People Who Eat Darkness

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  * * *

  “In the taxi business, he was the most successful,” said an Osaka Korean who remembered Kim Kyo Hak. “In the pachinko business too. He was charming, sociable, talkative. He was rather fat, and none too tall. He always wore a jacket that was too big for him. He drove the most expensive cars. He began his career in the market.” The man who told me this was a respected public servant in his fifties, distinguished in his field, with a foreign education and a fine collection of classical music recordings. His father, like Joji Obara’s, had been a Korean immigrant, and he smiled as he recalled how he had supported his family by purchasing dead horses from the knacker’s yards of the occupying American forces and selling their meat as beef.

  Those who made a success of life in the Zainichi ghettos shared this spirit of opportunistic entrepreneurship. People who lived through the ten years after the war remember a period of acute hardship and food shortages, in which grown adults sometimes died of hunger, but they also talk of fellowship and camaraderie that are rarely present in times of prosperity and of a dark, gallows humor. The Kim family lived in the Abeno-ku area of Osaka, in a neighborhood of wooden homes thrown up hard by one another in narrow alleys off a street of shops and market stalls. It was a tough, cheerful, noisy place; one of the family’s pachinko parlors was around the corner. But by the time the future Joji Obara was a toddler, the family had moved to an area little more than a mile south but a world apart in social status and glamour.

  This was Kitabatake, an immaculate district of huge silent houses surrounded by gardens in walled-off compounds, inhabited by the wealthiest and most respectable people in Osaka. They were people of restraint and breeding; however surprised they were at their new neighbors, they would have been unlikely to make any display of overt racism. But Korean immigrants in an area like this in the 1950s could not but have been conscious of their difference from those around them.

  In secluding themselves in such an area, the Kims would also have detached themselves from the life of the Korean community at large. But perhaps this was happening anyway. Kim Kyo Hak was one of the wealthiest men in Osaka—yet now almost no one remembers him. Like his son after him, he strove to move through life without a trace.

  Compelled, like all Zainichi, to make a choice of nationality after the war, he took that of South Korea. The rival residents’ associations, Mindan and Chōsen Sōren, were central to the lives of many Koreans in Japan. They served as social clubs, schools, and cultural centers, where friends and contacts could be made. Associated with them were credit unions that lent money to businessmen who could raise nothing from the Japanese banks. But, most unusually, Mr. Kim was not affiliated to either of them.

  The characters on the huge front gate in Kitabatake identified the family as Kim. But they also used the name Hoshiyama. Koreans often took new names because of the advantages to be had from fitting in, from being able to pass as Japanese. But the effort was self-defeating, because the names they chose still distinguished them as Koreans. Hoshiyama, for example, was the kind of name recognizable as typical of Zainichi. The Zainichi knew this, and it expressed their plight and their pride, and the pain of surrendering completely an identity as deep as that of race.

  “That was the period when the gap began to open up between rich and poor Koreans,” Manabu Miyazaki told me. “The society was split between the extremes. People like Obara and his family were the winners, in that sense. They would have had faith in the future, in a life without discrimination. But in Japanese society, discrimination is not so easily overcome. The Japanese tribe wants always to keep itself separate from other people, to maintain the differences. For Koreans who believed in their equality, that sense of difference was a cause of fury.”

  * * *

  “The first generation had great regard for their Korean identity,” said the man whose father had sold horsemeat. “Among them were some who had success in business, charismatic figures who built their own empires. They couldn’t find employment in the mainstream of Japanese society because of discrimination, and when they came across such discrimination, they asked themselves why. The answer they came up with was: education. They didn’t have a decent education—my father only went through elementary school, for example. And so they wanted their children to have a better education than they had received themselves.”

