The Strange Name and Ambiguous Gestures of a Japanese Brechtian in the Social Combustion of Prewar Tokyo

Summary

I. Koreya Senda: A Korean of Senda or a Japanese Brechtian Theater Director

In the third section of the 16th IBS symposium “Brecht Among Strangers: Foreign Affairs in a Global World,” discussions were held on issues such as “regional and social combustion,” “critical junctures of globalization,” “(being) forced to the margins, forgotten, and left behind socially and economically.” These are not only current issues of relevance in many places around the world. Similar problems existed in the cities of industrialized countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. People who had lost their jobs in provinces or foreign countries in the process of industrialization moved to large cities as low-wage workers. Cities such as Tokyo, Yokohama, and Osaka in the late 1910s and the early 1920s were East Asian examples of the “critical junctures” of historical globalization. In some districts of these cities, not only people from Japanese rural areas but also from China, Taiwan, and Korea, which the Japanese government had colonized, worked in small factories under harsh conditions. The alleviation of their plights was one of the issues that social activists addressed in their political movements.

In the early 1920s, Kunio Ito (Koreya Senda, 1904–94), later known as one of the major Brechtian theater directors in Japan, studied theater and German literature at Waseda University in Tokyo, dreaming of making a career as an actor and a director. In September 1923, he encountered the extraordinary aggression of the Japanese against foreign citizens at the time of the Great Kanto Earthquake, which took a heavy toll of lives in and around Tokyo. In the utter chaos caused by the earthquake, he was mistaken for a Korean in his neighborhood and almost killed by his compatriots. In the five or six days following the earthquake, Korean citizens were believed to be preparing to attack Japanese citizens, and thousands of them were lynched by vigilante groups and even by police officers.

Soon after this experience, Ito began to call himself Koreya Senda, a Korean of Senda (which is the abbreviated form of Tokyo's Sendagaya district).