Morning Dew
– A collaborative project between the artist and ex-“returnees” who defected from North Korea to Japan
Soni Kum, Hiroki Yamamoto and Kazuya Takagawa, and Nobuaki Takekawa with curator Yumiko Okada
From 1959 to 1984, more than ninety thousand Zainichi Koreans (ethnic Koreans resident in Japan) were repatriated by the Japanese and North Korean government to North Korea, a program of deportation that was couched as a humanitarian effort but was driven by Cold War politics. The so-called “returnees,” convinced they were moving to a “paradise on earth,” faced a harsh reality in North Korea that compelled some of them to defect. Those “ex-returnees” now living again in Japan hide the fact that they defected from North Korea due to fear of ongoing discrimination within the Zainichi community and worries for their relatives who remain in North Korea. Stigmatized as having been “brainwashed” by the totalitarian North Korean government, they live an invisible existence in Japan.
This exhibition is a collaborative effort of artists Soni Kum, Hiroki Yamamoto and Kazuya Takagawa, and Nobuaki Takekawa with curator Yumiko Okada that was first initiated from 2019 to 2020. Based on personal encounters with sixteen former “returnees” or their descendants, the three installations presented here artistically evoke the hidden stories of these former “returnees.”
Soni Kum’s three-channel video Morning Dew takes its title from a popular 1980 protest song by Kim Min-Gi. The song’s multiple interpretations, whether in the context of the artist’s having learned the song as a child in a Chongryon (North Korean) elementary school in Tokyo, or as part of the pro-democracy movement in South Korea in the 1980s, parallel the juxtapositions of historic film footage and live-acted scenes that the artist compiled to evoke the complicated emotions and experiences of former “returnees.” Without showing any of her interviews, the artist references violent abuses of power during Japan’s colonization of Korea, World War II, and the Korean War, as well as North Korean political propaganda, unsettling images of destruction, sweepingly beautiful landscapes, and footage of present-day Tokyo. Each of the seven sections of Morning Dew begins with a quote drawn from various sources including Aeschylus, Albert Camus, historian Bruce Cumings, Vladimir Lenin, an “ex-returnee” informant, and a Lakota Elder.
Hiroki Yamamoto and Kazuya Takagawa’s video Testimony explores the unusual dream of one “ex-returnee” and poses questions about how personal experience, memory, and the subconscious intertwine to envision the past.
The installation Tottori Korokoro (Rolling Acorns) documents artist Nobuaki Takekawa’s efforts to bring North Korean defector Myungjoo Kim from South Korea to Tottori, Japan, to see where her Zainichifather grew up before he was repatriated. Through the collaborative making of pottery, memories were shared, and connections made across generations and cultures.
朝露 Morning Dew: The Stigma of Being “Brainwashed”
By Soni Kum
Three-channel video installation (color; sound)
2020, 60 minutes
This video work is based on my experiences with fifteen former “returnees” who have defected and are living in Japan, whom I met and interviewed between July 2019 and July 2020. The “ex-returnees” refer to Zainichi Koreans who lived in Japan before emigrating to North Korea.
The “ex-returnees” have no place in the Zainichi community in today's Japan, and they are afraid that their remaining family members in North Korea might be taken away to internment camps. In addition, they fear that they might be discriminated against if their neighbors or acquaintances knew they were North Korean defectors. One of the challenges in making this video was that I was not permitted to film their faces.
Amid this aporia, I decided to create a video work composed of three screens, using footage from multiple sources, including live-action scenes with actors, archival materials, footage donated by friends, and footage downloaded from online sources.
I don’t directly know the people who appear in the archival film clips. Many of them have probably already passed away. Through collaboration with people across time and space, I wove a poetic video piece, which traces the fragmentary vestiges of violence.
