Following on from the excellent “My Anniversaries” Kim Sung-woon decided to shoot a documentary that hits closer home, focusing on the Zainichi Korean, whom he also belongs to. After his mother passed away in 1999, Kim started to capture the first generation of Korean-Japanese women who lived in Kawasaki, Sakuramoto on camera. His effort to present the thoughts, memories and opinions of the last generation who can speak about the war, their past and their present, took him 25 years to finish, only thanks to the support from 700 individuals and several organizations.
Arirang Rhapsody is screening at Nippon Connection
In that fashion, the documentary unfolds in successive fashion and in different timelines, with the women speaking and footage from the past shedding a more historic and general light to their lives, and essentially, the common history of Japan and Korea from 1910, when Japanese control of Korea started, until today. The testimonies of both the Halmoni, as Korean elderly women are called in a term that means ‘grandmother’ and the historic footage highlight a life that is mostly characterized by hardships and tragedy.
When Japan lost the war in 1945, 600.000 of the Koreans who have moved or were forced to move in Japan could not go back to Korea, and had to stay in a country that did not want them there, but could neither take care of them even if they wanted. With its economy in shambles and hunger spreading throughout, caring about a population the Japanese still consider outsiders to a large degree, was obviously not a priority. Through intense hardship and struggle, with a number of the ‘protagonists’ stating they had to do manual labor until their 80s before they were able to stop, they managed to survive and even thrive on occasion.
That they managed to learn to read, write, and paint after this is another central aspect of the documentary, with the letters they wrote about their feelings and thoughts being presented throughout the film.
In 1959, there was a repatriation project for the Zainichi Koreans, with 93,940 of them going back to Korea, meeting the 1,400,000 who had left after the War. Neither their lives were easy however, with the first ones in particular having to face the Korean War and the split of the country in two, and the latter finding another country in shambles. Expectedly, the concept of the relief women also figures in the documentary, while eventually the whole film and the women in focus move to Okinawa, in order to highlight a series of other women whose experiences within Japan are quite similar.
Even more impressively, and despite their age, the octogenarians plus women are frequently presented dancing and singing (mostly Arirang) and in general appear happy, in a true triumph of will and perseverance.
Considering the amount of footage Kim Sung-soon has amassed in the more than two decades he was recording for the project, coming up with a 125-minute documentary is not exactly a surprise. And although it would be difficult to leave something out, with even the two opposite parades (against Zainichi and against war) being quite significant, the sense remains that the whole thing is too long for what it is. In that fashion, it does become difficult to follow after a point, even if the amount of info justifies the length, and the editing, particularly in the succession of different footage, is on a rather high level.
On the other hand, as a chronicle of something personal that becomes wider in the face of the Zainichi, and even international with the history of the two countries, “Arirang Rhapsody” definitely works, resulting in a movie that demands patience, but is definitely rewarding.
