Come up with 6 questions with explanations.

 

Submit SIX questions and explanations in total. 

3-4 pages, double-spaced, Time New Roman 12

Submit 3 questions from the Preface of this book and 3 questions from the Introduction of this book. 

You are required to formulate questions in the way in which they address the main points of the assigned texts and the questions should demonstrate that you have read the readings. For each question, you are also required to provide an explanation of why the main idea of the readings is important. 

3 questions from Preface p. xiii – xxx

3 question from Introduction p. 1 – 17

Treacherous Translation
Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism
in Korea and Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s

serk-bae suh

Global, Area, and International Archive

University of California Press

berkeley los angeles london

Acknowledgments ix

Preface

xiii

introduction

1

Translation and the Colonial Desire for Transparency

1. translation and the community of love 18

Hosoi Hajime and Translating Korea

2. treacherous translation 46

The 1938 Japanese-Language Theatrical Version
of the Korean tale Ch’unhyangjŏn

3. the location of “korean” culture 71

Ch’oe Chaesŏ and Korean Literature in a Time of Transition

4. translation and its postcolonial discontents 104

The Postwar Controversy over Tōma Seita’s Reading of Kim Soun’s
Japanese Translations of Korean Poetry

5. toward a monolingual society 135

South Korean Linguistic Nationalism and Kim Suyŏng’s
Resistance to Monolingualism

Notes 161

Bibliography 199

Index 211

Contents

xiii

This book grew out of my endeavor to examine the ways in which the
issues of translation and language were embedded in Korean and Japanese
discourses on nation, culture, and literature in the context of Japanese
colonial rule and its aftermath in Korea. More specifically, the book
examines the role of translation in shaping attitudes toward nationalism
and colonialism in Korean and Japanese intellectual discourse from the
1910s through the 1960s. Critiquing the conventional view of translation
as a representation of an original text, a view that was prevalent among
both Korean and Japanese intellectuals, I argue that, when theorized as
an ethical and political practice, translation challenges the ethnocentric
view of culture and language embedded in both colonialism and cultural
nationalism.

Translation in the colonial context means not just the translation of
texts between the language of the colonizer and that of the colonized.
It also entails the representation of the colonized’s culture and of the
colonized themselves. When framed as the faithful rendering of a text
from one language to another, translation is supposed to represent the
original text. In addition, there is another level of representation involved
in translation. In the commonly held view of translation, it is expected to
facilitate understanding of the culture to which the original text belongs.1
The assumption underlying such a view is that the translated text repre-
sents the source culture from which the original derives.

As further examined in Chapters 2 and 4, the issue of representation
comes up even more conspicuously in the case of translating a text from
the language of the colonized to that of the colonizer. Furthermore, not
only is the colonized’s culture represented but the colonizer’s cultural
identity is also imagined in terms of its di}erence from that of the colo-

Preface

xiv / Preface

nized through translation. As Edward Said pointed out in Orientalism,
the Western orientalists’ translation of Middle Eastern and Indian clas-
sics in the 18th and 19th centuries enabled the West to imagine its civili-
zation with respect to what it considered the Orient in the time of modern
colonialism.2 Focusing on cases of translation from the colonized’s lan-
guage to that of the colonizer, Tejaswini Niranjana has astutely criticized
the conventional view of translation as the faithful representation of the
original, a view that, she argues, is collusive with regimes of colonial
domination.3 However, the problem of representation is not limited to
the case of translation from the language of the colonized to that of the
colonizer. When translating from the colonizer’s language to that of the
colonized, the translator, whether colonizer or colonized, cannot help but
continuously compare the culture of colonizer with that of the colonized
so long as translation is defined not just as a linguistic transfer of mean-
ings but as the rendering of an original text rooted in one culture to a dif-
ferent language whose signifying system is specific only to its culture. In
the course of translation, the original text that is understood to represent
the colonizer’s culture is thus made to help essentialize the colonized’s
culture in terms of the latter’s di}erence from the former. Furthermore,
not only are the cultures of the colonizer and of the colonized reified
through representation, but the former also is made to register as the
norm against which the supposed deficiencies of the latter emerge in the
course of translation. Thus, for example, instances in which there are no
words in the colonized’s language that correspond to ideas highly valued
by the colonizer are often ascribed to failings in the colonized’s culture.

As in the case of translations by writers from Western colonizer
nations, Japanese translations of Korean history and literature repre-
sented the colonized and their culture and shaped Japanese colonial dis-
course on Korea. Korean cultural nationalism arose primarily in re sponse
to such colonial representations of culture and nation, as is the case of the
Korean intellectual An Hwak, whose treatise on Korean literary history
will be examined in Chapter 1.4 However, because of its ethnocentric view
of culture and language, Korean cultural nationalism failed to e}ectively
challenge colonialist claims about the legitimacy of colonial rule.

Despite political and economical disparities in power between the colo-
nizer and the colonized, the cultural nationalism of the colonized enables
them to imagine their own language and culture to be equal to those of
the colonizer. It does so by positing an autonomous and homogeneous
national community of language and culture. Linguistic and cultural
nationalism can also empower a politics of resistance by the colonized

Preface / xv

against colonial domination. However, it can also spur something akin
to the multiculturalism found in the United States, which carves out an
autonomous space for the cultures of the minority while fully accepting
the legitimacy of the dominant ruling groups. In other words, the lin-
guistic and cultural nationalism of the colonized stops short of question-
ing the legitimacy of colonial rule. Cultural nationalism consequently
fails to provide a radical critique of colonial domination. Furthermore,
the linguistic and cultural nationalism of the colonized rests on the fixed
identities of the colonizer and the colonized that rest on such essential-
ist foundations as ethnicity, tradition, culture, and language. Even while
occasionally causing friction with colonial rule, linguistic and cultural
nationalism as ideology thus works concentrically with colonialism,
which also depends on the same essentialist foundations.

If a nation is “an imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson has
argued, the act of imagining a nation is never complete but must be
repeated constantly not only to police borders with other nations but also
to reformulate boundaries to adapt to political, economic, and cultural
changes in society.5 Culture is the arena in which imagination draws and
redraws the boundaries of the nation. Although race as a pseudo bio-
logical concept has been denounced as an illegitimate marker, culture
remains accepted as an authentic delimiter of a nation, because a specific
culture is, with very few exceptions, associated with a national commu-
nity. Colonialism and its legacies have erected the frame in which the
nation is imagined in the realm of culture. As Nicholas Dirks reminds
us, not only has modern culture been shaped by colonialism, colonial
domination itself is enacted through culture.6

Literature is one main cultural institution in which nationalism and
colonialism converge in the imagining of national boundaries. The mod-
ern literary conventions of genre and narrative technique originated in
the European tradition and spread to non– Western societies through
colonial expansion. Through adaptation and appropriation, the modern
literature of non– Western societies has been written in vernacular lan-
guages, which, with few exceptions, are thought of only in connection
with national communities. Thus, literature is viewed as the linguistic
expression of a specific culture that is linked to a national community.

One of the common definitions of a national literature is a body of
literature created for the community of a nation. The concept may seem
natural, but the word nation resists clear definition, and even if its blurry
boundaries are determined, the community depends on transparent com-
municability among its members. One of the prerequisites for transpar-

xvi / Preface

ent communicability is a common language. Dependence on translation
to communicate marks one’s foreignness and condemns one to exclusion
from the community. In short, one who does not speak the language is
not really a member of the community.

It is often said that a major part of Koreans’ indignation at the Japa-
nese arose from the colonial policy of assimilation. This so-called dōka
seisaku (assimilation policy) consisted of a set of institutional measures
devised by the colonial government to make Koreans and other ethnic
groups within the empire into good subjects of the Japanese state.7 How-
ever, in contrast to its stated goals, the assimilation policy never aimed
to entirely assimilate the Koreans into the Japanese nation. Although
the Japanese colonial government occasionally denounced discrimina-
tion against Koreans by the Japanese, the need for such admonitions only
underscored the enduring discrimination that reflected the deeply rooted
prejudice among ordinary Japanese against Koreans. Furthermore, al –
though the stated aim was to eliminate institutionalized discrimina-
tion at some future point when Koreans were thoroughly assimilated
into Japan, the goal remained always out of reach. Discrimination could
disappear only when all the di}erences between the colonized and the
colonizers would vanish. The present di}erences between the colonized
and the colonizers served to justify discriminatory practices. Di}erence
cannot be dissociated from discrimination under colonialism. It should
not be surprising that some Koreans called for the renunciation of Korean
culture, language, and whatever di}erentiated them from the Japanese.8
However, the total abolition of discrimination was always deferred to the
future. Here was a case demonstrating how colonialism pivots on di}er-
ence between the colonizers and the colonized to preserve the colonial
hierarchy on which colonialism exists. Colonialism does not eradicate
di}erence. It reconfigures it.

Just as colonialism maintains di}erences between the colonized and
colonizers while claiming to erase them, translation simultaneously
points to the gulf between two languages while trying to bridge the gap.
As examined further in Chapter 2, translation can hypostatize borders
between two languages and thus accentuate the di}erence between two
autonomous and homogeneous communities.9 It is linguistic and cultural
nationalism that posits an autonomous and homogeneous community of
nation. The imagined autonomous and homogeneous community masks
the fact that no community is completely sterilized of foreignness and
free from the contamination of otherness.

