In 1960s Japan, it was said that there were three things that all Japanese children loved: the Yomiuri Giants (nicknamed Kyojin), the yokozuna Taihō Kōki, and tamagoyaki. The catchphrase “Kyojin, Taihō, tamagoyaki” reveals how the rapid postwar proliferation of mass media and commodity goods allowed for an emergence of a popular culture that came to subsume the entire nation. As John Lie points out in his monograph Multiethnic Japan, however, the irony is that these symbols of Japaneseness were in fact “irremediably multiethnic and multicultural”: the leading player of the Yomiuri Giants at the time was the half-Chinese Oh Sadaharu; Taihō was half Ukrainian; and the modern form of tamagoyaki was indebted to the globalization of the poultry industry.
In this talk, Christina Yi will focus on Taihō and the conflicting narratives he produced about his upbringing in Karafuto (present-day South Sakhalin). In doing so, she will consider the legacies of empire and repatriation—legacies that persist into the present day.
This talk is free and open to the public. No registration is required.
Date & Time:
Friday, September 19, 2025 | 12:00pm – 1:30pm (PDT)
Location:
Asian Centre Room 604, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver
Speaker
Christina Yi is the Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at the University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her first monograph, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea, was published by Columbia University Press in 2018. She is also the co-editor for the edited volume Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan’s East Asia Empire (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023) and the translator for Kim Sŏkpŏm’s Death of a Crow (Karasu no shi, 2022).
