나카니시 이노스케의 「不逞鮮人」에 나타난 일본어의 위상

Abstract

Inosuke Nakanishi(1887～1958) was born in a countryside of Kyoto. Since his childhood, he had to support himself for his schooling. Sometime around 1910, he went to Korea to work as a reporter for the Pyeongyang Daily Newspaper. He wrote an article criticizing the cruelty imposed on the Korean miners working for the Fujitagumi Mining Company. He was accused of injuring the Mining Company's credit, and sentenced to serve four months in prison. Since about 1920 in Japan, there appeared proletarian literature based on socialist thought. Around that time, many Koreans whose farm land had been forfeited by Japanese government joined Japanese anti-government movements. On the other hand Japanese socialist movement leaders who were against Japanese imperialism helped Koreans for Korean independence movement. For this reason, there were a number of Japanese proletarian writers who used Korean situations as themes for their novels. Nakanishi was a representative of such writers. Nakanishi's work, Huteisenjin, appeared in the Magazine Kaizou, September 1922, presented an interesting point that it described the Korean characters in the story in Japanese language that was the language of colonial rulers. The anonymous main character was presented as a cosmopolitanist, and he had a Korean friend whose fiancée had been killed during the March First Independence Movement. The main character wanted to see her father and went to “K village in E county” with his interpreter. The village was located in Northwest of Korean peninsula and it was at that time a gathering place for “huteisenjin(disrespecting Koreans).” In concluding part, the main character thought, ‘Everything was due to the sins of their nation.’ This was actually the thought of the author. This novel, however, does not directly deal with the colonial rule itself, but only with the unstable psychological changes of the author himself. The author was more concerned with psychological questions such as respect for Koreans or prejudice about Korea, rather than with Japanese colonial rule over Korea. Of course, the author tried hard to transcend his psychological restlessness among the Korean language speakers. But it was not an easy job.