earticle

영어

This paper takes Morio Kita’s “Floating”(1958) as the object of consideration. Set in the midst of the Korean War, “Floating” tells the story of eight Japanese who are dispatched to South Korea on a mission to intercept radio communications between North Korean fighter planes and their bases. This paper focuses on the motif of air combat in the Korean War and the metaphor of ‘floating’, and analyzes the character of the Japanese. Through the characteristics found in the perspective of contemporary Japanese people looking at the Korean War, we examine how Japan and the Japanese are portrayed during the Korean War. As “Floating” is based on the Korean War as the main motif and is set in Korea in the midst of the war, it describes the situation of Korea at the time 1951 in many places. However, what Kiyama, the narrator, recalls whenever he witnesses the horrors of war is the war of Japanese he experienced. Just as the Japanese remember the Pacific War as a war against the United States that unfolded in the form of air combat with air raids and the dropping of atomic bombs, the war of Japan recalled by the narrator was a memory of air raids by B29 concentrated in big cities. The eight Japanese who participated in the air combat of the Korean War represent Japan and the Japanese during the Korean War period, as floating people who were unable to establish themselves in a postwar society that had been reborn as a democratic nation. And the common point that attitude of historical reflection on the Korean War lacks is discovered in them. In “Floating”, the Korean War is nothing more than a literary device to recall the memory of Japan's war, and is used as a tool to describe Japan and Japanese after the defeat. “Floating” is a work that describes the self-portraits of Japan and Japanese during the Korean War, not the Korean War, with the motif of the air combat of the Korean War.