Ryang
Biographic Data
| ID | 4915 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ryang |
| FAMILY NAME | Ryang |
| SIGNATURE | RYANG |
| AFFILIATIONS | Johns Hopkins University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8891-7440 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 58 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Japan, North Korea, and the Biopolitics of Repatriation
On December 14, 1959, amidst much fanfare and tears, the first repatriation boat (provided by the Soviet Union) carried thousands of Koreans from Niigata, Japan, to Cheongjin, North Korea. Hailed as a humanitarian project under the intermediation of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the repatriation of Koreans from Japan to North Korea continued until 1984, resulting in a total of more than 93,000 repatriates who relocated from Japan …
Anthropology as Method: North Korea at a Distance
North Korea is one of a very small number of countries in the world that an anthropologist has not set foot in with the purpose of conducting long-term ethnographic fieldwork. Given the country’s closed nature, anthropology seems to be the least qualified discipline with which to approach North Korea. Upon closer examination, however, this might not be the case; anthropology may offer unexpected advantages, not only permitting us to study North K…
Afterword: Transnational Asian Studies-Toward More Inclusive Theory and Practice
Based on the articles in this "Global Asias" forum, this essay proposes that in order to build a meaningful bridge between Asian studies and Asian American studies, we must first face what needs to be critically overcome in Asian studies itself: persistent white male domination of the field, on the one hand, and historical role that the United States has played in Asia, on the other. One possibility is to adopt a transnational Asian studies appro…
Visible and Vulnerable: The Predicament of Koreans in Japan
A critique of medicalisation: Three Instances
By briefly exploring three different examples where the existence of mental illness and developmental delay has been presumed, this paper sheds light on the way what Foucault calls the emergence of a regime of truth, i.e. where something that does not exist is made to exist through the construction of a system of truth around it. The first example concerns the direct marketing of pharmaceutical products to consumers in the US, the second the use …
The Rise and Fall of Chongryun-From Chōsenjin to Zainichi and beyond
Horrified by the sight of the lynching of African Americans, Abel Meeropol wrote a poem called Strange Fruit that is perhaps better known in the form of the 1939 rendition by Billie Holiday. African Americans continued to suffer lynching for many decades after the American Civil War-mostly in the South, but also in many other states all around the country. Being black meant risking being turned into a strange fruit hanging from a poplar tree, giv…
Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity
Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, Sonia Ryang writes Eating Korean: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity as much as an eater as a researcher. Her encounters with key Korean food items including cold noodle soup, pancakes, barbecued beef, and bibimbap, rice with mixed vegetables, in four different locations of Los Angeles, Baltimore, Hawaii (Kona and Honolulu), and Iowa City are at once entertaining, insightful, yet deeply moving, wh…
The Denationalized Have No Class: The Banishment of Japan's Korean Minority—A Polemic
Sonia Ryang possesses “double vision” in that she is a U.S.-based anthropologist as well as a cultural insider who grew up as a Zainichi Korean. Her family supported Chongryun (the North Korea-affiliated Zainichi Korean organization), which stood in contrast to the twentieth century's other Zainichi Korean organization Mindan that was affiliated with South Korea., Zainichi Koreans during the last century was largely divided in their identificatio…
Reading Volcano Island: In the Sixty-fifth Year of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising
I was eight or nine when M samchon ("Uncle M") arrived at our house in Japan on one of his regular late-night visits. In fact, it seemed as if he chose to visit at this hour, as if he was hiding from something or someone. Although he was not really related to us, he came from the same part of Korea, Jeju Island, and we referred to him using the term samchon, a Jeju term used when addressing uncles and aunts. He spoke in the Jeju tongue, which was…
Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry
Often depicted as one of the world's most strictly isolationist and relentlessly authoritarian regimes, North Korea has remained terra incognita to foreign researchers as a site for anthropological fieldwork. Given the difficulty of gaining access to the country and its people, is it possible to examine the cultural logic and social dynamics of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea? In this innovative book, Sonia Ryang casts new light onto th…
Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry
The Denationalized Have No Class: The Banishment of Japan's Korean Minority—A Polemic
The Denationalized Have No Class:The Banishment of Japan's Korean Minority—A Polemic Sonia Ryang (bio) 1. In a recent article entitled "Bringing Class Back In: The Changing Basis of Inequality and the Korean Minority in Japan," I read: . . . this study shows that the legal/institutional and socioeconomic structural changes in Japan for the past few decades, by decreasing ethnic inequality between Koreans and Japanese while increasing class inequa…
