Language is front and center in postwar Zainichi writings: texts penned by people of Korean descent residing in Japan. The Korean authors began to compose poetry and fiction in the Japanese language in a prewar colonial world in which they were indubitably Korean, so they either wrote in Korean or wrote in Japanese as a second language, highly conscious of using the language of the colonizer. It was only with the next generation that the controversy over the shishosetsu form took center stage in the discussion of Zainichi fiction, with a 1970 roundtable discussion by second-generation writer Ri Kaisei, first-generation writer and critic Kim Sok-pom, and the Japanese novelist Oe Kenzaburo, published in the journal Bungaku. Ri Kaisei rose to prominence in the era just following normalization of relations with the "Republic of Korea". By the time Yu Miri won the Akutagawa Prize in 1997 and became the most popular Zainichi writer of all time, the landscape had shifted significantly.