Activism

Crafting Solidarity after the Sewol Disaster

July 10, 2022 by Jieun Cho

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Sera Yeong Seo Park
July 5, 2022

For the bereaved of Sewol and activists in solidarity, the yellow ribbon is a powerful index of remembrance, political dissent, and community making.

A day before the seventh anniversary of the sinking of the Sewol ferry, I was sitting alongside a handful of activists in a snug children’s library in Yongsan District, with piles of yellow foam boards and silver chains stacked in front of us. The members of the Yongsan 4.16 Collective were determined to fashion as many yellow ribbons as possible to be circulated in the school district the following morning. This late-night ribbon crafting had become a ritual of sorts to memorialize the sinking of the Sewol ferry on April 16, 2014. April, for those who gathered there, was imbued with harrowing memories of the disaster and the weight of the guilt that they carried as helpless witnesses to the tragedy.

The Yongsan 4.16 Collective was just one among many local clusters of Sewol activism that I came to know during my fieldwork in Korea. Independently organized, these grassroots networks performed paramount work in sustaining the movement nationwide, in solidarity with bereaved family members calling for remembrance, truth, and accountability. What animated these spaces was the yellow ribbon—what was initially a token of condolence, and, later, of multiple affects such as grief, anger, and remembrance. Notably, many who took up the work of Sewol activism often deliberately avoided calling themselves “activists” (hwaldongga) because what they were doing, they told me, fell short of the single-minded, unfaltering commitment they associated with activist work. After all, they diverged from Namhee Lee’s account of the ideological, protest-oriented struggles of the anti-authoritarian, pro-democratization movement in the 1970s and 80s led by the Minjung—common people. Yet, as the Sewol movement illustrates, what it means to “act” was also changing with the historical and cultural currents of Korea. The yellow ribbons that I encountered on the field fashioned new, expansive modes of solidarity, opening up spaces for memorialization of the Sewol disaster and permeable connections within and beyond circles of activists.

The Sewol ferry disaster and the yellow ribbon

The Sewol disaster claimed the lives of 304 passengers, 250 of whom were high school students on a fieldtrip to Jeju Island on the southern coast of the peninsula. It quickly became clear that this was an utterly preventable tragedy. The MV Sewol ferry had been illegally modified to carry more cargo and passengers than originally designed; when the ferry took an abruptly sharp turn on the morning of the 16th, the captain and the crew members were among the first to escape, and passengers were told to “stay put.” Those who followed the instructions through the loudspeakers never made it out of the ill-fated ferry, while the dispatched coast guard forces merely circled around during the critical minutes of the rescue operation.

Image Description: A color photograph shows a group of people wearing yellow vests and holding signs. They stand in single file behind a large white and yellow banner that shows a yellow ribbon. A yellow bus and corroded ferry stand behind them.
Caption: October 2020, Jeonnam province, Korea. Activists demand the truth of the Sewol Disaster, as part of the Truth Bus (jinsilbeoseu) campaign. Sera Yeong Seo Park.

The sinking of the ferry quickly incited a widespread social movement in South Korea, founded on condolence for the victims, guilt in having condoned power structures that failed citizens, and collective determination that “things must change.” The Sewol movement broadly drew on the repertoires and networks afforded by the simin (citizens’) movements, which emerged after the installation of democratic governance. These relatively recent movements foregrounded what Amy Levine describes as “liberal, identity-based, non-violent approaches” to political change, relying on the language of hu m an rights and legal action. Yet the Sewol movement also maintained distinct effects and affects of its own. The yellow ribbon first emerged as a symbol of hope for safe return of the missing passengers: social media users embellished their profile photos with yellow ribbons and the slogan, “May one small movement bring a great miracle.” As the chance of victims returning grew fainter with each passing day, the yellow ribbon morphed into a symbol for remembering the victims and expressing solidarity with their families’ demand for truth and justice.

Refusing to remain idle in the aftermath of this shattering loss, citizens turned to the yellow ribbon to cope with, and make something out of, their grief. A collective that came to be known as the Gwanghwamun noran ribon gongjakso (Gwanghwamun yellow ribbon studio) took up a small corner across the memorial altar set up for the victims in Gwanghwamun plaza in Seoul’s city center. While some showed up daily, any passer-by could join in as they wished. After the physical studio was disbanded and the altar was taken down, other yellow ribbon studios emerged nationwide, most of which are run by volunteers who create and distribute ribbons to the wider public.