North Koreans in South Korea: In Search of Their Humanity
It is well known that tens of thousands of North Koreans have left their country to wander around China and vicinity, and if fortunate, to settle elsewhere, notably in South Korea. Most arrive via Southeast Asia or Mongolia, frequently aided by a South Korean Christian missionary organization. This scenario has been recognized in the new millennium as, and I speak with caution, a pattern. With caution, because after all, there cannot be a pattern…
Diaspora without HomelandBeing Korean in Japan: Being Korean in Japan
More than one-half million people of Korean descent reside in Japan todayâ the largest ethnic minority in a country often assumed to be homogeneous. This timely, interdisciplinary volume blends original empirical research with the vibrant field of diaspora studies to understand the complicated history, identity, and status of the Korean minority in Japan. An international group of scholars explores commonalities and contradictions in the Korean d…
North Korea: Toward a better understanding
Chapter 1 Introduction: North Korea: Going Beyond Security and Enemy Rhetoric Chapter 2 Chapter 1. North Korea and the Birth Pangs of a New Northeast Asian Order Chapter 3 Chapter 2. Socialism, Sovereignty, and the North Korean Exception Chapter 4 Chapter 3. Biopolitics, or, the Logic of Sovereign Love-Love's Whereabouts in North Korea Chapter 5 Chapter 4. The Split Screen: Sin Sang-ok in North Korea Chapter 6 Chapter 5. The Politics of Unificati…
The Denationalized Have No Class: The Banishment of Japan's Korean Minority- A Polemic
In a recent article by Bumsoo Kim entitled "Bringing class back in: the changing basis of inequality and the Korean minority in Japan," I read: "[...] this study shows that the legal/institutional and socioeconomic structural changes in Japan for the past few decades, by decreasing ethnic inequality between Koreans and Japanese while increasing class inequality among Koreans, have made class more significant than ethnicity in understanding the in…
Single Reviews
Book reviewed in this article: The Empire of Love: Towards a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality . Elizabeth Povinelli
The Tongue That Divided Life and Death. The 1923 Tokyo Earthquake and the Massacre of Koreans
And the men of Ephraim gathered themselves together and went northward, and said unto Jephthah: Wherefore wentest thou to fight with the children of Ammon, and didst not call us to go with thee? We will therefore burn thine house upon thee, with fire.And Jephthah said unto them: I and my people were at great strife with the children of Ammon. And the LORD delivered them into my hands. Wherefore then are ye come upon me to fight with me
Love in Modern Japan: Its Estrangement from Self, Sex and Society
This compelling and controversial book places the concept of love in both a social and historical context. Taking an approach in which state formation and vicissitude of power are explicitly taken into account in the discussion of intimacy and love, the author demonstrates that love as idealization and love as sexuality must be kept analytically separate. Chapters include discussions on sexualized rituals and fertility festivals, the murder case …
Does It Have to be hESC? A Note on War, Embryo, and the Disabled
In the spring semester of 2006, in my previous university position, I offered a course entitled: "Does it have to be hESC? Ethics and debate of stem cell research and cloning." As part of the course assignment, my students, divided into small groups, had to conduct group research on either a nation (or state within it) or a religious/political movement and its position on human embryonic stem cell research to present to the class. Groups elected …
Law in everyday Japan: Sex, sumo, suicide, and statutes - Mark D. West
How to do or not do things with words: The case of Koreans in Japan
In this article, I explore the ways in which ethnic identity is expressed by following the formulaic socio-linguistic norm, the very method of which defies the authenticity of identity itself, thereby asserting the identity's multi-facetedness as sustained in performative linguistic practice. I look at multi-sited socio-linguistic interactions among Koreans in Japan, who claim their primary identity to be that of North Korea's overseas citizens e…
Dilemma of a Native: On Location, Authenticity, and Reflexivity
With the focus on native/halfie anthropology, I address in this paper three issues of location, authenticity, and reflexivity of the anthropologist in close connection to the reality of uneven distribution of power inside academe among scholars and institutions, and, above all, anthropologists, including native anthropologists. I emphasise that interaction between the field and the ethnographer never closes even after the fieldwork is over; the i…
Japan and National Anthropology: A Critique
Japan and National Anthropology: A Critique is an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated study which challenges the conventional view of Japanese studies in general and the Anglophone anthropological writings on Japan in particular. Sonia Ryang explores the process by which the postwar anthropology of Japan has come to be dominated by certain conceptual and methodological and exposes the extent to which this process has occluded our vie…
A Note on Transnational Consanguinity, or, Kinship in the Age of Terrorism