  After his arrest, Joji Obara resisted all inquiries into his childhood and family. But a bizarre book, commissioned six years later by his lawyer, and that bears the signs of originating with Obara himself, dwells in detail on what he calls his “extreme special education for the gifted,” which began in early childhood. In the absence of other information about the family, it is revealing about the intense pressure that Mr. and Mrs. Kim placed upon their children from an early age. “My father was in prison for two and a half years,” Obara’s younger brother told me in my one, strange encounter with him. “He was [in the] resistance, fighting the Japanese. But the only thing I can blame him [for] is [that] he has no time to take care of the family. But he always said the importance of education.”

  Two years before he went to elementary school, Kim Sung Jong was sent to a Roman Catholic nursery; every day when he got home from school, three private tutors were waiting for the little boy. Violin and piano lessons, according to the book, began “at the age of three years and ten months.” On Saturdays, he studied with his music teachers from lunchtime until evening, and then played with an orchestra for an hour. On Sundays, there were more private tutorials in the morning and afternoon. “It was dreadful having no free time,” the book, narrated in the third person, records. “[Obara] deliberately pretended to be not worthy of teaching in order to escape from the misery.” He wrote his schoolwork with his left hand, instead of his right, to spoil his handwriting, and started on exam answers only when the time was nearly up. This later account summarizes the situation with an intriguing phrase: “He liberated himself by degrading himself.”

  At the age of six he entered the famous school attached to the Osaka University of Education, one of the best schools in the country. It was a self-consciously elitist institution, founded in emulation of a British public school. In the 1950s, many of the teachers were former officers of the disbanded Imperial Army and Navy, and the parents of the Osaka upper middle class—doctors, lawyers, and businessmen—competed to enrol their young sons.

  At school, Kim Sung Jong was known as Seisho Kin. A man who was in his class at elementary school remembered wrestling and playing baseball with him. “He was a strong boy then, on the big side,” he told me. “He had an older brother at the school, and I remember going to their house in Kitabatake, and his mother, who was very kind to me. He was a real Korean. He got angry quickly; he was very short-tempered. I thought his eyes were very strong. He had a strength in his eyes. But it would not be true to say that everyone liked him.”

  Another classmate from those days also played baseball with Seisho Kin. “He always wanted to be the pitcher,” he remembered. “Not that he threw very fast or with great control. He always wanted to show off, but his technique didn’t match his ambition. I don’t remember seeing him laugh cheerfully as a child. And he wanted things his way, without paying attention to what other people might feel. I think he set up a wall between himself and others. His contacts with others were shallow or nonexistent. When you ask me now, I can’t think who his close friends were.”

  These conversations were conducted half a century later, and several years after Joji Obara had been arrested and charged with a series of grave crimes. It was perhaps not surprising, although it was still striking, that of the ten people I tracked down who knew him as a child, not one described himself as a friend of Seisho Kin, or remembered anyone else who did.

  * * *

  Seisho was the second of four brothers. He was ten years older than Kosho, the youngest, and six years older than the third boy, Eisho. The oldest brother was Sosho, who had been born in 1948. In a traditional Korean family, it was he
who should have carried the greatest burden of parental expectation and pride. But there were problems with Sosho Kin.

  One of his schoolmates was Shingo Nishimura, who would go on to be elected to the House of Representatives of the Japanese diet. Nishimura was a member of the nationalist right wing, an ultrapatriot who believed that the Pacific War should be a source of pride rather than its opposite, and that Japan should arm itself against future war in Asia with nuclear weapons. Such people form a noisy but small minority in Japan; for one of them to be elected an MP is very unusual indeed. It was difficult to know to what degree Shingo Nishimura’s chauvinism shaded his childhood recollection, but he spoke sadly and rather fondly of Sosho Kin.

  His earliest memory was of a likable and well-adjusted boy who fitted in well enough in a class of high-spirited teenagers. “If people teased him, he took it in his stride and didn’t let it bother him,” Nishimura said. “I saw him at close quarters, and I always found him quite straightforward.” He knew that Sosho’s father was extremely rich, that he had made his money from pachinko, and that the family lived in the most expensive part of Osaka. “He was regarded as a bit different from others, but I wouldn’t say that he was bullied. He was like a pet to us. In junior high school, he was a very loving character. But when we started in senior high school, all of a sudden he changed.”