If translation aims at transcending the di}erence between linguis-

Preface / xvii

tic and cultural communities, which are externally independent and
internally unified, the ideal of translation is to transfer a text from one
linguistic and cultural community to another without losing any seman-
tic or syntactic meaning. In other words, the ideal of translation in this
context is an equal exchange between two languages and cultures. The
view of translation as an equal exchange rests on the assumption that it
is possible to establish a reciprocal relationship between two languages,
overcoming the di}erences between them. In this sense, translatability
refers to the possibility of equivalents that bridge the gap between two
languages. Previous studies on colonial translation by Niranjana and
Lydia Liu, to name a few, have pointed out that the idea of translation as
an equal exchange is incongruent with colonial domination and politi-
cal asymmetry between the colonizer and the colonized. Whereas the
previous studies have primarily problematized the colonial intervention
in the process of translation, however, I want to focus my critique on the
homology between the logic of translation as equal exchange and colonial
discourse, which depends on narrative strategies that serve in the end to
justify and defend colonial domination and exploitation.10

One might argue that translation has more to do with the commensu-
rability between languages than with the exchange value between them.
Karl Marx’s analogy between the circulation of commodities and transla-
tion helps us see the relevance of the idea of exchange value in relation
to the way in which translation is conventionally understood. To explain
how money mediates the exchange of products and thus turn them into
commodities in circulation, Marx likened the exchangeability of prod-
ucts to translatability. He wrote,

To compare money with language is not less erroneous. Language
does not transform ideas, so that the peculiarity of ideas is dissolved
and their social character runs alongside them as a separate entity,
like prices alongside commodities. Ideas do not exist separately from
language. Ideas which have first to be translated out of their mother
tongue into a foreign language in order to circulate, in order to
become exchangeable, offer a somewhat better analogy; but the anal-
ogy then lies not in language, but in the foreignness of language.11

In other words, the foreignness of language requires translation in the
same way as the di}erence between products in exchange necessitates the
concept of exchange value, that is, the value of one product expressed as
the use value of another product. Commensurability itself is not inherent
in languages but is rather made possible by the equivalencies translation
can provide for languages.

xviii / Preface

Since Marx, quite a few scholars in translation studies have employed
the trope of exchange to explain translation. George Steiner is one nota-
ble example. Steiner suggests that the ideal for translation is “exchange
without loss” between languages.12 Liu also uses Marxian concepts of use
and exchange value in her study of translations from Western languages
to Chinese in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As Liu points out,
the creation of equivalents between languages is far from innocent of
political intervention, and all the more so in colonial translation. In other
words, in Liu’s view, translation is not symmetrically reciprocal between
two languages. Production of equivalents is conditioned by the power
relations between two language communities. While acknowledging
the relevance of a new approach in colonial and postcolonial studies that
emphasizes translation as the site of resistance, Liu, however, warns us
that the trend could reduce the history of colonial translation into a single
narrative about the struggles of the colonized resisting the Western colo-
nial domination. She insists rather on looking at translation as a more
nuanced site of “resistance, domination, and appropriation.”13

In contrast with Liu’s view of translation as a venue in which the domi-
nant and the dominated conflict and negotiate with each other, I posit
that colonial translation is premised on the idea of exchange between the
colonizers and the colonized as equal parties. In other words, I focus my
analysis on the collusion between colonial discourse and the idea of equal
exchange implicated in the conventional view of translation that involves
constituting equivalencies between languages. Insistence on equal and
reciprocal exchanges in the conventional view of translation eerily paral-
lels the emphasis on the reciprocal and equally beneficial relationship
between the colonized and the colonizer in colonial discourse. For exam-
ple, as discussed further in Chapter 2, Japanese colonial discourse was
replete with rhetoric, as well as statistics, seeking to establish the belief
that Japanese colonial rule was equally beneficial to Koreans as it was to
Japanese, if not more so. Colonial discourse assumes a reciprocal rela-
tionship between the colonizer and the colonized even as power dispari-
ties enable colonial injustice and exploitation to prevail. It is not dicult
to argue the absurdity of a colonial discourse that assumes the colonial
relationship to be an equal exchange. But the complicity and homology
between colonial discourse and the view of translation as equal exchange
has not been closely scrutinized. Although colonial translation can be a
site of struggle and negotiation between the colonized and the coloniz-
ers, as Liu argues, that definition does not o}er a fundamental critique
of colonial domination. In other words, the collusion between colonial

Preface / xix

translation and colonial domination cannot be exposed to make a radical
critique unless the idea of equal exchange itself is carefully examined and
critiqued. I am not proposing that translation is inherently collusive with
colonial domination. Rather, I suggest a di}erent view of translation as
an ethical as well as political practice. Translation thus radicalized resists
the lure of cultural and linguistic nationalism on the part of the colonized
as well as the colonial enterprise of domination.

Drawing on the work of such thinkers as Marx, Emmanuel Levinas,
and Jacques Derrida, I conceptualize translation as an ethical and politi-
cal practice that interrupts the tyrannical dictation of the self over the
other and thus enables the former to encounter the latter in language.
Translation thus theorized highlights the ethical aspect of language as
a venue in which self and other can engage in dialogue without silenc-
ing unbridgeable di}erences. It also emphasizes translation’s potential
to create an anticolonial politics by exposing heterogeneity within the
languages and cultures of both colonizer and colonized, thereby disrupt-
ing the homogeneous linguistic and cultural communities promulgated
by the colonial hierarchy.

There are three main reasons why I base my criticism of colonialism
on Levinas’s thought. First, Levinas’s ethics is premised on the radical
alterity of the other.14 According to Levinas, the absolute alterity of the
other subjects the self to questioning its own legitimacy and orders the
self to act ethically toward the other.15 The self should not and cannot
speak, think, or behave on behalf of the other. Colonial domination is
an exemplary mode of rule that prevents the self from encountering the
alterity of the other. By the logic of colonialism, it is the colonizers who
decide what the colonized should do. To legitimize their domination, the
colonizers make it their moral obligation to bring in modern economic,
political, and cultural institutions to enlighten the colonized, who they
believe cannot civilize themselves on their own. Put simply, the coloniz-
ers believe they know better than the colonized what is good for them.
Thus, after the Sino-Japanese War (1894– 1895), the Japanese statesman
Itō Hirobumi lamented that Korea was “quite incapable of reform from
within” and that “those [reforms] which Japan had endeavored to introduce
seemed a long way o} from being realized.”16 Itō’s words demonstrate the
tyranny of colonialist subjectivity. The colonizers think, speak, and act
on behalf of the colonized. There is no room for the absolute otherness in
such a mode of thinking. In criticizing the logic of colonial domination
that disrespects the alterity of the colonized, I rely on Levinas’s ethics.

Second, recent trends in colonial and postcolonial studies have empha-

xx / Preface

sized the importance of ambivalence in colonial discourse, as explicated
in Homi Bhabha’s seminal book The Location of Culture. I agree with
Bhabha that colonial discourse is replete with ambivalence resulting from
its simultaneous recognition and denial of the di}erence between the
colonized and the colonizer. However, I am also concerned that emphasis
on colonial ambivalence tends to dismiss the clear di}erences between
the colonized and the colonizer. As Bhabha points out, the nationalist
critique of colonialism bogs down in the binary opposition between the
colonized and the colonizer. It is true that the nationalism of the colo-
nized is as fixated on such essentialist foundations as ethnicity, culture,
and language as the colonizer’s justification of the colonial hierarchy.17
Certainly, the cultural and linguistic nationalism of the colonized often
fails to o}er radical resistance to colonial domination exactly because it
does not aim to eradicate the mode of the essentialist identification and
instead merely reverses the order of the hierarchy. Such nationalism also
does not capture “the third space” of colonial reality that Bhabha regards
as the site of resistance to colonialism and the criticism of both colonial-
ism and nationalism that are based on binary oppositions. More impor-
tant, colonial nationalism seldom tackles colonial injustice done to people
who are outside of the supposed national community of the colonized.

Nevertheless, it is still necessary to retain a clear separation between
the colonizer and the colonized to force the colonizer to face his or her
all-encompassing ethical responsibility for colonial violence. Levinasian
ethics o}ers a way to criticize the essentialist identity on which both the
colonized’s nationalism and the colonizer’s domination hinge, while at
the same time retaining the irreducible di}erence between the colonizer
and the colonized. The ethical argument Levinas inspires me to make
does not blur the separation between the colonized and the colonizer
even though it attempts to criticize both colonialism and the cultural and
linguistic nationalism of the colonized. The ethical relationship that I
advocate entails a clear demarcation between the colonized and the colo-
nizer. However, the separation between the colonized and the colonizer
does not rest on such essentialist foundations as ethnicity, language, tra-
dition, or culture. The di}erence between the colonized and the coloniz-
ers rather is situated in the history of colonial violence. It is the history of
Japanese colonial domination, not any essentialist foundations of identity
that posit the di}erences between Koreans and Japanese.

Third, the Levinasian notion of eschatology leads us to reflect on the
inherent violence in the representation of the past and o}ers a way into
an “ethical history.” It might be seen as implausible to invoke Levinasian

Preface / xxi

ethics in defense of history because Levinas is critical of history for total-
izing the di}erences between individuals’ experiences into “a coherent
discourse.”18 This violent aspect of history is inevitable when recounting
the experiences of those in the past who are no longer present and thus
deprived of their own voices. Thus, in history, the individual is presented
only “in the third person.” However, Levinas does not completely rule
out the possibility of an ethical way of recounting the past, proposing
that eschatology can disrupt the tyranny of history. In his view, escha-
tology upholds the singularity of the individual because, unlike history,
it grants individuals the right to speak for themselves. But at the same
time, eschatology does not allow individuals to say whatever they want
because it prioritizes the alterity of the other over individual freedom.
When an individual’s fear that death will deprive her of her own voice
turns into concern over the murder of the alterity of the other, the pos-
sibility of eschatology emerges.

Before proceeding further, however, I need to explicate in more detail
the possibility of the political actualization of Levinasian ethics to justify
this book’s theoretical orientation.