Introduction There is no need to remind my readers that recent studies of kinship in anthropology have turned a number of interesting corners. The self-interrogatory that British social anthropology initiated in the wake of Asian and African decolonization, involving scholars such as Gellner, Beattie, Needham, and others—and a bitter bickering among them—reached a high point with Schneider's now classic, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984) …
Dilemma of a Native: On Location, Authenticity, and Reflexivity
With the focus on native/halfie anthropology, I address in this paper three issues of location, authenticity, and reflexivity of the anthropologist in close connection to the reality of uneven distribution of power inside academe among scholars and institutions, and, above all, anthropologists, including native anthropologists. I emphasise that interaction between the field and the ethnographer never closes even after the fieldwork is over; the i…
The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Massacre of Koreans in 1923: Notes on Japan's Modern National Sovereignty
About thirty years ago, when I was a student at a Korean middle school in T city, Tokyo's suburb, the best place to hang around with my classmates after school was the local library. We would lounge around and, disregarding the frowning eyes of Japanese users because of our loud giggles and conversation on top of our strange school uniform, which was a modified Korean dress, we would skim through many books and sometimes loan them out. One aftern…
Koreans in Japan
Until recently, ethnic minority in Japan meant predominantly those Koreans and their descendants who had settled in Japan during the colonial period (1910-1945). From the post-World War II period onward, however, the Korean population has remained steady at around 680,000 due to increasing naturalization and decreasing childbirth rates.The history of Koreans in Japan distinguishes them from recent labor immigrants, including newcomers from South …
Gender in Oblivion: Women in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea)
This article discusses the gender and women in North Korea. Not much is known about North Korea, let alone its gender relations. Based on published literature as well as on partial ethnographic data, the article looks into the status of women in the country, which is similar in many senses to that of women in the former Soviet-influenced socialist states, but is distinguished in an important area, that is, the relationship to the leader. The arti…
North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology, and Identity
Native Anthropology and other Problems
Chrysanthemum's Strange Life: Ruth Benedict in Postwar Japan
Revisiting Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, I follow in this article the postwar controversies in Japan over the book. Although enormously significant in the formation of postwar Japanese cultural identity and social scientific discourse, the book has gone through a strange life, subjected to diverse interpretations which reflect historical changes in Japan's self-perception. I propose that what is most strange about the reception…
Do Words Stand for Faith: Linguistic life of North Korean children in Japan
L'A. etudie la signification d'un discours « autorise » que les enfants eduques dans les ecoles nord coreennes du Japon sont obliges de prononcer. Elle emploie son materiel pour attaquer les approches linguistiques isolant les mots de leur contexte social d'utilisation en montrant comment les exercices de discipline de l'ecole coreenne ne s'etendent pas aux domiciles des enfants qui changent volontiers de codes dans leur environnement familial et…
Indoctrination or Rationalization: The anthropology of 'North Koreans' in Japan
Nationalist inclusion or emancipatory identity? north korean women in japan
This article considers the structure in which women’s gendered identity is subsumed under nationalist identity formed around the notion of patriotic-patriarchy. By focusing on the case of Korean women in Japan, who regard themselves as North Korea’s overseas nationals, this article examines how women’s emancipatory identity was connected to their positive redefinition of “patriotic motherhood” within the limits of nationalist discourse. Especiall…
Poverty of Language and the Reproduction of Ideology: Korean Language for Chongryun
The paper deals with the correlation between language and the ideological reproduction of Chongryun, the organization of Koreans in Japan, who identify themselves as 'overseas citizens of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [North Korea].' It draws attention to the different mode of employment attached to two different languages, Korean and Japanese. In the case of Chongryun, the linguistic unproductivity provides effective means to secure …
How to do or not do things with words: The case of Koreans in Japan
In this article, I explore the ways in which ethnic identity is expressed by following the formulaic socio-linguistic norm, the very method of which defies the authenticity of identity itself, thereby asserting the identity's multi-facetedness as sustained in performative linguistic practice. I look at multi-sited socio-linguistic interactions among Koreans in Japan, who claim their primary identity to be that of North Korea's overseas citizens e…
A Long Loop: Transmigration of Korean Women in Japan
Focusing on new women immigrants/migrants from Korea to Japan in recent years, this article explores the form of transmigratory practice of U-turnees, who have past experiences of having lived in Japan or been born there prior to the end of Japan's colonial rule in 1945 and returned to Japan around the year 1989 when the South Korean government lifted the restriction of overseas travel for its citizens. I suggest through mini life histories of fi…
