Cultural History Group Lecture

Speaker:
Sayaka Chatani (Associate Professor, Department of History, National University of Singapore)

Topic:
The Decolonization Project of Diasporic Koreans in Postwar Japan

Host:
Fang-Ru Lin (Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica)

Date and Time:
Monday, May 25, 2026. 1-3 p.m.

Place:
Room 802 at ITH

Language:
English

Registration:
Click Here to Register (redirecting to Chinese version)

Please Note:

1. To register, please fill out the registration form by May 22 (Fri.).
2. After registration, please attend directly. No further notice will be sent. If you are not able to attend after registration, please contact us (email: bettywong40129@gmail.com).

How did the "Korean minority" pursue decolonization while remaining in its former colonizer's land, Japan, after August 1945? This talk will introduce the worldview and politics of leftist Koreans, drawn from hundreds of interviews and archival research. An enormous grassroots energy of Korean residents, the hostility of the American and Japanese authorities, and the ideological appeal of North Korea led them to form a small nation within Japan. They were the central force that created a peculiar dynamic in zainichi Korean society and influenced postwar Japanese conservatism. The talk will explain how their decolonization impetus and deepening diaspora-ness were intertwined, and how their strong ethnic confidence affected second-generation Korean youth in the 1960s.

Sayaka Chatani is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. She is a multilingual social historian of the Japanese Empire and its aftermath. Her first book, Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2018), compares the experiences and mindsets of young men under imperial mobilization in the countryside of northern Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Okinawa. Her second book, A Nation Within: North Korean Zainichi in Postimperial Japan ( Stanford University Press, March 2026) delves into the internal dynamics of the pro-North Korean zainichi community and proposes a new perspective for studying postwar Japan.