Jan 16, 2016
Shota T. Ogawa
Film director Oh Deok-soo passed away from lung cancer on
Sunday. He was 74. Oh is known for his feature-length documentary films on
Zainichi Koreans (Resident Koreans in Japan) including Against Fingerprinting (1984) and The Story of Koreans in Postwar Japan: Zainichi (1997).
I met Oh late in his life. In 2010, when I first interviewed
him for my doctoral project, I was surprised to learn that he had as many
questions for me as I did for him. In the years following, it became my habit
to pay him a visit when I was back in Japan not only to seek advice on my
dissertation, but to report on my life in the U.S., for he was always
interested in hearing about the different and diverse ways in which Zainichi
Koreans live today. While I cannot write a personal tribute informed by
intimate familiarity, I want to offer a brief summary of his resume in the way
I believe he would have liked to see it told.
Born in 1941 in Kazuno City, Akita Prefecture, Oh first
entered the film world as an assistant to Nagisa Oshima, working on Violence at Noon (1966) and Sing a Song of Sex (1967), before
working for Daiei and Toei in their film divisions through the late 1960s and
the 1970s. Some of the better known television productions he worked on include
The Guardsman (starring Ken Utsui,
Daiei/TBS, 1965-1971), A Lone Wolf (starring
Shigeru Amachi, Toei/NTV, 1967-1968), and Key
Hunter (starring Tetsuro Tamba and Sonny Chiba, Toei/TBS, 1968-1973).
Oh was a familiar presence in local film festivals and
public symposia, particularly since completing his lifework, The Story of Koreans in Postwar Japan,
in 1997 which involved working closely with grassroots groups across Japan that
co-sponsored its production and realized a nation-wide tour of the film. In
addition to making his own films, he was active in organizing screenings of
others’ works that highlighted the historical presence of Koreans within
Japanese cinema. In the screenings he organized for the History Museum of
J-Koreans in Azabu, for example, he showcased the works of Zainichi Korean
directors such as Sai Yoichi, Lee Sang-il, and Kim Su-gil alongside films made
by Japanese directors that depicted Zainichi Koreans in interesting ways. Each screening
was accompanied by a guest speaker who might be the director, a staff member,
or a viewer with a special attachment to the title, and a post-screening
discussion followed by a party gave the event a unique communal character.
In recent years, he had branched out into exhibiting his own
photographs and probing the possibility of curating a museum exhibition of
picture books and school textbooks written for Korean children in Occupied
Japan. His multifaceted activity as a filmmaker, collector, curator, and
cultural organizer stemmed from his work on the monumental documentary, The Story of Koreans in Postwar Japan, for
which he had to condense a vast archive of music, photographs, home movies,
newsreels, and material artifacts into its running time of four-and-a-half
hours.
The unique ways in which Oh’s professional and artistic
career developed around rather than
fully within cinema were also a
product of circumstances. In an interview with film scholar Takashi Monma in
2005, Oh recounts that most studios had stopped hiring assistant directors when
he graduated from Waseda’s Theater Department in 1965. Even in Toei’s TV
division (Toei Tokyo Production) where he received most of the training and
rose to the rank of Chief Assistant Director, he was still on an irregular
contract with limited benefits or job security. The second half of his time at
Toei was thus spent on a prolonged strike that demanded improved labor
conditions for contract employees. It was only by taking up freelance
assignments to write screenplays for film, television, and manga, while
collectively running a franchised noodle shop that Oh and his fellow strikers
of Toei Production Company Labor Union were able to live through the 1970s.
It was paradoxically during the prolonged strike that Oh
found the key to direct his own films. Through befriending the editors of the
Zainichi Korean magazine Madan and
later cofounding its informal successor Jansori,
Oh became involved in the burgeoning movement of young Japan-born Zainichi
Koreans that sought to build a public sphere that overcame the Cold War
division. When the anti-fingerprinting protest broke out in 1980 and developed
into a major social movement by 1985, he found himself ideally situated to
document the movement from within, thanks to the significant overlap between
the target audience of Jansori and
the main actors of the protest movement. He founded his independent production
company Oh Kikaku for the project which was completed and screened within a
year while the protest was still ongoing.
On a number of occasions, Oh raised objection to the label
“Zainichi Korean film director” which he found constricting. But no other
director has so consistently explored the interrelation between Zainichi and
film, or to rephrase in his preferred expression: what it means to be Zainichi
Koreans living at a time when we have access to historical film documents. If
it is apt to call him a representative Zainichi Korean film director, it is not
because his interest was limited to Zainichi Korean issues, but because he took
up the challenge of weaving Zainichi Koreans’ social concerns into the fabric
of cinema. It is in this spirit that we can appreciate the opening scene of his
maiden film, Against Fingerprinting, that
shows an alien registration card set on fire. This was, he told the audience at
a screening, a visual homage paid to Kei Kumai’s Nihon retto (1965) that featured a visually striking shot of ants engulfed
in flame against the backdrop of the map of Japan. With Oh’s documentaries, we
can learn about Chesa (a Korean ceremony of ancestor worship) to a-ha’s “Take
On Me,” or make unexpected connections between Zainichi Korean history and
Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters or with
Yoshio Tabata’s postwar hit, Kaeribune (Repatriation
Boat). He made Zainichi Korean history cinematic.
At a time when Directors Guild of Japan is chaired by Sai
Yoichi and Eiren (Motion Picture Producer Association of Japan) have nominated
works by Sai, Lee Sang-il, and Yang Yong-hi to compete for the Foreign Language
Oscar in the Academy Awards, it appears all but certain that Zainichi Koreans
have gained citizenship in the world of cinema. Oh’s legacy might be understood
in the reverse term. Instead of making it in the film business, he made cinema relevant
to as many Zainichi Koreans as he could.
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