Locating “Japanese” Wives in the Chongryun-Zainichi History

In histories of North Korean women, the image of “mother” has been the focus of attention as it plays a symbolic role in the state’s revolutionary discourse in the past and the present. The tales of Kang Pan-sok (Kim Il Sung’s mother) and Kim Chong-suk (Kim Jong-il’s mother), widely taught in the late 1950s onward, give us concrete materials that show norms and images of idealized women in North Korean society. This paper discusses how (pro-) North Korean mothers living in Japan in the 1950s and ‘60s interpreted these tales through the lens of their own life experiences. Because it is nearly impossible to study popular perceptions of ideology in North Korean society, this exercise will potentially offer us an insight into how ordinary women might have engaged with state directives and explain bottom-up energy operating well beyond the initial liberation period of the late 1940s.

A study of the diasporic group, however, faces its own methodological issue. The receptions of state-led ideology are always framed in polemics: on the one hand, the pro-North Korean community in Japan and the women themselves celebrate their embrace of North Korean feminism; on the other, anti-North Korean critics condemn such embrace as a case of brainwashing. What should historians do when women themselves employ the polemics in their narratives? What does it mean to read the sources “against the grain” in this situation? How should we frame their experiences that are both celebrated and marginalized? This paper tries to disentangle the emotional issue behind the embrace of North Korean feminism by analyzing socioeconomic, postcolonial, diasporic, and gendered contexts and explore a new picture that could capture their experiences.