¹ Translator's note: Throughout this translation we will use the romanized chōsenjin and Chōsen whenever these terms appear, either written in kanji or katakana in Choi's essay. This method of translation has been chosen both to demonstrate, and accord with, the argument developed by Choi in the course of the essay, which calls attention to the historical specificity of the word Chōsen, as used by the Japanese colonial regime (1910–1945) to refer to the entirety of its colony on the Korean Peninsula, inclusive of areas partitioned into North and South at the end of the Korean War in 1953. As Choi points out later in this essay, residents of the Korean peninsula who were subject to forced mobilization as porters for the Japanese Imperial Army or laborers for mining, dam building, and other work in Japan, were called chōsenjin by the Japanese, although they themselves most probably would have continued to refer to themselves by the Korean- language term joseon saram. Throughout the postwar period, the terms chōsenjin and Chōsen have continued to be used in Japan. For example, although the political entity called Chōsen is now defunct, it is listed as a “nationality” (chōsenseki) on the Alien Registration Cards of those who remain stateless, i.e., those who did not declare South Korean, or any other, citizenship after the conclusion of the South Korea-Japan Basic Relations Treaty in 1965. While the terms Chōsen and chōsenjin both continue to carry some discriminatory overtones, in recent years both have been reclaimed by activists and progressive scholars. In the pages that follow, Choi argues that those “Koreans” who lived and died under Japanese colonialism should be referred to by the term chōsenjin, rather than the sanitized kankokujin (referring only to citizens of today's Republic of South Korea) or even zainichi kankoku/chōsenjin that some have chosen as a more politically acceptable term today. Thus the memory of the suffering of chōsenjin under Japanese colonialism will not be erased. At the same time, as we will see later, Choi envisions that a reclaimed chōsenjin could be used as an umbrella term to bring together those in Japan who are now fragmented by loyalties to either South Korea (Kankoku) or North Korea (still often referred to in Japanese as Chōsen).

² Choi, like Lee Chonghwa in her introductory taidan with Takahashi Yūji, makes the trope of “faraway death” central to the rhetoric of this essay. Like Lee, he uses the archaic term kakushi (客死), literally, “to die while traveling” or “to die while a guest,” whose ideographs do not rely on a distinction between “foreign” and “native.” The term also evokes the ethical question of how to deal with anonymous or unmourned deaths.

³ Kim Dong- choon, Chōsen sensō: Hinan, senryō, gyakusatsu [A social history of the Korean War: Displacement, occupation, massacre], trans. into Japanese by Kim Mihye, Choi Deokhyo, Cho Kyong- hee, and Chong Yong- hwan (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2008), 236.

⁴ Translator's note: The South Korean government of Roh Mo-h yun established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2003 to investigate human rights abuses and civilian massacres that occurred in Korea from the colonial period through the overthrow of the military dictatorship by the minjung movement in 2003. The Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization under Japanese Imperialism started its visits to former worksites throughout Japan in April 2005, against the background of state- level negotiations over the repatriation of the remains of conscripts known to be retained in Japan. With much of its work uncompleted, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and other groups linked to it were disbanded by the Lee Myung- bak administration when the commission's first mandate expired in 2010.

⁵ “Undoing/Resolving Han” is a translation of the subtitle: 恨を解く、恨解き. The concept conveyed by the character tH in this section's subtitle can mean “grudge” or “resentment” in Japanese, while in Korean it can also refer to “bonding based on suffering and hardship.” Furigana beside the second part of the title (恨解き) give it the gloss ハンプ リ to evoke “hanpuri,” the Korean pronunciation for “loosening the bonds of suffering.”

⁶ This essay, “ ‘Han kokka no kyōku’ to shite no Okinawa,” was included in the book Han kokka no kyōku [The unpropitious space of antistatism] (Shakai Hyōronsha, 1971). Arakawa was editor of the special edition on the antireversion debate compiled by the quarterly magazine Shin Okinawa Bungaku [New Okinawa literature] 18 (December 1970).

⁷ Arakawa, “ ‘Han kokka no kyōku’ to shite no Okinawa,” 304.

⁸ Arakawa Akira, Shinpan: Hankokka no kyōku: Okinawa, jiritsu e no shiten [New edition: The unpropitious space of antistatism—a perspective on Okinawa and independence] (Tokyo: Shakai Hyōronsha, 1996), 136-137.

