초록:
"Lieux de mémoire," which can be translated as "sites of memory," is the name of a project which was undertaken by a French historian, Pierre Nora, in the 1980s and the 1990s. Starting from a criticism of the quasi-nationalist framework of "lieux de mémoire," this paper proposes an alternative version of "lieux de mémoire" that is appropriate to the case of East Asia. In order to consider transnational "sites of memory" beyond the national and postcolonial limits of Nora’s project, this paper analyzes divided representations of a professional wrestler whose name is Rikidōzan in Japanese pronunciation, Yǒktosan or Ryǒktosan in Korean. In post-War Japan, Rikidōzan became a "national" place of memory. US-Japan relations during wartime and in the post-war period were projected onto the racialized figures of him and his foreign opponents. However, this site of memory could exist only when his Koreanness had been thrown down the "hole of memory." At the same time, the hole of memory in Japan instead became the site of memory in Korea. In South Korea, Yǒktosan became popular as an "international Korean" when his ethnic origin was still concealed in the Japanese media. In North Korea, Ryǒktosan’s fight against an American wrestler overlapped with the Korean War and with US-North Korea relations, and he became a hero of the "Korean nation."