The Transmission of Virulent Ideologies: Part II

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.”