마이너리티로의 변전과 그녀들의 한국전쟁－장혁주 소설에 나타난 ‘일본인 처(妻)’의 재현을 중심으로－

Abstract

The term “Japanese wife” refers to Japanese women who married men from areas called “outside” such as Chosun, Manchuria, and Taiwan before the defeat of the Japanese Empire. In the field of Korean representation, the existence of the “Japanese wife” was not well revealed during the colonial period, and even after liberation in 1945, it was only briefly revealed in the face of fluctuating relations between Korea and Japan. Considering the empty genealogy of Japanese wives, three Japanese novels(「Foreign wife」, 「Blue flowers in Busan Port」, 「Female spy in Busan」) published by Chang Hyuk-Ju, who lived in Japan during the Korean War, visited Korea as a war reporter and interviewed Japanese wives in person are quite remarkable. In order to accurately grasp the significance and limitations of these texts, this article proposed to consider the following three contexts together. First, it is necessary to contrast with the social and historical context of the real life of the “Japanese wives in Korea” who are very old but still alive. Second, it is indispensable to consider where Chang Hyuk-ju’s texts are placed in the genealogy of Japanese reprresentation. In this article, Chang Hyuk-ju’s text on Japanese wives was considered a kind of variation of repatriation narrative that was popular in Japan even during the Korean War. Third, I noted some “family similarity” that these “Japanese wife” novels share with Chang Hyuk-ju’s other writing on the Korean War, especially with famous narratives such as “Alas, Chosun!” and “Mugunghwa”. As a result of the analysis, Chang Hyuk-ju’s novel mainly dealt with the case of Japanese wives in Korea with middle-class or higher classes, and revealed that the anti-communist color was much less than the repatriation narratives popular in Japan at that time. Finally, through the desperate voices of Japanese wives who wanted to leave Chosuon, these three novels were also found to represent the postwar peace discourse of Japanese society that they would advocate neutrality without being involved in the Korean war. In the end, this article is an attempt to answer the question of what is the frame that can fully narrative the life experienced by Japanese wives. My conclusion is that the Japanese wives’ misfortunes have stemmed from their being one of the weakest links of the former imperial colonial group, a woman married to a Korean resident in Japan who was a second-class citizen throughout the colonial period and was fallen into a so-called “three-nation” people after the war.