One of the most awkward situations I face when hosting foreign guests in Korea is dining at a restaurant without an English menu. What begins as an exchange of gestures and broken words often falters into silence once I reach the point of explaining a dish. There is no need to describe its flavor, aroma, or texture as a gourmand might, yet the names of dishes are often tied to ingredients or expressions rooted in the local context. By contrast, when I am a foreign guest in a non-English-speaking country, I feel most at ease in the Sinosphere—Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Singapore— because of my familiarity with Chinese characters. If I see a menu written in Chinese characters, it is not difficult for me to tell whether a dish contains chicken, pork, noodles, or broth. Even if the spoken languages differ, the written characters are close enough in meaning to serve as a bridge. Moving from one word to the next, like navigating stepping stones across a stream, I can at least avoid the sensation of swallowing something completely unfamiliar.
Still, knowing a few Chinese characters offers only limited convenience when traveling. If I recognize the word gyoza on a menu and point to it, I may be served a plate of dumplings, but that is as far as a single character- word will take me across East Asia. A word alone cannot form a sentence. Isolated, it gives little sense of where it leads or how it moves. It remains only a basic, compressed unit of language. Knowledge of a region built on just a handful of such words scarcely goes deeper than the cluster of hashtags beneath an Instagram post about local restaurants. Touristic knowledge—pieced together from lists of what to eat and what to say—can never amount to a sentence about a region.
The word tourism (觀光) in the Sinosphere derives from a line in the I Ching: “Observe the splendor of the country; it will be advantageous to become the king’s guest.” In its original sense, tourism referred to envoys traveling abroad, who, while beholding the splendor of another land, were received as honored guests. In modern times, however, tourism has come to mean surveying a country’s resources from the vantage point of one entitled to hospitality—that is, from the position of the colonizer. In this case, the tourist’s stance relinquishes any will to understand a region not as a solitary word but as a sentence whose meaning emerges in context. The “borrowed tongue,” then, does no more than salivate at the sight of the land.
View of the College of Basic Medical Sciences of Jilin University, which used to be the State Council during Manchukuo (1932–45). Courtesy of the contributor.
“Once upon a time, there was a country called Manchukuo.” Such an opening would hardly seem out of place, for today Manchukuo survives largely as a forgotten presence. Even in Shenyang and Changchun, where I sought out sites connected to it, the prevailing official attitude toward this chapter of modern history seemed closer to: “Yes, it existed, but we would rather not bring it up.”[02] What most clearly recalls Manchukuo, instead, are the propaganda posters and postcards produced at the time. Japanese historian Kishi Toshihiko has drawn attention to the deployment of what he terms “ephemeral media”—materials reproduced for temporary purposes, such as posters, flyers, commemorative stamps, and picture postcards—in Manchukuo. Examples include picture postcards issued by the South Manchuria Railway Company, which extolled the importance of resource development in the region; the pamphlet Manchuria Resources Overview, published by the Manchuria Resource Hall, a shop and exhibition space introducing the region’s agricultural, livestock, fishery, forestry, and mining resources; and the poster “Behold! New Manchuria, Land of Paradise,” produced by the Tour Office for Korea and Manchuria, which both transmitted information and audiovisual materials on Korea and Manchukuo to Japan and marketed travel products in the region to Japanese consumers.
According to Kishi’s research, Manchukuo’s ephemeral media—produced with printing equipment, techniques, and materials imported from Japan—stood out in a landscape where literacy rates and access to electricity remained unevenly spread. The use of modern printing methods and design gave these materials a striking visual presence, making them effective tools for image building and disseminating state propaganda.[03] Under the puppet-state regime, Manchukuo actively produced images that advertised the region’s productive capacity, in reality serving the Empire of Japan’s interests. In this way, the image of production and the production of images operated in tandem. The wartime production-image-production cycle served not the people of the region, but the de facto colonizers intent on exploiting it. To present Manchukuo as a land of opportunity, an unexplored frontier, or a treasury of mineral wealth was to frame knowledge of the region in terms of production. Colonizers traversed into Manchukuo both physically and intellectually via a path paved by ideas of the territory as “resource” and “paradise.”