North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology, and Identity
Inscribed (men's) bodies, silent (women's) words: Rethinking colonial displacement of Koreans in Japan
This article discusses the socio-historically generated effects of the discourse of decolonization in the case of Korean labor recruits in Japan. During World War II, tens of thousands of Koreans were forcibly brought to Japan by the Japanese military and government as laborers (or kyosei renko, in Japanese). While unreservedly recognizing that the discourse denouncing this violent displacement is indeed a discourse of resistance, the article tak…
Love and Colonialism in Takamure Itsue's Feminism: A Postcolonial Critique
Takamure Itsue has many faces following different phases of her life: poet, activist-writer, anarchist, ethnologist and historian. Throughout these transformations, Takamure maintained her feminist position. This article concentrates on her politics of love, sex and marriage, formulated and presented in the pre-war period during the time of Japanese colonial empire. A specific focus is placed on her positionality in the act of writing within the …
Categories and Subjectivities in Identification of North Koreans in Japan
This article is about Korean residents in Japan, who identify themselves as overseas nationals of North Korea. Through ethnographical data I shall demonstrate that beyond a seeming opposition between minority identities and majority identity, there are multi-dimensional processes of self-identification employed by individuals who strategically mobilize social resources available. More often than not the legally-defined label or name only partiall…
Ethno‐political Community of ‘North’ Koreans in Japan
Historian-judges of Korean nationalism
Studies of Korean nationalism have not only been less researched but they have also been predominantly nationalistic and moralistic. Authors have tended to assume an already present nationalism ever since the late-nineteenth century. They have omitted analysis of the mechanism of the emergence of Korean nationalism and so have merely substantiated the concept. This tendency is attributed both to the lack of methodological sophistication - most of…
Indoctrination or Rationalization: The anthropology of 'North Koreans' in Japan
Poverty of Language and the Reproduction of Ideology: Korean Language for Chongryun
The paper deals with the correlation between language and the ideological reproduction of Chongryun, the organization of Koreans in Japan, who identify themselves as 'overseas citizens of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [North Korea].' It draws attention to the different mode of employment attached to two different languages, Korean and Japanese. In the case of Chongryun, the linguistic unproductivity provides effective means to secure …
Diffirence and Modernity: Social Theory and Contemporary Japanese Society , by John Clammer
Difference and Modernity consists of essays on various themes such as urban lifestyle and city, self and society, indigenous epistemology and ontology, modernity and postmodernity. Author John Clammer's ambitious discussion of “theorizing Japanese society” opens with a claim that “in Japan we have the only major case of a non-western country that has [joined] the front ranks of the modern ‘developed’ capitalist societies” (p. 1 ). Clammer's text …
Do Words Stand for Faith: Linguistic life of North Korean children in Japan
L'A. etudie la signification d'un discours « autorise » que les enfants eduques dans les ecoles nord coreennes du Japon sont obliges de prononcer. Elle emploie son materiel pour attaquer les approches linguistiques isolant les mots de leur contexte social d'utilisation en montrant comment les exercices de discipline de l'ecole coreenne ne s'etendent pas aux domiciles des enfants qui changent volontiers de codes dans leur environnement familial et…
North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology, and Identity
Native Anthropology and other Problems
North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology, and Identity
Categories and Subjectivities in Identification of North Koreans in Japan
This article is about Korean residents in Japan, who identify themselves as overseas nationals of North Korea. Through ethnographical data I shall demonstrate that beyond a seeming opposition between minority identities and majority identity, there are multi-dimensional processes of self-identification employed by individuals who strategically mobilize social resources available. More often than not the legally-defined label or name only partiall…
Nationalist inclusion or emancipatory identity? north korean women in japan
This article considers the structure in which women’s gendered identity is subsumed under nationalist identity formed around the notion of patriotic-patriarchy. By focusing on the case of Korean women in Japan, who regard themselves as North Korea’s overseas nationals, this article examines how women’s emancipatory identity was connected to their positive redefinition of “patriotic motherhood” within the limits of nationalist discourse. Especiall…
North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology, and Identity
Inscribed (men's) bodies, silent (women's) words: Rethinking colonial displacement of Koreans in Japan
This article discusses the socio-historically generated effects of the discourse of decolonization in the case of Korean labor recruits in Japan. During World War II, tens of thousands of Koreans were forcibly brought to Japan by the Japanese military and government as laborers (or kyosei renko, in Japanese). While unreservedly recognizing that the discourse denouncing this violent displacement is indeed a discourse of resistance, the article tak…
