When the New Year arrived and the production of my project entered its most intense phase, I soothed my overstimulated mind each night by reading a few pages of Han Kang’s essays and fiction before falling asleep. The habit began after I saw a news report late last year: President Yoon Suk Yeol had declared martial law, and I wanted to know more about the Gwangju Democratization Movement (May 18–27, 1980).
I planned to start with Human Acts, Han’s novel on the incident, yet The White Book and The Greek Hours caught my eyes first. At the time, I was editing a documentary, Fire in Water, on agriculture and brewing in Korea under Japanese rule (1910–45) and their ties to imperialism, so for the script I was reading Yanagi Sōetsu’s “The Art of Korea” (1922), Martin Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), and Yuk Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China (2016). I picked up The White Book and The Greek Hours because I was thinking about the whiteness Yanagi discerned in Korea and about the Greek philosophy that underpins technology of Western origin.
Nagata Kosuke, Fire in Water, 2025, single-channel video, color, sound, 41 min. 15 sec. Courtesy of the artist.
In The Art of Korea, Yanagi compares the arts of Japan, China, and Korea. He writes that Japan is an art of color, China an art of form, and Korea an art of line. A line, lacking internal fullness, necessarily carries its blankness—its whiteness—outside itself.[02] After Korea’s liberation from the Empire of Japan in 1945, Yanagi’s ideas were reimported into South Korea and reread amid the rise of dansaekhwa, yet his exoticizing gaze was later criticized.
The White Book, where Han Kang both aligns with and separates from her sister who died in premature birth, and in the same author’s The Greek Hours, in which a protagonist with aphasia studies Greek to regain her voice, are—though this is a somewhat rough grouping—both stories of new grafts made onto what had once been broken.
The reason I draw a single, rather flat motif—a graft onto what had once been broken—from the lonely polysemy of Han’s writing is that, while making my film, I kept turning this motif over in my mind. First of all, I was thinking about Korean agriculture and the brewing trade, both uprooted by colonial rule and war. At the outset, I felt uneasy about discussing that history from my Japanese point of view, yet the more pages I added to the script, the clearer it became that Japanese modernity—and, by extension, my own life—are grafted onto this uprooting.
Second, there is a curious nearness that appears only after a long detour: the nearness between living the life of someone whose own was halted (The White Book) and an East Asian who, having lost her own tongue, studies Greek, often regarded as the wellspring of the West (The Greek Hours). It is like meeting again on the far side of the earth after pushing one another ever farther away. In that scene, the re-mythologizing of a society torn apart by modernization stands side by side with the disciplining of a person raised in the suburb as nonplace.
Confronting Ruptures in History
Those of us whose lives began after the age of modernization—whenever I use the word we/us, I bump against the limits of my own imagination and the otherness of the others—stand, to a greater or lesser degree, on ground laid by rupture and defeat. Modernization, Westernization, industrialization, colonization: The breaks opened up everywhere and on every level— between center and periphery, humans and nature, West and East, naichi (mainland Japan) and gaichi (occupied territories). Even the idea of “overcoming modernity” espoused by the Kyoto School of thought in Japan, which was rushing toward total war at the end of the Pacific War (1941–45), was, at least for those scholars, a project to restore Japan’s traditional communities that had been undermined by Eurocentric modernization and individualism.[03] In other words, overcoming modernity was itself a graft onto something that had been broken.
The first terrain the Japanese government converted into a testing ground for modern agriculture, and the earliest region placed under the Liquor Tax Law’s tight controls, was not Taiwan or Korea, nor Manchuria or the mandated South Seas, but Japan’s own countryside.[04] Agronomist Terao Hiroshi (1883–1961)—who helped drive Japan’s plant-breeding revolution— was convinced that modern agriculture would thrive in the colonies precisely because the same techniques had already succeeded in Tōhoku, a region long labeled unfit for rice and dogged by repeated crop failures in Japan. Meanwhile, the Liquor Tax Law’s ban on home brewing first choked the doburoku (farmers’ rice wine) culture of Japan’s own villages. In its effort to secure the geobody of Japan, imperial policy colonized the country from within. Once the subject of “modern Japan” was created, every last detail of the past was retrospectively reorganized—like learning, through steady drill, to flex a little toe that had never obeyed.