  Between lessons, Sosho Kin would walk to the front of the class and chalk slogans on the blackboard, political slogans, full of resentment for Japan and the Japanese. “He would write, ‘Down with Japanese imperialism!’ and talk about how Japan was bad, and Japanese were bad, and Korea and Koreans were victims,” Nishimura remembered. “And he said that he was being followed by the Korean CIA”—the notorious South Korean intelligence agency, which frequently abducted and tortured its political enemies.

  This was the 1960s, a time of political tumult in Japan and Korea, with strikes and demonstrations against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty and the Vietnam War. But the closest that the rich and pampered children of the school got to left-wing politics was listening to Joan Baez records; Sosho Kin’s radical slogans were impossible for them to take seriously. “The other boys, we just watched him doing all this and laughed,” Nishimura said. “People would say, ‘Ah! He’s at it again.’ Some of them said, ‘If you don’t like it, why don’t you go home?’ When he talked that way, it was like watching a character in a comic. He took it so seriously, and the more seriously he took it, the less seriously everyone else did.”

  Towards the end of senior high school, Sosho Kin suddenly stopped coming to classes. Shingo Nishimura never found out why. There were vague rumors that it was because of an inadequate academic performance; later, he heard that Sosho had gone to the United States. Nishimura went on to university in Kyoto and qualified as a lawyer, the most competitive and prestigious of the Japanese professions. Twenty-five years passed, and he forgot all about the strange Zainichi boy. And then late one night in 1989 he received a telephone call.

  It was Sosho Kin, sounding terrified. He said that he needed to see Nishimura immediately. It was after midnight, but Nishimura found himself hurrying over, for the first time in his life, to the big house in Kitabatake. A maid admitted him; there seemed to be no one else at home. Sosho greeted him silently and produced a pad of paper on which he quickly began to write. “He wouldn’t speak,” Nishimura remembered. “He wrote everything down. He wrote, ‘I’m being bugged so I can’t talk. Even at home or on the train, someone is watching me and following me.’

  “Well, I looked at my surroundings and thought that it could not be true. He was in this big, peaceful house with a maid looking after him. It was obvious that there was no one following him or bugging him, but he believed it passionately.” Apart from expressing his paranoia about surveillance and pursuit, Sosho Kin wrote a little about his time in the United States. “I felt that his life there must have been very unhappy, that he must have suffered loneliness,” Nishimura remembered. “He said a little about it. He told me that once he had been in a tent in the middle of the desert, and that he had shot a rattlesnake.”

  It wasn’t clear from his scribbled sentences what Sosho Kin wanted his lawyer friend to do for him. Eventually, Nishimura took his leave. “What could I do?” he said. “I told him that he should have a good sleep and try to relax. Then I left.”

  Nishimura never heard from him again, although other contemporaries from the Osaka University of Education School did. Around the same time, a handful of ex-classmates had been contacted by Sosho Kin with a peculiar request. He wanted to borrow their copies of the school yearbook, and when the albums were returned, the faces of boys from Sosho’s year had been cut out with a knife.

  “At school, we knew that he was Korean,” Nishimura said, “but we had no particular prejudice. We were friends, in the usual way. We got on well. But, thinking back, it seems that even leading that wealthy life, he was unhappy, and he believed that unhappiness was brought about by Japan and the Japanese.”

  * * *

  The third of the boys, immediately junior to Joji Obara, was Eisho Kin. In different ways from his oldest brother, he too seems to have struggled with the face he presented to the world, and with his Korean identity.

