World War II

World War II is a historical reference point whose significance in the novel lies in what continues after it: the citizenship inherited by Kido’s family, the vulnerabilities built into Japan’s registration system, and the unresolved relation between personal belonging and public history. Rather than presenting the war as a self-contained episode, the narrative returns to it through records, family decisions, and later acts of remembrance, showing how a past can shape the present even when it was not directly experienced by the people who inherit it.

Citizenship and Family Identity

Kido’s family had Korean citizenship dating from before World War II. He was born and raised in Japan, first using the family name Lee and later introducing himself as Kido, but his parents did not explain why they had changed the family name. Because he grew up in an ordinary area of Kanazawa rather than a Korean enclave, and recalled little direct discrimination, he reached adulthood with limited awareness of what his ancestry meant to other people. The gaps in his understanding were part of the inheritance: family identity had been shaped by choices whose reasons were not fully told to him.

In high school, Kido became a naturalized Japanese citizen together with his parents, relinquishing the Korean citizenship the family had retained from before the war. His parents considered the change inevitable: he could not read Korean and regarded relatives visiting from South Korea as foreigners. Kido himself had been indifferent to the question until his father advised him to naturalize before a school trip to Australia. His father’s practical concern was that, in an emergency abroad, the Japanese government could protect Kido, whereas South Korea had no awareness of him. The advice made citizenship concrete as a relation of recognition and protection, not merely a label attached to ancestry.

That conversation remained in Kido’s mind because of his father’s unusual choice of the word “sense.” Kido suspected that his father meant “reality”: South Korea had no immediate reality for a son who could not read its language or feel connected to it. Yet the wording also suggested the reverse—that Kido might, through his father’s remark, begin to sense the country as part of his own history. The uncertainty endures, preserving the tension between inherited origin and lived affiliation rather than resolving it into a simple choice between identities.

Records, Loss, and State Recognition

The war also marks the background to problems of registration. After World War II, some people were left without a family register because they failed to report its loss after government-office records were destroyed by American firebombing. The consequences reach beyond missing paperwork: a family register makes a person legible to the state, while its absence can interrupt official recognition of a life. In the novel’s account of the later three-hundred-day problem, children can likewise remain unregistered when birth is not reported under rules that assign parentage after divorce. These cases differ in their circumstances, but together they show how legal identity can be shaped or withheld by administrative rules and omissions.

Kido and his colleague Nakakita discuss why people before the war might have wanted to avoid registration. Social security was limited, and an unregistered person might evade conscription; the state, in turn, promoted the Imperial Rescript on Education as part of a system joining citizenship to the family register. Nakakita describes this arrangement as a reinforcing circle: people excluded from the register were excluded from the imagined spiritual body of the nation and treated as lesser citizens. The conversation connects the paperwork of identity to a larger political structure, in which belonging is administered rather than simply felt.

Nakakita extends the point to Japan’s assimilation policies on the Korean Peninsula. His observation gives Kido’s own inherited history a political context: his family’s citizenship and name cannot be understood only as private matters, separate from the policies that organized imperial belonging. The register is therefore both an instrument of ordinary administration and a trace of unequal historical power. The novel does not make every present-day identity problem identical to that history; instead, it places them in a longer account of how governments define who is counted, protected, or excluded.

The Past Reconsidered Through Later Events

For Kido, this history becomes newly immediate after the Great East Japan Earthquake. News coverage recalls the massacre of Koreans after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, and Kido learns that Yokohama was among the places where false rumors of a “Korean riot” originated. His father-in-law’s earlier reassurance that, after three generations, Kido was fully Japanese had once seemed simply welcoming. In light of the reporting, Kido wonders whether the remark carried a deeper history than either he or his in-laws had acknowledged.

The distance between generations makes the question difficult to answer. Kaori’s grandfather would have been a young child during the Great Kanto Earthquake, while her great-grandfather would have been an adult. The disaster devastated Yokohama, with 80 percent of its urban area lost to fire, and Kido imagines his wife’s ancestors living through the violence that followed. But he has not asked Kaori or her parents what they know or remember. The past enters their present first as a question and an absence of conversation, not as a settled family account.

Kido’s eventual response is not a claim to have witnessed what happened. After consulting records, he learns that documented prosecutions involved 53 cases of Koreans being murdered and that the Ministry of Justice counted 233 deaths; estimates of the actual toll were several times higher, and Chinese people were also killed. These figures unsettle him because documentation gives the violence a public record while also revealing how much the record cannot fully contain. He begins to identify with Zainichi experiences of victimhood and, at the same time, recognizes his historical responsibility as a Japanese citizen. The inherited past makes his identity ethically more complicated, not less.

A History Carried Forward

World War II functions as one hinge in a much longer history rather than as a closed period. It helps explain why Kido’s family retained Korean citizenship, why naturalization became a practical decision, and why damaged official records could leave people outside the state’s account of existence. Later conversations about registers connect those consequences to assimilation and national membership, while the post-earthquake return to the 1923 massacre shows how public memory can reopen questions that a family has left unasked.

The novel’s treatment of this history is deliberately mediated: it reaches Kido through his father’s advice, administrative records, colleagues’ discussion, and news reports about an earlier catastrophe. That distance matters. Kido must neither pretend to possess memories he does not have nor dismiss the past because he did not experience it directly. World War II and its aftermath thus become part of the novel’s exploration of identity as something made from both lived circumstance and inherited history—an inheritance whose significance may emerge only when the present supplies new reasons to look back.