That said, pointing out that the victims of modernization and imperialism can be found inside Japan itself—while essential for thinking about agency in past violence—also risks obscuring accountability. We cannot load every lost life and culture onto the vague ghost of modernity—neither can we frame the plunder and destruction of colonialism in a simple opposition of subject and object. Precisely for this reason we need self-critique, through which we gain a chance to build solidarity across positions.
When I confront the vast question of historical responsibility, I remember Ogata Masato (1953–), who spearheaded the drive for official recognition of Minamata patients, lost his father to the illness and suffered from it himself. Minamata disease first surfaced around 1950 in Minamata City, Kumamoto Prefecture, in southern Japan; it was caused by organic mercury in factory effluent released by Chisso (Japan Nitrogenous Fertilizer Co., Ltd.).[05] He poignantly stated: “Chisso was me.” For nearly twenty years, Ogata fought to broaden compensation and secure fair certification for victims, yet in 1985 he withdrew his application and stepped away from the movement, declaring that settlement payments would reduce a pain that was meant to be shared to something like a business transaction—and he refused that.[06]
Chisso, he argued, embodied the guilt of civilization, a guilt none of us can escape. An impersonal system had driven the projects of modernity and colonialism, drawing everyone into its gears. Ogata’s response was to seek a way outside that system—outside modernity itself. It was a form of individualism born of staring the world squarely in the face, and it must have involved a self-destructive struggle verging on insanity. Born of the sea and having lived the life of a fisherman, Ogata, chose to withdraw from the struggle and return to the waters he called home. But for most people today, living in a modernity made all-encompassing by capitalism, there is no longer any sea to return to—and even if there were, going back would no longer be the right course. As I discuss later, modernity, as Ogata put it, remains unsolved.
Cover of A Catalogue of Joseon Rice Varieties [in Korean] (2022). In 1913, the Japanese Government-General of Korea compiled and published a book cataloging 3,830 traditional rice varieties from across the Korean Peninsula. The National Institute of Agricultural Sciences translated and published this work.
South Asian rice is generally not only different in rice quality from Japanese rice, but far inferior in terms of yield productivity and especially in its responsiveness to fertilizer for increasing yield. Its straw is also frail and incapable of making tough ropes or sacks as the Japanese rice straw can. In appearance, just once glance reveals the shapely form of the Japanese rice, clearly strong, healthy, fertile, and high-yielding, giving the deep impression that it is indeed the superior species. Hence I ought to say, “In our country, even our rice is of the Yamato race.”[07]
Historian Fujihara Tatsushi, in The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of Rice, underscores the role of plant-breeding technology in imperial Japan’s agricultural control of Korea and Taiwan. “Once a particular variety is introduced, no additional technique can raise yields beyond the biological ceiling set by that variety; what people can do is create the best environment so the plant can reach its own limit.”[08] The scale of irrigation works and the kinds and amounts of fertilizer and pesticide are all dictated by the chosen variety. Through its genetic information, the seed therefore “demands” certain fertilizers, in what quantities, and what forms of land improvement to undertake. Fujihara calls breeding technology “the advance guard, the trailblazer, and the command center of the agricultural-technology package that Japan supplied to farm villages in both the home islands and its colonies.”[09]
Rice equivalent to the “Yamato race” was taken into the colonies and, sometimes through economic incentive and sometimes by force, gradually replaced the local strains that farmers had passed down through generations. Select landraces noted for disease resistance or high yields served as interim standard varieties until area-specific breeds could be created, or they themselves became material for further breeding. The importation of improved Japanese varieties into the colonies and the enrollment of local landraces into plant-breeding technology and the modern farm system show that imperial projects such as colonization and assimilation were carried out even through nonhuman agents. Both the “Yamato” rice and the “Japanized” local strains, by virtue of their genetic traits, drove fertilizer production and irrigation works forward.