“Greater Manchukuo” poster, 37.7 × 52.8 cm. Courtesy of the Ita Yusei Museum, Tottori, Japan.
Information Office, General Affairs Agency, Puppet Manchukuo State Council, “Emerging Greater Manchukuo” poster, 76.5 × 52.0 cm. Courtesy of the Ita Yusei Museum, Tottori, Japan.
Although the colonial relationships between metropole and colony that defined the early twentieth century have formally disappeared, this does not mean that the coloniality underlying the perception of regions has been resolved. The gaze that once reduced a place to a site of production has merely shifted to one that reduces it to a site of tourism. Where once the language of primary industry—terms such as “resource” or “paradise”— framed a region, today it is the vocabulary of the service economy—“famous eatery,” “must-see list”—that provides the entry point into knowledge of place. Yet this shift reflects nothing more than a change in industrial structure; it does not constitute a qualitative transformation in how regions are understood.
The Japanese merchant Harada Toichiro, after traveling through China, Manchuria, Korea, and the Russian Far East, published Travel Daily Records of the Asian Continent, Attached with Comments to China, Korea, and Russia (1894).[04] The book concludes with the claim that Japan must actively develop Siberia as an untapped frontier, and it was promoted by the publisher Aoki Suzando with the slogan: “Why do the Japanese not seize the overflowing wealth of East Asia? Why do we not display the nation’s glory?”[05] Did Harada truly discover the splendor of a state through tourism? What he in fact perceived was an East Asian continent rendered consumable—an amalgam of production sites and tourist attractions, imagined as an object of exploitation. In the present era, when the splendor of a state has been replaced by the neon glow of night markets, the kind of knowledge that whets the appetite at the thought of a region still rests on Harada’s vision of it as both a production base and tourist destination.
Let us now turn to the play Kitty, whose protagonist is named Cat. In the opening scene, Cat lives with her parents and a real cat named Charmy. The father returns home and, like a rude restaurant patron, brusquely demands food from the mother, who serves him beef curry. Cat, however, declares that the apple pie her mother has baked is “cute” and refuses to eat anything else, rejecting the beef curry because the meat is “not cute.” The father rebukes his daughter, insisting that she must eat meat in order to have a good figure, grow tall, and stay alive. A staunch devotee of meat, he eventually erupts with rage when he discovers that the dish his wife has prepared is not meat at all, but soy substitute. In his fury, he rapes his wife at the dinner table. This scene, in which the home is reduced to the kitchen and the wife to the role of cook, exposes the workings of patriarchy. The father’s gaze—finding meaning in both space (the kitchen) and relation (the wife) only within the logic of production—mirrors Japan’s gaze upon Manchuria and Harada’s gaze upon the East Asian continent. The coloniality of this perspective—What can you do for me?—emerges not only on the vast scale of empire but also on the stage.
Exposing the exploitative nature of patriarchy is not the play’s only virtue. The coloniality underlying Manchukuo’s self-presentation as a paradise of production did not vanish with the collapse of the puppet state. In the same way, the father’s disappearance onstage does not signal the end of the exploitative narrative that reduces the home and the wife to functions of production. Back in the theater, after the father’s violence, Cat and her mother resolve to atone for having served him soy meat by offering him a gift of real meat. They purchase not only cuts from the butcher but also jerky and bones from a pet shop, fashioning them into the likeness of the woman with whom the father has been having an affair. They place this figure before him. Resembling a flayed anatomical specimen, it first repels the father, who recoils in horror. Soon, however, he steels himself and prepares to devour the meat-human. At that moment, the meat-human seizes the fork from his hand and stabs him to death. The curtain falls as the real cat, Charmy, feasts on the father’s corpse.
