2016, Vol., No.22

Journal of Manchurian Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.33

pISSN : 1738-3668
https://journal.kci.go.kr/manchuria

The largest open coal mine of Asia lies in Fushun, a village located in the east of Shenyang city in Northeast China. Regarding the Fushun coal mine as “the most important place in the future of the Empire,” after the Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese government immediately occupied Fushun, depriving the Chinese government of its developmental rights, and set out on a full-scale development of the mine. Indeed, Fushun became the crucial place for Japan’s economic invasion. However, from the standpoint of Chinese and Korean people the exploitation of labor was also the most tragic. Although many Chinese and Korean scholars have been keenly aware of the importance of Fushan mine, only two have written novels based on it—a Korean writer, Han Sulya, and a Chinese writer, Wang Qiuying. In 1926, Han Sulya lived in Fushun with his family for over a year, and acquired a proletarian consciousness. Upon his return, he published the short novel Night of the Dormitory. This novel portrays the toil-filled life of a Korean miner, newly migrated to Manchuria, detailed from the writer’s proletarian point of view. Later in 1940, Wang Qiuying, who was born in Fushun, published a novella, Coal Mine, set in the background of the Fushan coal mine. This novella is based on the realities of life in the Fushun mine, and successfully depicts the fate and hard work that a Chinese miner and his family must endure to survive. This research is a comparative study of the commonalities and differences between these two novels.

Japanese artistic leaders sent to work in Manchukuo were primarily members of the Imperial Art Academy of Japan, and served as channels through which the modern Japanese art system was implanted. As such, they were also the true operators of the arts in Manchukuo. Under the planning and support of the Cultural Association of Manchukuo-Japan or Japan’s Ministry of Cultural Project to China, their journeys to Manchukuo were geared toward leading the art world in Manchukuo, the puppet state of Imperial Japan. In particular, although Japanese artists participated as ‘judge consultants’ at several exhibitions such as the 1937 Art Exhibition in Japan and the Manchuria National Exhibition held the following year, they played the roles of bona fide judges in the real. Their roles as ‘judge consultants’ or ‘judges’ was the general operation and management throughout Manchukuo, with ‘deputy minister politics’ under ‘internal direction’ of the Kwantung Army. Their actions not only led to the development of the art of Manchukuo afterward, but also directed war art and strengthened art as propaganda.

The puppet state of Manchukuo was a Japanese colony in the first half of the 20th century. This literary field covers not only works of Japanese colonialists, but also Chinese, Korean, and Russian literary works that survived throughout this colonial framework. Such colonial works capture the multi-layered and pluralistic conditions in which nationality, ethnic identity, and language intertwined with East Asian colonialism. This article aims to examine literature under this complex colonial structure, and analyze different ethnic literary works in their own languages, which includes Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian. Each of these ethnic writings express the theme of anti-colonialism on the one hand, but also because of differences in terms of the colony’s position, the purpose and methods of defense against it, and the differences in intensity the results are multifarious. As such, direct anti-colonial literature, indirect anti-colonial works, self-flattering colonial propaganda works are multiple and disparate. This article inspects the relationship between East Asian colonialism and literature, and illustrates why and how literature played a part in anti-colonialism struggles. In order to scrutinize East Asian colonialism and offer a new thought of interpreting East Asian colonial literature, this article also intends to understand how colonial scars set in people’s mind, and the psychology of intellectuals in colonial areas, under which the entanglement of anti-colonialism/collaboration, accepted unwillingly/approaching voluntarily, and nationalism/colonialism. This research finally attempts to reveal another possible new interpretation of colonial literature out of the current existing theories on nationalism and post-colonialism, with an expressed focus on Manchukuo literature in East Asia.