In the 1920s, the Rice Production Increase Plan in Korea promoted not only the introduction of high-yield, fertilizer-hungry rice varieties but also the construction of large fertilizer plants and the dams needed to power them in the northern Korean peninsula. After completing Japan’s first synthetic ammonium-sulfate plant in 1923, Nippon Chisso Fertilizer Co., Ltd., selected Heungnam for its initial large-scale factory and the Pujon River as the site of the hydroelectric station. The fertilizer demand generated by the plan drew Chōsen Chisso Fertilizer Co., Ltd., and the entire Heungnam industrial complex to the region. To secure the electricity indispensable to chemical production, a chain of mountain dams, beginning with the one on the Pujon River, was built in the northern highlands. Hydroelectric and chemical installations centered on Chōsen Chisso Fertilizer Co., Ltd., launched originally to make fertilizer, aligned with the Japanese Government- General of Korea’s industrialization policy in the 1930s. The fertilizer company soon began producing carbide and explosives and, by the final phase of the Pacific War, isooctane for aircraft fuel.[10] Thus the “demands” issued by “Yamato” rice, carried through networks of capital and infrastructure, extended even into the military sector.
Cover of A Catalogue of Joseon Rice Varieties [in Korean] (2022). In 1913, the Japanese Government-General of Korea compiled and published a book cataloging 3,830 traditional rice varieties from across the Korean Peninsula. The National Institute of Agricultural Sciences translated and published this work.
This anthropomorphized “Yamato” race and the policy of drawing other species into the imperial fold extended beyond rice to microorganisms such as fungi. To increase industrial output and raise tax revenue, the modernization of Korea’s brewing sector introduced pure laboratory-cultured strains and, through the Liquor Tax system, suppressed home brewing. Today, liquor accounts for less than 2 percent of Japan’s tax income, yet in 1899, four years after the first Sino-Japanese War, liquor taxes provided more than 35 percent of state revenue.[11] Much of the money used to pay off war debts and administer Taiwan (1895–1945) was, indirectly, supplied by this tax.
In Korea, brewers had long relied on nuruk, a native fermentation starter that harbored the fungi present in each brewing environment. Because most alcohol was made not in centralized plants, but in small eating houses called jumak, every traditional liquor carried flavors and aromas specific to its locality. The Liquor Tax Ordinance introduced in 1916, however, made the production of nuruk and alcoholic drinks subject to licensing and pushed the sector toward consolidation. Techniques for making seishu, Japanese rice wine, and shōchū, distilled alcohol, were imported, laying the groundwork for modern Korean brewing. Traditional soju, Korean distilled alcohol, was replaced by a modernized Japanese shōchū that used Aspergillus luchuensis and Aspergillus kawachii, mold first isolated in Okinawa and its albino strain.
Resources for microbial isolation were gathered from everywhere, from Manchuria to the South Seas, and specimens with useful properties were cultivated in isolation and mobilized for industry. In Taiwan, officials scoured for fungi that excelled at saccharification and alcoholic fermentation, mobilizing strains such as Rhizopus javanicus and Saccharomyces pekka—both collected in Indonesia—for sugarcane–based alcohol production. Continuous stills, installed to distill the high-purity ethanol needed for explosives and pharmaceutical solvents, also gave Korea its diluted soju and supplied Taiwan with mijiu—a cooking liquor made from rice wine fortified with neutral spirits—which is now indispensable as a seasoning in Taiwanese cooking. By the final phase of the Pacific War, the same equipment was even expected to produce fuel for fighter aircraft after US sanctions had drained petroleum supplies.
Fungi equivalent to the Yamato race, smoothly and steadily executes the dissemination of fermentation methods, transformation of industry structure, and complete seizure of its distribution network. The characteristics of the fungus alter the fermentation technology, and the modified technology materially transforms the industry structure. Like the rice, the fungi established an organic network between technology and the system, which persisted even after Korea was liberated. Aspergillus oryzae and Aspergillus kawachii, along with selectively grown yeast, continue to bubble up soju and makgeolli in Korea’s brewing industry to this day. This ecological mobilization swept up humans, plants, and microbes alike—with lasting effects across East Asia even now—a thin white haze that no one notices and no one controls.
