Helen J.S. Lee - Colonial Relations of Everyday Life Through Senryu Poetry

Writing Colonial Relations of Everyday Life in Senryu

Helen J. S. Lee

I hear there are money-making trees in KoreaChsen wa kane no naru ki ga aru to kiki

Working and saving in an anti-Japan country Hainichi no kuni de dekasegi tamete kuru

To show that [I am] still alive, a cheap New Year’s postcardIkiteiru shirase ni yasui nengaj — Chsen senryu (Korean Senryu) (1922)

The senryu poems above reveal glimpses of Japanese settlers in colonial Korea that are often at odds with what we might associate with coloniz-ers.1 In contrast to the heroic portrayals of the successful Japanese colonists found in colonial propaganda texts, these poems reflect the personal voices

positions 16:3 doi 10.1215/10679847-2008-015Copyright 2008 by Duke University Press

positions 16:3 Winter 2008 602

of misinformed Japanese who fall for stories of overnight success in Korea, Japanese workers who experience Korean antagonism, a seemingly lost Japanese emigrant who finally manages to send a cheap New Year’s post-card to inform his family that he is still alive. This article addresses the experiences of what might be described as the unofficial, overwhelmingly working-class, and often impoverished Japanese settlers in the colonies who have been largely ignored in postcolonial studies of imperial Japan.

Life in the colonies for Japanese settlers was — as life everywhere is — largely shaped by class status. Peter Duus provides an insightful distinction of class membership by identifying two types of settlers: immigrants and colonists. The working-class Japanese settlers depicted in the poems belong to Duus’s definition of “immigrants,” which he opposes to “colonists” whose presence in the colonial territory was subsidized by the state and who had membership in the dominant stratum of the host society. The elevated and privileged status of “colonists” engendered markedly different colonial expe-riences from those of their countrymen who went to colonial territories as “immigrants”; the latter were “oppressed, assimilated, and rejected by the host society,” although they still ended up contributing to the exploitation of the colonized in one form or another.2

While much work has been done in postcolonial studies on Korean immi-grants to Japan (the zainichi), works on Japanese immigrants to Korea are scant. This is largely due to an academic trend that has privileged the insti-tutional construction of the Japanese colonial empire — political, economic, intellectual — stressing the mechanisms of domination and the expressions of the empowered class and producing a collective and effectively monochro-matic image of imperialist Japan. Such scholarly pursuits have unwittingly reproduced the image of a totalizing, powerful empire, thereby reinforc-ing the propaganda objectives of the imperial state, while overlooking what was an indispensable yet not-so-ideal constituent of the empire — the less-privileged working-class Japanese settlers in the colonies. The creators of the popular verse form senryu were just such subjects.

The novel Chsen (Korea), by Japan’s renowned haiku poet Takahama Kyoshi, sheds light on a moment of displacement that was commonly shared among the Japanese immigrants and occasional travelers who were headed out to destinations in the colonies, in hopes of finding opportunities for a better life:

Lee ❘❘ Writing Colonial Relations of Everyday Life 603

When my wife and I arrived at Shimonoseki Port it was deep into the night, and the forlorn crescent moon was peeking out between the clouds and the sultry wind was blowing. We had to wait for nearly two hours until departure. The first thing everyone notices at this port is the large blackboards hung high up on the walls, indicating the names of boats, where they are bound for, such as “bound for Inchon,” “bound for Pusan,” or “bound for Dalian,” along with departure and arrival times. These cities are destinations you would not see at any other port, a reminder to everyone that the moment of departing the homeland was nearing. Indeed, my wife, with a forlorn look, came up beside me, and pointing at the people who were gathered together, asked,

“Can all these people be crossing [the Sea of Japan] to go to Pusan?”“Of course. Everyone in this room is a passenger on the ferryboat going

to Pusan.”“But when you see so many people with families carrying in their

hands lunch boxes strung with cords, and a woman who seems to be traveling alone with a child strapped on her back, it looks as if they are going to a place nearby.” 3

Documented in this scene is what would become a virtual epidemic of border-crossing between Japan and its colonies as the empire began to stabi-lize its foothold on the Asian continent. While the scene illustrates the anxi-ety and discomfort of encountering foreign-ness, suggested by the names of unfamiliar destinations, perhaps more bewildering is the uncertainty of the people who seem ill-prepared for their sojourn. The crowd depicted in Chsen constitutes the outbound traffic of Japanese labor that resulted from a dramatic dispersion and reorganization of labor forces inside and outside imperial Japan from 1868 to 1945. In fact, vast numbers of people traversed the Sea of Japan in both directions, moving toward and away from the cen-ter of the empire. In one direction, impoverished Korean peasants who had been forced off the land traveled to Japan to seek job opportunities.4 Driven by similar circumstances of desperation at home, working-class Japanese traveled the other direction toward the continental “new world” viewed as a land of opportunity.

A study of Japanese immigrants and their everyday life in the colonies can provide a more contoured and complex picture of Japanese colonization.


In order to explore the daily lives of Japanese immigrants in colonial Korea, I examine a comic poetic genre, senryu, which was widely practiced at the time by Japanese both in the metropole and in the colonies. The particu-lars of this genre — vulgar, satirical, and light — and its popularity among ordinary people help provide a window into the culture and everyday life of the displaced Japanese, who widely embraced this literary practice to artic-ulate their sentiments and thoughts. Senryu poetry illustrates the diverse colonial experiences of Japanese immigrants who took up a wide range of occupations, such as day laborers, peddlers, shop clerks, and factory workers. Rather than assert a monolithic portrayal of these working-class Japanese settlers, this article explores the colonial dynamics rendered in each poem as a way to offer insight into the multifaceted lived daily experiences of Japa-nese immigrants in colonial Korea.

Such exploration reveals generally neglected dimensions of how colo-nial policies were actually carried out, as well as how and to what extent state ideology filtered down to Japanese immigrants. Unless we investigate the ways in which the theories and policies of the colonial state manifested themselves in everyday life, we run the risk of effacing the agency of peo-ple, just as the colonial authorities did by perceiving people both in the colonies and in Japan merely as a collectivity that would advance the state agenda. The current study is concerned with the discursive formation of “race” in colonial discourse and explores specifically how lived race relations complicate the ideology of race. Senryu is employed here as an avenue for examining what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “contact zone,” the spatial and temporal cross-cultural encounter in the colonial territories. Whereas Pratt suggests active engagement at close quarters in the so-called contact zone, through such terms as “copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices often within radically asymmetrical relations of power” (my emphasis), my study suggests that engagement in the contact zone was often characterized by distancing, ambivalence, avoidance of interaction, along with, of course, many instances of contact.5

It is important to stress that senryu is not presented here as a transparent medium that reveals lived experiences of Japanese immigrants. Rather, the poetic genre is used as literary representations that delineate some of the funny, strange, surprising, and jarring Japanese-Korean encounters and his-


torical moments. There is a possibility that a few Koreans composed senryu poems, but scant records about authors and the use of pseudonyms make it difficult to trace Korean participants. Further, given that senryu was popu-lar in colonial Korea from the late 1910s until the 1920s, a decade during which Korean collaboration with Japanese government was very limited, it is questionable if there was any Korean participation in such a closely knit Japanese settler community.

