Standing Before Memory — A Fieldwork Record from Tsuruhashi and Nishinari, Osaka (EN)

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CHO Hyesu
January 26, 2026

View the original (Japanese): 記憶の前でーー大阪 鶴橋・西成 フィールドワーク・レコード

This text is translated from the original Japanese. While every effort has been made to preserve the tone and nuances of the source, certain expressions may reflect the original language. Thank you for your understanding.

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Last summer, I visited Tsuruhashi in Osaka, one of the largest Korean commercial districts in Japan. I stopped by while visiting Nishinari and Cocoroom, a community space that has been active there for many years. Nishinari Ward and Ikuno Ward—where Tsuruhashi is located—face each other diagonally across Tennoji. Although I had been to Osaka before, this was my first time visiting this area.

My first trip to Osaka, on the other hand, was during a high school excursion. We took a ferry from Busan Port, passing through Tsushima, Shimonoseki, and the Seto Inland Sea before arriving at Osaka Port. Crossing the sea with my friends, we spent the time chatting noisily and eating instant Shin Ramyun in our cabin. We departed during the day and spent one night on board. The sea at night was so dark and deep that nothing could be seen. And when I opened my eyes, we had already arrived.

I begin with this story because the same route was used a hundred years ago. At the Koreatown Archive in Tsuruhashi, which I visited this time, I came across a map showing this very path. It is likely a route that dates back more than a century. It is also probably the same route my great-grandfather and maternal grandmother took when they returned to Busan after liberation.

My great-grandfather moved to Japan during the period when the Korean Peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule. I have heard that he went there to work. Beyond that, I don’t know much. He was a coal miner. My maternal grandmother was born and raised in a mountain village in Kyoto, which she reached by way of Osaka. I don’t know much about that either. After liberation, she boarded a repatriation ship for Koreans and returned to Busan, before she turned twenty. (Is it possible to “return” to a place one has never been?)

My grandmother died exactly one month before I was born. In other words, there is no time that we physically shared. Still, I like the stories I have heard about her. That is why I was glad when I found a sea chart at the Koreatown Historical Archive in Tsuruhashi.

I think I began to wonder about her when I became able to speak Japanese. My mother once thought that kaidan—“stairs” (pronounced kedan in Korean)—was part of the Busan dialect. There are a few other stories about my grandmother that I like. They all have something to do with Japanese. The one that stays with me most is my uncle’s childhood memory: that my grandmother would always speak in Japanese, but only with the woman who sold tofu at the market. When she returned to Busan, she could not speak Korean at all.

I am the only one who can understand the words my grandmother spoke in those days.
Even though she is no longer here.

My uncle, now an old man, sometimes searches on Google Maps for the address where my grandmother was born more than a hundred years ago, and looks at it on Street View. The address was given to him long ago by my grandmother’s younger sister. She, too, has been gone for many years. One day, my uncle said:

“I tried to access the records of Kyoto City, but maybe because I am overseas, I could not get in. Maybe we could find her name in something like resident registries or passenger records. Japan is a country where old records are still kept.”

I asked for my grandmother’s Japanese name.

“Since our surname is Kim……maybe it was something like Kane—something.”

Is it possible to search for a memory whose name you do not know?

WHAT Remains

If you get off at Tsuruhashi Station in Ikuno Ward, you can reach Koreatown in about ten minutes.
This area, long known as a residential enclave for Koreans since before liberation, was once called Ikaino (猪飼野).

What you see today is mostly Korean specialty shops. It has become a lively street filled with K-pop goods stores and Korean-style cafés, crowded with young people. At the same time, there are shops that look unmistakably like they are run by Zainichi Koreans (Koreans living in Japan, often across generations), preparing and selling side dishes in traditional ways. Elsewhere, snacks that briefly trended in Korea—and have already disappeared—are still being sold. At times, the street feels like an old district such as Jongno; at others, like the noisy front streets of Hongdae; and sometimes, like an ordinary street in Osaka. The place gives the impression of multiple layers of old film superimposed on one another. It is a kind of overlapping temporality that is difficult to sense in Shin-Okubo, Koreatown in Tokyo.

I 猪 — pig.
Ka 飼 — to raise.
Ino 野 — field.

