Jung Ui-shin's trilogy finale brings 1960s Korean miners to Seoul stage

A coal-mining town in Kyushu, Japan, in the 1960s. In a neighborhood where Koreans have settled, a woman named Sumi runs a barbershop, dreaming of one day opening a beauty salon under her own name. Her ordinary life is upended by a mine explosion. Even as loss and separation arrive — even as the wheels of history grind down on them — the people around her go on eating and drinking, laughing and loving and fighting their way through life. This is "Sumire Beauty Salon," the final chapter in a 20-year cycle of Zainichi Korean stories by playwright and director Jung Ui-shin, 69.

"Many people call it the 'Zainichi Korean trilogy,' but honestly, from the outset I had no intention of making it a trilogy at all," Jung said. "As I kept writing, I found myself writing about Zainichi Koreans in the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s."

Having brought the vitality of Zainichi Korean life to the stage through "Like Flowers in a Field" and "Yakiniku Dragon," Jung first staged "Sumire Beauty Salon" at the New National Theatre in Tokyo in 2012. The play opens Sept. 12 at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts in Seoul — its first showing in Korea.

Jung, who identifies as a second-and-a-half-generation Zainichi Korean, described the work as "a story about the coal mines of Kyushu in the 1960s," adding that while it carries the tragedy of the mines, he hopes Korean audiences will receive it as their own story.

"Sumire Beauty Salon" places a Kyushu coal-mining community at the heart of its narrative. Japan in that era was rapidly shifting its energy policy from coal to oil, and the resulting mass layoffs and neglect of safety standards produced a relentless string of catastrophic accidents. Jung traveled to Kyushu to research the region firsthand, meeting people who carried memories of those disasters.

"In Kyushu, family members and relatives of accident survivors were still alive," he said. "Being able to carry their voices to an audience feels deeply meaningful." He added that the parallels with the present were hard to ignore: "Just as in those mines, man-made disasters still occur frequently in modern society because of workforce cuts and budget cuts."

The research also yielded a discovery that reframed his understanding of history. Zainichi Korean workers who had labored in the mines did not simply disappear — they moved on and built new lives elsewhere.

"The miners in the Kyushu region were relocated to work as laborers building the runway for the Osaka Expo in the 1970s," Jung recalled. "The discovery that impoverished Japanese and Zainichi Koreans had been the ones sustaining Japan's economy came as a genuine surprise." People remembered as victims or bystanders in history had in fact been the workers underpinning Japan's rapid economic growth — and that realization, he said, was the decisive moment that made him want to write about Zainichi Koreans in the coal mines.

The play holds a turbulent sweep of history within it, yet the atmosphere onstage is never simply heavy. The stage breathes with life even amid harsh circumstances. Tragicomedy — laughter wrested from devastating tragedy — is one of the defining qualities of Jung's work. "Stories about love and sex are among the most fundamental human desires. I layered those on top of the tragedy of the mines," he said. "Comedy and tragedy run in parallel and converge. What is tragedy to me can look like comedy to someone else, and what is comedy to me can appear as tragedy to another. That is the multifaceted nature of human beings."

The title of the play — and the name of its protagonist — comes from the violet flower. "Sumi means violet in Korean," Jung said. "I was moved by the image of a violet blooming on the roadside, living out its full flower even when no one notices it."

The director's vision comes into sharper focus through the actors. Choi Ji-yeon, who plays Sumi — the woman who keeps her grip on life while running the beauty salon — said: "From the outside it looks like tragedy, but the world Sumi lives in from the inside is comedy. Even without being a hero or a fighter in history, Sumi's refusal to let go of her dreams and hopes amid the setbacks and despair of the life she has been given — that felt almost sublime to me."

Seo Dong-gap, who plays Naruhiro — Sumi's husband, a man who causes no end of trouble yet carries a deeply human anguish — also reflected on the character's resonance. "Naruhiro is a figure who symbolizes today's fathers and breadwinners, even if the era is different," he said. "My focus is on the feeling that no matter the circumstances, one must go on living."

After 20 years of writing these works, Jung said he has arrived somewhere beyond the Korean diaspora — at a history that belongs to all of humanity. Reflecting on when he first wrote "Yakiniku Dragon," he said: "I thought I was recreating a small world by writing about my own story. But I came to realize only later that, seen from a global perspective, it was a story about immigration and about the modern family."

Jung's work takes the Zainichi Korean experience as its starting point, but what it reaches toward is human emotion that crosses borders of nationality and ethnicity. When reading performances of "Yakiniku Dragon" were held in the United States and Australia, local audiences told him the same thing: "This is our story, right now."

That same conviction is why Jung believes "Sumire Beauty Salon" — a story set in the 1960s — will resonate with audiences in 2026. "If the mining story is dismissed as something that happened 60 years ago, it ends there," he said. "Stories about love and family that do not change are elements that are gradually fading in Korean society, which has achieved such rapid economic growth. I believe the pain and sorrow of these characters still speak to modern society." Kim Dong-won, who plays Hidehiro — Naruhiro's younger brother — shared that view. "If audiences see it as a story frozen in the 1960s, it will end there," he said. "But the depth of feeling those people had is no different from ours today."

Born in Japan, Jung founded the theater company Shinjuku Ryozanpaku in 1987 and began his career as a playwright. He also made a name for himself in film, winning the Mainichi Film Award for best screenplay and the Kinema Junpo screenplay prize for his script for "Where the Moon Rises." "Yakiniku Dragon" is the work that introduced him to Korean audiences in earnest — first staged in Korea in 2008 as a Japan-Korea co-production, it generated a strong response and was later adapted into a film.

The Zainichi Korean experience forms a vital thread in his work, but it alone cannot account for everything Jung has created. Across plays dealing with family wounds — such as "A Person Begging for Love" — violence and kinship within the Zainichi community as in "Blood and Bones," the memory of war and colonial rule in "Macbeth Under the Equator," and works centered on the postwar history of Japan seen through the children of Korean schools, one figure recurs: not history itself, but the individual who endures it. "Sumire Beauty Salon" reads, within his body of work, like a summation.

"I feel as though I have placed a period at the end of one chapter of Zainichi Korean history," Jung said. "They have worked hard in their own way, and I am living hard in my own way. What I want to say is: let each of us keep living as hard as we can."