  Eisho went to the foreign-language university in nearby Kobe. He was a talented and creative young man. He spoke Chinese and English, as well as Japanese and Korean, and he had literary and intellectual ambitions. A group of like-minded young Zainichi used to meet at a library in Osaka to discuss literature and the politics of being a Korean in Japan; Eisho was one of them. They talked of Dostoyevsky, Sartre, and Camus, and of the prejudice they faced in their daily lives: invisible for most of the time but hard and high as a prison wall. These young men would never be offered jobs at a top Japanese bank or trading house. However outstanding their university careers, they would never be recruited into the fast track of the diplomatic service or the Ministry of Finance. “Most Zainichi Koreans aren’t conscious of discrimination,” an Osaka journalist told me. “That’s just who they are—they get on with their lives. It’s the people with ambition, who want to rise in society, they’re the ones who hit the glass ceiling. Most of the time they don’t realize they’re captive. It’s only the ones who try to escape who suddenly become aware of the cage. These are people who’ve grown up in Japan, speaking Japanese, eating Japanese food, never imagining that they are objects of discrimination. For people like this, in the second or third generation, the shock of discrimination is very great.”

  I met a man who had been a member of this group of young intellectuals and a friend of Eisho Kin. They had spent many hours together, talking of books and ideas. But he always found Eisho’s company a strain. He was touchy and hesitant and defensive; the conversation never unfolded smoothly. “He was very stiff,” the friend told me. “He couldn’t be natural in the way he dealt with people. Whenever it got on to family matters, he always lost his composure. He was on guard all the time.” Once, he visited Eisho Kin’s home. The tone of their conversations, with their emphasis on radical philosophy and left-wing politics, had left him unprepared for its luxury and grandeur, and its garden filled with huge and expensive ornamental stones—immense, immovable manifestations of a family’s wealth and power. “My impression is that he had difficulty in accepting that he had risen in social class,” the man told me. “He couldn’t deal with the distance between himself and other Koreans.”

  Eisho Kin had aspirations to be a writer. When he was twenty-two years old, a short story of his was published in a journal of Zainichi writing. It was an account of the sadness of a young man: hesitant, awkward, tormented by self-consciousness, disdainful of others, and humiliated by them.

  The story is called “It Happened One Day,” and its protagonist is a Zainichi named Bun’ichi Ri. He is sitting on the subway when three Japanese men of his own age board the train; he understands immediately that they are deaf. Unintelligible whooping sounds come from their mouths. They communicate with
one another in sign language, with busily moving hands and exaggerated facial expressions. Bun’ichi wonders if subtle emotions and nuances of feeling can ever be expressed with fingers and eyebrows. But the deaf men are struggling so hard, with such physical effort, to communicate with one another. The sight of them moves him deeply.

  Bun’ichi, we are told, had “problems at home.” To escape them, he first put his energy into “social issues,” also of an unspecified kind. But he became disillusioned with the “phoniness” of the Zainichi organizations in which he participated and preoccupied by painful questions about discrimination. He identifies this not only in the treatment of Koreans by Japanese but also in a sense of superiority over others that he recognizes in himself. If Bun’ichi is a victim of racism, he also has to own up to prejudices of his own. “What are we to do with this habit, this instinct to discriminate against others, to feel good in setting another below ourselves?” he asks. “In thinking about such things, he felt the weight of a stone on the top of his head.” Bun’ichi feels himself to be divided within, to carry inside him a consciousness separate from his own—a cold, scrutinizing intelligence that passes judgment on him for saying one thing while intending another. It is the absence of this self-consciousness in the deaf men on the train that moves him so much. “They struggled without self-deception,” he observes. “There was no dishonesty in their desperate struggle to communicate.”

  A drunk Japanese man walks down the subway train—in his shiny suit and white shoes, he looks like a yakuza. One of the deaf men unintentionally brushes against him. The drunk reacts furiously, grabbing his collar and demanding an apology; all the deaf man can do is whoop wordlessly. Bun’ichi stands up and shouts at the bully to leave his victim alone, and so the man turns upon him. In a fight between the stocky thug and the tenderhearted Bun’ichi, it is obvious who will come off best. But before any blows are exchanged, the three deaf passengers come between the two of them—and in the end, it is the handicapped men who save the Korean from a beating by the Japanese gangster.