Fujihara regards Japan’s colonial agricultural regime, founded on plant-breeding technology, as an early stage in the economic mode of agricultural control that Cold War–era multinationals such as Monsanto later advanced.[12] What Japan once pursued locally through breeding-based modernization was, after 1945, expanded across much wider territories by global capitalism. High-yield varieties, together with the fertilizers and pesticides formulated for them, were introduced above all in East and Southeast Asia. While these packages promised poverty reduction and the political calm that might follow, they also bound farming households ever more tightly to the circuitry of global capitalism. For the postwar dictatorships that appeared in East and Southeast Asia—and for the capitalist states guiding the Cold War—stability was the shared objective; through agriculture, and the plant-breeding technology at its center, they sought to quell opposition movements and forestall a shift toward communism.
Under President Park Chung Hee’s Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement) of the 1970s, the Korean government rolled out Tongil rice, a high-yield variety created with plant-breeding technology at the International Rice Research Institute on the genetic base of IR8. At its peak, Tongil covered more than 70 percent of the nation’s sown-rice area.[13] After the Korean War (1950–53), boosting rice output became an urgent national task. In 1965, the government mostly banned the use of rice in alcohol production, bringing almost the entire history of rice-based traditional alcohols to an end. Korea did achieve self-sufficiency in rice, but landraces that had been eaten before Japanese rule were never replanted. Though Tongil was highly productive, its poor eating quality and the large disease outbreaks that came with dependence on a single variety gradually led farmers to abandon it. Today, most rice grown in Korea consists of cultivars first introduced during Japanese rule or new lines bred from that stock.
The view of Chōsen Chisso Fertilizer Co., Ltd. in Heungnam. 『日本窒素肥料事業大観』, 日本窒素肥料株式会社, 1937. Courtesy of the Minamata Disease Museum.
After the Second World War, the Soviet army seized the Heungnam industrial complex and transferred it to North Korea. That transfer broke up the Nichitsu group and shifted Japan’s chemical industry to the Minamata plant. The facilities removed from Heungnam—about 80 percent of the industrial group’s assets—reportedly became the backbone of North Korea’s postwar industrialization. In Minamata, production of synthetic ammonium sulfate resumed in October 1945 under Allied occupation. The next year, the plant restarted its acetaldehyde and synthetic acetic-acid lines, processes that released the organic mercury later identified as the cause of Minamata disease.[14] Capacity to convert those intermediates into plastics and fibers was rebuilt, and all wastewater from the manufacturing steps was discharged untreated into Hyakken harbor. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 stimulated heavy military demand, which Chisso used to establish large-scale production of chemical fibers, synthetic resins, and plasticizers. Acetaldehyde output rose exponentially: It surpassed the prewar peak of ten thousand tons in 1954 and reached forty-five thousand tons by 1960.[15]
(Left) The view of factory of Chisso (Japan Nitrogenous Fertilizer Co., Ltd.) in Minamata. 『日本窒素肥料事業大 観, 日本窒素肥料株式 会, 1937. (Right) The sludge sampled in 1985 from the Hyakken drainage outlet, where Chisso discharged wastewater into the sea for 36 years. Deposited in layers around the drainage outlet, the sludge showed the total mercury concentration reached approximately 220 ppm. Right is the flag with the Chinese character for “anger,” which is the Minamata Disease victims’ symbol of protest. Courtesy of the Minamata Disease Museum.
Minamata disease is a chronic neurological poisoning caused by organic mercury. It brings about sensory numbness, loss of balance when walking, narrowing of hearing and visual fields, and fetal developmental damage. The officially recognized cases exceed three thousand, making the episode one of the largest industrial pollution disasters on record. Although the rise of Minamata disease is often cited as the dark underside of the Korean War’s special-procurement boom and Japan’s subsequent highgrowth years in the 1950s, acetaldehyde production had in fact begun much earlier—in Minamata in 1932 and in Heungnam in 1936.[16] Symptoms now identified as resulting from Minamata disease were already recorded in Minamata in 1941.[17] Former senior staff of Chōsen Chisso Fertilizer Co., Ltd., later recalled that Korea under Japanese rule also saw a “strange, incomprehensible illness,” locally nicknamed “Heungnam disease,” that was likely the same condition.[18] According to public-health physician Ishihara Nobuo, the amount of organic mercury released from the Heungnam plant in the 1940s probably exceeded even the peak discharges later reached in Minamata.[19]
Internal colonialism, which arises with the modern nation-state, folds smoothly into imperialism and, in turn, global capitalism. In War and Agriculture, Fujihara shows this continuity by noting the tank as a “spin-on” of the tractor, the shared chemistry of fertilizers and explosives, and pesticides marketed as the “peaceful use” of poison gas.[20] Shuttling between civilian and military demand, these industries continue to reproduce the colonial structures that their technologies carry within them.
