Kim Jung-Hahn is the most famous writer in 1970' s Korean literature. It is very important to analyse the correlation between gender and nationalism in the Kim's works like Surado(1969) and A Letter From Okinawa(1977), because he is both a nationalist...
Kim Jung-Hahn is the most famous writer in 1970' s Korean literature. It is very important to analyse the correlation between gender and nationalism in the Kim's works like Surado(1969) and A Letter From Okinawa(1977), because he is both a nationalist and a feminist.
Kim's texts tell us that Korean women construct self identity resisting against Japanese imperialism. Madame Gaya (the heroine of Surado) was a good daughter-in-law. She conducted the ancestral rites and received guest cordially very well. But when her father-in-law prohibited her from building the buddhist temple, she ran away home and built the temple by herself. The temple became a place of refuge where Korean women prayed for her husband, son and daughter's coming back safe from Japanese recruiting.
Kim's texts, perhaps more than the works of any other writer in this period, represent "Japanese military sexual slavery' in relation to the nationality, class and gender.
As a nationalist, Kim accused Japanese imperialist and the pro-Japanese Korean of the policy of assimilation to annihilate the identity of Korean people in the last days of the Japanese domination. At the same time, as a feminist, he accused of recruiting and victimizing Korean women as Japanese military sexual slaves.
He recognized the relation between nationalism and gender as not exclusive but correlative.