Japanese Settlers in Colonial Korea

In 1911, the streets of Keij (contemporary Seoul) bustled with Japanese rickshaw-pullers, domestic maids, carpenters, tailors, and peddlers who took up these various occupations to earn wages in what they often found to be a hostile working environment.6 What had previously been sporadic adventures for those quick-profit-seeking opportunists changed to family-accompanied emigration, and the Japanese population in Korea steadily grew to 700,000 by 1940, or 3 percent of the entire population of the pen-insula.7 The 1911 survey of the Japanese population in Keij and the 1910 statistical survey of the occupations of Japanese immigrants in Korea provide a glimpse into the Japanese settlement community in the capital.8 Moving to Korea, for many immigrants, was a last resort. The despair of a Japanese worker is delineated in the following poem:

Nothing good in the naichi either, second visit to KoreaNaichi ni mo yoi koto ga nai saitosen (25)

This Japanese worker had already been to Korea, but for some reason goes back to naichi, the inner territories, to seek new opportunities, only to fail and return to Korea a second time.9 The second visit, saitosen, indicates added humiliation for those Japanese who had left the colony once, but end up forced to return. In this sense, although the colony may have provided opportunities to earn a living, it also becomes an object of resentment and a sign of failure for some immigrants.

Clearly, living conditions in colonial Korea encountered by Japanese immigrants differed from those experienced by colonists who had gone to Korea as intellectuals, bureaucrats, and wealthy entrepreneurs. Although


there were designated settlement communities for Japanese settlers, not all immigrants found their habitat and livelihood within the bounds of these protected enclaves, and many were forced to seek job opportunities outside settlement communities (kyorychi 居留地) in mixed (zakkyo 雑居) com-munities characterized by daily contact between the two groups of people.10

The theories of race that were part of the discourse of colonial subjuga-tion were designed to serve as a powerful tool to perpetuate distinct unequal power relations between Japanese and Koreans. But in the realm of everyday life, in sectors of society where power relations were not so neatly defined, nor strictly enforced, to what extent and in what ways did such racially governed relations play out? The contact zone between the working-class Japanese and their Korean counterparts brings most forcefully into play the dynamics and expressions of such complex relations.

Much effort was invested in an attempt to favorably position Japan in the world, as it was facing threats of its own by Western imperial powers. The wide array of racial theories articulated by the architects of Japan’s modern empire can be placed roughly in two major categories. One line of thought, exemplified by Watsuji Tetsur’s Fdo (Climate and Culture), argued for the racial particularism of the Yamato race and laid the foundation of the eth-nocentric beliefs known today as Nihonjin ron.11 The other strand in the dis-course of race, dka (assimilation), defined Japan’s relation vis-à-vis its colo-nies, often in a rhetoric calling for assimilation. Many expressions emerged in the light of assimilation theory, ranging from dbun dshu (same script, one race) to isshi djin (impartiality and equal favor).12 If dka of the 1920s placed the burden on Japanese colonial officers to “Japanize” colonized sub-jects, the kminka (imperialization of subjects) in the late 1930s placed the burden on the colonized to “become Japanese.”13 Abolition of the use of the Korean language, forced name change, and the enactment of compulsory conscription are well-known features of the kminka movement in colonial Korea. Not surprisingly, nowhere in the rhetoric of assimilation were Kore-ans (or other colonial subjects) granted status equal to the Japanese in the array of provisions designed to subjugate and to mobilize colonial subjects in service to the empire.

Inherently contradictory in its stated policies, the theory of assimilation, dka, and the kminka movement can be best characterized by their mode


of double dialogue, an inclusive dialogue that seemingly rendered imperial subjects as dutiful citizens of the empire only to justify further oppression and exploitation, and an exclusive dialogue that reinforced racial differences between Japanese and Koreans to “hierarchize” and differentiate Kore-ans. Political and social inequality between Japanese and Koreans never dissolved under the kminka movement, which stipulated specific changes for Korean subjects. When put into practice, the specificities of kminka could not but disclose ill intentions harbored by the imperial state. With the intensifying demand for labor during the Fifteen Year War (1931 – 45), Japan implemented the Name Change Policy (sshikaimei) in 1940.14 The usual translation of sshikaimei as “Name Change Policy” can be mislead-ing, as the policy implied something far weightier than a simple name change. In theory, to help them completely assimilate as Japanese nationals, Koreans were to adopt Japanese family names, the shi, 氏 , in order to unify multiple last names, the sei, 姓, that existed in Korean families largely due to the custom of women keeping their maiden names.15 This did not mean that Koreans were allowed to keep their Korean names in addition to the newly created Japanese surnames. In practice, it meant a thorough erasure of Korean names, a rejection of Korean cultural identity. However, fearful of creating an undifferentiated fusion of Japanese and Koreans, the impe-rial state had to employ a means of distinguishing Korean from Japanese subjects. One way to make Koreans identifiable was to prohibit transfer of the clan seat stated in the Korean koseki (family registry).16 This meant the permanent address of one’s paternal ancestry, indicated in the koseki, could not be altered or transferred, denying any possibility of Koreans becom-ing indistinguishably Japanese. In short, once born Korean, one could never become Japanese.

In contrast to the theories of race backed up by imperial policies, the fragmented sketches of colonial experiences in senryu paint colonial realities that were more fluid in nature, involving two-way dynamics between Japanese and Koreans that could have been perceived as subversive, even threatening, by the colonial government. That is to say, the lived relations between Japanese and Koreans cannot be reduced to a simple paradigm of the empowered colonizer and the powerless colonized. For example, while Koreans were forced to learn and speak the Japanese language, there were


Japanese immigrants who had to learn Korean for survival in the colony, indicative of a degree of “Koreanization” of those Japanese in unofficial, nonelite realms of everyday life.17 Take the following poem as an example:

Too fluent in Korean, I am mistaken for a yoboChsengo umaku dekisugite yobo ni sareru (37)

Revealingly, this verse presents a Japanese immigrant who has acquired such fluency in Korean that he is mistaken as Korean, presumably by Koreans. A Japanese man who speaks fluent Korean is taken as a yobo. A derogatory term, yobo originally meant something like “hey, you.” During the colonial era, however, it was a more explicitly derogatory term of reference when used by Japanese, generally used to designate working-class adult Korean men.18 Rarely do the official colonial accounts perceive language learning as a two-way exchange between the Japanese and Koreans. Patricia Tsurumi’s study on language education in the colonies testifies to the intensity of effort invested in forcing the Japanese language on Taiwanese and Korean subjects, and yet we encounter in senryu poems Japanese immigrants who learn Korean simply in order to survive.

