The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  The Young Koreans United New York chapter meeting room became our rehearsal space, and we occupied it for almost a month. Rehearsals were grueling. Students were skipping classes to attend, and members who had jobs either quit or went on leave. They were bound to be penniless by the end of the performance, but fortunately, the Korean American community got wind of this and collected food donations, raised funds, and helped sell tickets. We titled the play Reunification Gut: The Blue Mountain Calls for Us, and the performance marked the establishment of the Young Koreans United cultural movement group. The members continued to request instructors from Korea to teach them pungmul, dance, talchum mask dance, folk songs, pansori opera, and gut rituals, and passed their knowledge on to other youth. They became both artisans and activists. They appeared at international solidarity events and protests, making a joyful racket with their drums and gongs, and quickly became famous. Years later, after I came back to the States from my visit to North Korea, I would attend the performance of the fully matured, professional troupe, now named Binari.

  New York was now into winter. Someone came looking for me in the Young Koreans United office in December: Professor Wada Haruki of the University of Tokyo. He had heard that I was in New York and decided to drop by on his way to a conference in DC. Based at the University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, Wada Haruki was an authority on Russia and North Korea. He had been a student activist as part of the Japanese postwar (Ampo) Struggle generation, had protested against the war in Vietnam, and was now actively supporting the Korean democratization movement. He even chaired the Japan–Korea Solidarity Committee. In short, he was yet another figure held in contempt by the South Korean government. There were quite a few foreign intellectuals similarly labeled as subversives, such as Bruce Cumings, who differed from other American scholars in his view of the Korean division and North Korea, and whose work was banned in South Korea. Wada Haruki asked me to visit Japan on my way back home.

  When I arrived in Japan on Christmas Day, Cho Seong-wu, who had been contacted by Yoon Han Bong, was at the airport to greet me. Cho Seong-wu had been imprisoned several times for his involvement in the student movement at Korea University before finally managing to re-enroll and earn his diploma. He was then falsely accused of the serious crime of “conspiracy to commit a rebellion” and was imprisoned again, but by a stroke of good luck was pardoned and went on to continue his studies in Japan. Through Professor Wada Haruki’s Japan–Korea Solidarity Committee, I got to meet Japanese writers, journalists, professors, and leaders of citizens’ organizations, and attended their talks.

  My friends in Japanese civil society have always won my respect with their modesty, work ethic, and dedication. It is my belief that their work not only contributes to peace in Asia but to democracy in Japan. A perpetrator of war in Asia, Japan had managed to rise from the ashes thanks to the sacrifice of Korea’s division, but even that success was undermined by the oppressed lives of the Japanese underclass. From Japan’s imperial heights to its postwar lows, social change remained an impossible dream. Japan was instead stuck in a never-ending state of “modernization.”

  Wada Haruki introduced me to Yasue Ryōsuke, the editor of Sekai magazine. The Korean Japanese community remember him fondly. Some Koreans who had been dragged overseas through Japanese military conscription or forced migrant labor during the war had managed to return to Korea after Liberation, but many were already settled in Japan and were unable or unwilling to leave. Koreans living in Japan were a united community up until Liberation and national division, both in 1945. Suddenly freed from colonial penury, the Korean Japanese, most of whom belonged to the lower working class, had to find a new place for themselves within Japanese society. They created the Alliance for Korean Japanese People, which, reflecting the ideological division of North and South, soon split into the pro-South “Korean Residents Union in Japan” and the pro-North “General Association of Korean Residents in Japan.” For half a century after Liberation, both the North and South Korean governments used the Korean Japanese for political gain without ever doing anything for their brethren in return.