Grotesque as it may be, does the villainous father’s death promise a happy ending? The parricide/mariticide, after all, closes only the first act of a three-act play. The story continues. In act 2, Cat, now an adult, is inadvertently drawn into the filming of a pornographic video at her first job. From then on, she drifts between workplaces, repeatedly appearing as an extra in pornography, until she begins a relationship with Roman, a host-club worker and YouTuber. To support him, she turns to sex work. When Roman’s YouTube channel is suspended and he is dismissed from the host club, he attempts to kill Cat and then himself. At that moment, the meat-human reappears, kills Roman, and saves Cat. Act 3 opens with the widowed mother selling apple pies. As demand grows, she builds a factory, creates more meat-humans, and exploits them as laborers. Her business prospers, and the mother—once a cook of soy-meat dishes—becomes a consumer of meat. Appalled by the way she devours her colleagues (other meat-humans), the meat-human finally kills her.
Performance view of Ichihara Satoko/Q’s KITTY (ROHM Theatre Kyoto Repertory Premiere, February 2025). Text and direction: Ichihara Satoko, Cast: Birdy Wong Chingyan, Hanamoto Yuka, Nagayama Yurie, Sung Soo-yeon. Produced by ROHM Theatre Kyoto. Courtesy of Nakatani Toshiaki.
Throughout the play, the dead and living flesh of humans and animals alike are savored, consumed, and devoured. These scenes show how the colonial gaze—the way of seeing that reduces its object to a site of production or to a mere producer—is embodied and represented. Amid this blood-soaked and brutal narrative, one scene lingers most vividly: Cat declaring the apple pie she likes to be “cute,” while dismissing the beef curry she dislikes as “not cute.” The moment stands in stark contrast to Charmy the cat’s line, describing the father’s flesh as “delicious.” By rendering life as nothing more than edible flesh, the play underscores the violence inherent in taste. And a parallel can be drawn with the colonizer’s satisfaction in images that frame Manchukuo as a land of production—or, more precisely, the colonial gaze that perceives it only as a land to be consumed.
To view something aesthetically is to ask what kind of pleasure it affords, and the most elemental form of that pleasure is taste. One explanation for the etymology of the Chinese character for beauty (美) is that it derives from the term “large sheep” (羊大則美), referring to the pleasure of savoring the sight of a fattened sheep.[06] This reveals how taste and beauty are intertwined sensations, with exploitation at their core. What, then, is the nature of the sensation Cat describes as “cute”? One proposed etymology for the Korean word gwiyeopda (cute) traces it to gayeopda (pitiable), while the Japanese term kawaii (可愛い) is thought to be derived from kaohayushi (顔映し), meaning “a face that is out of shape.”[07] If so, the opening of the play—where Cat calls the food “cute” rather than “delicious”—may be read as a deliberate gesture, foreshadowing the exploitative objectification implicit in the lines that follow. After all, might not the word “delicious” itself be a form of reassurance, an expression of ease in exploiting a being perceived as pitiable or malformed? For the father, meat is delicious (cute) because it provides both the strength that sustains patriarchy and the sustenance produced by the mother in the household. For the mother, meat was once food she did not eat, but after it became the basis of her enterprise—meat-humans working in her factory—and the means by which she celebrated that exploitative success, it, too, became delicious (cute). For Roman, Cat is cute (delicious) because she earns money through sex work to support his lifestyle. These modes of description echo imperial Japan’s promotional images of Manchuria as “resource” and “paradise” or Aoki Suzando’s slogans urging the Japanese to seize East Asia’s “overflowing wealth” and “the nation’s glory.” It is, in other words, the colonizers’ mode of representation, one that gazes upon the object’s pitiable condition only to envision the “pleasure” that the colonizers will easily grant themselves.
In Kitty, characters successively expect others to produce something for them, convinced that such expectations cannot possibly be refused—only to be killed in turn. The play stitches together scenes in which patriarchy, the sex industry, and carnism regard their objects in certain terms: (only) as beautiful, (only) as cute, (only) as delicious. Just as the ephemeral media produced by Manchukuo and imperial Japan abruptly revealed Manchuria’s regionality, so, too, these stage scenes expose the coloniality of objectification and compel the audience to sense, just as abruptly, a particular regionality. Which region this is can be discerned in the dialogue.