While Japanese government officials were producing pejorative racial images of the Koreans, the Japanese residents in Korea had to live with acute malice directed toward them by most Koreans. As suggested by the senryu poems at the opening of this article, the unforgiving and hostile living envi-ronment of the Japanese working class in Korea made them likewise bitter and critical of the imperial state, and their struggle for livelihood contrib-uted to the way in which they harbored uncertainty positioning themselves vis-à-vis Koreans.

From Popular Sentiment to Subversive Thought: The Politics of Senryu

Senryu is an uninhibited genre, a satirical, light verse form of 5 – 7 – 5 syl-lable structure that often expresses thoughts and sentiments, capturing the foibles and vulgarities of daily life in colloquial language.19 Senryu poems are saturated with representations of everyday life that illuminate the social exchanges and landscape of ordinary Japanese immigrants in the colony.

My purpose in focusing this study on senryu is not to look at it as an aes-


thetic literary practice but rather to explore the social dimension of a unique genre that evokes a specific moment in history. In his discussion on how novelistic language operates, Mikhail Bakhtin introduces his now familiar concepts of “dialogue” and “heteroglossia.”20 Dialogue underscores the social nature of language that necessarily involves a speaker, a listener, and rela-tions between the two. Heteroglossia refers to the multiplicity of languages that exists within a single language, including all the forms and styles of speech, rhetorical modes and vocabularies (culture-specific terms) used in everyday life. Bakhtin’s dismissal of poetry stems from what he views as its lack of operative dialogue and heteroglossia. In Bakhtin’s view, the novel is dialogic and heteroglossic in that it is laced with a variety of languages that cohabitate in any given moment in history, and it struggles to “overcome or at least parody the univocal, monologic utterances that characterize official centralized language.”21

Just such a conjuncture of dialogic heteroglossia distinguishes the sen-ryu poems in the anthology Chsen senry (Korean Senryu). Selected by an editor, Masaki Junsh, who went by the pseudonym Rykenji, these poems present a fecundity of heteroglossia that illustrates a wide variety of ways of speaking by introducing rhetorical strategies and vocabularies and by refer-ring to languages that belong to subcultures within the Japanese community in colonial Korea. Interwoven in a specific set of social conditions, the poems in Chsen senry attempt to engage with a socially like-minded audience, evoking agreement and shared sentiment, often demonstrated by shared laughter, or making witty remarks that draw out the assenting response, “That’s right!”

Satire and laughter are two of the striking features that enable this poetic genre to approach reality through comedy and open up a number of ways to interpret the object or moment addressed.22 Senryu verses often make fun of others (Koreans), but they frequently also direct the derision and humor at the composers (Japanese) themselves. Thus, simply to dismiss the ridicule or satire that takes place in senryu as “pejorative” is to deny the essence of this dialogic genre, which invites the writer herself or himself into the fields of ridicule and humor. What we should grasp instead in senryu is the lib-erating effect forged by its invitation to laughter, one that stresses multiple potential ways, and even multiple subject positions, for interpreting an event.


Senryu writers take up the role of Bakhtin’s clown and fool as they clothe themselves under self-mocking and satiric pen names and readily embrace laughter, which “demolishes fear and piety before an object.”23 Hence sen-ryu creates a literary space that legitimates a light-hearted, ungoverned treatment of what might be viewed as controversial or discomforting were it presented in some other form. This characteristic mode of representation, combined with its popularity and accessibility, are conditioning elements that allow the genre to engage and critique social conditions of everyday life. Vividly satirical, the themes of senryu reflect unfiltered human emotions and customs that give shape to everyday life.

Rooted in the literary traditions of the Edo period, the term senryu origi-nates from the name of a prominent haikai critic, or tenja, Karai Senry (1718 – 90). Of the two contrasting haikai practices that prevailed in the early seventeenth century, the verse writing game called zappai (miscellaneous haikai) attracted students of lower classes,24 while the orthodox haikai poetry of Matsuo Bash (1644 – 94) appealed to men of letters.25 From the game of zappai emerged a variant form called maekuzuke, a widely used instructional verse form, in which a master would announce a fourteen- or seventeen-syllable maeku that functioned like a title, and the students would compose relevant additional stanzas called tsukeku.26 Karai Senry, who was a chief official of his ward, rose to prominence as a maekuzuke contest judge whose wit and talent contributed to its further dissemination as a literary pastime. Unlike other masters of maekuzuke, Karai Senry limited his contestants to the city of Edo, making it unique to the popular culture of Edo (Tokyo).27

Generally, senryu disregards literary conventions and restrictions, both structurally and thematically, while haiku carries with it the burden of hav-ing to meet such literary criteria as providing seasonal words (kigo) and cae-suras (kireji).28 Edo senryu depict the social conditions of the time, explicitly revealing people’s social behavior as well as the foibles of human nature, including carnal pleasures. Because of the minimal compositional rules of this genre, senryu has long been accessible to and associated with untrained, nonelite commoners as a playful and relaxed cultural expression, and thus has always occupied the bottom rung of the literary hierarchy.

From this Edo tradition of senryu, a movement of kindai senry (modern senryu) emerged in late Meiji Japan, one that aimed to break away from


being a simple pleasure-oriented medium. The Meiji-born senryu writers (discussed below) responded to the upheavals of modern Japan by employing the genre more as a political vehicle than a means of entertainment. It was this strand of senryu, as opposed to the mainstream practice aimed at enter-tainment, that developed into a medium for political and social commentary that came to figure prominently in the senryu poetry that proliferated in the colonies.

Among the Meiji-born thinkers who recognized the political utility of the genre was Inoue Kenkab (1870 – 1934). Chief editor for the senryu col-umn in the Nihon shimbun (Japan Newspaper) from 1903 to 1915, Kenkab founded the journal Senry in 1905 and, through it, advocated his egalitar-ian beliefs. This orientation would come to inform what would later be known as the Shin Senry Und (New Senryu Movement) in the 1920s. The journal Senry was renamed Taish senry in 1912, and it continued to thrive under the title Senryjin. During the rise of the Taish Democ-racy Movement there was a senryu renaissance, with more people joining local study groups not only throughout Japan but also in colonized Korea. The senryu boom, then, was a cultural phenomenon that occurred simul-taneously in the metropole and in the colonies. This widespread cultural practice resulted in material exchanges across the Sea of Japan, two of the most notable examples being senryu-related publications and senryu poets. For example, senryu journals were frequently advertised in newspapers in colonial Korea. And the prominent senryu poet Kenkab visited colonial Korea twice, in 1919 and in 1926. I will come back to Kenkab’s connec-tion with colonial Korea later in my discussion of Chsen senry. Kenkab’s so-called New Senryu Movement, which aimed to express egalitarian ideas in support of human rights, was nevertheless criticized by his contempo-raries for its servile attitude toward the institution of the emperor. How-ever, Kenkab’s attempt to elevate senryu to an art form for Japanese read-ers gained popular support along with the rise of the Taish democracy movement.