At the height of the mass protest denouncing the corruption of the Park Geun-hye administration and demanding the president’s impeachment, the yellow ribbons came to adopt another layer of meaning. The bereaved of Sewol took to the streets to demand truth and accountability, mobilizing a post-disaster campaign of unprecedented scale in Korea. Grievances against the administration were already simmering to the brim when Park’s flagrant abuse of power came to light at the end of 2016. In the weeks leading up to March 2017, Seoul witnessed 20 consecutive weekends of mass mobilizations demanding that Park step down from office―protests unparalleled in scale and reach, writes Nan Kim, since the democratic uprising in 1987. Yellow ribbons were among the most pervasive motifs in these anti-Park rallies, donned not only by the bereaved but by innumerable other citizens who took to the streets, testifying to the inextricable tie the disaster shared with the wider denunciation of the Park administration.

Image Description: Two sets of silver keys and keychains, each including a twist of yellow ribbon dangling on a keychain. The ribbon on the right is visibly worn.
Caption: The owner of the thin and frayed yellow ribbon on the right had been carrying it with him since 2014, soon after the sinking of the Sewol Ferry. Sera Yeong Seo Park

As the Sewol movement expanded, Liora Sarfati and Bora Chung argue that yellow ribbons served as an “affective symbol” that “tie[d] together the personal grief and shock from the disaster with broader public concerns such as personal safety and corruption,” while also being incorporated “into other social injustice debates and demonstrations.” Nan Kim now dubs the yellow ribbon “the most prevalent and durable material metaphor of progressive dissent” in Korea. According to Kim, it was precisely the diverse significations of the yellow ribbon––not just militancy and dissidence, but also hope and the ribbon’s moral register––that gave the symbol such a wide reach.

Materiality, sociality, and the yellow ribbon

My ethnographic work suggests that yellow ribbons were powerful because they fostered a sociality in which people forged ethical and affective attachments to the Sewol cause. In the case of the Yongsan 4.16 Collective, for instance, the crafting sessions kindled conversations about what the disaster meant for each person in the room. On the eve of the seventh anniversary, Eunhee, a seasoned activist who led the Sewol movement in the district, invited everyone to share what had brought them there. Eunhee’s invitation sparked a string of reflections as we went around the room, from a 20-year-old first-timer who had put together events in memoriam for the victims throughout middle and high school to a woman in her forties with children of her own around the age of the deceased students and for whom the tragedy hit too close to home. As the night drifted along and yellow ribbons piled up before us, a chorus of stories emerged. The simple, manual labor of crafting ribbons had woven us together into a collective bound by a common commitment to remembrance.

Image Description: Two children and a woman stand in a busy street in front of a white table, on which stand two trays and two piles of small yellow ribbons. A man on the other end of the table hands them yellow ribbons.
Caption: A family collects ribbons during a street campaign held in the Yongsan district, on the 7th anniversary of the Sewol Disaster. Sera Yeong Seo Park.

Distributing the ribbons on busy streets was also an important part of the project of remembrance. Most pedestrians would carry on without giving a second look at the yellow ribbon campaigns, a bitter testament to the waning presence of the Sewol disaster in the public memory. But there were always a few memorable encounters that reminded me and my fellow campaigners of the power of this symbol as it travels. The owner of a small restaurant across the street from where we held our campaign for the 6th anniversary, for instance, approached us to ask whether he could chip in with a donation; an elderly man inquired if he could take five more for his friends. Several people retracted their steps once they heard the word “Sewol” to skim through the bundle of ribbons laid out on the table. Each of these encounters, albeit ephemeral, facilitated a continual circulation of the yellow ribbons, kindling diffuse, far-reaching networks of solidarity through everyday material encounters.

Towards a wide movement

The yellow ribbon became a versatile symbol standing for, yet also exceeding, the critique of systemic failures and corruption that the Sewol Disaster had brought to the surface. For the bereaved of Sewol, a chance encounter with a yellow ribbon dangling on a stranger’s backpack could be a poignant reminder that theirs is not a solitary fight. For activists across the peninsula, the crafting and distributing of the yellow ribbon is a small yet crucial means to keep the memory of the Sewol disaster alive.

The Sewol movement, according to an activist I met in the field, would be viable insofar as it is a “wide” movement, one with blurred boundaries between its locus and the margins, and between sporadic and sustained engagements. In this formulation, the loosely organized ribbon-crafting sessions and the fleeting encounters with the recipients of the yellow ribbon were as crucial as events of more pronounced political energy and impact, such as protests. The yellow ribbons were crucial for achieving this width, their crafting and circulation inviting diverse repertoires of solidarity without circumscribing what solidarity is or ought to look like.