Support：北朝鮮難民救援基金 加藤博／北朝鮮帰国者の生命と人権を守る会 山田文明／北朝鮮の強制収容所をなくすアクションの会 宋允復、小川晴久、横田めぐみさん等被拉致日本人救出新潟の会 小島晴則
Cast：和座彩、石川学、小島晴則
Interview：元「帰国者」のみなさま
Director of Photography：飯岡幸子 Yukiko Iioka
Technical Support：RAM Association（東京藝術大学大学院映像研究科）桂英史、和田信太郎、佐藤朋子
Music：Stace Constantinou, Anastasia Vronski
Installation：山形一生 Issei Yamagata
Translation：Rebecca Jennison
Support：川村文化芸術振興財団 ソーシャリー・エンゲイジド・アート支援助成
Archive Support：Jane Jin Kaisen、神戸映画資料館 安井喜雄、康浩郎、「朝鮮 蔚山達里にて」一般財団法人 宮本記念財団 所蔵 宮本馨太郎 撮影、The Past Unearthed, the Fourth Encounter (Moving Images From Gosfilmofond), Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision Steve Russell, The US National Archives, 根津映画倶楽部 島啓一、舞木千尋、浅川志保、小島晴則、NPO法人映画保存協会 石原香絵、International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)、NHK 荒井拓
Tottori Korokoro (Rolling Acorns), 2020
By Nobuaki Takekawa
Ceramics, archival materials, and slide show
Encounter with Meehwa Shin’s book Defectors
As part of my research, I realized that the Japanese tendency to consume the "devastation" of North Korea in the 1990s pressured “ex-returnees” to exclude any positive experiences from their stories about living in North Korea. This has contributed to stress and division within the Zainichi community when looking back on the repatriation project. In the chapter on Kiwon Chun, a “professional protector of North Korean defectors,” it is mentioned that the grandparents and father of Myungjoo Kim migrated to North Korea from Tottori in Japan as part of the repatriation project.
What is unique about the book Defectors by Meehwa Shin, published in 2018, is that it tries to inspire other defectors and related projects by focusing on their “successes” after their defection, rather than the painful experiences in North Korea.
I decided to start my Morning Dew project by trying to contact Myungjoo Kim. Myungjoo Kim lives in South Korea, and her father was born in Tottori and lives in North Korea. I believed that my role was to replace those experiential gaps between generations with art that evokes the imagination of the audience.
Inviting Myungjoo Kim to Tottori
Myungjoo Kim’s grandparents were from Cheju Island and immigrated to Osaka during the colonial period. After the war, her grandfather joined Chongryon, The General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, and moved to Tottori. Myungjoo Kim’s father migrated to North Korea with his parents under a repatriation program when he was fourteen years old.
Born in North Korea, Myungjoo Kim defected in 1998 at the age of eighteen, amidst the hardships of life after the “Arduous March” (also known as the North Korean Famine or the March of Suffering, a period of economic crisis and mass starvation from 1994 to 1998). In Northern China, she married a South Korean man who worked for a Korean company. In May 2000, when she was seven months pregnant, she attempted to smuggle herself into South Korea, but her ship strayed into North Korean territorial waters; she was arrested and forced to have an abortion.
In June 2000, she was released from prison with amnesty to commemorate the North-South summit. She again crossed the border to China and was reunited with her husband. She had another child, who was born with cerebral palsy. She confided to a Korean newspaper reporter that she wanted her son to receive medical treatment in South Korea. In 2007, she defected to Thailand, leaving her seven-year-old son behind. There she was assisted by Pastor Kiwon Chun. Since then, she has been living in South Korea and her son was able to undergo surgery.
The Trip to Tottori
Someday, instead of my father, I would definitely like to visit Tottori, which my father misses so much. My father told me stories about his memories of playing on the beautiful beaches of Tottori, so everything is etched in the corner of my mind about where to go and what to see. I could tell my father, ‘I went to your hometown, dad!’ How pleased he would be if I could report that to him.
—Myungjoo Kim in Meehwa Shin’s Defectors
I had already had connections with people involved in the arts in Tottori Prefecture and Myungjoo Kim’s words resonated with me. I consulted with Defectors author Meehwa Shin, and through the trust she had built with her interviewees, I was able to invite Myungjoo Kim (and three others from Durihana Church in Seoul) to visit Tottori.
From February 16 to 20, 2020, we welcomed MyungJoo Kim and three others to Tottori Prefecture to visit various seaside areas where her father might have grown up. During the trip, we learned about the Korean residents in Tottori Prefecture and the repatriation project, as well as the historical exchange between Tottori and the Korean Peninsula. The group shared warm feelings of connection while accepting the sadness of a life torn apart by politics and history. They were a dreamlike five days that passed by in a flash.