It is important to note that Kenkab’s senryu journal published a wide spectrum of often conflicting ideas expressing multiple viewpoints. Hardly a monolithic poetic practice, senryu embraced a diverse range of political perspectives, views about art, and visions of the future. One of the lines of


thought that emerged by way of the senryu movement was the proletarian senryu that introduced more progressive ideas. Morita Katsuji (1892 – 1979) of Nagoya, who worked for the National Railway Company, established yet another senryu journal in 1922 titled Shinsei (New Birth). In it he advocated the abolition of traditional senryu, which he thought were nothing but rec-reational and entertainment-oriented verses.29 Proletarian activist and poet Tsuru Akira (1909 – 38) also saw the political utility of senryu. He promoted much more subversive ideas than those of his contemporaries, as he adhered to Marxist theory and sought to materialize his vision of a utopian regime by way of socialism.30 To Tsuru Akira, senryu was a mode of social criti-cism that could mirror the contradictions and failures of bourgeois society. His political activism, however, was short-lived: he was eventually hunted down by the government, arrested, and incarcerated in 1931. Until he died in prison in 1938, at the age of twenty-nine, he had devoted his life to estab-lishing the League of Proletarian Senryu (Puroretaria Senrykai) and the Federation of Japanese Laborers’ Art (Nappu), and vigorously disseminated his political ideas in senryu journals such as Kenkab’s Senryjin.

From the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, the sen-ryu movement provided a discursive terrain that enabled thinkers with dif-fering political ideas to question social reality and human relations brought about by the relentless reordering of Japan on its rise as an imperial power. While occupying different positions along the political spectrum, each of these Meiji-born thinkers strategically employed senryu as an expres-sive medium to articulate their political criticism of a chaotic social reality engendered by the rise of capitalism.

From Metropole to Colonial Korea: Senryu as Pop Culture

As the boundaries of the modern Japanese state spread outward to encom-pass Hokkaido, Okinawa, and the Asian continent in the late nineteenth century, senryu, whose provenance was Edo culture, came to be practiced in the colonies, including Korea, as we have seen above. Within the Japanese settler community in Korea, senryu became one of the most widely prac-ticed forms of popular culture. Many Japanese immigrants to Korea wrote senryu that were anthologized in Chsen senry, of which about 90 percent


of the poems were gleaned from Chsen shimp (Korea Newspaper),31 while the rest came from various newspapers, journals, and study groups.32 In the early 1920s, senryu reached the height of its popularity on the main Japanese islands (hondo), giving rise to many publications and locally based senryu associations. In colonial Korea, senryu columns first appeared in Keij nipp (Keijo Daily) in 1916.33 A daily column was featured by 1919 in which a small group of writers contributed several verses on a given topic. By 1923, the senryu column in Keij nipp became a regular daily feature with a sig-nificantly increased number of contributors. Featured on the same page as serialized fiction, tanka, and haiku, senryu had both a wide audience and a large number of participants from the Japanese settlement community.

Senryu writing was practiced in such a way that topics were announced in advance in the newspaper and the general public contributed correspond-ing poems. Inoue Kenkab served as a judge in selecting the verses on a given topic that ran for several days, after which the winning poems were published with brief commentaries by the judge. Cash prizes were awarded to winners. Among a large number of participants throughout Korea, there were contributors whose pseudonyms appeared frequently in Keij nipp, suggesting a group of active senryu writers in colonial Korea. It is worth noting that these contributors were participating from all over Korea, send-ing in their contributions from remote villages far from the capital city. In addition, the Keij nipp held nationwide senryu contests twice a year in which prominent senryu poets from Japan served as judges and winners received handsome cash awards. The newspaper would run an advertise-ment announcing the date and topic for these contests well in advance, and participants were required to pay a modest contest entry fee. These contests were always held at the Keij nipp headquarters in Keij, and all participants received a small souvenir from Japan.

Senryu’s popularity in colonial Korea resulted in a profusion of publi-cations, and several senryu anthologies are known to have been published there.34 Reminiscent of Edo gesaku writers, almost every senryu writer published under humorous and sometimes self-mocking pseudonyms, as if to masquerade as Bakhtinian clowns, and for this reason, the identities of writers in Chsen Senry are difficult to trace.35 Such guarantee of ano-nymity had an emancipating effect that encouraged unrestricted expression


of human emotions and ideas, often in satiric form. Another characteristic feature of senryu, notable in such short-verse forms, was a profusion of shift-ing subject positions, sometimes multiple, that allowed hybrid voices. That is to say, the subject position is not always fixed within a senryu poem. There is sometimes more than one subject position, or sometimes one subject speak-ing from multiple subject positions. Thus, in some of these verses, as is true of compact, elliptical Japanese poetry of all kinds, it is hard to tell who is speaking and from whose point of view the speaker is speaking. Take the following example:

On a holiday of the (Japanese) dwarfs, a sake jar goes on the headWeinomu no chohunnari-de atama ni kame ga nori (7)

In this verse, the subject can either be a Japanese who is paraphrasing a Korean who is carrying the sake jar, or a Japanese observer who is speak-ing from the vantage point of the Korean who is carrying the sake jar on her head.36 This blurring effect is created by the use of Korean language. Weinomu is a derogatory Korean word referring to the Japanese, meaning “a dwarf.” Chohunnari is the “Japan-ized” pronunciation of the Korean word chounnal, meaning “a good day” or “a celebratory day.” It can be interpreted here that the Korean laborer is actually saying the first stanza and the Jap-anese observer is paraphrasing it. Another possibility is that the Japanese observer has internalized the subject position of the Korean and is speaking from it. By transcribing the sound of the Korean language, this verse opens up the possibility of multiple subject positions. This poem depicts the irony of a situation in which a Korean laborer who resents the Japanese enough to refer to them as weinomu would still readily carry sake jars to earn money. To interpret it differently, the Japanese patron despises the Korean laborer who would not abandon her contempt for the Japanese yet who would still carry her sake jar to earn wages.