In Japan, pigs were historically regarded as “managed life”—raised for ritual offerings, tribute, and the tables of the aristocracy. Thinking of this, I recall that the buraku district in Kyoto I once visited—another place where Koreans had lived in clusters—was originally home to people engaged in leatherwork, slaughter, dyeing, and the handling of the dead.

When we consider that spaces associated with blood and death have often been located at the margins of the city, the name Ikaino begins to feel like that of another ground that supported the city from beneath. Areas marked by dangerous labor, low living costs, and social stigma tend, over time, to become places where migrants settle. Many of the sites where people from former colonies formed communities in Japan are layered upon much older histories of discrimination.

And yet now, aside from yakiniku, pigs no longer seem to have much to do with this place. In streets filled with K-pop playing from every corner and people dressed in Korean-style fashion, the name Ikaino feels almost like a forgotten past. That may be because the young people who live here now—or who come because they love Korean culture—do not share any lived time with the era when this place was called Ikaino.

A historical archive has been established in one of the alleys of Ikuno Koreatown, and I visited it.

It began as a Japan–Korea cultural exchange space established in 2003 by Mr. Hong Yeo-pyo, one of the many people from Jeju who fled to Osaka during the April 3rd Incident. In 2023, it became the Osaka Koreatown Historical Archive. Inside, materials tracing the history of this street—from maps of the 1910s to recent photographs—were on display.

The earliest record marking the beginning of this community is a 1903 account of Jeju haenyeo crossing the sea. The haenyeo, now recognized as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, are women who sustained their livelihoods through the sea, yet were long marginalized. Amid repeated famines, exploitative structures, and the monopolization of seafood distribution during the colonial period, they crossed the sea to dive in distant waters.

Later, a large Korean community—centered around people from Jeju—formed in Osaka. After liberation, families affected by the Jeju April 3rd Incident also joined them.

In the 1920s, it is said that letters could reach Korea simply by being addressed “Ikaino, Japan.” There were even cases of families who had stowed away from Jeju being found through letters sent in this way.

Perhaps this was only possible in a time when people knew the names of everyone in their neighborhood. After looking at the population records of this small district, I found myself, for a moment, thinking that I, too, might be able to find traces of my grandmother.

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The exhibition inside the archive was arranged in reverse chronological order, moving from the present back into the past. The present—where K-pop plays—feels far removed from the time when haenyeo crossed the sea as stowaways.

On display were records of changes in administrative districts, the division between Chongryon and Mindan, documents from after the implementation of the Special Permanent Resident status, photographs of addresses bearing both Korean and Japanese names, and images of local festivals. They were all intensely “objective” materials.

In other words, a museum or archive is not simply a neutral repository of memory, but a space that determines what is recognized as worthy of being remembered. To become an archive—or a kind of “museum”—is to demand public recognition. And so the materials gathered there, precisely because they present themselves so clearly, almost seem desperate.

An archive is a passage through which memory is made possible. “To create an archive” is to acknowledge that something holds value—for someone, or for a group. Perhaps that is why some people continue to build such places. What is a crucial historical record for one may mean nothing at all to another. Not all histories are granted universal representation.

Many such archives are not formally recognized under Japan’s Museum Act. By remaining outside official institutions, they gain a certain communal character and political autonomy, but they also take on difficulties in their operation. Without professional curators, expertise in preservation and management may be lacking, and labor often depends on volunteers. As a result, there are always materials that cannot be adequately maintained. Compared to formal museums, the collections are not large, yet even these must constantly be selected and reselected.

A museum is a scale that measures the time a community has lived through. And sometimes, there are things that do not appear on that scale. The absence of records is not simply a matter of the past being invisible. It means that the channels through which the present can relate to the past are blocked. The distance between past and present is not merely a matter of time, but of what kinds of sensory mediations allow us to access that time.

I began to think of these archives as one possible form in which imagined memory can reside outside institutional history. In incomplete museums, the scale is broken—and perhaps because of that, it repeatedly reminds us of what has never been placed upon it.

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Since we have come to the archive, before going to Nishinari, let me briefly write about records.

Even now, but especially in my early years studying in Japan, I was deeply drawn to Japanese women artists who dealt with critiques of imperialism and the ethics of recording. I devoted a significant portion of my master’s thesis to MARUKI Toshi, who, together with her husband, spent 32 years painting the Hiroshima Panels. The Marukis painted in order to record memories that the media of the time did not. In their later years, they included American soldiers and figures in hanbok, refusing to overlook those who had been excluded once again. I also began to reconsider those Japanese who were born and raised on the Korean Peninsula and reflected on imperialism from that position.

