'Why does Japan stay silent?' — Japanese theater collective digs into 'Eternal Labor'

"Can humanity reflect on colonialism?" (from "Eternal Labor")

A T-shaped structure fills the stage in front of the audience. At the end of its tilted incline sits a precarious construction that calls to mind an enormous seesaw. Experimental props and posters bearing the word "struggle" in both hangul and hanja are scattered across the stage, while an inscrutable number scrolls across a screen at the back — 3XXX. It counts the time elapsed since humanity first mined coal. Even after the lights go out, the number keeps ticking, second by second. It is the accumulated "time of exploitation" that civilization has let slip by.

The play opens with subtitles in hangul and Japanese: "Japan rules the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945," the words of a tortured history. A middle-aged woman with graying hair steps onto the stage. She dredges up an old memory — a story of men and women working shirtless in pairs at a coal mine somewhere in Japan. The two were not a married couple; they were partners matched solely for the purpose of labor. To extract coal, they had to lean on each other's bodies. A woman's body became both the subject of labor and a target invaded by the gaze and desires of others. Children from the mining village mocked the women's bare bodies and scrawled graffiti over them.

"I tattooed my body with that graffiti. I thought it could become a shield to protect me from men's sexual advances."

On a single body, labor and sexuality, survival and violence become entangled. The stage, which begins in the memory of an underground coal mine, poses questions about the buried memories of Japanese imperialism and the stubborn silence of contemporary society. This is "Eternal Labor," by OLTA, a Japanese interdisciplinary arts collective that has long explored the history concealed beneath the smooth surface of everyday life.

"Eternal Labor" closes the Seoul Fringe Festival and runs through Sunday at Mary Hall, Sogang University. Director Jangchi said the work was conceived with an eye toward "the environment surrounding us, the social structures, and the infrastructure that underpins who we are today — and how to translate that into the language of the stage."

The makeup of OLTA, whose members met as classmates at Musashino Art University, is itself striking. The collective was founded in 2009 as a group of 11 visual artists and has since narrowed to five co-creators. Starting from visual art, the members have expanded into interdisciplinary practice as a way to give deeper expression to the stories and ideas they explore.

The seeds of "Eternal Labor" were planted in 2021. Director Jangchi described it as "a work that grew out of years of exchange between Korea and Japan." During the pandemic that year, the collective created a piece called "Land of the Living," for which they conducted field research at coal mines and mineral mines across Kyushu and the rest of Japan.

OLTA had already been making work that examined the history and relationship between Japan and Korea. A 2014 residency at the Nanji Art Studio in Seoul and an earlier piece, "Japanese Ideology," led the collective through research tracing the remnants of militarist ideology in everyday life — and brought them face to face with the darker chapters shared by the two countries.

Meguninja, who works as both a writer and actor in OLTA, said that living day to day in Japan makes it "extremely difficult to remain conscious of the historical relationship between Korea and Japan." Public education does not cover it in depth, she said, and there is a pervasive reluctance in civil society to bring up the past. Yet the collective pressed straight into the heart of that history.

"When I was researching the Sumida Ward area of Tokyo, I came across the massacre of Koreans that took place during the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. I realized that local residents didn't want to speak about it at all. I found myself asking: why don't people want to talk about history? Why do they try to cover it up? That question — and the search for what lies behind that silence — is what drove us to make this work." (Meguninja)

The personal backgrounds of OLTA's members have also shaped the collective's direction in significant ways. Director Jangchi is a Tokyo-born Japanese person whose father is a third-generation Korean resident of Japan and whose mother is a fourth-generation Korean resident. The other four members all grew up in the Kanto region. Jangchi reflected that being from the Kanto area made the history feel viscerally close. "If we had been from Kansai or somewhere else, we might have felt it was a little more distant," he said.

"Eternal Labor" begins in the coal mines of Kyushu during the Japanese colonial period of the 1920s, but it does not confine itself to that story. Drawing on research that stretches from the Japanese archipelago across the Korea Strait to the Korean Peninsula, the work traces the connections between imperial-era domination and the structures of contemporary society. The labor and exploitation that unfolded behind the facade of economic development are layered onto the body of a modern woman.

The production deliberately strips away specific place names, granting the events a kind of anonymity. Meguninja said she wanted audiences to receive the work "not as something that happened only in one particular place, but as a problem that could be happening anywhere, right now."

OLTA's focus on coal mines extends directly from its previous work. While researching mines across Japan for "Land of the Living" in 2021, the collective came upon a communal grave for Korean and Chinese laborers at the site of the Hitachi Mine in Ibaraki Prefecture.