If we are to assume the first interpretation — a Japanese observer para-phrasing a Korean laborer — a form of dialogue, as opposed to mono-logue, emerges. An instance of monologue would be utterances by a sin-gle person or entity that, to use V. N. Vološinov’s definition, “gravitate the object toward the inner world of the speaker,” without reference to social


relations.37 In contrast, a dialogic utterance is a product and reflection of a social relation between a speaker and listener in a specific social context.38 The Japanese observer is wholly connected with the Korean laborer by a social relation that implicates the two as the gazing colonizer and the toiling colonized. The privilege of the observing colonizer is in direct proportion to the usurpation of the labor of the colonized. Heteroglossia manifests itself as a hybrid cluster of Japanese and Korean languages that underscores the socioideological dimension of the colonial relation between the speaker and the listener. This heteroglossic use of language is illuminated in the Japanese pronunciation of the derogatory term weinomu together with chohunnari in the first stanza. These terms belong to what we might call the “Japan-ized” Korean language that was singularly prevalent in Japanese communities in the colony. Thus in this heteroglossic poem, at least two sets of what Bakhtin calls “unofficial languages” can be observed: one is that of a colo-nized Korean referring to a Japanese person using derogatory terms; the other is the Korean language acquired by the Japanese community living in the colonies. Both languages employ the rhetoric of commoners who unpre-tentiously speak a colloquial language.

Assuming the second interpretation — a Japanese observer speaking from the Korean point of view — opens up additional possibilities of interpreta-tion. By taking on the persona of a Korean laborer, the Japanese observer penetrates into the psyche of the colonized and speaks from his or her van-tage point. The subjectivity of the colonized is completely effaced and rein-vented by the colonizer who has internalized the cynicism and hatred of the colonized. Albert Memmi’s analysis of the colonizer-colonized relationship is useful here. While complicating the dynamics of the relationship beyond the confines of different theoretical disciplines, Memmi illustrates the fatal dependency between the colonizer and the colonized, a destructive reci-procity of conduct between the two colonial partners.39 On the one hand, the colonizer’s existence and his privileges (which are not solely economic privileges) depend on his usurpation of the colonized. Thus while it might torment him to live with a self-perpetuating sense of guilt and injustice as he exploits the colonized, he is not free to refuse this ongoing systematic exploitation, for it would result in the loss of his subjecthood. On the other


hand, for the colonized, so resentful of and indignant toward the colonizer, a sense of admiration invades him, and he eventually assimilates into the colonizer’s system for his own survival. The twisted dynamics of hatred and self-hatred illuminated in Memmi’s analysis are synchronized in one voice, conflating two subject positions, as the colonizer internalizes the resent-ment of the colonized who has relinquished her contempt by selling her labor in exchange for the wage offered by the colonized. Such undesirable but unavoidable exchanges are some of the most pronounced features of the colonial contact zone, which not only denotes the spatial cohabiting of the colonizer and the colonized, but more importantly reveals the exploitative appropriation of labor (of the colonized).

Senryu: A Poetic Genre of the Common People in the Colony

Life in the colonies was an alienating experience for many Japanese immi-grants. The articles contributed by the Japanese residents in Keij nipp illustrate their shared sense of nostalgia and homesickness. For them, senryu served as an important cultural medium that helped create a sense of com-munity, of belonging to this displaced population.40 This forum for composi-tion had an invisible audience, a reading community that supposedly shared the same sentiments and lived experience. At the receiving end, reading the poems provided daily symbolic assurance of membership in an imagined community. Subscription to a senryu journal helped affirm their link to a broad community of fellow displaced Japanese whom they had never met while providing a shared artifact on foreign soil. More explicitly, participat-ing in a senryu study group, which was quite popular in colonial Korea, endorsed the physical communal body of members. For example, Keij nipp, on November 8, 1922, featured a notice announcing a regular meet-ing of the Yongsan Senryu Study Group (Yongsan Senry Kenkykai).41 The announcement provides the date and place of the meeting, the topic to be addressed, and requires all participants to bring five verses on the given topic. While not explicitly indicated, this notice invites all Japanese settlers living in the area who are interested in composing senryu poems. The main event of the meeting consisted of reading everyone’s poems and selecting the


best ones. The climax of these local events were nationwide senryu contests held throughout colonized Korea, at which members of the senryu com-munity would gather and celebrate their communal membership away from their homeland.

The poems in Chsen senry direct us to the interior of everyday life in colonial Korea. From a proud yangban42 who sips on his long cigar pipe, to an aged kisaeng43 who has fallen to the ranks of a lowly prostitute, these verses reveal the wide spectrum of Korean society with which the Japanese had come into contact. Take the following examples that illustrate the atti-tude of the Korean nobility toward Japanese domination:

Sipping on the long cigar pipe, the first-class countryNagakiseru kahetamanma ittkoku (2)

Korea is symbolically represented by the long cigar pipe which suggests the stereotypical characteristic of Koreans: idleness. Nevertheless, Korea becomes elevated to the rank of first-class nation under Japanese rule. This poem also underscores the disunity between Korea and Japan and, at the same time, points out Japan’s ineptitude at governing the colonized population. Thus the status of ittkoku (first-rate country) does not result from a joint effort, but from the sole effort of the Japanese, who feel bitter and resentful toward the indifferent attitudes of Koreans. These widely held and displayed expressions of passive resistance by Koreans appear in the following verse:

The obstacle of Korea, the apathy of the Korean nobilityChsen no kobu tsurumaki no futokorode (5)

This verse points out the uncooperative attitude of the Korean noble class, which is symbolized by the tsurumaki, the outer garment worn by noble-men. The posture of futokorode — crossing two arms in the front, usually two hands tucked under the obi (for Japanese) or tucked into sleeves (for Koreans) — depicts the collective attitude of the tsurumaki, the nobility. The posture of futokorode denotes meanings of spectatorship, indifference, and disengagement. This simple gesture is clearly defiant, even hostile. A differ-ent form of resistance is illuminated in the encounter between a Japanese visitor and the wife of a Korean family:


The (Korean’s) wife reports, “His lordship isn’t home” (so I am afraid that I cannot do anything for you)Yangban ga fuzai desu kara to nybo ii (36)

How strange it must have seemed to the Japanese visitor who summoned a Korean man probably belonging to the nobility and to hear his wife call her own husband using an honorific term, yangban, meaning his lordship or his highness. The term fuzai desu kara can be interpreted to mean that the wife cannot receive nor can she be of any assistance to the visitor. The wife uses a term of respect for her husband that seems inappropriate to a Japanese visitor, whose custom expects that honorifics not be used to refer to one’s own family members in relation to outsiders. Suggested in this scene are the undying Korean Confucian customs that are steadfastly practiced in everyday life, even under Japanese domination, and the behavior of the Korean wife that humiliates the Japanese guest.

