Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity

5. The 38th Parallax: Nakagami in/and Korea

· 171 ·· CHAPTER 5 · The 38th Parallax Nakagami in/and Korea A Second Life for Asian Modernity The ideas of exchange and exile punctuated Nakagami’s works. During a period of intense travel beginning in the late 1970s, he transposed these questions from the immediate domestic context of Kumano and kokubungaku (national literature) to the regional context of East Asia. He paid special attention to the national context of Korea, itself fraught with ideas of Southernness—divided by a border from the North, a former “South” of Japan’s imperial reach and emerging from its position in the global South to become a modern industrialized nation. Between 1978 and 1985, Nakagami visited Korea seven times and traveled extensively from his base in Seoul. Korea would become one of the largest subjects in his oeuvre. Nakagami initially imagined Korea as an alternative to Japanese modernity but became disillusioned with the revival of nativist culture by leftist intellectuals because they abandoned its roots in outcast culture when they mobilized its cultural forms for antiauthoritarian protest. Although his initial expectations do not pan out, his interest is vindicated by the vitality of street life in Seoul and the new styles of writing and photography that he engages to capture Korea as a whole. Nakagami idealizes Seoul and Korea as a whole because there literature is closely tied to life; war and modern nationalism give that life a clarity it lacks in Japan: “Korea has an animated kind of energy. If you are in Seoul for even ten days, in this energetic Korea, it becomes obvious this is a place where literature is constantly bubbling under. That is something I am envious of as a novelist. First of all, there was a civil war (nanboku sensō) within the same people, and national boundaries were laid down as if to draw a line on a map. Neither of these two things exists in Japan.”1 Through these 172 THE 38TH PARALLAX travels, Nakagami observes the heightened “sense of entropy” resulting from the tensions between North and South.2 Nakagami benefits from this entropy by being one of the few Japanese intellectuals to interact with Korean writers, editors, and intellectuals in the years following the 1980 Kwangju Massacre. Seoul may have been under curfew, as he writes in the essay Dancing, Seoul (Rinbu suru, Seoul), but it was also the stage for the democratization movement of the 1980s and after-hour editorial summits. He uses his forays into the literary worlds and the performing arts venues of Seoul and Chŏngju to describe the “exceptional” yet exemplary kind of modernity that may be experienced in Korea.3 These works both redefine the critical term of monogatari and use media forms that draw their rhetorical and documentary power from immediacy. This chapter considers Nakagami’s immersion in journalistic essays and roundtables about Korea. It then turns to look at places that show his search for direct contact with the vital elements of folk forms, political resistance, and a sense of time that was anti- or nonlinear and multiple and therefore unstructured: markets and photography. I follow his attempts to determine whether populist culture is still attached to outcast culture, a question he poses to dissident poet Kim Chi-ha and other writers as well as scholars and performers engaged in conserving folk forms. I conclude that he ultimately decides that, despite his initial high hopes for accomplishing a salvage ethnography, Korean intellectuals, too, have channeled hisabetsu-min (outcast) folk forms into the greater cause of modernization. Partisans of the democratization movement have subordinated the specific historical character of hisabetsu-min culture to a more generalized populist (shomin) resistance against aristocratic (yangban) culture. The resistance, too, has repeated Japan’s embrace of modernization and made itself too modern to be salvaged. An outside to this structure, however, can still be found in the live action of the marketplace and in the populist kinds of exchange that sustain it. Finally, to show this marketplace vitality, I look at works of fiction published during and after his stays in Korea. The Mirror Curtain Nakagami’s publications on Korea begin with the series of reportage essays published in 1978 in the Tokyo shinbun newspaper, compiled as On the Other Side of Landscape (Fūkei no mukō e). The term “landscape” clearly refers to Karatani Kōjin’s description of modern subjectivity in Japan as formed by a THE 38TH PARALLAX...