Zainichi playwright lingers on stories of survival
“Sumire Hair Salon" playwright and director Jeong Ui-sin / Courtesy of Sejong Center for the Performing Arts
Whatever happens, you have to live.
“Sumire Hair Salon,” a play by Zainichi playwright and director Jeong Ui-sin, 69, tells the story of an ethnically Korean family living in a coal-mining town in Kyushu, Japan, in the 1960s. At the center of the story is Sumi, the second of three sisters, who dreams of opening a hair salon. A series of tragedies unfolds, including a mining accident and seizures caused by carbon monoxide poisoning. In the midst of all this despair, however, Sumi’s father urges his daughter and her husband to keep living.
“Sumire Hair Salon” is the final installment of Jeong’s “Zainichi trilogy,” following “For Example, Like a Flower Blooming in the Field” (2007) and “Yakiniku Dragon” (2008). Fourteen years after its Japanese premiere, the play is being performed for Korean audiences for the first time at M Theater at Sejong Center for the Performing Arts. The Hankook Ilbo recently met Jeong at Sejong Center.
A scene from the play “Sumire Hair Salon" / Courtesy of Sejong Center for the Performing Arts
Jeong was born and raised in Himeji, Japan, an area with a large population of Zainichi —ethnic Koreans whose families have resided in Japan for generations. His work is known for bringing the lives of ordinary people to the stage, looking at the twists and turns of history through the lives of everyday people rather than heroes whose names have been recorded in history.
“I thought that showing how people change and how their lives become distorted as a result of an incident, rather than focusing on the incident itself, would better reveal the extent of the responsibility for the accident,” Jeong said. “Above all, I wanted to record in the play the fact that foreign workers, Zainichi and poor Japanese workers are the very people who have supported Japan’s economy, even though today’s Japan rejects foreign workers and Zainichi.”
Jeong's play emphasizes “the strange and comical sides of human beings.” The characters eat, fight and fall in love even as life remains precarious. “It may seem strange that people eat while crying when they are suffering and sad, but that is human existence itself,” he said. “Sorrow and suffering do not disappear. They are things we have to carry with us until we die.”
The message that people must endure even when they cannot see what lies ahead becomes more concrete through Sumi's family. Like Jeong’s own family, Sumi's includes people with South Korean, North Korean and Japanese citizenship. Naruhiro, Sumi's husband, has Japanese nationality, while her father refuses to give up his North Korean citizenship. The strong personalities of Sumi's sisters also reflect Jeong’s mother and aunts.
“My family members have different nationalities, but we still all gather together to hold ancestral rites,” he said. “Even when we are scattered in different places, the strange connections and bonds of being family live through us. I think society is made up of different kinds of people coming together.”
The way family members hurt one another is another recurring element in Jeong’s works. “It seems that Zainichi have particularly strong feelings of both love and resentment within their families,” he said. People often date and marry within the small Korean Japanese community, making relationships between families even more closely intertwined.
A scene from the play “Sumire Hair Salon" / Courtesy of Sejong Center for the Performing Arts
Theater as ritual between audiences, actors
For Jeong, theater means bringing painful memories like watching his grandmother proclaim that she wanted to die back to the surface. But it does not end with remembering. Strangers gather in the same space, watch the same story and find a moment of comfort.
“Theater is a ritual, a memorial service in which audiences and actors share the same space, acknowledge each other’s loneliness and comfort one another,” he said. “The stage is not one person’s dream. It is a place where the audience and the people onstage create a single dream together.”
That is also why theater remains necessary in an age overflowing with content. “The vitality of theater, where people encounter and interact with one another in the same space and feel each other’s warmth, is something human beings need,” he said.
A scene from the play “Sumire Hair Salon" / Courtesy of Sejong Center for the Performing Arts
Swept away by waves of history
Jeong’s interests extend beyond the Zainichi community. The next work he would like to introduce to Korean audiences is “Children of the Sea,” which has been staged several times in Japan. A wordless play combining mime, music and dance, it tells the story of children playing by the sea who are caught up in a war.
“I want to tell the stories of nameless people who disappear, swept away by the waves of history,” he said.
Jeong’s hope for Korean audiences watching “Sumire Hair Salon” is that they will see it not as a story that happened long ago in Japan, but as a story about themselves, their families and the people around them.
At the end of the program book, he wrote: “I hope the cries of the characters will reach the hearts of Korean audiences, and that a hope — like a small violet blooming by the roadside — will take root in those hearts.”
The play runs through Saturday.
This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.