Samuel Perry

Bringing together the fields of Japanese literature and history, From Across the Genkai Sea contributes to an emerging body of work on Japanese culture that has brought into relief Japan’s deep connections to the Korean War. Challenging the myth of a postwar period, the project sheds light on how the Korean War was experienced affectively by different communities in Japan: members of the divided ethnic Korean community, the ideologically split Communist Party, women in “camp town” communities, as well as repatriated colonialists. By making memoirs, fiction, propaganda, and poetry written by these marginal groups central to this moment in history, this study offers a fresh portrait of the newly democratized nation, when older narratives of class, gender, and ethnicity were reconstituted to render the Korean conflict “someone else’s war” in Japan’s postwar imagination.