‘재일조선인 1세 여성’ 라이프 스토리와 자기/민족지적 욕망 － 다큐멘터리 영화 <해녀 량상>과 <하루코>를 중심으로 －

Abstract

This paper analyzes the documentary films Haruko and A Diver Ms. Ryang through the term “auto/ethnography”. Both films, released in Japan in 2004, utilize the images of “the first-generation Korean woman in Japan” recorded by “the second-generation man” in the 1950s and 1960s retrospectively. In both films, ethnography (in the sense of Japanese producer’s description about Koreans in Japan) and autoethnography (in the sense of describing Koreans’ own culture) do not exist independently or individually, and the perspective of the describer is also not clearly distinguished. This phenomenon is caused by the fact that both films constitute a hierarchical narrative with various ethnographic descriptions in common. In this paper, I appropriate that kind of narrative as “auto/ethnography”, paying attention to relations between various textual activities. The subjective origins of ethnography are revealed by autoethnography in which people who were formerly the subjects of ethnography undertake to describe themselves ethnographically in the postcolonial situation. The black-and-white images of both films taken by a cameraman from the League of Artists of Koreans in Japan (Munyedong) from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, on the one hand, are tied to the context of the collective practice of visual culture of the league. On the other hand, however, they are an attempt to separate themselves from that context. In this paper, I trace the process in which the facial images of two female characters, highlighted in sequences of the “return to North Korea” (Kuiguk or Puksong) of the films, are (de)semantized, in order to illustrate how these images appropriate the subjective origins of ethnography and how they are re-appropriated in the perspective of contemporary Japanese society. Next, in order to examine the ways in which the “past” and the “present” are structured in A Diver Ms. Ryang and Haruko, I try to read them focusing on the “movement of translation” and the “auto/ethnographic desire”, respectively. Finally, by not overlooking their own desire for narration associated with their familiar sense in the voices of the female characters, regardless of narrative completeness or intention, we can see the potential of “counter narratives” that work in the blind spots of the chain of “auto/ethnography”, or of the “memorial project” that regards the “first-generation Korean (women) in Japan” as the subject of “self-anatomy” of the second generation or the “category” of Japanese society.