Although Levinas is critical of politics as the realm of power relations,
the problem of politics is at the heart of his thinking on ethics. As Levinas
explains it, the self ’s ethical responsibilities to the other can come into
conflict because the world is inhabited by multiple others. Often the self
has to prioritize one “other” over another to uphold justice. This can only
be accomplished through politics. Nevertheless, Levinas has been criti-
cized for his political position. For example, many who admired him as
a philosopher of ethics were befuddled by his hesitation in denouncing
the state of Israel for the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps at
Sabra and Shatila in 1982. Thus, Slavoj Žižek criticizes Levinas for the
unbridgeable distance between his “high theory” and his “vulgar com-
monsensical reflections” on real politics.19

As a matter of fact, Levinas’s uncompromising insistence on the abso-
lute alterity of the other poses an almost insurmountable problem to any
attempt to ground criticism of such political injustice as colonialism in
his ethics.20 If the other is beyond the self ’s grasp, relentlessly resisting
the self ’s assimilation of the other into the self ’s own consciousness and
thus questioning the certainty of the self ’s legitimacy, is it still possible
to thematize the other as the colonized? Once we tie the other to the
colonized, will we not e}ace the absolute alterity of the other? In a word,
the question is whether the other in Levinasian ethics can be concretized
as others who su}er from injustices and thus calls for our intervention

xxii / Preface

in politics to bring justice. This diculty of making sense of the other
as those who are oppressed in the real world is often interpreted as the
ine}ectiveness and impracticality of Levinas’s ethics and has even been
viewed as the result of his political conservatism. Thus when Levinas
was hesitant to designate Palestinian refugees as the other, his failure
to address the violence of the Israeli state against Palestinians seemed
to have come not only from his never neutral attitude toward Israel but
also from political ine}ectiveness or even perniciousness inherent in his
ethics.21

It is possible to push the issue even further to the point of questioning
the very possibility of Levinasian ethics by raising the following ques-
tion: How can Levinas speak of the other if it exceeds the self ’s cognitive
power and evades the self ’s understanding? If talking about the other
inevitably involves thematizing it in discourse and consequently regard-
ing the other as an object knowable to the self, ultimately turning the
di}erence of the other into something assimilable to the same, then did
Levinas not end up betraying the very premise of his own ethical prin-
ciple as soon as he spoke and wrote about the other? Is ethical language
possible when incorporating the other into discourse unavoidably vio-
lates the alterity of the other?22

Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being can be seen as his response to such
questions. In the book, Levinas distinguishes the two aspects of lan-
guage, the saying and the said. The said is the thematizing aspect of
language, what is said, whereas the saying is the aspect of language that
far exceeds thematization and thus remains beyond and outside what is
said.23 Risking oversimplification, it can be argued that the saying refers
to an event of speech whereas the said constitutes the message or content
of speech. The saying points to the essence of language that is ethical
because it instances the primordial moment in which language begins
with the other.

Being faithful to Levinas’s words, it can be said that the other is never
synchronous with the self. If the other were contemporaneous with the
self, the other could be brought into the consciousness of the self.24 The
other never coincides with the self, however. Rather, the other comes up
only as a trace, what Levinas calls the face. The face discloses itself as the
saying. The face of the other demands that the self respond and orders the
self to enact a saying of its own. Speech thus emerges with the other with
whom the self desires to engage. The self ’s desire arises neither from free
will nor from egoistic need but from the shame that the other evokes.25
The self ’s shame in turn coincides with the demand to be responsive and

Preface / xxiii

responsible and constitutes the following questions: Have I not harmed
the other to be here at this moment? Have I not usurped the other’s place?

Without the saying, the said is oblivious of the essence of language
that is ethical.26 Such obliviousness misleads us into seeing language
only as a tool for the transmission of ideas. If the essence of language
is to transmit ideas (the said) between interlocutors, then such a view
will ultimately confirm the self ’s cognitive power because that means the
self can understand others in dialogue well enough to safely assume that
what the self takes its interlocutor to mean corresponds suciently to
what is actually meant. However, can the self hold up the absolute alter-
ity of the other if it is complacent about its understanding of the other?
Does complacency not lead to the confirmation of the self ’s legitimacy
with respect to the other? Levinas’s di}erentiation of the saying from
the said makes it possible to see the ethicality of language, which the
saying points to. Although the view of language as a tool for transmitting
ideas is premised on the belief that interlocutors can understand each
other well enough, Levinas’s emphasis on the saying is a reminder that
“enough” is never enough and language is never reduced to the said.27 By
illuminating the ethical aspect of language and questioning the primacy
of the said in the conventional understanding of language, the saying
disrupts the certainty of the self ’s legitimacy that the said prioritizes.

For Levinas, language is the privileged venue in which the self comes
closer to the other. However, there is no guarantee that the self can ever
reach the other. On the contrary, the self is always exposed to the risk of
being ignored and misunderstood by the other in dialogue. Rather than
being able to confirm the legitimacy of the self, the self is deprived of the
certainty of its legitimacy in conversation with the other. The self is not
only vulnerably exposed to misunderstanding and indi}erence but also
held solely responsible for respecting the saying without reducing it to
the said. If “I” is misunderstood and ignored, it is only “me” who should
be responsible. If “I” is accused of misunderstanding and indi}erence, it
is also “me” who should be found guilty.

The diculty of actualizing politics based on Levinasian ethics per-
sists, however, because politics, even if it is emancipatory, never allows
for such rigorous insistence on the alterity of the other as demanded
by Levinasian ethics. Then, despite the above justification for basing
my criticism of colonialism on Levinas’s ethics, should I not admit that
Levinasian ethics inevitably falls into the fetishization of the other that
is ultimately impractical and even completely useless, politically speak-
ing? Is there any way to salvage Levinas’s ethics from the aforementioned

xxiv / Preface

accusation? I believe one way to argue for the relevance of Levinas’s eth-
ics to politics involves answering the following question: How does the
ethicality of language translate into anything relevant to politics? As
discussed above, the seeming impossibility of transition from ethics to
politics in Levinas’s thought derives from the fact that his rigorous insis-
tence on the absolute alterity of the other prevents the other from being
readily concretized as others. The entangled and complicated relationship
between the saying and the said is helpful in understanding the equally
entangled and complicated relationship between ethics and politics in
Levinas’s thought.

As mentioned above, despite the obvious privilege he assigns to the
saying over the said, Levinas does not fail to emphasize that the saying
cannot manifest itself without the said.28 Although the saying precedes
the said, it cannot materialize without being coupled with the said. Put
simply, the saying as an event cannot occur without being said. Thus,
the manifestation of saying requires the said. Likewise, the other cannot
manifest itself other than in the appearance of an other. Even though it
is imperative to be alert to the fact that any understanding of the other
as a concrete other, a person who su}ers political persecution, inevitably
risks assimilating the other to consciousness and thus violating his or her
alterity, it is also necessary to recognize that no encounter with the other
can materialize except as an encounter with a concrete human being with
whom the self desires to engage not because it egotistically desires com-
panionship but because the appearance of the other evokes shame in the
self and demands that it be responsible for the other’s su}erings.

It might be helpful to discuss Levinas’s essay titled “Dialogue” to
further examine how his ethics are indeed relevant to politics. Levinas
begins the essay with an observation that, since World War I, not only
politicians but also philosophers have valued dialogue as a venue in
which people are meeting each other to talk out disagreements and dif-
ferences and reach consensus peacefully. He however asserts that the idea
of dialogue premised on the tradition of Western thought does not live up
to the meaning of genuine dialogue, because, in the tradition of Western
thought, dialogue is conventionally regarded as taking place between
two interlocutors who share a common foundation for knowledge, be
it God (as in Judeo– Christian theology), reason (as in rationalism), or
custom (as in Humean empiricism). In the idea of dialogue premised on
the common ground of knowledge, there is no room for encountering the
other who is outside and beyond such a common ground. To Levinas,
such a dialogue based on the common ground is not a genuine dialogue

Preface / xxv

but rather a monologue. A more serious problem found in such an idea of
dialogue is that the powerful often impose their ways of thinking on the
powerless as the common ground for dialogue.29 The lack of violence in
this case is not real peace because it is contingent on the suppression of
the voice of others. Levinas highlights in the work of Martin Buber and
Gabriel Marcel on dialogue the possibility of ethics that enables “the I” to
encounter the absolute other.

What captures my attention in Levinas’s essay is the fact that his con-
cern about real politics inspired him to engage with Buber and Marcel
philosophically and to radicalize their thoughts by reading the ethics of
alterity into them. For him, the conventional understanding of dialogue,
which is based on a common ground of knowledge, cannot ensure genu-
ine peace. Levinas calls for ethics to question the legitimacy of politics,
which often masks the suppression of the powerless and mistakes the lack
of physical violence for peace. In other words, in his view, ethics is called
for to disrupt politics as the latter goes about its usual business. What
we should call attention to is the fact that incongruity between ethics
and politics enables the former to interrupt the latter. Ethics can disrupt
politics because it is beyond politics. If the realm of ethics coincides with
that of politics, there is no way ethics can interrupt politics from outside.
When politics is put in line with ethical demands, it is interrupted by eth-
ics, which demands that the self ask and answer the following questions:
Am I good to others, the humanity who are other to me? How can I be in
good conscience when fellow human beings are su}ering? What should
I do to bring justice to the powerless? The point is that, in order to be
ethical, one must never be in good conscience. Thus, Levinasian ethics,
which concerns the alterity of the other, passes toward a mode of politics,
which infinitely demands that the self care about others, especially those
who are oppressed.

It might be said that concern about the other without considering oth-
ers is politically empty, and care about others without upholding the other
is ethically blind. In that sense, radical politics inspired by Levinasian
ethics is not so far away from the spirit of Marx, whose political program
anticipates the advent of a new society founded on the ethical imperative,
in other words, “from each according to his ability, to each according to
his need.”30 In Chapter 2, I read Marx through the lens of Levinas to high-
light ethics in Marx’s political economy, and I read Levinas through the
lens of Marx to rescue radical politics from the limits of Levinas’s ethics.