Tottori Korokoro (Rolling Acorns)
Kazuwa-yaki pottery, which has been passed down in Kurayoshi City, was once a popular ware for the common people. Myungjoo Kim’s father may have used it. In the workshop of Kiyoshi Nakamori, the third generation of Kazuwa-yaki potters, Myungjoo Kim made acorn objects as a gift to her father.
Acorns are called tottori (토토리) in Korean. I don’t know if it was intentional or accidental, but Myungjoo Kim’s father taught his daughter the Japanese children’s song “Donguri Korokoro” (“Rolling Acorns”). When I read the lyrics again, the part “We played together for a while, but I missed the mountain so much that I cried” sounded sad.
I added pottery made in my atelier in Saitama to the locally produced Kazuwa-yaki pottery to create an installation as a waterscape, overlapping the pond of “Donguri Korokoro,” the Sea of Japan, and the memories of the trip.
With special thanks to
Meehwa Shin, Yoshimasa Nishimura, Azumi Akai, Naomasa Okumura, Taishi Sasayama, Yusuke Ueda, on Lee, Yuki Fujiwara, Noboru Mitani, Yeonuk Jeong, Kiyoshi Nakamori, Kimikatsu Kinoshita, Yumiko Okada, Guest house Tami, Myungjoo Kim
Yejin Jo, Kyung Hee Lee, Kiwon Chun
Testimony, 2020
By Hiroki Yamamoto and Kazuya Takagawa,
Video (color; sound) 24 minutes
In The Poetics of Space, written in 1957, Gaston Bachelard notes, “Every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds special color.” As this imaginative French philosopher put it, the “image” of reality that a person envisions may be intricately intertwined with the “dream” that the person sees.
In the fall of 2019, we began interviewing a male former “returnee” from Japan. He “returned” to North Korea in the 1970s and “defected” to Japan around 2010. The interview went smoothly as we asked about life in North Korea and the circumstances of his defection, but then we suddenly encountered a situation that perplexed us. During the interview, in a response to a casual question posed as a kind icebreaker, the man began to speak suddenly and awkwardly. The prompt was quite simple: Tell us about an impressive dream you had in North Korea. The content of the dream that he told us was so unusual that it was difficult to tell the difference between the dream and reality.
We decided to delve into his dream as deeply as we could. How was it connected to the realities of postwar Japan and North Korea, which he experienced firsthand? Or were they disconnected? Was the image of a “democratic nation” that Japan dreamed of after the war, or the image of “Heaven on Earth” that North Korea dreamed of following the division of North and South after the Korean War, part of the strange—at least they seem to be so to us—dreams of men? And how does history (if there is such a thing) capture or constrain this existence?
If reality and dreams form an intertwining entanglement, why can’t dreams testify to reality (or at least some of its aspects)? Is there a clear-cut boundary between dream and reality and what do our attempts to distinguish between the two throw back at us? How can the “personal past” be situated and to what extent can art be an effective means of unraveling something akin to the Gordian Knot?
Morning Dew: The Experience
This documentary aims to convey the essence of a multi-media exhibit focusing on the lives of Zainichi Koreans (ethnic Koreans resident in Japan). It was installed at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Cornell in the spring of 2023. Titled, "Morning Dew: the Stigma of Being Brainwashed," it was a collaborative three-part installation by Soni Kum, Hiroki Yamamoto and Kazuya Takagawa, and Nobuaki Takekawa. The documentary was produced by two Cornell undergraduate film students, Shania Gumbac Bravo ('23) and Shuqian Lyu ('25) and funded by the Cornell Council on the Arts.
With special thanks to
Ellen Avril, Chief Curator and the Judith H. Stoikov Curator of Asian Art, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
Brett de Bary, Professor Emeritus, Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University
Matt Conway, Registrar, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
Amala Lane, Program Initiatives and Media Coordinator, East Asia Program, Cornell University
Andrea Potochniak, Editorial Manager, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
William J. Woodams, Chief Preparator, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
T. Joshua Young, Administrative Manager, Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University
Financial support provided by
Kawamura Arts and Cultural Foundation, Socially Engaged Art Support Grant
The Pola Art Foundation
The Jarett F. Wait, Class of 1980, and Younghee Kim-Wait Endowment for Korean Arts at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
East Asia Program, Cornell University
Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA)