⁹ Nakazato Isao, Okinawa: Imeeji no ejji [Okinawa: The edge of the image] (Tokyo: Miraisha, 2007), 244.

¹⁰ Arakawa, Shinpan: Hankokka no kyōku: Okinawa, jiritsu e no shiten.

¹¹ The words of Lu Xun are from “My Old Home,” in Selected Stories of Lu Xun, trans. Yang Hsien- ji and Gladys Yang (Beijing, 1972), 63-64.

¹² For a discussion of the ways in which Japanese notions of Okinawa can be seen in the films about Okinawa produced by director Nakae Yūji, see Ōmine Sawa's essay “Uragaesu koto, omotegaesu koto: 1999 nen ikō no Okinawa no hyōshō” [Inside out and outside in: Representations of Okinawa after 1999], in Okinawa Eigaron [Okinawan cinema], ed. Yomota Inuhiko and Ōmine Sawa (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2008), and the transcription, in the same collection, of the panel discussion on this topic convened at the symposium Okinawa kara sekai o miru (Seeing the world from Okinawa), held at Meiji Gakuin University in June 2007.

¹³ Arakawa Akira, “Kindai Okinawa to Chōsen” [Modern Okinawa and Chōsen] published in Kikan Sanzenri [Sanzenri Quarterly] (Winter 1978): 165.

¹⁴ Okamoto Keitoku, “Gūkan, 42” [Random thoughts, 42], Keeshi Kaze 4, no. 7 (June 2005), in Okamoto Keitoku, “Okinawa” ni ikiru shisō—Okamoto Keitoku hihyōshū [A philosophy of living in Okinawa: Critical writings by Okamoto Keitoku] (Tokyo: Miraisha, 2007), 248.

¹⁵ The Korean word halaboji (grandfather) is a respectful way of addressing older men.

¹⁶ The word “multiplicity” (tasū) was my stage name in the play Hengen kasabutajō (Shape-shifting scabrous castle) performed by the troupe Yasen no Tsuki Haibiitsu in Tokyo and Beijing in 2007, and is a poetic expression that the play passed on to me. It is a word connected in my mind to the playwright and actor Sakurai Daizō, as well as to the troupe that performed the play. And it is without doubt a word I myself came to embody as an actor in that troupe. Whenever I weave that word into my critical writing, I think of it as a kind of translation of the play and also an expression of my esteem for it.

¹⁷ “I am not a minority, but multiplicity.” This is something I determined for myself when I participated as a panelist in the symposium on antireversion theory, titled Maakarawajiiga?! Kitarubeki jiko ketteiken no tame ni (Where will the anger come from? Towards a right of self-determination to come) held at the Sakima Art Museum in Okinawa on May 18, 2008.

¹⁸ Arakawa Akira, “Hanfukkiron to dōka hihan—shokuminchika no seishin kakumei toshite ikkikan” [Antireversion debate and the critique of assimilation—on a spiritual revolution under colonialism], Zenya 9 (Fall 2006), 300.

¹⁹ Kim Shi-jong, “ ‘Zainichi’ no hazama de” [In the crevices of “zainichi”], in Heibonsha raiburari (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001), 457. Translator's note: In our reading, when Kim Shi-jong refers to the way the terms chōsenjin and zainichi have become almost interchangeable, he does so as a poet who is himself called zainichi. Although he has lived in Japan for over sixty years, Kim Shi-jong was born on Jeju Island and holds South Korean citizenship. He searches for a way to give both the terms zainichi and chōsenjin new meanings which might overcome the divisions arising out of the different terms and categories by which the fragmented zainichi community is now known. Moreover, Choi here uses the ideograph 朝鮮人 for chōsenjin by contrast to the prior katakana spelling of チョウセンジン (also read chōsenjin) to suggest that the discriminatory nuances that still cluster like shadows around the word might be replaced by a literal reading of it as “people of Chōsen,” in the same way that an American in Japanese is Amerikajin or a Canadian Kanadajin.

²⁰ The Korean peninsula was unified under the Joseon Dynasty from 1392 until the time of its annexation by Japan in 1910.

²¹ Sun Ge, “ ‘Sōgō shakai’ chūgoku ni mukiau tame ni” [Toward encountering China as a “synthetic society”], Gendai shisō 30, no. 9 (2008): 54-58.

²² Translators' note: When Choi places “peoples as a whole” in apposition to the plural of “persons” (人々), he uses the character 人民 to clarify that he does not mean “nation” or “people” in the nationalistic sense.