Love and Colonialism in Takamure Itsue's Feminism: A Postcolonial Critique
Takamure Itsue has many faces following different phases of her life: poet, activist-writer, anarchist, ethnologist and historian. Throughout these transformations, Takamure maintained her feminist position. This article concentrates on her politics of love, sex and marriage, formulated and presented in the pre-war period during the time of Japanese colonial empire. A specific focus is placed on her positionality in the act of writing within the …
Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin
Introduction: on resident Koreans in Japan Sonia Ryang 1. Politics of legal status: the equation of nationality with ethnonational identity Chikako Kashiwazaki 2. On the North Korean homeland of Koreans in Japan Sonia Ryang 3. Political correctness, postcoloniality and self-representation of 'Koreanness' in Japan Koichi Iwabuchi 4. Mothers write Ikaino Melissa Wender 5. Reading against the bourgeois and national bodies: transcultural body-politic…
Ethnography or Self-cultural Anthropology: Reflections on Writing About Ourselves
A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960-1665 (review)
A Flourishing Yin is a study that enables the reader to appreciate the rich and complex history of Chinese medicine with surprising ease and clarity. As the title shows, the book focuses on the feminine in China's medical history from 960 to 1665, the period encompassing the Song and Ming dynasties. The "female department" or fuke is Furth's subject, corresponding to today's gynecology and obstetrics, with some extension to pediatrics. The study …
Gender in Oblivion: Women in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea)
This article discusses the gender and women in North Korea. Not much is known about North Korea, let alone its gender relations. Based on published literature as well as on partial ethnographic data, the article looks into the status of women in the country, which is similar in many senses to that of women in the former Soviet-influenced socialist states, but is distinguished in an important area, that is, the relationship to the leader. The arti…
Dead-End in a Korean Ghetto: Reading a Complex Identity in Gen Getsu's Akutagawa-Winning Novel Where the Shadows Reside
(2002). Dead-End in a Korean Ghetto: Reading a Complex Identity in Gen Getsu's Akutagawa-Winning Novel Where the Shadows Reside. Japanese Studies: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 5-18
A Long Loop: Transmigration of Korean Women in Japan
Focusing on new women immigrants/migrants from Korea to Japan in recent years, this article explores the form of transmigratory practice of U-turnees, who have past experiences of having lived in Japan or been born there prior to the end of Japan's colonial rule in 1945 and returned to Japan around the year 1989 when the South Korean government lifted the restriction of overseas travel for its citizens. I suggest through mini life histories of fi…
Has Japan or Our Image of it Changed
Chrysanthemum's Strange Life: Ruth Benedict in Postwar Japan
Revisiting Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, I follow in this article the postwar controversies in Japan over the book. Although enormously significant in the formation of postwar Japanese cultural identity and social scientific discourse, the book has gone through a strange life, subjected to diverse interpretations which reflect historical changes in Japan's self-perception. I propose that what is most strange about the reception…
The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Massacre of Koreans in 1923: Notes on Japan's Modern National Sovereignty
About thirty years ago, when I was a student at a Korean middle school in T city, Tokyo's suburb, the best place to hang around with my classmates after school was the local library. We would lounge around and, disregarding the frowning eyes of Japanese users because of our loud giggles and conversation on top of our strange school uniform, which was a modified Korean dress, we would skim through many books and sometimes loan them out. One aftern…
Koreans in Japan
Until recently, ethnic minority in Japan meant predominantly those Koreans and their descendants who had settled in Japan during the colonial period (1910-1945). From the post-World War II period onward, however, the Korean population has remained steady at around 680,000 due to increasing naturalization and decreasing childbirth rates.The history of Koreans in Japan distinguishes them from recent labor immigrants, including newcomers from South …
Japan and National Anthropology: A Critique
Japan and National Anthropology: A Critique is an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated study which challenges the conventional view of Japanese studies in general and the Anglophone anthropological writings on Japan in particular. Sonia Ryang explores the process by which the postwar anthropology of Japan has come to be dominated by certain conceptual and methodological and exposes the extent to which this process has occluded our vie…
Sociology (38 works) · Political science (36 works) · Law (29 works) · History (25 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Politics (23 works) · Japanese History and Culture (21 works) · Asian Culture and Media Studies (20 works) · Gender Studies (17 works) · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies (17 works)