Finally, Derrida is also relevant to my criticism of both colonialism
and cultural and linguistic nationalism. His criticism of foundationalism

xxvi / Preface

calls into question cultural essentialist presumptions embedded in such
phrases as Korean nation, Japanese literature, and Western civilization. For
example, as demonstrated in Chapter 3, Derrida’s theory of supplement
is helpful for looking at how colonial ideology subsumes the colonized’s
culture within the colonizer’s culture, while at the same time essentional-
izing the latter as distinct from and superior to the former. Furthermore,
Derrida, who was born and raised in colonized Algeria, deliberates on the
linguistic situation of the colonial society in his book Monolingualism of
the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin.31 He provocatively argues that “all
culture is originarily colonial” and that language plays the essential role
in enabling culture to legitimize domination.32 Derrida’s insights are also
helpful for examining the violent nature of the monolingual language
policy that standardized the Korean language and stamped out the use
of the Japanese language in liberated Korea after 1945. As discussed in
Chapter 5, the majority of Korean intellectuals deemed it necessary to
implement a monolingual language policy in liberated Korea. Derrida’s
insights o}er a critique of the nationalist argument that the suppression
of the Japanese language was necessary to unify Korean society and to
purge Japanese colonial legacies.

organization of this book

Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Korea
and Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s comprises an introductory essay
and five chapters. By analyzing short stories written during the colonial
period by the Korean writer Kim Saryang (1914– 1950) and the Japanese
writers Nakajima Atsushi (1909– 1942) and Nakanishi Inosuke (1887–
1958), in the introductory essay I aim to lay out the concerns and issues
addressed throughout the book. More specifically, by focusing on the
translators featured in the stories, I examine the ways in which those
literary texts reveal the colonizer’s unease over translation as the neces-
sary but imperfect mediation that frustrates transparent communication
with the colonized. I argue that the colonizer’s anxiety over translation,
as manifested in the literary texts, is related to the desire to reconfirm
his or her authorial and authoritarian voice. Finally, by examining the
preface the Japanese poet Kitahara Hakushū (1885– 1942) wrote for the
1929 Japanese translation of Korean folk songs published by Kim Soun
(1908– 1981), I further argue that translation can open up the possibility
of a critical reflection on the idea of the unified national subjectivity on
which colonial discourse pivots.

Preface / xxvii

In Chapter 1, “Translation and the Community of Love: Hosoi Hajime
and Translating Korea,” I examine the treatises the Japanese journal-
ist Hosoi Hajime (1886– 1934) wrote in the 1910s and 1920s on trans-
lation, culture, and Korea. A prolific translator of the Korean classical
canon, Hosoi regarded his translation projects as an e}ort to facilitate
Japanese understanding of the Korean nation and culture. He implored
his Japanese readers to love and embrace Koreans as their own family. By
analyzing Hosoi’s texts on national character and literature in relation
to Korean nationalist intellectual An Hwak’s treatise on the same topics,
I show how the concept of national literature intervened in shaping the
identities of colonizer and colonized. I also aim in this chapter to examine
translation’s role in schematizing national character, as demonstrated in
Hosoi’s texts. Hosoi revealed his disregard of translation by using “trans-
lation” as a trope to signify “unreflective imitation” and “copying” that is
inferior to the original, while simultaneously stressing the importance of
Japanese translations of Korean literature. I argue that despite the seem-
ing contradiction, Hosoi’s high regard for, and mistrust of, translation
both resulted from conventional views of translation as a representation
of an original. Finally, I read Hosoi’s treatises on Japanese colonial rule
over Korea through the lens of G. W. F. Hegel, because Hegel’s ideas of
law, love, family, and community foreshadow the contradiction inher-
ent in Hosoi’s justification of Japanese colonial rule over Korea. Hegel
is helpful for understanding the ways in which Hosoi’s concept of love
cannot but fail to bind Japanese and Koreans together despite his hope
that the power of love can enable colonized and colonizers to overcome
their di}erences in language, culture, and ethnicity.

In Chapter 2, “Treacherous Translation: The 1938 Japanese-Language
Theatrical Version of the Korean Tale Ch’unhyangjŏn,” I discuss the Japa-
nese theatrical company Shinkyō’s controversial 1938 Japanese-language
staging of the popular Korean romance Ch’unhyangjŏn (The Tale of Spring
Fragrance). Although the performance garnered favorable reviews from
Japanese critics, the Japanese-language version Ch’unhyangjŏn received
uniformly unfavorable, skeptical, and even hostile responses from
Korean critics, who regarded it as a poor translation of the original story.
Despite the disagreements between Japanese and Korean intellectuals
about the play, however, the idea of translation as equal exchange was
embedded both in the colonizers’armation of the play as an exemplary
step toward cultural assimilation and the colonized’s protests against it
as an “inaccurate” or “unfaithful” translation. As discussed earlier, such
insistence on equal exchange in translation colluded with the idea of

xxviii / Preface

symmetrical reciprocity between the colonizer and the colonized in colo-
nialist propaganda. Moreover, such emphasis on reciprocity persistently
pervades the current discourse that justifies neo-imperialist aggression
on a global scale. I draw on Marx and Levinas in examining Korean and
Japanese responses to the Japanese theatrical group Shinkyō’s staging of
the Korean folk tale Ch’unhyangjŏn because Marx and Levinas o}er a
valuable theoretical framework for criticizing the ideas of equal exchange
and reciprocity that underpinned both Korean cultural nationalism,
which ended up retreating from political resistance to a more conciliatory
insistence on cultural autonomy, and Japanese justification of cultural
interactions between Japan and Korea, which colluded with Japanese
colonial rule over Korea.

In Chapter 3, “The Location of ‘Korean’ Culture: Ch’oe Chaesŏ and
Korean Literature in a Time of Transition,” I focus on Ch’oe Chaesŏ
(1908– 1964), a leading Korean intellectual, active translator of English
literary criticism, and chief editor of Kokumin Bungaku (National Litera-
ture), a prominent Japanese-language journal published in colonial Korea
from 1941 to 1945. Ch’oe asserted that the unfolding of history in the
20th century demanded a paradigmatic transition from liberalism and
individualism to state-centered nationalism in culture and literature. He
also privileged everyday life as allowing people to live as members of
communities that ultimately are integrated into the state. By positioning
Koreans as subjects of the Japanese state who were equal to the Japa-
nese people, his argument implied that the colonized should be treated
on a par with the colonizers. Further, Ch’oe advocated Koreans’ cultural
autonomy as an ethnic group within the Japanese empire. Rather than
hastily celebrating Ch’oe’s logic of collaboration as a subversive disrup-
tion of the colonial hierarchy, I contextualize his thoughts on nation,
culture, and literature with those of contemporary Korean, Japanese, and
Western intellectuals and explore how his concepts of history and every-
day life enabled him simultaneously to justify Japanese colonialism’s
political domination of Korea and to defend Koreans’ cultural autonomy.
By comparing Ch’oe’s critical essays on literature, culture, and politics
with his own Japanese translations of the same essays, I also analyze the
way in which the originals and the translations addressed a slightly dif-
ferent readership. I argue that such a miniscule di}erence in the assumed
readership between the Korean originals and the Japanese translations,
however, interrupts the univocal signification of such concepts as tra-
dition, culture, Japan, and Korea on which Ch’oe’s essays pivoted. The
di}erence reveals that the meanings of such concepts are undecidable in

Preface / xxix

Derrida’s sense. The undecidability inherent in the significations of the
concepts ultimately undermines Ch’oe’s discursive strategy that aimed
to expand the conceptual boundaries of the Japanese nation (kokumin) to
include Koreans and at the same time advocated the autonomy of Korean
culture within the empire of Japan.

In Chapter 4, “Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents: The Post –
war Controversy over Tōma Seita’s Reading of Kim Soun’s Japanese
Translations of Korean Poetry,” I examine the postcolonial controversy
over Japanese leftist historian Tōma Seita’s interpretations of a collec-
tion of Korean poetry, which Kim Soun, on whose folk song translations
Kitahara Hakushū commented, translated into Japanese during the colo-
nial period. In a series of essays from 1954, Tōma read into the poems an
allegory of the Korean nation’s su}ering under Japanese rule. However,
Kim denounced Tōma’s politicization of what he considered lyrical poems
because, in his view, Tōma, who could not read Korean, misrepresented
the poems and Korean culture by relying on Kim’s own Japanese transla-
tions. What Kim did not mention in his denunciation, however, was the
fact that some of what he considered Tōma’s misinterpretations resulted
from Kim’s own problematically loose translations. The controversy
poses questions concerning the relationship between history and litera-
ture, the ethics of translation, and the epistemological violence inherent
in representation. In this chapter I attempt to respond to such questions
by examining Tōma’s essays on Korean poetry and Kim’s criticism of
them. To bring out the theoretical implications of the issues involved in
the controversy, I discuss them through Fredric Jameson’s controversial
essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” in
which he looked at non– Western literature as national allegory. In the
1950s, many Japanese leftist intellectuals saw the Japanese as a nation
oppressed under U.S. hegemony and aligned postwar Japanese national-
ism with the nationalisms of other Asian peoples, especially the Chinese
and Koreans, whom they regarded as beneficiaries of national liberation.
By contextualizing the controversy in the torrent of early 1950s debates
among Japanese leftist intellectuals about what constitutes progressive
national literature intent on challenging both rightwing nationalism and
American dominance in Japan, I also treat the controversy’s potential for
encouraging a just relationship between the former colonized and colo-
nizer by drawing on Levinas’s notion of eschatology as an alternative to
history in recounting the past.