While senryu poetry allows us to see the interplay between Japanese set-tlers and Koreans in intimate domains such as intermarriage, deciphering these short verses requires that we attend to the particular circumstances of social exchange. Language and culture converge and create heteroglossia in these senryu verses, which mirror the social conditions wrought by the specificities of the local culture that characterized the Japanese colonial set-tlement communities in Korea. For example:

“Hey, look at this!” (he) shows off his nose blowing.Yigutbara jzudaro to tebanakami (43)

Yigutbara is a colloquial Korean expression that means “(Hey!) Look at this!” It is a plain form of speech directed at people of equal or lower ranks. The custom of blowing one’s nose by pressing one nostril with one’s thumb was seen by the Japanese as an uncivilized Korean custom. Here, a Korean man unabashedly alerts his audience by saying, “Take a look at this.” He is not ashamed of this custom and even volunteers to show it off to the Japa-nese, or Koreans. The Korean word yigutbara is interwoven in the Japanese narrative without any marker. While this expression probably was familiar to Japanese settlers in colonial Korea, to the home audience in the naichi during this time, or to contemporary Japanese readers, it is a mystifying


foreign phrase. The subject position is also of interest here. Supposedly the observer-writer has synchronized with the subject position of the Korean who blows his nose and speaks from that perspective.

While brazen behavior by Koreans is not uncommon to senryu, what might have been more aggravating for the working-class Japanese immi-grants was the collective contempt with which Koreans held the Japanese. Thus, the Japanese working class had to be sensitive to a degree of counter-surveillance by Koreans and had to stay vigilant as to what they could or could not say publicly:

After coming to Korea, [one is] inclined to praise IeyasuChsen e kite Ieyasu no h wo home (4)

This poem pokes fun at the fact that, when Japanese people come to Korea, they predictably choose to speak highly of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founding warrior of the Tokugawa regime (1600 – 1867). Revealed in this verse is the watchful behavior of the Japanese people living in colonized Korea, who had to exercise prudence in order to not agitate the Koreans. That is, although Toyotomi and Tokugawa were both influential warriors in late-sixteenth-century Japan and their effort led to the establishment of the Tokugawa military government, this poem notes how Japan’s aggression toward Korea in 1592 is collectively remembered among Koreans as Toyotomi’s warfare, not that of the Tokugawa regime. Therefore this verse implicitly enlists the names that should not be publicly mentioned when in Korea. One of the most abhorred Japanese men in Korea, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, of course, led the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592. Japanese might also mention leaders of Meiji Japan who laid the foundation of the colonial government, but in Korea they, too, were objects of hatred and resentment. (It should be recalled that, in 1909, Ito Hirobumi, the governor-general of Korea, was assassinated by the Korean liberation-movement leader An Jung-keun.) The h in the poem above might indicate that, between Hideyoshi and Ieyasu, the latter was a safer figure to invoke as time had softened the sting of his offence against Korea. Also embedded in this verse is a taunting cynicism directed at the Japanese settlers who inevitably had to comply with the new unspo-ken rules in the colony in order to survive and make a living. In contrast to the Japanese ruling class who commanded the colonial government, the Jap-


anese commoner had to be alert to Korean popular sentiment and accord-ingly exercised greater sensitivity in their dealings with Koreans.

Such a schism in the social reality between the privileged Japanese colo-nists and the working-class Japanese immigrants is illuminated in poems that voice skepticism and distrust toward state policies, especially the policy of assimilation (dka), which was so vigorously propounded by the Japanese government. The following poems provide shrewd critiques of dkaron, or assimilation theory. Revealed in these verses are the irreconcilable tensions created by incongruities, disparities, incompatibilities, and disunities that further polarized Japan and Korea under colonial dominance. On the one hand, most Koreans were uncooperative and steadfastly resisted the Jap-anese state agenda. On the other hand, Japanese settlers themselves were unsure and even skeptical of Japanese policies.

Chong’ga too must be Japanese, and yet . . .Chong’ga mo nihonjin to wa omoedomo . . . (60)

Chong’ga is a culture-specific derogatory term, derived from the Korean, chong’gak, and used by Japanese to refer to unmarried young Korean men. When adopted by the Japanese living in Korea, however, this term conveyed prejudice against young Korean males of the impoverished peasant class, most of whom were laborers who lived from day-to-day by doing menial labor. Under the imperial state’s assimilation policy, the entire Korean popu-lation was supposed to be regarded as Japanese. This poem alludes to a Japanese person who is conceivably gazing at a chong’ga and thinking to himself: “how can he be considered one of us?” The key to this poem is its unfinished ending, which leaves a lingering effect of denial and rejection:

Talk of dkaron comes out of the same mouth that asks what is makkôlliMakkarii wa nanda no kuchi de dkaron (30)

Makkarii is the Japanese pronunciation of the Korean rice wine, makkôlli. This popular beverage was central to Korean everyday life and would be familiar to anyone who spent a lengthy period of time in Korea. Without an appreciation for this staple of Korean culture, one could not dare to pretend to know Korea. This poem is a critique of ignorant Japanese who have little understanding of Korean culture but who pretentiously speak of assimila-


tion. More specifically, the criticism is directed at officials who hardly know anything about Korea, but who speak nonchalantly of assimilating Koreans into the Japanese population. Such bureaucratic ignorance is also illumi-nated in the following verse:

Three-day visit then the observers claim to have made sense of KoreaMikka mite Chsen wo toku shisatsudan (44)

After a three-day inspection trip, a group of delegates from Japan claim to know Korea. Mikka (three days) at the beginning of the poem rhetorically sets up the incompletion or ineptness of the project that shisatsudan (the observers) have come to accomplish. The Japanese word mikka is used to indicate a short span of time that is inadequate to acquire any expertise or knowledge of Korea. This verse illuminates the tension between the igno-rant government official and the well-informed observer of Korean society seen in the previous senryu.

One of the boldest commentaries comes in a voice intoxicated with makkôlli wine:

A man drunk on makkôlli scolds the policeMakkarii kigen ga junsa wo shikatteiru (14)

Possibly a drunken Korean man scolds the junsa, a police officer, who symbolizes the disciplinary power of the imperial state.44 Challenging the police officer effectively undermines the imperial state’s authority, some-thing that was inconceivable to many Koreans, but this incident captures a moment where drunkenness confers license to act brazenly. If the drunkard is Japanese — the poem remains ambiguous about the identity of the drunk-ard — the situation illustrates a different complication, as it poses a direct insult to the home government coming from one of its “loyal citizens.”

In this poem, too, the national identity of the subject remains ambiguous:

A drunkard yells, “What the hell is a yangban!”Yangban ga nanda to donaru yopparai (58)

If we view the drunkard as Korean, then discontentment with the class system of Korean society is voiced as the man vents his frustration. If this drunken man is taken to be Japanese, this verse then reads, “Why should I


pay any respect to these yangban? Who are they to deserve any respect from a Japanese?”

Interestingly, Japanese who appear in Chsen senry do not have the secu-rity and confidence that we might expect to find among members of the dominant group. Rather, senryu discloses the insecurity, anxiety, skepti-cism, and even resentment that hover over Japanese settlers in the colonies. Many poems express the stress felt by Japanese living under the hostile gaze of their colonized hosts. Incompatibility and disparity between Korea and Japan are also bitterly professed in a number of poems.