Just two words long—Minamata disease—yet the term drove people to tremble in fear, to hide, to be pushed to madness and torn apart, and finally to taste an unfathomably deep human sorrow. In that calamity, I see not only perpetrators and victims; I believe the very nature of human beings and of their society as a whole was laid bare, leaving nothing concealed. Confronted by the fundamental question “What is a human being?,” I was shattered and, in 1985, lost my sanity. That collapse sprang from the realization that no human subject of responsibility could be found: not in Chisso, not in politics or administration, not anywhere in society. All that remained was Chisso as a system, politics and administration as systems, society as a system— nothing more.[21]
Ogata Masato argues that certifying pollution victims and granting relief has become an institutional, uniform process for handling lives that have been lost or affected.[22] The vast responsibility placed on a systematized organization is more than any individual could bear. Wrongdoing produced by a system has no one to atone for it; it can only await institutional resolution by yet another system. Compensation and damages, too, are delivered through these codified routines, and every injured life remains caught inside the machinery, made invisible once an institutional solution is pronounced.
So much has been lost and so much has been left unresolved that we no longer know what it is we have lost. This very loss of loss may be the modern project itself. As the historian Sakai Naoki (1946–) has argued in “The Overcoming Modernity” and the Kyoto School, through his discussion of postwar evaluations of Tanizaki Junichiro (1886–1965), the formation of the national is at once the formation of tradition and the formation of history.[23] Time and space, once stretching continuously from the past into the present, are divided and integrated in the name of the nation, so that its geographical body and its historical periodization are constructed simultaneously. Thus, time and space are uprooted and modernity is grafted in; the past is reduced to a mere cause of the present—though numberless pasts have been shattered and left behind.
In her Nobel lecture “Light and Thread,” Han Kang recalls that while researching the Gwangju Democratization Movement she learned of a young night-school teacher and realized she had to invert her own question— Can the present help the past? Can the living save the dead?—into its mirror: Can the past help the present? Can the dead save the living?[24] We cannot help the past, nor can we save the dead. All that has ever been done is grant the past an institutional settlement or reorganize it from our present vantage point. The ideological state apparatuses that order the past may change, yet the past itself does not. Even so, there will surely be moments when the past—when the dead—comes to the aid of the present, of the living.
Beneath our feet lie countless pasts, innumerable dead, and quite literally uncountable lives that have been broken—at times abandoned, at times structurally kept out of sight. Yet, even so, those stalled pasts, those invisible dead, still find small paths into the present: through the brewers who went on moonshining beneath the floorboards; through the farmers who kept their seed rice, waiting for the day it could be sown again; “from wick to wick, from heart to heart, on a thread of gold.”[25]
Nagata Kosuke is an artist based in Kanagawa, Japan. Through photography, moving image, and installation, his practice explores the self and the other, nature and culture, the body and the environment, and other binary oppositions that undergird modern thinking, and their latent ambiguity. His recent work has focused on video essays and performances, reflecting on how food culture shapes national identity, the body techniques and power relations contained within table manners, and the control of animal and plant life in food production. His major solo exhibitions include Eat (2020) and group exhibitions include Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025: Comission Project (2025) and the Aichi Triennale (2019).
[1] Han Kang, “Light and Thread,” Nobel Lecture by Han Kang, trans. e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Stockholm: Nobel Foundation, 2024), 10.
[2] Yanagi Sōetsu, “The Art of Korea,” The Selected Writing by Yanagi Sōetsu 4 [in Japanese], ed. Japan Folk Crafts Museum (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1954), 117–121.