The characters in Kitty do not speak. Only Cat delivers lines—and even then she does so through a prerecorded voice.[08] This voice was recorded in advance by the three actors who play Cat—one Japanese, one Korean, and one Hong Konger—each in their mother tongue (Japanese, Korean, and Cantonese, respectively). In their first appearance, each actor typically delivers Cat’s lines in their own language. As the play progresses, however, the recorded voice begins to weave in the other two languages, until, at moments of heightened intensity, Cat’s speech becomes a jumble of all three, even within a single sentence—for example:
媽媽將肉細かく切り刻んで紅淋淋라고 부릅니다. 煮嘢食. (When Mama cuts meat up really small and gets blood everywhere— that’s called cooking).[09]
Since Korean and Japanese are both agglutinative languages with a subject- object-predicate order, it is relatively easy to substitute words or expressions from one into the other. Cantonese, however, is morphologically different. As an isolating language with a subject-verb-object order, its insertion into Korean or Japanese dialogue produces a kind of breakdown: A sentence that has already reached its conclusion in Korean or Japanese must be concluded once again in Cantonese. Even so, we call this heap of unintelligible words and sentences chopped up by Ichiraha a dialogue. What, then, is conveyed through this jumbled speech, spoken in the borrowed “three mothers’ tongue”? Perhaps this mix of languages is an attempt to press against—or even unsettle—the territorial boundaries so often assumed to demarcate the so-called mother tongue.
Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole. [ . . . ] From this internal boundary, which is drawn by the spiritual nature of man himself, the marking of the external boundary by dwelling-place results as a consequence.[10]
The German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) argued that when people speak the same language—more precisely, the same vernacular— the inner boundaries that arise “by nature” among them extend outward to become external boundaries, or national borders. In other words, the borders naturally formed by a people gathered around a common vernacular—that is, a nation—give rise to the state. In this formulation, the nation is nothing more than the vernacular itself, “for it exists only in literature (language).”[11] The political historian Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson would later critique this belief, characterizing the nation as an imagined construct.[12] Nevertheless, so long as the nation is unconsciously regarded as a form of nature, the vernacular it speaks will continue to naturalize territories, cultural and geographical borders, and regions alike.
Had Cat spoken in only one language, the scenes that treat others solely as beautiful, solely as cute, or solely as delicious would naturally have been read as belonging to the region where that language is spoken. If the play had been performed entirely in Japanese, for instance, it would have been received as a story situated within Japan’s “internal boundary,” formed by “those who speak the same language.” The audience, in turn, would inevitably have divided into those who recognized it as a story of their own nation and those who regarded it as foreign. The patchwork dialogue, however, delivered by three actors, resists the naturalization of Cat’s journey into the story of one particular region. With Cat’s speech seeming to issue from three mouths, not only are those unfamiliar with the three languages cast into the role of foreign guests but even native speakers of one of the languages will find themselves repeatedly slipping into that position. Ichihara punctures Fichte’s notion of the internal boundary (language), leaving the audience uncertain of the national context of the stage on which Cat stands and compelling them to encounter the splendor of a state in one region in an altogether different register.
The dialogue in Kitty consists of sentences broken apart and awkwardly stitched together in three languages, producing a deliberately ridiculous form of speech. However, such patchwork language has, at times, functioned as a medium of communication. Consider, for instance, the case of Manchukuo. There, the Japanese, though a minority, occupied key positions and dominated the privileged classes, while the majority, Chinese people referred to as Manchurians, lived as a colonized population. For the purposes of effective governance, the Japanese could not rely solely on their minority language, nor could the Manchurians, for sheer survival, hold fast exclusively to Chinese. Whether issuing commands or pleading for mercy, these two groups without a common language were compelled by necessity to communicate. Out of this necessity emerged Kyōwa-go, a pidgin language developed from the colonizers’ Japanese and the locals’ Mandarin. Consider, for example, the following exchange. A Japanese housewife asks, “Look at this stove’s chimney. Isn’t it broken?” (このストーブのえんとつカンカン，ワイラじゃないか). Her Manchurian servant replies, “Madam, I understand.” (オクサン我的明白了). The housewife speaks primarily in Japanese but inserts the Chinese words for “look” (看看 kànkàn) and “broken” (坏了 huàile), rendered phonetically in katakana. The servant, by contrast, answers in Chinese but begins his sentence with the Japanese honorific okusan (奥さん), meaning “madam.” Such hybrid speech, in which basic Japanese sentences were interlaced with Chinese words or expressions, was not simply a matter of either side casually misusing the other’s language. Linguistically, it belonged to what is known as a pidgin: a makeshift common language used among people who do not otherwise share one.
