A Diaspora and a Child of Colonialism
Text by Aki Onda
I've had a nomadic nature all my life, wandering from city to city like a rolling stone. Now I’m in Mexico City, and it's probably the right place to start writing this essay. I often feel most comfortable in countries with histories of colonial occupation. I felt the same in Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia, and so on. In postcolonial societies, life and culture tends to be "mixed blood" due to complex social, historical, and political constructions. I feel at home in these places. This is reflected in my art, which is essentially syncretic — different artistic forms are combined and collaged in complex ways.
I started thinking about these questions of heritage and refuge last year when I found a photograph of my paternal grandparents in my parents’ house in Nara, Japan. Every New Year’s Day when I was a child, my father would take my mother, me, and my siblings to see our grandma in Osaka. I have fond memories of her but zero knowledge of my grandfather, who was a vague mystery to me. I didn't even know his name. For the first time in my life, after finding the photograph, I asked my father about his parents and our Korean ancestry.
My paternal grandparents, Park Insu and Chung Yeongim, immigrated to Osaka from the southernmost province of Korea around 1930. My father doesn’t know what their life was like before. By 1942, the year after World War II began, they had six children including my father. Tragically, my grandfather drowned to death in the Yamato River while catching fish in 1942. Following this disastrous accident, my grandma had five more children from her second marriage which lasted two decades. She raised a total of eleven children alone. My father described her as full of love. “She fed her husband and children first and then had what was left over after that. We never starved and were fed okay even during the evacuation to avoid air raids to Gufu from 1943 - 46. The family survived difficult times because of her.” After the war, the family settled down in Oriono-cho, in the southern part of Osaka, and had a modest life in a two-story house by the Yamato River. I remember it was a frugal house standing close to the big river. From a window, I could see the water surface at a close distance. As a child, I wondered what would happen during a flood. Much later, I learned many Koreans lived in such a hazardous area.
Just to tell you some historical background, in 1910, the Empire of Japan annexed Korea after years of intimidation and war. The Korean empire became a colony of Japan. During the occupation, until the surrender of Japan for World War II in 1945, many Koreans moved to Japan either voluntarily or forcibly. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans were forced to fight in the Japanese Army, work in their factories, or enter sexual slavery, so-called comfort women. Many Korean residents remained in Japan after the war and endured terrible discrimination. For many of them, going back to Korea could be worse as the political and social turmoil in the peninsula continued and eventually the division into two occupation zones and subsequently the Korean War. My paternal family came to Japan during turbulent times.
My father, Masashi Onda, was born in 1939 and led an extraordinary life. He was a genius field hockey player — the center forward and goal getter — and nobody could reach his level even when he was a teenager. Because the Japanese government didn’t easily allow naturalization for Korean residents, he had South Korean nationality. He joined the 1958 Asian Games as a member of the South Korean national team and won the bronze medal. Back then he had a Korean name, Park Yeonbong. Not just talented on the athletic field, he was also intellectually outstanding and wanted to become a university professor. However, it was impossible to get such a job with Korean nationality. Luckily, the Japanese national field hockey team helped his case for naturalization so that they could take him to the 1968 Mexico Olympics. He became a professor and led his university teams, both men and women, as a legendary coach and manager, including bringing the Japanese women's national team to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He told me, "I just wanted to achieve my goals, and I was determined. It didn't matter to me if I played on different national teams." It's easy to speculate that both Korean and Japanese societies have no liking for this attitude, and he mentioned his mother and siblings didn't appreciate his naturalization.
I wonder how my father's life and Korean ancestry affects my life and artistic practice. First, I will explain my mother's side, since it's a combination of both.
I was born in 1967 to a Japanese mother Akiko Onda, who met my father when they were university students. They married at a young age. "Onda" was my mother's family name and it was quite uncommon to use a maiden name after a marriage in Japan. My mother eventually became an abstract painter. She was the one who planted the seeds for me to be an artist and do things differently. My childhood was certainly an unusual story. My sexuality was ambiguous and I identified myself as a girl. "Aki" is a female name which I chose myself. I loved doing everything girls do. It was something biological as well as ideological. My mother and her circle were into feminist theories and her mother was a university professor when it was rare for a woman to have such a job. My grandmother and mother lived with my aunt, Kazuko Onda, who often took care of me when I was a little kid. She was one of the first female journalists and a prominent women's rights activist in Japan since the 1920s. On my mother's bookshelves, I was fascinated by the autobiography of Judy Chicago and the diary of Anais Nin. I grew up thinking that women are much more attractive, progressive, and courageous than men, despite their precarious social status.
I couldn't fit into the hyper-conservative Japanese education system and refused to obey their rules. I quit kindergarten in four days. In elementary school, I ignored teachers and made drawings instead. One day, I found diaries my father wrote under his Korean name when he was young. They expressed his experiences as a foreigner, and I felt empathy for his sense of alienation. This gave me a perfect excuse — 'I'm not Japanese. I have no obligation to follow their rules!' — which prompted me to radicalize myself. On the first day of junior high school, I had a serious fight with teachers when they tried to cut my long hair, which was forbidden at school. They had no idea how to deal with me, and I didn't want to be there. I started skipping classes, eventually stopped going, and learned everything from obsessively reading books instead. My childhood and teenage years were traumatic, which resulted in serious depression. Thankfully, my parents were supportive and encouraged me to do whatever I believe.
I was an outcast in Japanese society, and in a sense, my family was on the fringe as well. When I was a teenager, I questioned where I was from and who I belonged to — a quest for my ethnic and social identity. I traveled around South Korea and spent time in Seoul, Busan, and small fishing villages on the coast. I knew Korean people from my past exposure to paternal family and several visits to South Korea as a child. I certainly felt affinity and fondness. But it was not like a going-back-to-the-roots story. Indeed, it was the opposite. I realized that I completely lost a sense of belongingness to any particular ethnicity. Emerging from a crack of the two countries, I was a child of colonialism and became a diaspora. Did this give me any negative feelings? No. I found solace there and accepted it. I moved to the US in 2000, and lived in NYC for nearly two decades, which helped me to be aware of this even more. So many New Yorkers have multiple backgrounds and deal with the complexity of their cosmopolitan life daily. Who cares? Almost nobody.
As an artist and composer, I'm an autodidact. Instead of learning art and music-making in school, I absorbed knowledge from the artistically and intellectually rich environments I was in, and also from experiences outside of homes and schools. As a child, I learned weaving and dyeing, and I sold my textile works. When I was fifteen years old, I became a photographer and documented music and dance performances for magazines in Kyoto and Osaka. Around the same time, I was exposed to the works of Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger, and the iconic Japanese film and theater maker Syuji Terayama. This was my starting point in exploring a universe of avant-garde cinema, which for decades has been an important aspect of my work as a composer of music. I access multiple fields but don’t come from or belong to any of them. Mirroring my family background, my diasporic artwork spreads and mixes in many ways.
Published in Tangled Vol. 2, A Collection of Writings from Asian American Musicians, American Dreams, US, 2023
Edited by Patrick Shiroishi