This article discusses how the mother's identity among pro-North Korean female residents of Japan had been constructed in the 1960s through focusing on the performativity of female activists who participated in Nyeosung-Dongmaeng (NSDM), an affiliated women's organization of Chongryun, the largest left-wing Korean organization in Japan. Since the early 1960s, a mother's role had been ideologically emphasized in the pro-North Korean community under the influence of the Revolutionary Mother Ideology (RMI) from North Korea. The first congress of Korean mothers in Japan was held in 1962. This congress was influenced by a speech given by Kim Il-Sung, where he stated that the responsibility of caring for children was in the hands of mothers. In the late 1960s, female activists from NSDM initiated the movement following in the footsteps of Kim Il-Sung's mother, Kang Pan-Suk. Through NSDM's campaign, Kang Pan-Suk became the ideal of Korean womanhood as the revolutionary mother who put her heart into raising children who will become great revolutionaries. To put RMI into practice, female activists organized mothers' associations at each Korean school to support ethnic education for Korean children. As a result, their practices represented the image of the traditional mother because RMI was based on a patriarchal gender role. On the other hand, a subversive reading of the lessons gained from narratives of unknown Korean female warrior biographies in the anti-Japanese movement during the period of Japanese colonization demonstrates the new performativity of female activists of NSDM would be possible as revolutionaries, not as mothers. In this context, the potential of gender parody appears. In conclusion, female activists from NSDM had performatively constructed the mother's identity in the 1960s. This means that their identity politics was always gendered.
View full abstract