When the Plan Fell Apart: What ZMP Taught Me This Summer
New relationships, unexpected questions, and learning to become a custodian of Zainichi history.
At the beginning of the summer, I had a very ambitious plan for the Zainichi Music Project.
I created a calendar, several spreadsheets, and long lists of everything I intended to accomplish: research, grant applications, crowdfunding preparation, institutional outreach, podcast episodes, and the development of ZMP’s first original music.
I am usually very good at following a plan. I built The Piano Pod through organization, persistence, meeting deadlines, conducting interviews, and managing production schedules. I assumed I could build ZMP in much the same way.
But this project had other plans for me.
When Outreach Became Something More
One of my goals was to contact professors and institutions working in musicology, composition, Korean studies, oral history, and other fields connected to ZMP.
These were cold emails. I had never met most of these people, and I had no idea whether they would respond.
But they did.
The emails became substantial phone and Zoom conversations. Professors recommended books, films, scholars, artists, and institutions. They saw possibilities for ZMP in universities, cultural organizations, performances, and, perhaps, eventually, documentary work.
Their interest was encouraging, but their questions also exposed how much I still needed to understand.
What kind of music did I want composers to create? What source material should they encounter? How would Zainichi history enter the music? What responsibilities should collaborators carry when interpreting a history that is not their own?
I could answer some of those questions. Others made me stop.
My outreach had opened doors, but each door revealed another room I had not yet explored. I realized that I needed deeper historical and literary research, a clearer artistic brief, and more time to consider whom I wanted to invite into this work.
My carefully organized agenda began to fall apart. At first, I interpreted that as failure.
But while my checklist stalled, the project was growing in ways I had not anticipated.
I formed a small, trusted support system around ZMP. New relationships developed with professors, artists, and members of the Zainichi community. Two musicians agreed to compose what may become the project’s first original works.
The summer produced fewer completed tasks than I had planned, but it gave ZMP a much stronger foundation.
Finding Each Other After Decades
The most profound development began through Substack and social media, when two fellow third-generation Zainichi Koreans found the project.
Within a few weeks, I met both of them here in Brooklyn.
It is difficult to explain how extraordinary that felt.
I grew up in a Zainichi family in Japan. Both of my parents were Zainichi Korean, as were my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. But when I moved to the United States, that world was suddenly far away.
My relatives remained in Japan, and meeting another Zainichi Korean in the United States felt almost impossible. Explaining that I had been born and raised in Japan but was not Japanese, that my family was Korean but had never lived in Korea, and that I had grown up without citizenship was usually too complicated.
So I learned to say, “I’m from Tokyo.”
It was true, but it left out almost everything.
Then, after decades without a Zainichi community around me, I found myself sitting across from two third-generation Zainichi Koreans in Brooklyn.
For once, I did not have to explain the history behind every part of my experience. They already understood its contradictions — the uncertainty around nationality, the pressure to conceal who we were, and the difficulty of explaining an identity formed between Japan and Korea.
Because I felt understood, I began speaking more openly about my childhood, my family, my immigration experiences, and the choices I had made to survive.
As I told my story to someone who understood its history, I began to see my family — and myself — differently.
Seeing My Mother Again
For years, I had flattened my mother’s story in my memory. I thought of her primarily as someone who had been poor, trapped, and struggling.
Get Yukimi Song’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
During these conversations, I began to see her ambition and strength more clearly.
She came from a family that had once been financially successful but lost everything. She was intellectually curious, progressive, and determined to give her children an excellent education. She fought to place me in a better public school and later sent me to private schools where I could study music.
I also reconsidered my parents’ decision to leave Osaka and begin a new life in Tokyo. I had always understood that move as ambition. Now I wondered whether they had also been trying to escape a life already prescribed for them within the segregated community where they had grown up.
They were young and adventurous. They drove to Tokyo in an orange Volkswagen Beetle with their eight-month-old baby — me — and opened a coffee shop. Perhaps they were trying to reinvent themselves and create a life beyond the expectations they had inherited.
Those realizations changed the way I saw some of my own choices. Decisions I had judged as reckless began to look different when placed within a history of survival, conditional belonging, and the determination to create a life that had once seemed impossible.
I also learned that experiences I had treated as private failures were shared by other Zainichi Koreans. Even losing my Special Permanent Resident status after leaving Japan was not simply evidence that something was wrong with me. The legal security I thought I possessed had always been more fragile than I understood.
The Emotional Weight of Being Understood
These conversations were exhilarating, but they also left me feeling exposed and emotionally exhausted.
For several days, I shut down. I questioned what I had shared and whether I had revealed too much. My coach later described the experience as a “vulnerability hangover.”
I had opened parts of myself that had remained largely unspoken for decades without realizing how much care I would need afterward.
That experience helped me understand that Zainichi history is not simply a collection of facts I can research, organize, and transform into art. The silence surrounding this history has left generations of grief, anger, shame, confusion, and pain largely unprocessed.
When I speak about it, I sometimes touch on experiences that my family never had the language or safety to examine.
That is why this work cannot be rushed.
Becoming a Custodian
During this period, I spoke frequently with a trusted colleague. At one point, she told me:
“You need to think of yourself as a custodian of this history.”
That word stopped me.
Until then, I had described myself as ZMP’s creator, producer, researcher, and storyteller. But custodian gave me language for the responsibility I had been struggling to understand.
A custodian does not own a history or control every interpretation of it. A custodian cares for it. She continues learning, listens to the people connected to it, protects its integrity, and considers carefully what should be carried forward — and how.
I want to tell this history from within it, as someone who has lived and inherited it. That does not give me the authority to speak for every Zainichi Korean, and my family’s story is only one part of a much larger history. But I can speak honestly from my own experience while listening carefully to those whose experiences differ from mine.
It also means being discerning about collaboration. Not every person involved in ZMP must be Zainichi Korean, but artistic talent and enthusiasm are not enough. Anyone helping interpret this history must be willing to study it seriously, listen to people within the community, and approach the material with humility and care.
A Different Kind of Progress
This summer taught me that ZMP cannot grow in the same way The Piano Pod grew.
It requires organization, but it also requires research, reflection, relationships, emotional processing, artistic experimentation, and perhaps some healing. Its progress will not always fit neatly inside a calendar or spreadsheet.
Whenever I became stuck, I assumed I had stopped moving forward. Now I understand that getting stuck is sometimes part of the process. It may be the moment when I am listening more carefully, questioning an assumption, or recognizing that the project needs to move in a different direction.
I began the summer believing I could carry something enormous by becoming more organized.
But perhaps that is not how something enormous is carried.
It is carried carefully. It is carried with help. It is carried by stopping when necessary, adjusting your grip, and continuing one step at a time.
ZMP is still taking shape, but I understand its weight more clearly now — and I am learning how to carry it.
If you would like to follow this journey and help sustain the research, writing, interviews, and artistic development behind ZMP, please consider becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack.
You can also support the project directly through its fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts:
Support the Zainichi Music Project through NYFA
Thank you for reading — and for taking these steps with me.