And yet, when I first encountered these artists, there was something that struck me more deeply than the works themselves. It is a private astonishment I have never spoken of before.

It was the fact that these artists had images from the early twentieth century—photographs, faces.

All the photographs of my grandmother begin in the 1980s, in color. Considering that she was born in the 1930s, nearly fifty years are missing from the visual history of her life. I have never seen the face of my great-grandfather, neither in a photograph nor in a drawing.

After the Meiji Restoration, Japan actively adopted Western culture and, through industrial development grounded in colonial rule, became a nation of images. By contrast, for Koreans at that time, cameras were not personal possessions but tools of Japanese officials, soldiers, and newspapers. It was rare for individuals to own a camera.

The power to record images is also the power to remember history from one’s own point of view.

In a world where memory must be proven without records, can we believe it?

Is it possible to carry forward a memory that leaves no record?

Somewhere

Nishinari has long been referred to as a “problem area” in Osaka. It is often summarized through the postwar histories of poverty, labor, and riots in Japan. But what I encountered there felt somewhat different.

I will write about Nishinari.

Until the Meiji period, Nishinari Ward was largely a rural area. To understand how this neighborhood came to be represented with such a problematic face, we have to begin with Shinsekai, located right next to Tennoji, and with Tsutenkaku, the tower that stands shining at its center.

When I happened to visit, Tsutenkaku at night was lit up with a message celebrating the Osaka Expo 2025.

Including the 1903 National Industrial Exhibition, Osaka has hosted a total of three expositions.
In 1903—the same year as the earliest record of Jeju haenyeo crossing to Tsuruhashi—this area became a site where modern Japan showcased its latest technologies. Under the name “Human Pavilion,” Ainu, Koreans, Chinese, and Okinawans were exhibited.

Today, Shinsekai is a chaotic district filled with takoyaki stands, kushikatsu shops, izakaya, pachinko parlors, and the towering signboards of Mega Don Quijote. But immediately after the exposition, “Shinsekai” (literally, “New World”), true to its name, was a successful model of Western imitation, filled with ornate attractions—carousels, cable cars, music halls, and even artificial waterfalls and valleys.

After the war, more people gathered in search of work, and as labor demand surged during the reconstruction period, the population of Nishinari—just across from Shinsekai—grew rapidly. Yoseba, lodging areas for single day laborers, were densely built, and even now the Airin district of Nishinari remains the area where the largest number of these facilities still exist.

Then came the second exposition: Expo ’70 in Osaka. As Asia’s first large-scale international exposition, it concentrated massive development and construction labor, drawing even more day laborers into the area and establishing a low-cost labor market. In the shadow of Japan’s economic growth, this district came to be associated with ongoing labor conflicts, acquiring labels such as a “slum” or a “dangerous area with poor public safety.” It settled into place as a space that supports the spectacle of the city from below.

The area, once known as Kamagasaki, was later renamed the “Airin district,” but the people who live there still use the old name.

In fact, the reason I was able to come to Nishinari at all was because a teacher I trust told me that Cocoroom was a place I had to visit. I came here with them. One of my friends, who grew up in Osaka, told me they had never been here even once. I entered this place on borrowed trust.

During this visit to Osaka, I stayed at Cocoroom. I shared meals and daily life there.

Cocoroom.

It was harder to find than I expected.

Because it is located inside a shopping street, getting close was easy.
But the entrance did not look like a “guesthouse.” It looked more like a street stall, things laid out in front. So I lingered there for a while.
I’m not entirely sure, but there were secondhand items. Clothes. Cups. Books. Small objects. Everything… was there. It was difficult to understand, at a glance, what kind of place it was. Not categorized. Just there. It didn’t feel like a place meant for efficient storage or exchange.

I stood there for a while.
Here?
I spotted the word “Cocoroom” and went in.

Inside, a table.
A café?
But also a guesthouse.
But…
People cook and eat together.

That kind of place.

There is a small garden, and a well. The well, I was told, was built together by people in the neighborhood when this place was first made.

Cocoroom first appeared in 2003, like a café in Shinsekai, and moved to Kamagasaki in 2008. It has now been running for over twenty years. At the time, it was called Cocoroom: Archive of Voice and Language (こえとことばの資料室 ココルーム).
It is also known as the “Kamagasaki University of the Arts.” But it is not a real university. (what is a “real” university, anyway?)