A pidgin is a “language in process,” or an “initial language” that comes into existence when speakers of different languages, unable to understand one another, extend points of linguistic contact in order to stave off a complete breakdown in communication. Kyōwa-go both reflected the process of Japanese imperial colonization and carried the early form of a Manchukuo language (which likely would have continued to develop had the colonization endured).[13] At first glance, Kyōwa-go might appear little more than clumsy sentences pieced together from a tourist phrasebook or the faltering speech of a foreign visitor relying on a handful of Chinese characters. Yet the traces of this linguistic game—in casual greetings, commands, commercial exchanges, and popular expressions oscillating between ridicule and fascination—show that participation in it was never entirely one-sided, even under profoundly unequal power relations. This language is fraught with hesitant efforts on the parts of both Manchurians and Japanese to stitch together a fractured society, culture, language, and people—traces that illuminate the particularities of Manchuria’s regional condition. As noted earlier, a pidgin is not merely a clumsy overlay of foreign words onto a native tongue, but a fully functional communicative system—an embryonic stage in the emergence of a new language. Seen in this light, Kyōwa-go, as both a language of process and of beginnings, questions the very illusion of linguistic perfection or complete mastery. In place of Fichte’s purist belief—that language naturalizes a people and a region, rendering them eternal—pidgin and Kyōwa-go point to a different lesson: Knowledge of a region never arrives at a state of completion, and the conviction that only the native can possess such knowledge must likewise be abandoned.
If Kyōwa-go revealed Manchuria through the linguistic play between Manchurians and Japanese, what region is disclosed by Cat’s lines? Cat may be understood as embodying the convergence of three identities— woman, worker, and animal—and, further, as representing those who speak Japanese, Korean, and Cantonese. In this sense, her seemingly chaotic lines might themselves be read as a pidgin: an improvised language forged from three languages by the women, workers, and animals of this region. The region her speech evokes could be referred to as East Asia as a space where patriarchy, the sex industry, and carnism converge in trinity. However, Cat’s pidgin does not seek to establish another internal boundary. This is because her speech resists the colonial impulse to remember only those words that name what a region can provide, while also challenging the notion of approaching a region through complete knowledge, pure nativeness, or the perfect sentence. Therefore, Cat does not claim that the East Asia disclosed in her words is the only or the true East Asia. Via the East Asia of the colonized, the audience arrives instead in a kind of terra nullius where tourists or foreign guests can’t help but speak with a “borrowed tongue.”
In this essay, I have traced a journey toward knowing a region. Such journeys often begin with fragmentary knowledge—akin to being able to read just enough words on a menu to avoid spoiling a meal—about a place that could bring “pleasure.” When we speak haltingly of a region with a “borrowed tongue,” the danger always lurks like smoldering embers that we might treat that region merely as a means to an end. Nevertheless, the belief that one can achieve complete knowledge of a region, rendering it not in broken words but in seamless sentences, carries its own blind spots. For such a belief risks overlooking the fractured and partial speech of the diverse voices that constitute a region, instead naturalizing only a few features— such as language or ethnicity.
Ichihara Satoko’s Kitty and the pidgin Kyōwa-go both suggest that knowing a region requires the humility to recognize that anyone may become a foreign guest. Both are composed of scattered words: The first weaves together a Manchukuo of early twentieth-century Manchurians and Japanese; the second, the East Asia of contemporary women who speak Japanese, Korean, and Cantonese, workers, and animals. However, the regions thus woven consist of incomplete sentences. These imperfections resemble the situations of their incomplete speakers, as well as the ground on which they stand. In the end, Manchurians, Japanese, and Cat alike are the very incomplete sentences that they utter with borrowed tongues. At the same time, they become the regions where they must live like tourists— all are guests, turning their “borrowed tongues” and “borrowed ears” into sentences and regions. I close with the final lines of a song titled “Borrowed Tongue”: “Now, let me tell you. / Your mouth and ears were never your own.”[14]
* I am grateful to Ita Yusei Museum, Ichihara Satoko, Ogura Yukako of Theatre Company Q, and Manabe Shunsuke of ROHM Theatre Kyoto for providing materials, and to Yu Yolan for the Cantonese translation.
