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Precis: "A Sentimental Journal: Mapping the Interior Frontier of Japanese Settlers in Colonial Korea" (2011) by Jun Uchida

Jun Uchida, in her article “A Sentimental Journal: Mapping the Interior Frontier of Japanese Settlers in Colonial Korea" (2011) explores the role of affect and sentiment in shaping cross-cultural encounters in late colonial Korea, as seen and experienced through the eyes of young Japanese settlers who grew up in Seoul. She uses sentiment and sensibility, as inscribed in records of the settler's sensory experience of Korea and its people, as the analytical framework through which to refract and reflect on the formation of selfhood, the process of socialization as “Japanese,” and the dynamics of colonial encounter more broadly. To do this, Uchida focuses on two contact zones, "family and school", in order to draw out the experiences and analyze the formative environments that influence the settler’s notion of “place and race”. Her research reveals that it is through the daily interactions between Japanese and Koreans in higher learning institutions, as well as in the workforce, that contradictions of the colonized belief (as taught in the primary schools and home) is seen and experienced, and that both Japanese and Korean students eventually come into the fold of their countrymen and may unintentionally play a part in ethnical discrimination, thus rendering the call of naisen iitai as a faćade to the reality they live in. Uchida’s work is significant in colonial studies as it sheds light to a different angle of colonial studies and may prove useful for future students and researchers of the field.

(December 13, 2018)

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