At Cocoroom, staff and visitors prepare meals together every day, eat together, and do the dishes together. During my stay, the Osaka Kansai International Art Festival was taking place nearby, and I met a Vietnamese artist who was staying here while working on a residency and visiting exhibitions.

Those who apply can join a Nishinari tour led by the director, Kanayo—also known as the “Kamagasaki Art Tour.”
Below are fragments from the tour, recorded in photographs and notes.

During the tour, I was also able to hear about Tobita Shinchi, located nearby. After the licensed pleasure quarter Shinchi Otobe in Osaka’s Namba district was destroyed by fire in 1912, it was relocated here. Until the Anti-Prostitution Law was enacted in 1958, this area functioned as a large-scale pleasure quarter (approximately 74,700 square meters). Since the Edo period, Japan had regulated sex work through a system of licensed prostitution, and Tobita Shinchi can be understood as its spatial realization. At the time, the district was enclosed by high walls, entry was permitted only through designated points, and many women were bound by contractual arrangements that restricted their movement outside. It seemed to reflect an idea of separating the space of sex work from that of everyday living.

Today, some establishments continue to operate in the form of ryōtei, but Kanayo spoke of how the women here may be in the midst of a transition—seeking other ways of living, and other forms of care.

Kamagasaki and Tobita Shinchi are within walking distance of each other. But rather than seeing them simply as geographically adjacent, I think they need to be read together through the lenses of labor and sexuality. Tobita Shinchi was not only a space of sexual consumption, but may also have functioned as a place that offered contact, recognition, and a sense of welcome after a day of labor. In that sense, it can be seen as a mechanism of emotional and physical reproduction, enabling workers to return to the site of labor. The two districts, in this way, were intertwined within the labor system, complementing one another.

Nishinari—especially Kamagasaki—has functioned as one of the largest gathering sites for day laborers in Japan. And yet, despite the decisive role it played in supporting Japan during the period of high economic growth, the lives of individual workers have rarely been recorded. They remain only as nameless statistics, or as the representation of a “problem area.” Labor is central to the functioning of the city, but the lives of workers tend to slip out of institutional archives.

Cocoroom is run by Ueda Kanayo and a group of staff, including interns and volunteers.
Kanayo is a poet.
I know a little about women who write poetry.
I studied creative writing. Some of my friends are poets. I have learned how to write from poets.

There is something like a kind of generosity in women poets—one that carries a certain pain. I should not speak too freely about others, but I think I know something of that kind of generosity. It is generous, and then even more so. The person themselves may be at ease, even happy, and yet, for those who watch, it leaves a small unease.

At Cocoroom, Kanayo continues to organize projects around what she calls “expression,” gathering people through various activities under the slogan: “To live is to express.” She uses the word “expression,” but not “poetry” or “art.” I have never seen a good poet among those who compel others to write poetry. Perhaps for that reason, I came to trust her, somehow.

When I sit in the lobby of Cocoroom, I find myself feeling that I should be helping with something. But no one asks me to do anything. It is open. There are no roles, no obligations. And yet, a strange sense of responsibility emerges. I can enter. I am not turned away. I can sit there, doing nothing. Sometimes, a resident with a disability comes in and speaks at length, alone. The staff respond—loosely, casually—but they do not send him away. They allow him to remain there. And when he says he is leaving, they say goodbye. It is very peaceful. It does not feel like someone is caring for someone else. They are simply there, in the same space. And then, when it is time to eat, everyone prepares the meal, eats, and cleans up together.

The day after I began staying at Cocoroom, I unexpectedly ran into an artist I knew. Osaka is such a large city, and yet. Because this place had felt somewhat isolated, the coincidence felt strangely out of place.

And, for some reason, I cannot clearly recall the faces of the people I shared the room with. I do not remember who was there, or who was not. Who left first, or who arrived. It feels as though no one had been there. Or as though we had exchanged lively greetings. Both seem possible.