At the same time, Koreans who appear in these poems do not reflect the images of oppressed colonized subjects that we might expect. The brazen and even outright rude behavior of Koreans toward Japanese is captured in various contexts, such as in intermarriage between a Japanese husband and Korean wife, in Korean homes, and on the streets between Japanese and Korean residents. Koreans thus emerge as animated characters whose voices are audible and who talk back to the Japanese.

In short, senryu poems provide a patchwork view of Japanese-Korean encounters that collectively calls into question the presumed docility of Koreans as colonized subjects and of Japanese immigrants as collaborative participants of the empire, as they have often been configured in the study of colonial relations between the two groups.

Conclusion

I have explored the popular poetry, senryu, which vividly illustrates the lived race relations between Japanese settlers and Korean subjects in Korea who were bound by the dynamic of specific colonial sociopolitical circumstances. Some of the examples illuminate the colonial contact zone in a variety of forms and contexts, while others shed light on the struggles of those Jap-anese immigrants who laboriously tried to make a living in the colony. Rather than the neatly divided portrait of colonial society or class-distinct dynamics, what senryu delineates is an array of colonial racial dynamics that include the despair and anxiety of living among the colonized, the dis-parities between the two groups of people, the inevitable mixing with the colonized, and pointed criticism of state policies.


Scholarly efforts to understand Japan’s colonization of Korea, or other parts of Asia and the Pacific Islands, have hitherto focused predominantly on the institutional dimensions of Japanese domination. Historical accounts often aggrandized a gallery of heroes in the colonies who were always suc-cessful businessmen, civilizing educators and intellectuals, and progressive government officials.45 Despite the lack of official recognition, perhaps just as essential and indispensable to Japan’s expansion effort were the crowds of ill-prepared Japanese workers depicted in Takahama Kyoshi’s Chsen, who aimlessly ended up in the colonies and participated in building the infrastructure of colonial governance along with the Japanese settlement communities.

The senryu verses introduced in this essay collectively narrate a history of everyday life among the working-class Japanese settlers in colonial Korea. More importantly, they help historicize the individuals, the nonelite immi-grants and their Korean counterparts, who have long been neglected in the history of Japan’s colonization of Korea. From these selected senryu verses, clear signs of rupture between state policy and the everyday life of people emerge, suggesting that a very different life existed outside the official institutions. In addition, varying degrees and forms of interaction between Japanese and Koreans complicate the behavioral and psychological dynam-ics between the colonizer and the colonized that are constructed based on European experiences of colonial dominance.

Notes

An earlier draft of this essay was submitted as one of my dissertation chapters. I am grateful for the guidance of James A. Fujii at the University of California, Irvine, who has tirelessly provided support and encouragement throughout my graduate training and my teaching career. I was also fortunate to work with inspiring scholars in the field. Edward Fowler and Henry Em served on my dissertation committee and provided constructive criticism on the earlier draft of this manuscript. Kawamura Minato at Hosei University, Tokyo, generously took me in as his advisee during my field research in Japan from 1998 to 2000. Uchang Kim at Korea University always reminded me of the importance of examining the human dimension in colonial history. For their constructive comments at various stages in the writ-ing of this essay, I would like to thank my friends Kelly Jeong, Kimberly Kono, Michele Mason, and Mary Witoshynsky. The insightful comments from the two anonymous review-


ers at positions helped me improve an earlier draft of this manuscript, and I thank them for their rigorous engagement with my essay.

A shorter version of this essay was presented at the Association of Asian Studies Confer-ence in Chicago March 22 – 25, 2001. The Monbusho Fellowship supported my field research in Tokyo in 1998 – 2000, and the Korea Foundation’s fellowship for field research in 2006 – 7 provided support for additional research and writing of this article.

In this article, the long Japanese vowels are marked by a macron and Korean vowels are indicated by ˇ. All translations from Japanese and Korean to English are mine unless otherwise indicated.

1. All of the senryu discussed in this article were included in Masaki Junsh, ed., Chsen sen-ryu (Korean Senryu) (Seoul: Rykenjisha, 1922). Page numbers are provided in parentheses in the text.

2. Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 296.

3. Takahama Kyoshi, Chsen (Korea) (Tokyo: Jitsugyononihonsha, 1912). Takahama, a well-known haiku poet, wrote this rare fictional work shortly after his first visit to Korea in 1911. It appeared in the Osaka mainichi (Osaka Daily) and Tokyo mainichi (Tokyo Daily) simultaneously.

4. For a study on Korean migration to Japan, see Michael Weiner, Race and Migration in Impe-rial Japan (London: Routledge, 1994).

5. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4.

6. Kimura Kenji, Zaich nihonjin no shakaishi (The Social History of the Japanese in Korea) (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1989). Kimura Kenji explains that during the decade after Japan’s defeat of China in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, Nagasaki and Yamaguchi sent the largest num-ber of immigrants to Korea, about 60 percent of the total Japanese immigrant popula-tion to the country. This trend changed after 1905, when Japan secured its grip on Korea by ousting Russia during the Russo-Japanese War, 1904 – 5. After this, the percentage of immigrants from Nagasaki and Yamaguchi amounted to only 30 percent, and the areas from which immigrants originated spread out to include regions across Japan. Most of the immigrants from the Nagasaki and Yamaguchi areas were sea merchants, seamen, fisher-men, salt producers, and women who made their living by cotton-weaving.

7. Changsoo Lee, ed., Koreans in Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1981), 33 – 34.

8. See tables 1 and 2 in Kimura, Zaich nihonjin no shakaishi, 12. Keij is a Japanese pro-nunciation of the characters for Kyongsung, which was the capital of Korea at the time. Geographically, Keij sits within the parameters of present Seoul; however, I choose to use Keij to differentiate it from the postcolonial term, Seoul, which encompasses a larger area today.


9. During Japan’s colonial expansion, naichi, Japan proper, was used in comparison with gaichi, the external colonial territories.

10. Accounts of the contact zone are captured in various textual sources. One of the examples of colonial encounters, zakkyo (雑居), or mixed living between Japanese and Koreans, is illustrated in a travelogue, Saishin no kanhant (Current Situation in Korea), written in 1906. The writer of this text, Shiozaki Seigetsu, notes that the city of Kangen (Kangkyung in Korean) is a remarkable frontier where approximately four hundred Japanese immigrants have established a settlement community although the city is neither an officially recog-nized open port nor a sanctioned habitat for Japanese immigrants. He praises the pioneer-ing spirit of the Japanese immigrants who have the courage to open stores or run agricul-tural management businesses in this tightly knit Korean city in which most of their clientele is Korean.

