2 - Zainichi Cinema and the Post-national : Romance and Inter-ethnicity in Gu Suyeon's Road Movies

This paper discusses the identity politics of zainichi cinema from a post-national perspective. It examines the intertwined portrayals of inter-ethnicity, nationhood and masculinity depicted in a form of the Japanese-Korean romance. Zainichi cinema is a sub-genre of global diaspora film, dealing with stories of or made by the Koreans living in Japan. The discussion addresses the significance of zainichi cinema which has evolved as an alternative form of global diaspora films. The aim is to investigate the systematic assimilation policy of host countries in which still remain in the social and political arena a number of largely unheard voices of ethnic minorities. The historicity of zainichi cinema conveys the positioning of the people who were doubly confined by the post-colonial circumstances and the cold war power politics of post-war Japan. Informed by the brief historical studies of the zainichi film practices and representation, this study explores the identity politics of contemporary zainichi film. 
The textual analysis focuses on the representational ambivalence and multiple perspectives communicated by zainichi filmmakers disapproving of the Japanese indiscriminate cultural assimilation policies and processes endorsed by the myth of national homogeneity. The films chosen for this paper include Gu Suyoen’s three romantic road movies, namely, Worst By Chance (2003), Bulgogi: The Yakiniku Movie (2007) and Hard Romanticka (2011). Despite the different generic conventions and story-telling between the individual films, intertextual analysis can identify the historical continuity of zainichi filmmaking that defies the prevailing social norms oppressing the cultural representation of ethnic minorities in Japan.