Flashlight

Choi’s novel is built around Serk’s identity as a lifelong outsider, which stems from his childhood experiences in Japan. His fictional experiences represent a larger historical phenomenon that underscores the complexities of citizenship and identity. To better understand why Serk rejects his Korean identity and self-identifies as Japanese, it is necessary to understand the phenomenon of the Korean diaspora in Japan, colloquially known as the Zainichi (Korean for “residing in Japan.”)

Following its victory in the Russo-Japanese War, Imperial Japan moved to consolidate its power over the East Asian region by annexing the Korean Empire as a colony in 1910. Though this opened the border for Koreans to enter Japan, mass migration only began in the 1920s, when Japan used Koreans to meet the challenge of a national labor shortage. By the end of World War II, the ethnic Korean population of Japan numbered in the millions, lured by the promise of official assimilation. The Japanese surrender in WWII upset the trajectory of this policy; from 1945 onwards, ethnic Koreans faced increased racial discrimination and economic exploitation.

A major complication tied to this shift is that many ethnic Koreans were encouraged to integrate into Japanese society through marriage and childbirth. When Japan regained its sovereignty from the United States in 1952, a majority of Zainichi were from a new generation born in Japan; they identified as culturally Japanese and were not proficient in Korean.