  With the transports of Korean Japanese families to North Korea that began in 1959, and the fingerprinting of registered foreigners that began in 1955 and only stopped in 1993, Korean Japanese people began identifying as Zainichi. They divided themselves into three nationalities: Republic of Korea (ROK), Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and “Joseon,” alluding to the Korean peninsula’s name prior to Liberation. Intent on waiting for reunification, this third group refused to choose between North and South. As Japan did not have diplomatic ties with North Korea, the Korean Japanese who were either of North Korean nationality or Joseon allegiance were effectively considered temporary residents and subject to all sorts of discrimination, such as being forbidden to travel overseas without first acquiring a re-entry visa. Six hundred thousand Korean Japanese had been divided into Northern and Southern, with 300,000 eventually becoming naturalized Japanese citizens, unable to endure the oppressive discrimination of Japanese society.

  I mention this history of the Korean Japanese to explain the deep relationship between Yasue Ryōsuke and Korea. He had worked at the Iwanami Shoten publishing house when young, and was volunteering as an aide in Tokyo governor Minobe Ryokichi’s office when he learned the Korean Japanese were trying to establish their own school, so he helped them found Korea University (not to be confused with the school of the same name in Seoul). Some years later, when I visited Japan before my trip to North Korea, I saw that he had become the CEO of Iwanami Shoten, which was a progressive publisher that had been anti-war during World War II and continued being a beacon of peace and good conscience for Japan’s intellectuals.

  Yasue’s interest in Korea began with the 1960 April Revolution, an uprising led by labor and student groups, and continued through the social unrest of the next two decades. From 1973 to 1988, he published a column called “Communiqué from Korea” in Sekai written by someone calling himself “TK Seng.” Korean intellectuals of that time may not have known Yasue Ryōsuke, but they did know TK Seng, the faceless Korean who wrote about the things no one in the South Korean media dared mention. Yasue also interviewed Kim Il-sung in North Korea, a first in the history of Japanese journalism. It was, therefore, obvious what the South Korean government thought of him. He maintained good relations with Japan’s ruling and opposition parties and cherished a dream about the future of Asia as an Asia-Pacific peace community, a dream which we in Korea were beginning to share with him.

  He was very lighthearted and funny in person. When criticizing his enemies, he sounded more like he was chastising a friend who had made a mistake. I never got from him the sharpness that I experienced with other Japanese intellectuals.

  Yasue Ryōsuke invited me to lunch one day. When I arrived at the offices of Iwanami Shoten, he introduced me to the novelist Ōe Kenzaburō. I assume he arranged this meeting because he thought that, as a novelist myself, I might enjoy talking to a fellow writer, rather than being limited to conversations with Wada Haruki, who was a sociologist. It was a nice gesture. I was surprised but happy to meet Ōe. Eight years older than me, he was just a boy during World War II. I, meanwhile, had been born in Manchuria and spent my own boyhood during the Korean War after crossing the 38th parallel. I was the first generation after the Japanese occupation to receive a Korean education, and I experienced the student revolution of April 1960. Just as Japan was swept by protests against the security treaty between Japan and the US, Koreans objected to the Korea–Japan talks at around the same time, allowing students and intellectuals of both countries to connect with each other. The Korean War split Korean literary society into North and South, with North Korean literature degenerating into propaganda for Party and leader and South Korean literature reduced to anti-communist screeds or blinkered fictions completely cut off from reality. The April Revolution that deposed President Rhee Syngman ushered in a spate of foreign books and ideas, and m
ost of what came from the West came through the breakwater that is Japan. Around this time, Japan’s classical and contemporary literature, including genre works, were being widely translated into Korean and appearing in women’s magazines, fashion glossies, literary journals, and art periodicals. With foreign publications being imported from Japan, book peddlers and bookstores specializing in these titles proliferated in the small streets off downtown’s main thoroughfares, where the cost of rent was a little cheaper and bookstores clustered.

  A great variety of world classics collections and series on Western thought were published, as well as dozens of pocket editions. During the postwar years, it was through Japanese contemporary literature that I had my first glimpse of the modernity of a literature open to the world, and it was that window that allowed me to see beyond the society that boxed me in. We used Japan as a stepping stone to jump back and forth between the lives depicted in the faraway West and our interiority as it existed on the Korean peninsula. This was part of the process of overcoming our own internalized colonization, as well as the beginnings of a literary magazine movement that attempted to find Korea’s own place in the context of world literature.