[3] The Kyoto School refers to a group of scholars active in the early twentieth century, as well as the intellectual movement they formed, centered at Kyoto University and led by Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), who played a central role in shaping modern Japanese philosophy. Engaging deeply with European philosophy and scholarship, these thinkers reinterpreted Japan’s indigenous thought, culture, and society, cultivating an intellectual dialogue that crossed the boundaries of East and West. Their notion of “overcoming modernity” was at once a critique of the Eurocentric foundations of modernity. However, their ideas have since been criticized for having been appropriated during wartime to provide theoretical justification for Japan’s imperialism.
[4] Japan prohibited home brewing in its own country in 1899, prior to banning it in Korea in 1916.
[5] Japan Nitrogenous Fertilizer Co., Ltd. (Nippon Chisso Fertilizer Co., Ltd., today’s Chisso) appears under several different names and abbreviations, and what each label refers to changes with period and context. “Nichitsu” can be the simple shorthand for Nippon Chisso Fertilizer Co., Ltd., yet the same word is also used for the broader Nichitsu (an abbreviation of “Nihon Chisso”) group, which comprised a cluster of chemical, power-development, and related enterprises. Additional ambiguity stems from the postwar years, when the company altered its legal name more than once in the course of corporate reconstruction. To minimize confusion, this article—unless otherwise indicated—employs the following scheme: “Nichitsu” denotes the entire group from the 1930s until 1945; “Nippon Chisso Fertilizer Co., Ltd.” designates the single firm prior to that decade; and “Chisso” covers its postwar incarnations—namely, Japan Nitrogenous Fertilizer Co., Ltd. (Nippon Chisso Fertilizer Co., Ltd., up to 1950), New Japan Nitrogenous Fertilizer Company (Shin-Nippon Chisso Fertilizer Co., Ltd., 1950–1965), and Chisso Corporation (from 1965 onward).
[6] Ogata Masato and Tsuji Shinichi, Rowing the Boat of Eternity: A Personal History of Minamata Disease [in Japanese] (Kanagawa: Seori Shobo, 1996), 165–166.
[7] Terao Hiroshi, “Rice and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” Kagaku [in Japanese] 12, no. 11 (1942): 1.
[8] Watanabe Hyoriki, Theory of Agricultural Technology [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Ryukei Shosha, 1976), 54–55.
[9] Fujihara Tatsushi, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of Rice [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 2012), 12.
[10] Kamata Shoji, The Suffering of Japanese in North Korea: The End of the Nichitsu Heungnam Factory [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Jiji Press, 1970), 5–8.
[11] The 18th Statistical Yearbook of the Japanese Empire [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Cabinet Bureau of Statistics, 1899), 507–511.
[12] Fujihara, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of Rice, 4–5.
[13] Kako Toshiyuki et al., “Rice Policy and Rice Consumption in Korea,” Agricultural Economic Papers of Kobe University [in Japanese], no. 27 (1994): 4.
[14] “Detailed Chronology of Minamata Disease,” Soshisha, the Supporting Center for Minamata Disease [in Japanese], https://www.soshisha.org/jp/about_md/chronological_table/.
[15] The Social Scientific Study Group on Minamata Disease, In the Hope of Avoiding Repetition of the Tragedy of Minamata Disease─What We Have Learned from the Experience─, National Institute for Minamata Disease (2001), 13.
[16] Ishihara Nobuo, “There Was Heungnam Disease Before Minamata Disease: Minamata Disease Was Not a Bolt from the Blue” [in Japanese], https://www.asoshiranui.net/minamata/com11.html/.
[17] “Detailed Chronology of Minamata Disease,” Soshisha.
[18] Ishihara, “There Was Heungnam Disease Before Minamata Disease.”
[19] Ibid.
[20] Fujihara Tatsushi, War and Agriculture [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Shueisha International, 2017), 40–41.
[21] Ogata Masato, Chisso Was Me: Thoughts on Minamata Disease [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2020), 7.
[22] Ibid., 8.
[23] Sakai Naoki, “The Philosophy of the Kyoto School under Pax Americana,” “The Overcoming Modernity” and the Kyoto School [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Ibunsha, 2010), 7.
[24] Han, “Light and Thread,” 5–6.
[25] Ibid., 10.
Fellow Sooyoung Leam
