Last post, I wrote about the unease individuals feel when they study their own history and how they feel comfortable learning about this history of others because it removes their own actions from the equation. There, I focused on Zakir in Inzitar Husain’s Basti. Today, I want to continue that discussion; however, I want to shift it a little by looking at the ways that Yuasa Katsuei addresses how colonial Japan used education to oppress and subjugate the population of Korea during their rule. Katsuei’s Kannani (1934) highlights the impacts of Japan’s colonial project and the ways that it suppressed the populace.

Kannani focuses on the relationship between a twelve-year-old Japanese boy Ryuji, who moves to Korea when his dad gets a job as a police officer, and a fourteen-year-old Korean girl Kannani. Katsuei’s novel, while upending the colonial narrative of assimilation where the colonized assimilates to the culture of the colonizer, lays bare the ways that education and fear works to create and perpetuate virulent ideologies. Katsuei does this through the use of children who, as Mark Driscoll puts it, provides “evovactive scenes of Korean and Japanese children interacting in ways the novel wants to represent as natural and happening before the corrupt ideology of ethnic superiority . . . had completely overwritten this natural purity.”

The novel provides countless examples of individuals indoctrinating Ryuji into the ideology of his superiority of Koreans. Before his family even leaves Japan, they perform “ a ritual mizusakazuki” because the family fears that they will never see Ryuji and his parents again once they go to Korea. They fears Koreans will kill them. Elsewhere, when Ryuji wants to try a candy that all of the Korean children enjoy, his mother’s words reach him, telling him the candy is dirty and dangerous and that it will kill him. She tells him that the candy makers spit on their hands and make the candy dirty, infecting and killing the Korean children who eat it. Ryuji thinks to himself, “How sad, all Korean kids will get sick and die just from eating candy.” Yet, when he thinks about it more, he realizes that is not the case because he has seen plenty of Korean children eat the candy, and they “always looked healthy and lively.”

While these two examples stem from Ryuji’s family, he also learns about his “superiority” over Kannani during his classes at school and Kannani learns about her “inferiority” in the same place. Ryuji and Kannani go to separate schools, one for Japanese children and one for Korean children, but they both get the same lessons; however, some teachers and Kannani’s school seek to subvert the colonial power and provide Kannani and the other students with their humanity and dignity. During an exercise at school, Ryuji confronts the holes in the veneer of his education that he experiences through his friendship with Kannani. In his journal, he writes,

I’ve heard that we Japanese govern Korea justly and fairly, but actually this isn’t true; I’m very depressed about this. Kannani, the Korean girl who lives in the house next to mine, says she despises Japanese people. The closer I get to Kannani, the more I understand her feelings. I like Kannani; I like her very much. There’s no better friend than her. I despise the Japanese boys who bullied the poor Korean girls yesterday and who humiliate Korean friends like Kannani. It would be better if the Japanese who do things like that are thrown out of Korea. Our school principal told us we must be good friends to Koreans and that Japanese who marry Koreans are great heroes. I truly believe this.

His teacher calls upon him to read his journal entry to the class, and when he finishes, they all fall silent as Ryuji thinks to himself, “The truth always wins out.” The teacher and classmates learn about the “boys” who bullied and raped a Korean girl with a stick the day before, but they “received no punishment of any kind.” Ryuji learns, from his family and school, that he is “superior” to Kannani and that he can do anything he wants to her, but he knows this is false and that he has no right to claim any “superiority” over her or others.

Kannani’s father started a school, but the Japanese colonial government closed it down and forced Kannani and others to go to the colonial school. There, Kannani got lessons from her history teach Uemura “who lectured to the Korean girls about how Japan is always good and Korea is always bad.” Kannani and the other girls hated Uemura, and they mimicked his speech, trying to subvert his lectures because he taught them they were “inferior.”

While Uemura upheld the virulent ideologies of the Japanese colonial government, Mr. Park, a Korean teacher, subverted them. In a geography class, he pointed to a map on the wall and told the students, “Today, we are going to study the land that we are living in today, the one that our ancestors handed down to us; in other words, we’re going to learn about the fatherland, Korea.” Mr. Park’s lecture excited the girls, and he had to calm them down so they wouldn’t get in trouble because he was, through the very act of teaching them about their own history, subverting Japan’s control over Korea.

Controlling education controls the populace. We see this in countless colonial enterprises, authoritarian governments, and elsewhere. Yet, we feel comfortable reading it about elsewhere because we say, “That doesn’t happen in the United States.” Yet, it does. We’ve seen it before with the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Lost Cause narrative, specifically in their push to deem any book that went against their white supremacist ideologies as “unjust to the South.” We see it with “divisive concepts” laws and attempts to ban books from the classroom and libraries. We see it with things such as the 1776 Commission. We see it here. We cannot ignore it and say, “That happened elsewhere in colonial Korea or Pakistan or Germany or . . .”

The question becomes, what lessons do we want to teach our children and future generations?

What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.