Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kogawa`s novels, such as Obasan and Itsuka, powerfully portray a time of racist discrimination against Japanese Canadians during and after World War Ⅱ. Canadians once read Obasan with shame, but now perhaps as a novel of national healing. The readers of Japanese ancestry, on the other hand, see in the novel the sad proof that Japanese ethnic culture is being diluted. Thus it seems that where a reader stands determines what he/she sees in the novels. Koreans stand in a special position, since Korea was under the domination of Japan during the same period while Japanese Canadians suffered from racism. This study is an attempt to examine the novels from a Korean point of view. Japanese-Canadians wish to be seen only as “Canadians,” and hide their ethnic identity, even though they dwell in the hyphen between Japanese and Canadian. Emily, for example, insists that even Momotaro, a traditional Japanese tale, is a Canadian story. This imperialistic story, told by mother to daughter every night is part of the Japanese culture handed down to the new generation. Korean readers, who can associate this story with Japan`s colonization of the Korean peninsula, cannot see it as anything other than a Japanese story. It is interesting to see that Emily, who protests against racism in Canada, keeps silent about the Japanese atrocities in Japan`s colonized lands. And it is ironic for Korean readers to find that her accusations against Canada are the very ones Koreans have made against Japan. Emily knows about her sister`s disfigurement by atomic bomb in Nagasaki, and her later death, but keeps silent about the truth, because her sister (Naomi`s mother) asks her “not to tell” about it. Together with Obasan, she conspires to tell Naomi only her sister`s idealized version. Naomi`s mother is representative of her Japanese origin and, by extension, Japanese history. Her mother`s destiny parallels Japan`s, and her aunt (Emily) hides the ugly face of her mother and motherland. Thus Naomi even idealizes her mother as a “martyr” of the atomic bomb. The bomb is nothing but destructive and inhuman for them; but, for Koreans it brings about their liberation from the inhuman domination of the Japanese empire. This is evidenced by Richard E. Kim`s novel, Lost Names, which covers almost the same period as Obasan. Koreans can be resisting readers by asserting themselves against the control of the text. Their resistance to the authorial sensibilities of a Japanese Canadian can open a new perspective on the work, and thus help widen the horizon of interpretation of Kogawa`s novels.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".