‘재일’의 심상지리와 사할린

Abstract

In South Korean society following the liberation, the (non)repatriate narrative on Koreans in sakhalin was made in the form of being combined de-colonizing and anticommunism(anti-Soviet Union), but failed to be positioned as an important element in national history. On the other hand, it was emerging as one of the narratives on the forced labor victims in the 1960s in Japan with fighting against the ‘repatriation’ narrative in Japanese people. Out of it, Lee Hoi-seong's work is a story of people who proceed with living as a Korean Japanese with postponing or abandoning repatriation, by having the memory in Sakhalin as the starting point of separation. Such Korean resident in Japan is a fruit of colonial history in the past. (Memory of) Sakhalin, which is repeated like the obsession in his work, is a pain of ‘now-here,’ not the past or nostalgia. Accordingly, as for him, Sakhalin is playing a role of prism, which looks at Japan where Korean Japanese people are living, and which sees homeland, at the same time. This writing had text mainly as 「Road Once Again(またふたたびの道)」(1969) and 『Traveler during hundred years(百年の旅人たち)』(1994) in Lee Hoe-seong's novels. It examined about the difference in memory of ‘Sakhalin’ that was contained in two works, and about which meaning those things have, respectively. Especially in 『Traveler during hundred years』, Sakhalin was revived as a place of ‘testimony’ and ‘confession.’ The itinerary of traversing(crossing) the Japanese Archipelago for 4 days was a method of overlapping the whole area of the Japanese Archipelago with the victim narratives of its experience and memory. Through the narratives on ‘Family abandoned,’ ‘Person left,’ and ‘Person of having become scapegoat’ in the divided homeland, it aroused a place called trans-national Sakhalin as well. The imagined network, which is led to Sakhalin-Japanese Archipelago-divided homeland in his memory, showed paradox that is associated with separation and discontinuity owing to the double and triple ‘overlapped’ separation. His memory of Sakhalin in this way made a distance from the historical narrative, which is described with a name of Japanese. And it is working as a method of making ‘counter-memory’ that isn't returned to Japan's narrative of national history. It is the same even in South Korea, of course.