| This project addresses colonial relations of race between Japanese settlers and Koreans in colonial Korea. It uses source materials in both Japanese and Korean to explore how working and merchant class Japanese participated in the racialization of Koreans. I consider a wide array of popular media in Japanese: travelogues and guide books, poetry (senryu), comic books and photography, directed at everyone from small businessmen to the growing population of Japanese who were becoming curious about Japan's new colony, Korea.{09}These so-called "ordinary Japanese citizens" had direct contact with Koreans, not as administrators, soldiers, or government officials, but as the occasional traveler, the small-time entrepreneur, and the poor immigrant.; By examining different literary genres written by working class and merchant class Japanese settlers in Korea during Japan's imperial expansion (1868--1945), I investigate how the non-elite and unofficial discourse of race was constructed as well as how it, in turn, informed, reflected, and even challenged the "official" discourse of colonial racial relations. I argue that a broader perspective on how ordinary Japanese experience colonialism can supplement and, more importantly, question prevailing representations of colonial reality. In contrast to the officially recognized colonial relations of national inequality, the senryu poems, manga, and travelogues/guidebooks reveal to us the dynamics of race relations in everyday life. |
