‘Zainichi’ Who?: The Other Who Cannot Move across Borders

‘Zainichi’ is the Japanese way of pronouncing the Chinese characters ‘在 日,’ which is ‘재일’ (Jae-il) in Korean which means ‘residing in Japan.’ Yet the psychoanalytic discussion on the jargon term Zainichi enables us to consider the boundaries which surround ethnic Koreans residing in Japan. ‘재일조선인’ (Jae-il Chosun-in), pronounced ‘Zainichi Chosenjin’ in Japanese, are refugees usually confined in the enclosed space of Japan. Yet the word ‘confined’ is not limited merely to that of a geographical and/or a political sense. They have been forced to experience themselves being separated from their ‘native community’ as well as being continuously ‘other-ized’ by the majority of Japanese society. It has caused them to be confined by the ‘boundaries of identity.’

For the second and third generation Jae-il Chosun-in born in Japan after World War II, the aforementioned situation brought about a severe identity crisis. To overcome this schizophrenic situation, they endeavored to travel to their ‘motherland’ (the native land of their antecedents) and associate with its people to solidify a sense of unity. Yet their attempts to transcend the boundaries of identity usually failed. This paper will focus on the identity boundary problems of Zainich Chosenjin with the help of the literary work Yuhee (1988) written by a female Zainich Chosenjin author Lee Yangji (李良枝) in Japan.