Sera Yeong Seo Park is a PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral dissertation examines the social movement that emerged in the aftermath of the Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea. Her research interests include activism, emotions, affect, and the anthropology of ethics and morality.

Cite as: Park, Sera Yeong Seo. 2022. “Crafting Solidarity after the Sewol Disaster.” Anthropology News website, July 5, 2022.

Performance, Sign Language, and Deaf Identity in Japan

June 11, 2019 by Heidi K. Lam

Society of East Asian Anthropology
Steven C. Fedorowicz
June 5, 2019

Editors’ Note: This piece is part of a SEAA column themed series “Cultural Consumption and Performance in Asia.” The articles highlight different aspects of consumption and performance in a range of Asian regions. They examine issues such as cultural curation, the uses of the past, material culture, power and market, as well as the enactment of lived experience.

Early in my research, Deaf people told me repeatedly that Japanese Sign Language (JSL) is the most valued aspect of Deaf culture and the most reliable means of communication and information-sharing. Performance genres using JSL, such as film, theater, comedy, dance, pantomime and puppet shows, are important components of Deaf culture that illustrate Deaf social issues and provide enjoyable and understandable entertainment. Through 20 years of research experience in Japan, I realized that JSL itself can also be viewed as a performance genre found in the everyday lives of Deaf people, considering the relationship between their presentations of JSL and shared Deaf identity through the consumption of information and values. Elaborating on the ideas discussed in Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Bohannan (1992) writes of how people accept, create, renew and reject culture through performance. I discuss in this essay these performances involving JSL, based on fieldwork conducted at workshops held by the Japanese Sign Language Atelier in Hirakata city, Osaka prefecture—a sign language circle (or club) that use storytelling techniques to teach JSL and ultimately Deaf identity. I show how culturally Deaf people are consumed with rejecting the “small-d deaf” orientations placed on them by society and striving to adapt their social roles to match their ideal “capital-D Deaf” identity.

Not all deaf people are Deaf

The deaf/Deaf terms and differentiation have been used within deaf and sign language studies in the United States since the 1980s, if not earlier. Deaf activists in Japan recently began using these English terms to describe their situation. “Small-d deaf” refers to hearing loss; deafness is seen as a disability requiring medical assistance and social welfare support to aid and/or rehabilitate the individual. In this context, oral teaching methods are stressed to help deaf individuals better communicate within the hegemonic hearing society. Such methods originated from the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Milan, Italy in 1880, where a resolution was passed banning the use of sign language in deaf schools. These policies were quickly adopted by the United States and many European countries, and later by Japan in 1920. The ban on sign language in the classroom, mandated by the Japanese Ministry of Education, remained in effect until 1993.

Members of Japanese Sign Language Atelier practice to improve their performance of JSL and create greater Deaf identity. Steven C. Fedorowicz

“Capital-D Deaf,” in contrast, refers to a certain cultural belonging rather than hearing loss or absence. The term Deaf was created in defiance of the deficit laden “deaf and dumb” expression, with the capital “D” serving as an empowering device that emphasizes the group identity. Culturally Deaf people view themselves as a linguistic minority that uses a visually based language. Often working together in social movements (Honna and Kato 1995), Deaf people fight against discrimination and prejudice, spread awareness of JSL, and empower themselves to make their own decisions about education, language and economic issues. Such movements can be seen as promoting an ideology of cultural independence from hearing society, an example of Benedict Anderson’s (1983) “imagined community” based on a shared identity.

Sign language in Japan

Two forms of sign language are currently used in Japan: JSL and Signed Japanese. Deaf people describe JSL as their mother tongue and the language they use among themselves. Recently codified by Japanese Deaf linguists, it is different from spoken Japanese with regard to modality, grammar, word order, and worldview. Facial expressions and classifiers are used as key grammatical elements. JSL classifiers, akin to counters in spoken Japanese that are used to quantify nouns depending on size and shape, become handshapes that substitute for standardized signs. Within this form of visual communication, signers can move and manipulate a classifier like the object it represents.

As Signed Japanese lacks the all-important facial expressions and classifiers found in JSL, Deaf people often find it confusing. For them, the meaning, nuances and the relationships between imagery and reality are absent in Signed Japanese.

Deaf people describe Signed Japanese as an artificial sign language that was created, used and promulgated by hearing educators, social welfare workers, and most sign language interpreters. While Signed Japanese borrows some handshapes from JSL, it forces them into the same grammatical order as spoken Japanese. As Signed Japanese lacks the all-important facial expressions and classifiers found in JSL, Deaf people often find it confusing. For them, the meaning, nuances and the relationships between imagery and reality are absent in Signed Japanese. Furthermore, Deaf people resent that hearing people enforce the use of Signed Japanese rather than the more natural JSL.