In Chapter 5, “Toward a Monolingual Society: South Korean Linguistic
Nationalism and Kim Suyŏng’s Resistance to Monolingualism,” I tackle

xxx / Preface

national language in South Korea after its liberation from Japanese
colonial rule. During the colonial period, Japanese was privileged and
promoted as the ocial language of the Japanese empire in Korea. In
the wake of the country’s liberation from Japan, the whole spectrum of
Korean intellectuals agreed, despite vast political di}erences, that it was
necessary to rigidly standardize Korean as the national language while
suppressing the use of Japanese to build a homogeneous national cul-
ture. The prominent poet and prolific translator Kim Suyŏng (1921– 1968)
belonged to the generation of Koreans who were forced to learn Japanese
during the colonial period, only to be coerced again into using exclusively
Korean after the liberation. Kim left a series of notes on his poetry that
attest to the lingering presence of colonial bilingualism in postliberation
South Korea despite the state’s systematic e}orts at suppression. In his
notes, Kim confessed that his writing continually negotiated between
Korean and Japanese. Kim’s case raises questions about the ideology of
a national language that works to obliterate the foreignness of language
and reinforces monolingualism as a cultural community’s normative lin-
guistic condition. Kim’s notes on his poetry highlight his role as a rare
“critical intellectual” who warned against monolingualism’s repressive
nature in postliberation South Korea.

1

Several years ago, while searching digital archives for Korean intellectu-
als’ critical essays on literary translations published during the colonial
period, I came across a newspaper article from 1930 reporting that six
detectives from the Chongno Police Station in colonial Seoul had finished
translating into Japanese within three days the mission statements and
policies of a communist group under investigation for subversive activi-
ties.1 The article conveys a sense of self-congratulation on the part of
the police that they could successfully submit the translated evidence
to the prosecutor’s oce so quickly. There was nothing new about the
colonial authorities’ persecution of Korean revolutionaries and the story
would have escaped my notice except that it calls attention to the fact
that Japanese colonial bureaucracy and colonial rule itself required a vast
number of the colonial functionaries who performed the everyday task
of translator.

As a matter of fact, the main task of most Korean ocers in the Japa-
nese colonial police was to translate between their Japanese colleagues
and the colonized. After the March First movement in 1919, the colonial
government used monetary incentives to encourage Japanese police o-
cers to learn Korean. Although the number of Japanese police ocers
conversant in Korean gradually increased as a result, most Japanese police
ocers could not do their police work without the help of translators.2

Since my encounter with this article, which serves as a reminder that
Japanese colonial rule depended on translation and its practitioners to
sustain itself, various figures of translators have come to my attention
from colonial-era literature written by both Korean and Japanese writers.

Nakajima Atsushi’s 1929 “Junsa no Iru Fūkei: 1923nen no Hitotsu no
Sukecchi” (Landscape with Policeman: A Sketch of 1923) tells the story

Introduction
Translation and the Colonial Desire
for Transparency

2 / Introduction

of one such colonial functionary/translator, a Korean ocer in the Japa-
nese colonial police named Cho Kyoyŏng.3 The majority of the transla-
tors working to make sure that colonial power pervaded every nook of
colonized society came from the Japanese colonial police.4 As a colonial
functionary, Cho is disliked by the colonized. Unlike his Japanese col-
leagues, he is also mistrusted by the colonizers. In the eyes of the colo-
nized, he is a traitor, a transgressor of the bonds of blood with his nation.
On the other hand, he is viewed with suspicion by the colonizers as a
potential saboteur who might manipulate communication between the
colonized and the colonizers. In other words, he is a translator who per-
forms the thankless task of translation. Witnessing daily discrimination
by Japanese settlers against his fellow Koreans, Cho agonizes over his
split loyalties to the Japanese state and the Korean nation.

In the end, Cho is fired because he clashes with his superior over how
to treat the case of a brawl between Korean and Japanese teenagers. The
story does not inform the reader what exactly is the cause of Cho’s argu-
ment with his boss about but only implies that he demands fair treat-
ment for the Korean students. After receiving the notice of termination
and severance money, Cho wanders around and ends up squandering his
severance money on a prostitute. The story ends with Cho running to a
group of manual laborers sleeping in the street, and his final words are
a lament: “you, you, this peninsula . . . this nation.” Cho lost his stable
source of income, but he has also broken free from the precarious posi-
tion of translator between the colonizer and the colonized.

While Nakajima’s story hints at the precarious position between the
colonizers and the colonized to which the colonial translator/functionary
is condemned, a scene in Kim Saryang’s 1940 Japanese-language short
story “Kusa Fukashi” (Deep Grass) describes the ways in which transla-
tion works to maintain the linguistic hierarchy in the colony.5 The story
concerns an unexpected reunion between Pak Insik, a Korean medi-
cal student at Tokyo Imperial University, and his high school teacher.
While Insik is visiting his uncle, a magistrate in a remote mountainous
region in Korea where he and other Korean students are to participate in
a medical volunteer program for slash-and-burn farmers, he unexpect-
edly meets his high school Korean language teacher, whose students
have nicknamed him “Noseblower.” “Noseblower” was a laughing stock
in Insik’s high school, where nobody took the subject of Korean language
and literature seriously. To make matters worse, the teacher’s servility
toward his Japanese colleagues embarrassed the Korean students. He
was one of the teachers whose resignation Insik and his classmates had

Introduction / 3

demanded when they organized a classroom walk-out. Now, six years
later, Insik discovers that his former teacher is working as a clerk for his
conceited and vainglorious uncle, the colonial bureaucrat.

In the scene in question, “Noseblower” is translating the magistrate’s
less-than-fluent Japanese-language speech for villagers. The magistrate’s
speech does not flow well in the ears of his nephew Insik, whose excellent
Japanese has allowed him to enter the most prestigious university in the
Japanese empire. The magistrate cannot tell voiced from unvoiced con-
sonants (confusing ga, and ka, for example) and constantly mixes them
up, a common mistake among Japanese speakers whose mother tongue is
Korean. In other words, his Japanese is marked with traces of Koreanness.
Overbearing and anxious at the same time, the magistrate is nevertheless
speaking in Japanese about the colonial policy instituted in 1937 forbid-
ding Koreans from wearing their traditional white clothes on the grounds
that more time and water are required to launder them. Struggling to
keep up, “Noseblower” is stumbling often over translation to Korean. The
assembled villagers understand none of the foreign language coming
out of the magistrate’s mouth and are perhaps equally clueless about the
rationale behind the colonial policy even when the speech is rendered
into the language they understand. For all three parties in this farcical
scene — speaker, translator, and listeners— the Korean language ought to
have been a more e}ective medium of communication. Conveying a mes-
sage, however, is not the primary concern of anyone present.

What is at issue is that through translation Japanese is reconfirmed
as the language of authority. The magistrate reasons that the Korean
language cannot evince the dignity he, an ocial of the Japanese empire,
deserves. In other words, he thinks that if he were to speak in Korean,
he could not command respect and obedience due him from his audi-
ence. Translation adds the final touch to the constant configuration of
the colonial hierarchy of languages. The majority of the colonized, who
are alienated from power, cannot access the authoritative voice directly
but hear it only through the mediation of translation. The magistrate’s
Japanese, which is less than fluent, nevertheless registers in the minds
of the villagers as the flawless language of authority, not least because
it has been translated. The villagers cannot tell the awkwardness of the
magistrate’s Japanese, which to Insik’s ears is less than standard Japanese,
the imagined ideal speech without which the idea of the homogeneity of
Japanese could not hold. The villagers know the speech is being delivered
in a foreign tongue not only because they do not understand it but also
because it requires translation to Korean. The language must be Japanese

4 / Introduction

because it is coming out of the mouth of the magistrate, the representa-
tive of Japanese colonial power. In sum, the magistrate wants to speak in
Japanese because it is the language of authority and the villagers know
his speech is being given in Japanese because it is being translated into
Korean and he is a colonial ocial representing the empire of Japan.
Thus, the scene farcically marks language politics in colonial society and
translation’s collusion with it.

On the one hand, by showing in the case of Insik and his uncle that
linguistic boundaries do not always coincide with racial or ethnic bound-
aries between colonizer and colonized because the colonized can learn
the colonizer’s language, the story subverts, in a way, the unreflectively
immediate correlation between language and ethnicity embedded in
colonial discourse on literature and culture. In Chapter 3, I will further
discuss this issue of the often assumed correlation between language,
ethnicity, and literature when I examine the writings of the Korean intel-
lectual Ch’oe Chaesŏ. Kim Saryang’s story, on the other hand, reveals that
translation reifies linguistic boundaries between Japanese and Korean
and demarcates those who can speak Japanese from the rest who cannot.
Dependence on translation to communicate in the colonizers’ language
marks exclusion from power. Furthermore, in the story, language still
functions as a relatively stable demarcation to set apart the Japanese from
Koreans because the magistrate’s awkward Japanese testifies to his less-
than-complete mimicry of the colonizers.

Whereas translation’s collusion with colonial domination does not go
unnoticed in such literary works as “Deep Grass,” the colonizer’s uneasi-
ness toward translation recurs throughout colonial literature. Nakanishi
Ino suke’s 1922 story “Futei senjin” (Recalcitrant Korean) memorably
evokes from the perspective of a sympathetic Japanese intellectual the
sense of unease and frustration the colonizers feel at their dependence
on translation.6 As a matter of fact, the story can be read as an allegory
of colonial translation, or at least of one mode of colonial translation, and
thus the failure of translation in its most fundamental sense. It begins
with a Japanese man named Usui Eisaku traveling with his Korean trans-
lator to the far northwest region of Korea in the early 1920s. His destina-
tion is far from the urban areas that the Japanese keep under tight control.
Anti– Japanese guerilla activities persist around the region. The purpose
of the trip is to meet an old Korean man who is known to be one of the
leaders of anti– Japanese resistance. Usui hopes to have honest conversa-
tions with him and other Koreans with strong anti– Japanese sentiments
and to let them know that not all the Japanese support Japanese colonial

Introduction / 5

rule and that quite a few sympathize with Koreans’ demands for inde-
pendence. His wish is sincere, but he cannot deliver his thoughts to the
Koreans he meets without the help of a translator. His Korean translator,
whose name is not given in the story, does not seem to care about Usui’s
sincere wishes, but instead worries more than Usui about the Korean
insurgents, who do not hesitate to use violence for their cause.