Another example of a contact zone between Japanese and Koreans is delineated in a self-help guidebook, Chsen e iku hito ni (To People Who Are Going to Korea), published in 1914, in which the writer, Ugaramon, emphasizes the large Japanese population in Korea, and goes so far as to claim that there is not a single place in Korea, even in the remote out lying regions, where one cannot find a Japanese person. In this text, Koreans are discussed in terms of their communication skills, and Korea is presented as an accommodating place for any Japanese, even for those who have no knowledge of the language. This picture of inte-grated habitation between Japanese and Koreans is illuminated when the author mentions a place called Tomihirach of Pusan, where Japanese and Koreans have managed to establish a Japanese-Korean joint market (Nissenjin kyd ichiba), serving both communities.

Such cohabitation between Japanese and Koreans eventually becomes official policy with the institutionalization of dka, which gains momentum in the late Taish era (1912 – 26). An article featured in Keij nipp on March 18, 1922, reprimands some of the public bath-house owners (presumed to be Japanese) in Keij Ward, who prohibit mixed bathing between their Japanese and Korean customers by setting up different hours or designating separate tubs for each group. In a stern tone, the article criticizes the acts of discrimination against Koreans and calls for cooperation between the two groups.

11. For a further discussion on Watsuji Tetsur’s Fdo: Ningengakuteki ksatsu (Climate and Culture) (Tokyo: Iwanami shten, 1935), see Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

12. Ramon Myers and Mark Peattie, The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895 – 1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 96 – 97.

13. For a discussion on dka and kminka in colonial Taiwan, see Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 2001), 89 – 132. In another work, Stefan Tanaka argues that Japanese historians used the shared origin with China to claim Asian affinity, but took one step further to break


away from a Sinocentric world order in Asia by constructing the authenticated Orient in China. Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Past into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

14. For a thorough study on the Name Change Policy, see Miyata Setsuko, Kim Young Dal, and Yang Tae Ho, Sshikaimei (Name Change) (Tokyo: Meiseki Shoten, 1992).

15. Miyata Setsuko, Choson minjung kwa hwangminhwa Chongch’aek (The Korean People and the Policies of Imperialization) (Seoul: Iljogak, 1994), 59 – 78.

16. Koseki is a document of one’s paternal lineage that also indicates the geographical origin of one’s ancestry. An example of a Korean koseki is included in Miyata, Kim, and Yang, Sshikaimei, 215 – 17.

17. One example of an unofficial realm is what Ann L. Stoler calls “domains of the intimate” in her book Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

18. In contemporary Korean language, this word has evolved to convey a different meaning and is widely used as a way to call one’s spouse.

19. Utsuo Kiyoaki and Alan Crocket, Senryu (Saga: Daid, 1978). Utsuo and Crocket trace senryu’s early publication back to a collection titled Yanagidaru (The Willow Barrel), which was published in 1765.

20. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

21. Ibid., 301 – 15.22. Bakhtin quoted in Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a

Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 442.23. Ibid.24. Makoto Ueda, Light Verse from the Floating World (New York: Columbia University Press,

1999), 17 – 18. Professions of the premodern senryu writers ranged widely. Firemen, story-tellers, landlords, stewards, ivory sculptors, embroiderers, tavern owners, noodle-shop oper-ators, lantern sellers, cooks, plasterers, Zen monks, friars, physicians, and samurai wrote senryu verses. Only a few women wrote senryu in Edo since waka was an appropriate poetic form for women. Karai Senry’s anthology, Yanagidaru, whose publication ran from 1765 to 1838, notes women writers whose pseudonyms were Uy (Crow’s Friend), Tessen (Steel Fan), and Bungyo (Literate Fish).

25. Ueda, Light Verse, 6.26. Ibid.27. Ibid., 9.28. Sakamoto Kshiro, Shink senry und no kb (The Light of the New Senryu Movements)

(Tokyo: Asahi Evening News, 1986), 11.29. Sakamoto Kshiro, Inoue Kenkab. Tsuru Akira — Senryu kakushin no kishutachi (Inoue


Kenkab and Tsuru Akira: The Pioneers of Senryu Reform) (Tokyo: Kogawa Dmei, 1990), 130 – 32.

30. Ibid., 214 – 40.31. Chsen shimp was launched by Japanese residents on December 10, 1881, in Pusan, Korea.

The paper was published in two languages: Chinese, directed at the educated Korean read-ers, and Japanese, directed at the Japanese merchants and traders. For a study on Chsen shimp, see Albert A. Altman, “Korea’s First Newspaper: The Japanese Chsen shimp,” Journal of Asian Studies 43 (1984), 685 – 96.

32. The editor of Chsen senryu lists Chsen minb (People’s Daily Korea), Genzan (Wonsan in Korean) mainichi shimbun (Wonsan Daily), and various magazines including Tairiku ksh (Continental Commerce), Nandaimon (The South Gate), Mutsumi, and several regional senryu study groups.

33. Keij nipp (Keij Daily) was one of the most prominent and long-lived newspapers in Korea under Japanese rule, which circulated from 1907 to 1945. It was another major source of senryu. This newspaper underwent a few name changes. From 1907 to June 24, 1908, it was published under the title of Keij shimb, which switched to Keij shimbun (both titles translate as Keij Newspaper) until the end of the same year, then switched back to Keij shimb until the end of 1911. Keij nipp was a new name in the Taish era.

34. Bit Senry, Senry sg jiten (The Comprehensive Dictionary of Senryu) (Tokyo: 1974). Sen-ryu sg jiten lists a number of senryu anthologies published in colonial Korea from 1920 to 1941.

35. Identities of senryu writers are untraceable in senryu anthologies of Edo as well.36. Carrying something on one’s head has long been a cultural practice for women in Korea. Men

usually carried baggage on their back using a wooden device called chige, an A-frame.37. V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R.

Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 73.38. Ibid., 86.39. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon, 1991).40. Benedict Anderson’s argument is compelling in this case. See Anderson’s study on print

technology and the emergence of imagined community. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Com-munity (New York: Verso, 1983).

41. Yongsan is an area in Seoul where there used to be a considerable number of Japanese settlements during the colonial era. Today Yongsan houses one of the major U.S. military bases.

42. Yangban is the noble class of the Yi Dynasty (1392 – 1910). In the last decades of the Yi Dynasty, there were classes of yangban, “commoners,” “artisans,” and “slaves.”

43. Kisaeng are usually associated with highly cultured and educated women courtesans of Korea.


44. The position of police officer, junsa, was not exclusively held by Japanese. Literary texts as well as historical documents indicate that many Koreans also held this post. Thus, it is hard to discern whether the junsa addressed in the poem is Japanese or Korean. So my interpreta-tion goes as far as recognizing junsa as a symbol of the Japanese imperial authority in the colonies.

45. For a further discussion on the topic, see Louise Young’s chapter, “Colonizing Manchuria: The Making of an Imperial Myth,” in Mirror of Modernity, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 95 – 109.

Documents

Helen J.S. Lee - Colonial Relations of Everyday Life Through Senryu Poetry