Yi Moon-seok is interested in how the social aspects mediating between the state and the individual can be created within visual culture, and he writes and plans projects related to this theme. He currently works as a manager at the MMCA Residency Goyang. He co-managed the exhibition space Philosopher’s Stone [Mihakgwan] (2021–24). He worked as a project manager and assistant curator at the Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2020–23). Through the project Against the Dragon Light (2019–), co-curated with curator Eugene Hannah Park, he has been conducting workshops and publications focusing on socially engaged art in East Asia.
[1] Established in 1932 in Manchuria by the Empire of Japan’s Kwantung Army, Manchukuo outwardly promoted the principle of “five nations in harmony, utopia of the kingly way,” envisioning an Eastern utopia in which five Asian peoples—the Japanese, Manchus, Han Chinese, Mongols, and Koreans—would coexist in harmony. This vision was juxtaposed with the Western powers, which were seen as ruling through hegemonic force, by upholding the Confucian ideal of the kingly way. In practice, however, Manchukuo existed only as a puppet state, serving as a base of production for Japan’s war supplies and as a strategic foothold for the empire’s expansion into China and Russia.
[2] Sites too prominent to ignore—such as the former imperial palace—have been refurbished as tourist attractions, while many of the monumental government buildings from the period have been repurposed as university or hospital facilities. The stone markers placed in front of them invariably refer to the “State of Manchukuo” with the prefix “wei”, meaning “false.” Smaller structures, however—the sort that in Korea might at least have been preserved as registered cultural heritage—are often in such advanced disrepair that many are on the verge of collapse. According to a local guide who assisted me during my fieldwork, the Chinese government has chosen not to demolish these sites outright, but instead to leave them in a state of neglect.
[3] Kishi Toshihiko, Manchukuo Through Visual Media: Posters, Picture Postcards, Stamps [in Korean], trans. Jeon Kyung-sun (Seoul: Somyung Publishing, 2019), 20–23, 45–48, 58–63.
[4] Harada Toichiro, Travel Daily Records of the Asian Continent, Attached with Comments to China, Korea, and Russia [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Aoki Suzando, 1894).
[5] Ibid., 43–44.
[6] “[The character 美] denotes sweetness. It is composed of the graphs for sheep (羊) and great (大). […] As the commentary explains, a large sheep signifies beauty.” “美,” Dictionary of Chinese Character [in Chinese], https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E7%BE%8E/.
[7] Choi Jiyeon, “We Are Better than We Think,” Chungcheong Times, last modified December 27, 2023, http://www.cctimes.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=780871/.
[8] Strictly speaking, the other characters’ lines are also written into the script, but they all appear in parentheses, so the actors perform them silently, without speaking. Roman’s voice is heard only when his YouTube broadcasts are shown onstage. The real cat, Charmy’s lines appear as subtitles projected on a screen, accompanied by the sound of meowing. Cat’s recorded lines are projected simultaneously in Japanese and English on screens placed above and below the stage.
[9] Here, the underlined portions are in Japanese, the boldface portions in Korean, and the remainder in Cantonese.
[10] Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull (Chicago and London: Open Court Publishing Company, 1922), 223–224.
[11] Karatani Kōjin, Language and State: Lecture Series II [in Korean], trans. Cho Young-il (Seoul: Book Publishing b, 2011), 30.
[12] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
[13] Chien Yuehchen, “Takashi Sakurai Wartime Pidgin Chinese: Kyowago, Soldier Chinese and Others. Sangensha. 2015,” The Japanese Journal of Language in Society [in Japanese] 20, no. 1 (2017): 190–192.
[14] “Borrowed Tongue,” track 2 on Lee Minhwi, Borrowed Tongue, 2016.
Fellow Sooyoung Leam
