People in Okinawa were both victims and perpetrators during Kanto Massacre

“People in Okinawa were victims killed by those in Mainland Japan during the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923. However, they were both perpetrators of massacres as vigilantes.”

Shun Medoruma, a Japanese writer representing literature in Okinawa, said during a press conference held at the Korea Press Center in Jung-gu, Seoul on Monday. He voiced that people in Okinawa were both victims and perpetrators during the Kanto Massacre when innocent Joseon people were killed. “People in Okinawa were considered a lower class than the Mainland Japanese and were mistaken as Joseon people and killed because they didn’t speak the Mainland Japanese language fluently. However, they also had a duality that they discriminated against Joseon people over the fear of being discriminated by the Mainland Japanese,” said the writer. “People eventually become perpetrators unless they make efforts not to become one in history.”

Medoruma was born in Okinawa in 1960 and won the Akutagawa Prize, one of the two literature prizes in Japan with the highest authority along with the Naoki Prize, for his novel, "A Drop of Water." He also won the Kawabata Yasunari for “Spirit Stuffing” in 2000.

The press conference was held in response to his being selected as a winner of the seventh Lee Ho-cheol Literary Prize for Peace hosted by Eunpyeong-gu, Seoul. The prize was established in 2017 to honor writer Lee Ho-cheol who was displaced during the Korean War and wrote novels on conflicts and peace. “Medoruma criticized the self-contradiction and irrationalities of the power structure in Okinawa, including discrimination and oppression in a colony and the U.S. military’s presence, and made efforts to transcend them culturally,” said Kim Seong-ho, the chairman of the selection committee of the prize.


hoho@donga.com