Schools for the deaf worldwide, especially in Japan, primarily endeavor to teach students to speak. Instructions in pronunciation and lip reading take up so much time that deaf children are often three years behind their hearing counterparts in academic subjects. Also, not all deaf children can acquire adequate and understandable speech. Those who can pick up some speech are considered brighter than their classmates and are often mainstreamed into hearing schools. If any sign language is used in deaf schools, it is Signed Japanese, a by-product of oral education. These conditions lead to small-d “deaf” orientations, as well as “hearing disabled” and/or “hard of hearing” identities. Culturally Deaf people are critical of these conditions and outcomes; they often lament the limitations of oral education and Signed Japanese in regular academic classes and the lack of effective communication which ultimately block the realization of any shared Deaf identity.

Activism and workshops to create Deaf identity

While the national organization Japanese Federation of the Deaf has been instrumental in the recent legal recognition of JSL in some municipalities and prefectures, the most dynamic efforts in promoting JSL and resolving everyday deaf-related issues for the benefit of deaf people have been made by local grassroots groups. Although hundreds of sign language circles exist in Japan, most teach Signed Japanese to hearing people. The Japanese Sign Language Atelier in Hirakata city, however, was founded in 1997 by Deaf people as a sign language circle for the benefit of Deaf people. Atelier’s early goals were to promote JSL and Deaf culture by spreading awareness, to fight discrimination in communication and education, and to create Deaf identity in local communities.

Atelier hosts and conducts regular workshops with Deaf teachers, researchers and entertainers, with the aim of benefiting Deaf people who use JSL. A few years ago, the group started a series of workshops called the Atelier Project that was intended to be a “clinic” for teaching participants a “pure JSL” unpolluted by Signed Japanese. Except for a few hearing people, most participants in these clinics were deaf. Their previous deaf identity was based upon being raised in a hearing world, being subjected to oral methods of language acquisition at deaf schools, or being mainstreamed into hearing schools.

One Atelier Project workshop I attended used storytelling to practice image training and interpretation from Japanese (in written form with some emoji) to JSL. Storytelling is an important tool in JSL training. Components that appear to be pantomime, theatrics or embellishments are important for the effective performance of JSL and should be viewed, respectively, as classifiers, intonation, and description. Good Deaf storytellers are admired for their communication skills and their ability to transmit Deaf cultural traits and values of the Deaf.

During the workshop, participants were given a Japanese text—a script with a simple story. They were asked to memorize it and interpret it into JSL. Performances were videotaped so they could be re-watched and carefully scrutinized. The few hearing participants were asked to go first. Most of them treated the exercise as a literal translation from a written form of Japanese to a signed form; in other words, their performances were heavily influenced by Signed Japanese. The Deaf teacher told them that their signing was incorrect. Next, deaf and Deaf people were asked to show their versions of the text. Many deaf participants were chided for signing in a “hearing” manner and encouraged to become “more Deaf,” to change their performance so as to become culturally Deaf.

Finally, the Deaf teacher demonstrated his version in JSL. He often uses classifiers rather than standard signs. He also stressed the use of imagery and everyday experience, for example the actual experience of walking a dog that both hearing and deaf participants did not consider. Most importantly, his rich facial expression served as a crucial grammatical component for conveying thoughts and feelings.

The Atelier Project workshops’ goals are to eradicate Signed Japanese, replace it with JSL, and transform deaf orientations into Deaf identity. Most times, such transformations are achieved. Small-d deaf people often discover their deafness as adults and resent the fact that they were denied effective communication, the use of JSL, and group identity, because the mainstream society emphasized their so-called disability and enforced oral education policies. They now have the chance to associate with Deaf people and groups to improve JSL competence and gain a greater understanding of Deaf culture. Through such endeavors, deaf people can become Deaf.

Steven C. Fedorowicz is a cultural anthropologist, visual anthropologist, and associate professor of anthropology in the Asian Studies Program at Kansai Gaidai University. His interests include deaf communities, sign language, performance, globalization and ethnographic photography. See more of his work athttp://visualanthropologyofjapan.blogspot.com/.

Please contact Shuang Frost (shuanglu@fas.harvard.edu) and Heidi Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) with your essay ideas and comments.

Cite as: Fedorowicz, Steven C. 2019. “Performance, Sign Language, and Deaf Identity in Japan.” Anthropology Newswebsite, June 5, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1182