ABSTRACT
Residents of Seoul who chronicled the political and social demise of the Japanese rule of Korea did so in part by using cuisine as a realm for interpreting and negotiating the changes around them. Unable to remain in their homes in Korea, these residents spent the months after defeat remaining futures for themselves, not as colonists but as ordinary Japanese back in the home islands. They did so by using food metaphors to re-narrate or elide the history of the colonization of Korea. The residents of the Seisei Dormitory boarded the repatriation train leaving Seoul in early February 1946, arriving in Japan at the port of Hakata the following week. There, they all went to a hot spring together, to soak away the dirt of Korea. As Imamuras case represents, the paucity of food upon arrival worked in a different way, forcing returnees to revise their idealized view and adjust to the realities of a devastated country.
