Abstract
The purpose of this article is to explore the issue of war responsibility as it has been dealt with in Japanese children’s literature after the Fifteen Years War. Historically, Korea and Japan have lived together through very close exchanges in the social, economic, and cultural spheres. However, when the issue of colonizer/colonized relations during the Fifteen Years War is raised the relationship between the two countries rapidly deteriorates. This seems to arise from a lack of understanding and different approaches to the war. With this in mind, the article surveys the discourse of Japanese children’s literature relating to the issue of Japanese responsibility for war, looking in particular at the work of Noboru Wada, which is unusual in dealing with the problem of the forced conscription of Koreans by Japan during the war and portrays the Japanese as perpetrators. It thus explores how children’s writers have put into practice the idea of the responsibility for war through a change of perspective on war from an ‘event’ to a ‘relationship between people.’
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Notes
Notable among the works of these writers are Tsuboi’s Twenty-Four Eyes (1952) and Takeyama’s Harp of Burma (1947).
Starting with the publication of the Asia-Pacific War Narrated by My Father (3 vols. Doushinsha) in 1969, books were published to introduce the public to children’s literature about the war, including The War Experience Continuously Talked About (5 vols. SoudoBunka), published by the Japan Children’s Writers Association in 1979; A Collection of Children’s Literature on Atomic Bombing (30 vols. Choubunsha) in 1985; History of the Asia- Pacific War for Children (5 vols. Iwanamisyoten) in 1991; “War and Peace” Children’s Literature Museum (21 vols. Nihontosyosenta) in 1995; Our Asia-Pacific War (3 vols. Doushinsha) in 2004.
There are two types of Zainichi: Koreans living in Japan who have Korean nationality and Joseon people in Japan who have North Korean nationality. In general, it refers to the Korean people who crossed over to Japan from the Korean Peninsula from the period of Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945) to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Korea and Japan (1965), and in Japan it is used of Korean residents who currently live in Japan with a “special permanent resident” qualification.
Wada deals with the detailed procedures of the Matsushiro Underground Imperial Headquarters investigation (interviews with forced mobilizers, author background, social effects, etc.) in a documentary format in Matsushiro Underground Imperial Headquarters. (1991b, pp. 1–61)
Born in 1936, Noboru Wada became an elementary school teacher and writer of Japanese children’s literature. While attending the Faculty of Education at Shinshu University, he participated in the founding of the literary coterie magazine Flag on the Hill to engage in writing activities. In 1966, he won the Short Story Award from the Japan Children’s Writers Association for his story, “Bug” (Wada, 1982, p. 223). His Fortress of Sorrow (1977) won the First Tsukahara Kenjiro Literary Award. In 2005, he was awarded the Sankei Children’s Publishing Culture Award for We Can’t Save the Earth with Weapons.
The site that ranks 12 films produced by Yamada Tengo has no reviews or ratings for Kim’s Cross (https://cinema-rank.net/list/52488). ALLCINEMA’s evaluation of Yamada’s works also provides only brief information about Kim’s Cross (https://www.allcinema.net/person/249200).
Since the mid-1990s, the political right in Japan has argued that the Japanese government was not responsible for the forced mobilization of Korean women as comfort women for the Japanese military during the colonial period, and that existing textbooks overemphasize Japan’s imperialist aggression. Following the historical revisionism based on this conservative ideology, from around 2005 Netouyo (Internet Right Wing), which carried out right-wing media campaigns on the Internet, appeared. This social atmosphere created anti-Korean sentiment, which rapidly spread with the development of a subculture in Japanese society after the formation of the “Zaitokukai” (Association of Citizens against the Special Privileges of the Zainichi) in 2007 (Yi, 2016, pp. 64–65; Higuchi, 2014, p. 24).
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Gijae Seo is a PhD who majored in Japanese literature and culture in the early modern period. She works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Center for Asia·Diaspora, Konkuk University, Seoul, Korea. She is currently working on Japanese children's literature on war and has written a book titled Sikata Sin and Children’s Literature on War (2017), which analyzes the works of Sikata Sin, a children’s literary writer who returned from a Japanese colony following the end of the war. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2021S1A5A2A01061875) and this paper was supported by the KU Research Professor Program of Konkuk University.
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Seo, G. Koreans at Matsushiro Underground Imperial Headquarters and Wada Noboru. Child Lit Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-024-09576-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-024-09576-w