The only protection available to Usui against the possible hostility of
the insurgents is a letter of introduction from his friend from college,
Hong Hŭigye, a socialist who had been the fiancé of the old man’s daugh-
ter, now deceased. The letter, written in Korean— which Usui does not
understand— is his sole protection. The old man has every reason to hate
Japan. Not only has his country lost its independence to Japan but his
daughter perished at the hands of Japanese forces during the March First
movement.7 Usui is understandably very nervous about meeting with
the old man. His nervousness arises primarily from the assumption that
these anti– Japanese Koreans will not discriminate between sympathetic
Japanese like Usui himself and the rest of the colonizers at whose hands
Koreans su}er. Usui can communicate with the colonized only through
translation, and his limitations in communication with Koreans intensi-
fies his nervousness. If he encounters hostility from the colonized, his
fate will rest on his translator, whose reliability is in question not because
of his Japanese abilities but because of his lack of commitment to Usui’s
cause. Usui is also distressed by the backwardness of the region so far
from the civilized urban center he came from. Even though he is decorous
enough not to say so in front of Koreans, he refers to them as “natives”
(dojin), a pejorative revealing his sense of superiority over the supposed
primitiveness of the indigenous people.

Getting o} the train that brought him to this dismal place isolated
from civilization, Usui looks around nervously. When he learns that the
train station manager is Japanese, he asks him how long it would take to
reach his destination on foot, speaking as clearly as he can to make sure
the manager will know from his speech that he is Japanese, too. Usui does
not need to ask the question because he knows the answer. He just wants
to speak with a Japanese person, sentimentally thinking that it will be his
last chance to talk to a fellow countryman until he returns. Concerned
about Usui’s safety, the manager recommends that he stay the night and
set out the next morning. Although grateful for the manger’s concern,
Usui decides to continue his trip at once, following the suggestion of his
translator, who urges him to depart as soon as possible so that they can
arrive at their destination before night falls. The Japanese station man-

6 / Introduction

ager stares ominously at the translator dressed in Korean clothes, which
unmistakably marks him as a Korean, but the translator ignores him. As
Usui leaves the train station, the lone post of modern civilization in the
middle of an untamed land, his anxiety mounts.

Usui’s encounter with a local is discouraging enough. The Korean
boatman refuses to take Usui across a river because he is Japanese. The
translator’s attempt at persuasion fails as Usui’s goodwill fails to trans-
late. Usui’s request to be ferried across is linguistically too simple to be
untranslatable and thus the failure of translation does not derive from
incommensurability between Korean and Japanese. Although the river
seems to symbolize linguistic, cultural, and emotional barriers between
the colonizer and the colonized, Usui’s helplessness in the face of the
boatman’s refusal hints at the vulnerability of the speaker with respect
to the addressee’s rejection and the misunderstanding to which the self
might be subject when engaging in conversation with the other with
whom the self shares no common ground. Does not such an occasion
of conversation between ultimately heterogeneous interlocutors call
for translation in its true sense, the translation necessitated by failure
of communication? Does not such genuine translation require the self ’s
commitment to conversation with the other despite the risk of being
ignored and misunderstood? Certainly, leaving his linguistic, cultural,
and emotional comfort zone, Usui is willing even to risk being harmed by
the colonized to have a talk with the insurgents. Refusing to give up, Usui
swims across the river. Impressed by Usui’s perseverance, the boatman
promises that he will take him back across the river when he returns.

Usui’s perseverance pays o}. To his surprise, the old man speaks Japa-
nese, although his Japanese is tainted with the peculiar Korean accent
and mispronunciations of Japanese words. Usui’s anxiety over the hos-
tility he expected from the old man subsides as he learns that not only
can the old man speak Japanese but also he receives his Japanese guest
with both generosity and dignity. Even when the old man is showing the
blood-stained clothes his daughter was wearing when she was killed, he
graciously struggles to hold his emotion in check so as not to upset his
Japanese guest too much. The old Korean and the young Japanese warm
to each other. Usui’s goodwill is finally transmitted to the old man and it
is thus translated. But who translates it? Is there any genuine translation
involved in the interactions between the old man and Usui? The Korean
host is courteous enough not to be too critical, and the Japanese guest is
willing to be critical enough of Japanese colonial rule. The reader might
momentarily forget that Usui was contemptuous of the backwardness

Introduction / 7

of Koreans in the region. The Korean and the Japanese understand each
other and they agree with each other. Neither miscommunication nor any
points of contention lie between them. They are in sync. No translation
is called for. Finding his services are not required, the translator retreats
into silence. Thus, the story is also about the erasure of translation.

As the story proceeds, it takes an unexpected turn. Having been well
treated with good food and drink, Usui retires to sleep in a room pro-
vided by the old man. Awakened in the middle of the night by a strange
sound, he sees a dark shadow entering and checking his possessions. The
shadow soon leaves, but Usui recognizes it as the old man. Usui starts
to suspect that the old man’s hospitality is a ruse to lure him into a trap.
He curses himself for naively believing that he can build solidarity with
Koreans by transcending di}erences in language, culture, and ethnicity.
His suspicion grows into paranoia and he concludes that, from the begin-
ning, his friend Hong has colluded with the old man to harm him. In the
end, it turns out that the old man is probably rummaging through Usui’s
possessions to find out if Usui is a spy from the Japanese police. The old
man is a known anti– Japanese activist and must be alert to any possible
police intrusion. Usui knew about the old man’s anti– Japanism from the
beginning, and that is exactly why he wanted to talk to him. Thus, Usui’s
commitment to a genuine encounter with the insurgent turns out to be
much more fragile than it first appeared.

When these mutual suspicions and misunderstandings arise, the
translator is clueless and helpless. He fails to interpret the old man’s real
intentions behind his suspicious actions or to mediate between the colo-
nizer and the colonized. He is as much scared and suspicious of the old
man as Usui is. He is a failure at his task as a translator, mistrusted by
the station manager in the beginning, found ine}ective in persuading the
boatman, and unnecessary for mediating between Usui and the old man.
Moreover, he fails to resolve misunderstandings between the two when
they need his intervention most. It is Usui himself who later realizes that
he misunderstood the old man’s stealthy visit while the translator is still
debating whether to escape from the old man’s house. Thus, the story
pivots on the failure of translator and translation.

What does the ultimate failure of translation in the story reveal about
the colonizer’s anxiety over translation? Why is the translator mistrusted
and translation obviated in the story? Why is translation erased at the
moment when the insurgent anti– Japanese Korean and the sympathetic
colonizer Usui open their hearts to each other? As argued below, I sus-
pect that the anxiety of colonizers over translation relates to the idea of

8 / Introduction

translation as a supplementary mediation between the addresser and
addressee. In the ideal situation of transparent communication, the
addresser and the addressee speak the same language. The presence of
a translator hints at the impossibility of transparent communication and
exposes the uncertainty of the univocal signification of the addressor’s
authorial voice. To execute colonial power over the mundane lives of
the colonized, the colonizer has to rely on language to convey thoughts,
intentions, and orders to the colonized. However, most of the colonized
cannot understand the colonizer’s language. Thus, translation is called
for at the service of colonial rule. Nevertheless, the need for translation
reminds the colonizer of his vulnerable dependence on translation for
communication with the colonized. As discussed below in more detail,
translation highlights the materiality of language because it centers on
di}erences between languages. That materiality frustrates the trans-
parent signification of the colonizer’s authorial voice, the voice of the
authoritarian regime of colonial rule. In short, in the mindset of the colo-
nizer, the need for translation suggests that despite the intricate network
of military and administrative apparatuses at his service, his authorial
voice is still vulnerable to the misunderstandings and refusals of under-
standing by the colonized in the course of signification and translation.
In that sense, the erasure of translation in the story “Recalcitrant Korean”
resonates with the colonizer’s desire to reclaim his absolute authority
over transparent communication and reconfirm his authorial voice. The
colonizer’s desire dictates that his voice should be heard and understood
without adulteration. From that perspective, translation inevitably fails
because it cannot help but adulterate the authorial voice in the process of
translation.

The story brilliantly shows that even a sympathetic Japanese like
Usui is still entrapped in such authorial and authoritarian subjectivity
of the colonizer. Usui does not desire to encounter the other who refuses
to understand his good will. In other words, Usui fears translation as
an occasion in which the self faces the other, who might challenge the
univocal signification of the self ’s authorial voice. Thus, the translator is
mistrusted, and translation obviated. The thankless job of a translator is
taken up by a nameless Korean in the story.8

In principle, a colonial translator need not be from the colonized. A
colonizer can be a translator if he or she is proficient enough in the lan-
guage of the colonized. As a matter of fact, as the first chapter of this
book shows, the translation of Korean historical and literary classics
into Japanese by Japanese translators simultaneously shaped and con-

Introduction / 9

firmed the ways in which Koreans and Korean culture were represented.
Nevertheless, there are virtually no depictions of Japanese figures who
translate between Japanese and Korean in colonial literature.