  Ōe Kenzaburō had protested against the Vietnam War and supported incarcerated writers around the world, including Kim Chi-ha, in solidarity with efforts for peace in Asia and Japanese civil society. He was unassuming and of a quiet nature, but remained consistent in his mission and actions as a writer into old age. Ōe once said to me that he envied Koreans for living in a country so rich in narrative. I probably answered with something cynical, along the lines of “That’s just a nice way of saying we’ve had nothing but trouble.” I added that I envied Japan’s freedom. Ōe demurred: “We’re not strong at all, we’re just getting by from day to day.” He and his wife had a child with a developmental disorder, he added, and daily life was not easy. But it was also this child that motivated him to keep on working at his literary career. His quiet words moved me deeply and I was ashamed of my cynical retort.

  I felt the need to visit the Kansai region, which was in many ways a more important place to the Korean Japanese than Tokyo. I went on a tour of Kyoto, Kobe, and Nara while based in Osaka, giving talks sponsored by Japanese civil groups. Yang Kwan Soo, who was married to a second-generation Korean Japanese and studying for his PhD, contacted Cho Seong-wu and together the two of them organized everything for me. During his student years at Seoul National University, Yang had been imprisoned for demonstrating against President Park Chung-hee. He’d gone abroad before the Gwangju Democracy Movement, but as his home was in the same province as Gwangju, he always felt guilty about how he lived in comfort and safety far away from it all. He had brought together a group of students who were proficient in Korean to translate The Kwangju Uprising into Japanese. The book was already being circulated by Korean Japanese civil groups on both the left and the right, as well as through local organizations. Each region’s talk naturally arranged itself around the Gwangju Democracy Movement.

  I worried that the Korean government would never let me get away with engaging in political activity in Japan. But when I thought of the people of Gwangju, I shook off my fear. I couldn’t shirk the responsibility of revealing the truth behind Gwangju, just as I couldn’t ask someone else to put the book of testimonials together.

  In the audience were many people who had read the book and many who hadn’t, but every talk turned into a moment of sadness and anger. There’s one question in particular—an ordinary one, perhaps—that has stayed with me. What did I think of North Korea after twenty years of post-Liberation division? To a Korean, answering this question in a public space presents a conundrum: do I answer according to my conscience, like someone professing an unpopular religious faith, or do I prevaricate? At the very least, I couldn’t choose one side and not heavily criticize the other. My other option was to avoid answering altogether, which no one would have minded. The audience was well aware of Korea’s National Security Act.

  But I did answer. “I’m not pro-division. But I’ve never been to North Korea myself, so I can’t really talk about it. The only real answer I can give you is that my writing and I are products of South Korean history and that South Korea is my destiny.”

  The person who had asked the question suddenly shouted: “So you’ll spend the rest of your life accepting division? If a writer from the motherland gives up like this, what are we supposed to do, living as outsiders in this foreign country?”

  The moderator, Yang Kwan Soo, managed to smooth things over and move on to the next question. My answer was a canned response I’d developed in Berlin. Another hand shot up to ask why I was so thoroughly negative about South Korea but unwilling to voice a single criticism of North Korea. I answered without hesitation that I wasn’t criticizing South Korea per se but the military dictatorship that ruled it. Having seized power through a coup d’état, they were not the government of the people. I had never been to North Korea and knew nothing about it, so there was nothing I could really criticize. I asked him if he was implying that I should visit North Korea. The questioner’s face went red with fury, but he sat down in silence and the audience burst into applause.

  “So you’ll spend the rest of your life accepting division?”

  I thought about this question for a long time. I had never really accepted division as permanent. But it was true that I had attempted nothing, and let my fear of the National Security Act limit my activities and actions and writing. Was it enough, to avoid “praising” the North Korean regime, to say that communism was evil and that we had to destroy the communists if we wanted reunification? I thought of the people who had died in both North and South during the Korean War, the people who had broken the taboo of this border and were imprisoned or executed, and all the people in Gwangju who died while demanding democracy. If I did not try to cross this border myself, then I was not a writer. I wasn’t anything.

