KJCKorea
Journal Central

This paper examines two cinematic representations of political violence in early 1970s Japan—Kōji Wakamatsu’s <United Red Army>(2008) and South Korean director Kim Mi-Rye’s documentary <East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front>(2020). By analyzing these films, the study reconsiders the powerful image of “violence” constructed by mainstream Japanese media around the United Red Army incident and the bombing attacks carried out by the “East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front.” It seeks to move beyond the representational field shaped by this media discourse and to explore alternative meanings of violence as a political and ethical act. The two incidents, which unfolded as postwar Japan entered the stage of advanced consumer capitalism, were thoroughly demonized by the media and came to symbolize the end of the “season of politics” that had defined the 1960s. While Wakamatsu’s film meticulously reconstructs the ideological process through which the United Red Army’s internal purges transformed into a death driven logic, it ultimately fails to explain why such violence emerged or why the group lacked mechanisms to restrain it. By contrast, Kim’s documentary traces the lives of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front members—still stigmatized as “terrorists” in Japan—revealing their enduring reflection, remorse, and commitment to anti-imperialist critique and East Asian solidarity. More than fifty years later, these ongoing gestures of reflection and solidarity transcend the instrumentalist binary of violence and nonviolence, suggesting the possibility of what Judith Butler terms an “ethos-practice” that resists “the institutional life of violence.”

This article reads Han Kang’s first novel, Black Deer, from the destruction of workers’ lives caused by the restructuring of the mining industry during the period of industrial transition. Although the term “industrial transition” is commonly used in a neutral sense to denote the generational shift of leading industries, it is in fact a period marked by structural violence, in which those who fail to adapt to social change are left behind and experience large-scale devastation of their lives as old industries collapse and new ones emerge. Black Deer depicts the structural transformation through which those once praised as “industrial warriors” come to be treated as surplus members of society. This article focuses on two main issues. The first concerns the sense of debt and guilt that exists between those who have left the mining village and those who remain. Han portrays how those who abandoned their families to escape poverty and death are unable to free themselves from the past because of those they left behind “there.” The stories of runaway or missing miners’ daughters and disintegrated families form the core of this theme. The second issue is an ethical mourning for those who were forced to endure a life in which death became routine, while countless industrial accidents were socially tolerated in the name of industrial growth alone. Viewed from the perspective of industrial transition, the rise and decline of the mining industry constitutes a violent process that entails not only physical and psychological exploitation but also ontological exploitation.

Since the 21st century, digital archiving efforts have been actively pursued, converting classical texts into digital form and making them available to researchers and the general public. Until the 2000s, this process was primarily centralized. However, since the 2010s, regionally-led archive construction efforts have also been actively pursued, driven by the need for regional cultural revitalization. Gangwon has also been actively pursuing this trend, actively collecting and providing regional classical texts. Representative examples are <Center for Korean Studies Materials: Gangwon Regional Center>, spearheaded by the Institute of Koreanology at Kangwon National University, and the <Gangwon Korean Studies Archive>, established and operated by the Yulgok Institute of Korean Studies. These projects are particularly significant in that they provide a unified collection of materials previously unexcavated and organized under the umbrella of “Gangwon.“ However, due to time, financial, and human resources constraints, these materials have not yet reached the advanced processing stage. Future improvements in the areas of “substantial data collection,” “systematicity,” and “scalability” will likely result in a more complete archive. Furthermore, to foster a stable research environment, it is urgent to establish an independent classical studies training institution and program within the Gangwon region.