The lack of bilingual Japanese figures in colonial literary texts reflects
a colonial reality in which Japanese was privileged not only by the
colonizers but increasingly also by the colonized themselves, a point I
will discuss further in Chapter 5. Whereas, as seen in the case of Hosoi
Hajime, the main focus of Chapter 1, quite a few Japanese Korea experts
engaged in textual translation (pŏnyŏk in Korean/hon’yaku in Japanese),
it was Koreans who were relegated as colonial functionaries/translators
to the task of verbal translation (t’ongyŏk/ tsūyaku) for mundane matters.
The dearth of Japanese functionaries/translators is also inferred from
the following quote from a column published in the newspaper for the
Japanese colonial police in Korea.9 The column’s author laments the lack
of enthusiasm among Japanese colonial ocials to learn Korean.

Officials are not interested in Korean language study, and accord-
ingly they cannot do their work without translators as some argue
that there is no need for learning Korean because Korean children
have been taught Japanese at elementary school for the last twenty
years. This is a precondition for taking the first wrong step in ruling
Korea.10

Although indicating that there were few Japanese functionaries/transla-
tors in colonial Korea, the quote also begs further questions about trans-
lation and, its implication in and resistance to colonial domination. The
author of the column does not suggest that Japanese colonial bureaucrats
should learn Korean to replace Korean translators. Instead, he urges that
Japanese colonial bureaucrats should do their work without translators.
What does this dismissal of translators tell us about? Why does the
author not see that the realization of his suggestion for Korean language
study will eradicate neither translation nor translators but only turn
Japanese colonial bureaucrats themselves into translators, who translate
between Japanese and Korean? Does this rejection of translation and
translators not echo the uneasiness of the colonizers about translation
as revealed in the literary texts examined above? From where does this
desire to eradicate translation come?

A clue to a rather prosaic answer can be gleaned from the above dis-
cussion on Nakajima’s story “Landscape with Policeman: A Sketch of
1923.” Korean functionaries/translators are suspected of either sabotag-
ing or muddling communication between the colonizers and the colo-

10 / Introduction

nized. Unlike the Korean functionary/translator, the bilingual Japanese
bureaucrat does not mediate between the colonizers and the colonized.
He himself is a colonizer. Above all, is it not obvious that he represents
no one other than his own authorial voice? Such reasoning, however, does
not exhaust colonial translation, which flows in both directions between
the languages of the colonizer and the colonized. Not only would the
bilingual Japanese bureaucrat still have to translate for his fellow colo-
nizers from Japanese to Korean but, more important, he would also have
to render Korean-language texts both textual and verbal into Japanese.

It is necessary to push the discussion further to take it as a point of
departure for rigorously examining translation and its relationship to
colonial domination. The conventional understanding of translation,
which Roman Jakobson designated as translation proper, posits that
translation is above all a linguistic practice of rendering an authorial voice
ex pressed in one language into another, whether the voice is inscribed in
a written text or enunciated verbally by a speaker. What makes transla-
tion distinct from other linguistic practices is the interval between the
language in which the authorial voice is originally expressed and the
language to which it is transferred. In essence, then, there is no di}er-
ence between textual translation (pŏnyŏk/honyaku) and verbal transla-
tion (tongyŏk/tsūyaku). In the course of translation, the authorial voice
is fixed onto a meaning in a di}erent language, which has its own sets of
semantic and syntactic patterns and rhetorical modes. Without the dif-
ference between languages translation intends to transcend, translation
is not distinguishable from interpretation or rewording, which Jakobson
called intralingual translation because of its anity to translation.11

The cognate relationship between translation and interpretation turns
attention to another interval, which inheres not only in translation but
also in any act of reading and listening, the interval between the autho-
rial voice and its signification. The authorial voice cannot present itself
instantly and transparently because it materializes only through lan-
guage and because that very materiality compromises the spirit of the
voice. In other words, to be addressed to the other, the authorial voice
needs to first be transformed into a series of sounds or letters. Even in the
case of monologue, the voice cannot materialize outside of language. Put
di}erently, the voice comes only as a sign that supposedly corresponds to
its meaning. However, as long as the voice can be expressed only as a sign,
it does not remain univocally tied to a fixed meaning. As Jacques Derrida
elucidated, signs are invested with meanings that can be expressed only
by other signs.12 If meanings are generated through the relationship

Introduction / 11

between signs and the authorial voice comes only as a sign to be signi-
fied, then there is always slippage between the authorial voice and its
signification. Unlike in the case of interpretation or rewording within one
language, the authorial voice is initially expressed in one language and
its signification is eventually enacted in another in the course of transla-
tion. Because of di}erences between languages, the interval between the
authorial voice and its signification is much more pronounced in the case
of translation than that of interpretation or rewording.

The authorial voice exceeds the limits of what Derrida called voice,
which is supposed to be the pure medium of interior monologue immedi-
ately and transparently present in the consciousness of the subject.13 As
Derrida demonstrated in his critical interpretation of Edmund Husserl,
desire for the presence of transparent and immediate meanings figures in
the voice, the idea of the pure medium of interior monologue. Although
the authorial voice is already contaminated by references to the exter-
nal world, the solipsistic voice is silent, prior to utterance, and insulated
within the solipsistic interiority of the subject. Only in the instance of
solitary speech is a perfect match between a signifier and a signified pos-
sible. Such an absolutely clear signification within the subject’s interior-
ity, however, communicates nothing to the other because an immediate
and transparent meaning present to the subject’s consciousness is not
transmissible to the other, who is external to the interior sel˜ood of the
subject. In other words, any attempt to engage with the other accompa-
nies the adulteration of the subject’s solipsistic voice.

With the above exposition of translation in mind, let us return to the
Japanese colonial police newspaper column in which the author does not
acknowledge that what he recommends Japanese colonial bureaucrats do
is translation. As suggested above, despite the desire for the erasure of
translation manifested in the column, the Japanese bilingual bureaucrat
could not break free from the position of a translator. His work would
inevitably entail rendering Korean texts, both textual and verbal, into
Japanese. In such a case, he would obviously be engaging in translation
in its common sense meaning. Then, what about the other way around
in linguistic transactions? Is he translating when speaking or writing to
the colonized in Korean? The question is deceptively simple. Is it not too
obvious that he is speaking rather than translating when enunciating
in Korean? Put di}erently, unlike in the case of translation in the usual
sense, both the authorial voice and its signification coincide in the same
person when the Japanese colonial bureaucrat is speaking or writing in
Korean. Thus, it appears that the answer to the question should be nega-

12 / Introduction

tive: The Japanese bureaucrat’s linguistic practice of speaking or writing
in Korean fails to qualify as translation.

The seemingly simple question merits further examination, however,
because it pertains to understanding the desire for the erasure of transla-
tion revealed in colonial discourse. In a situation in which a Japanese
writer fluent in Korean is rephrasing his own Japanese-language work in
Korean, the consciousness of the subject splits into the speaker (or writer)
and the interpreter even though it is the same subject who has written
the work in Japanese and is rephrasing it in Korean. To be more exact,
the consciousness of the subject is punctuated with the split into one who
wrote the original work and the other who is interpreting it, and the two
are distanced or spaced in the Derridean sense by time. This split is all
the more pronounced because of the presence of the text, the work, which
is being rendered in a di}erent language.

Does this split of the subject not inhere in the Japanese bureaucrat’s
speech in Korean? As discussed above, the work in which the authorial
voice of the past is inscribed marks the interval between the speak-
ing and translating subjects within the same person. Because there is
no visible work of the authorial voice from the past in the case of the
Japanese bureaucrat speaking Korean, the split of the subject is likely to
go unnoticed.

To make the point more concretely, suppose that the interval between
the authorial voice inscribed in the work and its interpretation enacted
in translation is progressively narrowing and converging to such a point
that the voice is almost simultaneously signified in a foreign language
as soon as it is presented to the subject’s consciousness. No matter how
miniscule this interval may be, because it implies the split of the subject,
it cannot be eradicated completely because the authorial voice material-
izes only as a sign and an interval necessarily remains between the voice
and its signification even when the subject is speaking to himself. The
split of the subject inheres in any enunciation, whether it is speaking or
translating. The materiality of language constantly frustrates its imme-
diate and transparent signification. Because the materiality of language
is spotlighted by di}erences between two languages in the course of
translation, the act of translation accentuates such a split of the subject,
which often goes unnoticed in monolingual practices.

Translation is a paramount instance in which the subject encounters
the other from within as well as without. As examined above, demand
for translation presupposes an other who does not share any common
ground with the self for understanding. At the same time, translation

Introduction / 13

highlights the split of the subject, which hardly comes to light when
the self speaks its native tongue, supposedly under its total command.
Does the desire to erase translation glimpsed from colonial discourse not
amount to a yearning for transparent communication and fear of fac-
ing the split of the subject, then? Because the presence of the translator
brings to attention the impossibility of the self ’s control over the other in
conversation, and translation calls the putative unity of the subject into
question, translation can be said to undermine the epistemological and
ontological foundation of an individual colonizer’s subjectivity, which is
often uncritically extended to the national subjectivity of colonizers.

As discussed earlier, however, the collusion between colonialism and
translation depicted in the Korean and Japanese literary texts suggests that
translation as conventionally understood can also reconfirm the ethnic and
linguistic identity of the enunciating subject by reifying the boundaries
of the languages between which translation is taking place. The Japanese
poet, critic, and early Tolstoy translator Kitahara Hakushū’s preface to
the Korean translator Kim Soun’s 1929 Japanese-language anthology of
Korean folk songs Chōsen Minyoshū (Collection of Korean Folk Songs)
illustrates the ways in which the concept of translation works simultane-
ously to denaturalize and reconfirm the unified subjectivity of the indi-
vidual as well as national self.14 In the earlier part of the preface, Kitahara
Hakushū in e}ect deconstructs the unified subjectivity of the Japanese by
historicizing its emergence. However, his deconstructive move dissipates
into oblivion as his discussion on translation proceeds with an e}ort to
recover the unity of the Japanese national subjectivity in the end.