"When I came face to face at that site with the graves of forced laborers who had lost their lives in accidents, I had no choice but to confront, with my whole body, the question of labor and resources within the Japan-Korea relationship," Jangchi recalled.

That experience led the creative team to "Darkness," a work of reportage by Morisaki Kazue, a writer born in colonial-era Daegu who was repatriated to Japan after the war. The team also drew on the documentary paintings of Yamamoto Sakube, a former coal miner turned artist, and on texts by Hannah Arendt and Bernard Mandeville as the structural backbone of the production.

Jangchi said Morisaki "was born in colonial Korea and wrote with a profound sense of guilt toward Korea after the war's end," describing her work as "an enormously important text in terms of its engagement with the legacy of colonial rule."

OLTA neither drags "the suffering of the past" carelessly onto the stage nor attempts a realistic reenactment of mine labor. "We are not the people who worked in those mines," Jangchi said quietly. "We cannot imitate or stand in for the anguish and pain that those workers endured." The collective was equally wary of the trap of forcing a crude equivalence between past and present.

"What matters, I think, is asking what the structure of labor has compelled human beings to do — and how our generation should confront a history that is gradually being erased." (Meguninja)

This is also why the production chooses instability over reenactment. The steep incline on which the performers stand was modeled on the angle of a simulated escape tunnel the team discovered during their mine research. On a floor that tilts and sways like a seesaw, the actors must constantly redistribute their weight among themselves to keep from sliding off. The weight of history and the questions it raises become a literal, physical load on the performers' bodies.

"The concept for the stage started from the idea that the ground is shaking — that I want to shake the floor," Jangchi said. "I wanted to make visible the tension and burden that falls on the human body when it confronts social and political contradictions." The same logic applies to the claw machine — a "UFO catcher" — suspended in midair above the stage. Through "an absurd game in which you reach out to grab something but can never quite hold it," the production mocks the contradictions of lack and labor within the capitalist system.

Time and space do not flow smoothly — they collide. The moment Seoul Subway Line 1 grinds to a halt in the dark, the stage connects to the Tokyo Metro across the sea; the noise of an influencer couple on a YouTube channel called "Eternal Labor" cuts against the din of a protest. The diverging lives of a Japanese girl born on Japan's National Foundation Day, Feb. 11, 2011, and a Korean girl born on March 1 Independence Movement Day the same year overlap in a single space — a strange dissonance in which a national holiday and a personal birthday become entangled. Bernard Mandeville's 18th-century fable of the bees and an ecofeminist perspective are woven in, exposing the silence surrounding the unpaid labor offloaded onto nature and women.

The most intimate thread running through the work is the female body. Meguninja's central concern — that "thinking about women and labor means looking at women's bodies" — took on sharper definition through interviews with Korean railway workers.

"I heard that because railway worksites were built around men, there were no women's restrooms, and women had to hold even water. The heavy equipment on site was designed from the start for men's physiques and strength. Women have to force their bodies to fit into that environment and endure. On top of that, there is the broken continuity of careers interrupted by pregnancy and childbirth."

On a single stage, the reality of women who once leaned on each other's bare bodies to mine coal and the reality of women today who must squeeze themselves into male-centered standards converge. Meguninja turns toward the question of whose body the "environment of labor" was designed around.

Those who were trapped in the dark depths a hundred years ago expand, in the work's vision, into the "invisible people" of contemporary society. Meguninja turned her gaze beyond the theater walls. "In fact, an audience member who has the leisure to buy a ticket and come to a theater is not a member of a socially vulnerable group," she said. "The truly invisible people are outside the theater — those who have never been to a theater and have no time to come, people who must pour every ounce of energy into getting through a single Saturday's livelihood. Those are the people who have been thoroughly erased from today's society."

When the work premiered at the 2025 Aichi Triennale international arts festival in Japan, it was shortlisted for the Kishida Kunio Drama Award, Japan's most prestigious prize for playwriting. The nomination recognized the work's tracing of the movement of resources and labor along a spatial axis running from the Great Kanto Earthquake through the Kyushu coal mines and the Korea Strait to the Korean Peninsula. Since the premiere, however, some audiences and critics have called the work "difficult."

"Audiences often say that performances dealing with Japanese militarism or colonial issues are 'difficult,'" Meguninja said. "But I don't think it's because the content is genuinely hard to understand. I think it's avoidance — not wanting to engage with something uncomfortable."

Rather than offering answers, OLTA's method has always been to crack open a fissure and unsettle the audience. "There is a common assumption that labor is a means of contributing to the world," Jangchi said, "but I want to go back to the very foundations and ask what that labor actually means for me and for human beings." Meguninja expressed her hope that "audiences will look at the distortions of the world and find their way back to their own existence."