Guerrilla Media

Abstract This article examines guerrilla interventions in early 1920s japanophone media by migrating Korean writers and Japanese allies contesting the language of imperial treachery. Following the 1919 Korean independence uprising, metropolitan Japanese-language print was moved by discussions about the threat of anticolonial terrorism from so-called futei Senjin (“treacherous Korean malcontents”). Those same discursive figures and affective currents of fear and loathing, however, opened spaces for counterhegemonic Korean-Japanese dialogue and collaboration at the margins of newspapers and in new Korean-initiated journals. While highlighting overlooked linkages between sites of japanophone counterdiscourse from the Yomiuri's Zanbaken column to the groundbreaking journal Seinen Chōsen, this article centers the play with imperial signification in guerrilla media ventures launched by anarchist couple Pak Yŏl and Kaneko Fumiko. Confronting official censorship and popular xenophobia, these small journals waged campaigns of typographical terrorism resignifying the hateful terms of futei treachery for a transnational alliance of anti-imperialist malcontents.