As discussed further in Chapter 4, during the colonial period, Kim
actively introduced Korean literature and culture to Japan through trans-
lation. The success of his Korean folk song anthology earned him promi-
nence as the most authoritative Japanese-language translator of Korean
literature and enabled him to go on to translate and publish modern
Korean poetry. This anthology is still in print 80 years after its initial
publication.

Kitahara Hakushū begins his preface with a memory of Korea when he
was a child in his hometown of Yanagawa, which is in Fukuoka prefecture
on the island of Kyūshū, the part of Japan closest to Korea. Children in
his hometown used to call Korea “Kara,” a name that conjures up a sense
of intimacy and nostalgia (shitashiku natsukashimareta) for him. From
time immemorial, even in the era when Japan was “closed,” the region
had close trade and cultural relations with Korea. Village fishermen often
sailed to the shores of the Korean peninsula to fish and Korea appeared

14 / Introduction

often in the village elders’ stories. Some of the fishermen fathered mixed-
blood children with Korean women and their wives burned with jeal-
ousy. Kitahara Hakushū’s memory of the virility of the men from his
village, which could function as a metaphor for Japan’s colonial expan-
sion, ironically leads him to realize that the culture of his home region
has descended from miscegenation between the cultures of ancient Japan,
Korea, China, the South Pacific islands, and the Netherlands, which had a
trading base in nearby Nagasaki during the Tokugawa period.

Kitahara Hakushū’s recognition of the cultural miscegenation of his
home re gion makes him di}erentiate the collective identity of his people,
whom he addresses as the first person plural “we,” from the national subjec-
tivity of Japan. He goes on to point out that even though both the Tōhoku
region of northern Honshū and his home region supposedly belong to the
same country, Japan, the Tōhoku region was more alien than Korea to
people in his home region who were brought up with their regional folk-
tales and language deriving from the mixture of such di}erent foreign
cultures. Hakushū historicizes the process of the unification of Japanese
culture by observing that Japanese folk songs and children’s songs tran-
scending regional limits gradually emerged only after the implementa-
tion of the “alternate attendance” policy of the Edo period and the ensuing
expansion of trade between distant regions during the Tokugawa period.15

What catches our attention in Hakushū’s discussion is the double-
edged function of “translation” in his discussion, simultaneously denatu-
ralizing and reconfirming the putative unity of Japan. Hakushū percep-
tively argues that Japanese folk songs and children’s songs are actually
translations of regional songs. Because the folk songs would not have
been understandable to people from other regions if people had continued
singing them only in their regional dialects, the songs were translated
into standard Japanese. From this observation, Hakushū inferred that the
putative unity of Japanese culture was constructed not least through the
process of translation of regional di}erences as variations of one uniform
people and culture. Although Hakushū did not go into detail about how
the unified subjectivity of the Japanese behind this translation process
might arise, the Japanese national subjectivity and the idea of homoge-
neous national culture emerged, as many Japan historians have pointed
out, only after the new Meiji government had implemented educational,
economical, and political institutions to integrate various social and local
segments into the unified consciousness of the Japanese in the process of
building a modern nation state in Japan in the late 19th century.16

In his Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, the Japanese critic

Introduction / 15

Karatani Kōjin insightfully points out that Japanese writers’ translation
and internalization of Western literary works made a decisive impact on
the formation of modern Japanese literature. His examples are Futabatei
Shimei’s translations of Ivan Turgenev and Mori Ogai’s translations of a
variety of European literary works.17 In contrast to such “external transla-
tion” from Western culture and literature, Hakushū is calling attention
to the importance of “internal translation” from various localities within
Japan in the construction of modern Japanese culture. Needless to say, it
became feasible to make a clear distinction between “external” and “inter-
nal” only after translation drew boundaries between the unified space
designated as Japanese culture and others outside.

By calling attention to the aspect of translation that violently renders
regional di}erences as mere variations of one uniform culture, Hakushū
inspires the reader to glimpse traces of regional di}erences that had been
suppressed through translation in the process of constructing a homo-
geneous national culture. However, Hakushū’s discussion suddenly
re verses course and proceeds with his reconfirmation of the unified
national subjectivity of the Japanese. In this case, too, it is the notion of
translation that enables him to postulate the unity of Japanese subjectiv-
ity. Even though the culture of Hakushū’s home region became integrated
into the unified Japanese culture only through the process of transla-
tion, Hakushū argues that, because people in his home region are also
Japanese, it was not impossible for them to internalize the Japanese spirit
and tradition, which seeped into written language as well as lyrics of the
songs from other regions. It seems as if he believes the unified Japanese
subjectivity preceded the construction of homogeneous Japanese national
culture through translation. Hakushū’s reasoning is, of course, circular
because it suggests that the preexisting homogeneity of the Japanese had
laid down the foundation on which the homogeneous Japanese subjectiv-
ity was built through the construction of homogeneous national culture.

In Hakushū’s ensuing discussion, however, the idea of a unified Japa-
nese culture registers most clearly in contrast to Korean culture. Hakushū
sees Kim’s translation of Korean folk songs into Japanese as a commend-
able feat bridging a much wider gap in language and national character
than the translation of regional folk songs into standard Japanese and
their dissemination to other regions of Japan. Here, when Hakushū refers
to a linguistic practice transcending a gulf between Korea and Japan,
translation is ironically understood to reify boundaries between Japanese
and Korean cultures and languages. In contrast to the case of translating
regional cultures within Japan into standard Japanese where the practice

16 / Introduction

of translation suppresses di}erence, the act of translating Korean folk
songs into Japanese plays up the di}erence between two nations. Accord-
ing to Hakushū, the lyrics of the Korean folk songs tend to be more acer-
bic, cynical, and melancholy because they developed from “the particular
domestic situation of Korea.” The implication is that because the Korean
people were misruled by an incompetent and despotic ruling class, they
tended to express anger, cynicism, and sorrow in their folk songs. In
Hakushū’s view, Chinese influence was also so strong over the formality
and vocabulary of Korean folk songs that it had a negative e}ect on them.

Despite his emphasis on the di}erence between Japanese and Korean
folk songs that ensures the homogeneity of Japanese culture in contrast
to Korean culture, Hakushū’s profuse praise of Kim’s translation betrays
his uneasiness toward the lack of di}erence he expected to find in the
Japanese translations of Korean folk songs. In Hakushū’s eyes, Kim’s ex –
pert translation made Korean folk songs too “Japanese.” Kim’s mastery
of Japanese poetic sensitivity and diction was to such a degree that his
translations evoke uncanny feelings of repulsion. Here again can be seen
Hakushū’s forced maneuver at reconfirming the homogeneity of the
language and culture enclosed within Japan. As noted above, Hakushū
asserted in the beginning of his preface that people in his home region
in Kyūshū felt closer to Korea than to such distant regions within Japan
as Tōhoku. As cultures of di}erent regions within Japan were integrated
into Japanese national culture through translation, Korean culture grew
alien even to people like Hakushū, who had previously felt close to Korea.
Hakushū, however, seems to have entirely forgotten the supposed inti-
macy with Korea of which he reminisced. Through Kim’s skillful trans-
lation, Korean folk songs, part of now defamiliarized Korean culture,
return as something uncannily similar to Japanese folk songs and eerily
familiar to Hakushū.

As Hakushū himself recognizes earlier in the preface, the defamil-
iarization of Korean culture to people in Hakushū’s home region at least
came as much from the homogenization of culture in Japan since the
Tokugawa period and especially since the Meiji Restoration as from the
deteriorating domestic situation in Korea or from Chinese influence over
Korean culture. When Hakushū treats Japanese culture as a unified body
of social practices particular to Japan and distinct from those in Korea,
his perspective has already shifted from the one rooted in his regional
identity to one based in the Japanese national subjectivity. As can be
seen in his anxiety over the lack of expected di}erence in Kim’s Japanese
translations of Korean folk songs, the unified body of Japanese culture

Introduction / 17

and the Japanese national subjectivity can be posited only in contrast to
Japan’s other, whether it is the West or its colonies like Korea. Instead of
critically contemplating his anxiety, Hakushū holds up Kim’s mastery
of Japanese vocabulary and poetic diction to reprimand contemporary
Japanese poets for their indi}erence to Japanese literary tradition as they
rush to imitate the Western poetic style. Thus, Hakushū ends up recon-
firming the homogeneity of Japanese culture and language supposedly
inscribed in Japanese literary tradition.

What eventually undermines Hakushū’s initial insight into the frag-
mented nature of national subjectivity is the fact that, for him, the dif-
ference of the other the self encounters in translation is not absolute.
As seen above, translation for Hakushū is the site where di}erence is
either suppressed, as in the case of the regional folk songs translated into
standard Japanese, or stressed, as in the case of the Korean folk songs
translated into Japanese. The di}erence Hakushū recognized in both
cases is appropriated to posit the self-sameness of the Japanese and that
of Koreans.

As the Korean poet Kim Suyŏng, who is the focus of Chapter 5, shows,
translation can also be a site at which the self-sameness of national sub-
jectivity is brought into question because an act of translation continu-
ously pushes the translator to doubt whether he or she can master the
mother tongue, let alone the foreign target language, an anxiety over
the very underpinnings of a sense of belonging to linguistic, national,
and cultural communities. In short, translation can be an occasion in
which the self encounters the otherness of its own mother tongue. The
self ’s encounter with the otherness of its native language can constitute
a first step toward an ethically and politically arduous position for criti-
cal reflection on the self ’s relationship with its own language, culture,
ethnicity, and country. As I argue to varying degrees throughout this
book, particularly in Chapters 2 and 5, such a self-reflective position is
ethical and political because it can eventually open up an alternative way
of associating with others who are presently excluded from communities
defined by their sameness.