  In order to adapt our American performance of Reunification Gut: The Blue Mountain Calls for Us to the Japanese stage, we created a preparation committee, led by Lee Hoesung, filled with Koreans of different nationalities and Japanese activists. We did a press conference for publicity and started to assemble young performers. The sole requirement was to be a Korean Japanese resident of any nationality. We borrowed the space of the Japanese troupe Kuro Tento and opened an audition where about a hundred Korean Japanese showed up.

  We were accepting of any Korean with an appreciation for Korean culture, and so we picked the cast based on passion and talent, and the rest who wanted to volunteer were hired as stagehands. We became a family of fifty. Some of the young members had come from as far away as Osaka and Kyoto.

  Before going into rehearsal, we held a ceremony where we hung a sign that said “Uri Cultural Center” (Our Cultural Center) by the office door. We decided to call our group Hanuri (“One Us”) after the composition of our group. Osaka’s Yang Kwan Soo was also readying the launch of another Uri Cultural Center. In the Kansai region, the organization would stretch from Osaka to Kyoto, Nara, and Kobe. After two months of practice, the Tokyo performance was held for four days in March at the Japanese Trade Union Confederation auditorium. There was an unprecedented spring snowfall on opening night and traffic was jammed, but the auditorium was packed. The stage was on the same level as the audience, and there was practically no division between players and watchers, much like it had been in Korea, where the traveling troupes would simply find an empty spot in a factory or village and put on a show.

  The lobby of the auditorium was bustling with all sorts of civic groups handing out pamphlets and newsletters. After every performance we danced a festive nanjangchum with the audience and shared ceremonial rice cakes, meat from a roasted pig’s head, and makgeolli rice brew. These performances continued in Osaka and Kyoto. A kind of “reunification shaman gut ritual” was being held all over Japan.

  I could sense a yearning for change in Japan. Though it was much freer than Korea, people did not
feel that they’d achieved a mature form of democracy. Since the Meiji Restoration a hundred years before, Japan could say it had gained the appearance of modernization, but this modernity had not come from below, through the values of freedom, human rights, and equality, but from above—through a fascism centered around the monarchy. Since its imperialist days, Japan’s power and capital were concentrated in the elite, and it managed to rebuild its economy by leaning on America’s Cold War tactics in East Asia. Japanese democracy itself had not been achieved by its people, but was granted to them by the American occupying forces. Never having had a chance to confront its national shame and use it as an opportunity for inner growth, Japan’s twisted modernity was headed toward a society that was dangerous even to itself. Its strong ruling party, which never gave up power, ruled the country unchallenged for decades, and its press, while seemingly free, never managed to cross a certain limit. Korea’s developmental dictatorship in pursuit of capitalist modernization tried hard to catch up with Japan, but because of national division, Korea and Japan ended up on very different trajectories.

  ~

  I returned to Korea on May 9, 1986. My activist friends Lee Myoung-jun, Choi Yeol, and others were waiting at the gate, as they were worried I’d be taken away, but the ANSP arrested me anyway and took me to their headquarters on Nam Mountain in Seoul. There, with the Council of Writers for Freedom and Practice holding a protest right outside, I was grilled about my activities in Europe, America, and Japan over the past year. The PEN International annual congress was being held in Hamburg at the time, and as there were German, American, and Japanese writers in attendance with whom I’d become acquainted, the conference turned into a “Free Hwang Sok-yong” movement. Unlike the PEN branches in other countries, PEN Korea tends to take a government-propaganda line to this day, to say nothing of what they were like back then. When the chair of PEN Korea, Jeon Sook-hee, declared that “Hwang Sok-yong is being investigated for political, not literary reasons,” an enraged Günter Grass, the chair of PEN West Germany, leaped onto the stage and grabbed the microphone from her. Perhaps because of this international support, or the government’s unwillingness to stir up any trouble regarding Gwangju, I was not charged and ended up being released.