On the last day, I went to Sankaku Park (Triangle Park) in the Airin district.
I had seen it before on YouTube. It is known as a central site of this neighborhood, where riots once took place. In recent years, more YouTubers have begun visiting Nishinari, repeatedly producing videos that take the surrounding landscape and poverty as their subject. I have watched such videos myself. Elderly people lying carelessly along the roadside. Drinks in vending machines all priced at 100 yen. Suspiciously cheap accommodations. Free food distribution. Those kinds of images. On my way there, I heard that as the everyday lives of homeless people and elderly laborers—especially around Triangle Park—became subjects of filming, residents had grown increasingly sensitive to photography. Perhaps because of that, there is not a single photograph of the park on my iPhone.
Nishinari may no longer be an “invisible place.” Rather, it may have become a place that is consumed through a particular way of being seen. This kind of visibility does not necessarily bring out the complexity of life or its historical context. More often, it seems to reproduce the image of a “problem area.” The more records and images accumulate, the more, paradoxically, life remains in forms that are not recorded.

I found myself thinking about the television in Sankaku Park that I had seen in one of those videos. Whether the surroundings were really as they appeared mattered less. What remained, strangely, was the image of a television standing in the middle of the park, like a utility pole. It was odd—almost absurd—to see a television in such a desolate place. And yet, for some reason… I could not forget it.

Sankaku Park has a stage on one side. A pale, ochre-colored field, and scattered trees surrounding it. I was told that Kamagasaki University of the Arts (Cocoroom) holds a performance on this stage once a year. When I visited with my teachers, someone was sleeping beneath the stage, its roof worn down. In the middle of the field, there was also a television. It was covered. It seems it is only uncovered at certain times. While writing this, I looked it up, and found the following news:

“Street Television” Revived in Nishinari’s Airin District — Local Company Takes Over Management
Mainichi Shimbun, April 12, 2019, 19:49 (last updated 22:54)

In the Airin district of Nishinari Ward, Osaka, a “street television” that had been enjoyed by workers as a form of entertainment for over half a century was revived on the 12th for the first time in about a year. The television had broken down in March of last year, and its future was uncertain, with the Nishinari Police Station of the Osaka Prefectural Police even considering its removal. However, a local company has taken over its management and installed a new television.

Under a tree in the park, a few people were grilling meat.
It was the first time I had seen something like that in a park in Japan. People in worn clothes were laughing as they ate. A Black man saw us and waved his hand.
“Hey, where you from!”
He smiled widely. I hesitated for a moment, then just smiled back and walked past.

The fact that this neighborhood did not push me away made me more cautious.

At the same time, Nishinari is changing, with an aging population and the arrival of new migrants. A Chinese religious building has recently appeared, and people of different nationalities now live here alongside long-term residents. I heard something else about the Airin district. In the past, people with Hansen’s disease often came here. The reason was simple. No one looked at them strangely.

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In Tsuruhashi, there were memories someone had tried to leave behind, arranged in the language of institutions, with their gaps. What was collected. What was exhibited. What was left out. In Nishinari, lives no one had tried to preserve remained where they were. Some memories, by not entering institutional display, remain in the present tense. They continue through repeated actions, speech, relationships, and the habits and rhythms of the body. They are not fixed. They recur, and remain unfinished.
In these two places, I asked the same question twice.
Am I someone who is allowed to speak in front of these memories?
The words I write. The thoughts I have.
What can I(We) do?
Who is remembered, and who is able to leave something behind?

I still do not know whether I am someone who is allowed to speak in front of certain memories. Between unrecorded faces, nameless statistics, and lives no one leaves behind, I find myself hesitating. In Tsuruhashi and Nishinari, I saw what is lost when memory enters institutions, and what remains when it stays outside them. Somewhere between the two, perhaps, lies the name of my grandmother, which I do not know. There are parts of her life with no record. No institution. No public language. And yet they do not disappear for me.

Is it possible for a memory to remain,
even if one has never been there?

For some reason, I find myself increasingly held by scenes I have never seen.
That memories I did not experience can come to matter.
This text is less a record meant to leave something behind, and closer to a pause somewhere within memory.
Some lives leave only arrival. Others pass through, without a beginning or an end.

At Cocoroom, every morning, we went out to the arcade street and did exercises. A song made for Cocoroom would play. Facing each other, we stretched, moved, turned. When people passed by, we greeted them. This is the memory I like most.
Because, in that moment, I felt a little less like an outsider.

No.

Perhaps it is simply because we greeted one another.

The Airin district was quieter than I expected.
At night, it felt unfamiliar.
Like a dark sea.
One I may have seen before.
Or only heard about.