The symposium also contemplated the new identity of young ethnic Koreans living in Japan as a multi-cultural society. It also showed movies and videos that would help the young Japanese come to a new realization of Japan's colonial rule over Korea and historical memories and lead them to think about problems inherent to symbiotic society. These efforts and challenges of the young generation have significant implications in understanding the identity of the recently growing wave of immigrants and Asian women who settled down in Japanese or Korean society through marriage and employment, or stay as students, and of their children and in social communication with them.