From colonization to Zaitokukai: the legacy of racial oppression in the lives of Koreans in Japan

ABSTRACT

Some scholars have argued that anti-Korean oppression is disappearing from Japanese society, and that race is irrelevant to the current condition of Zainichi Koreans, Japan’s disenfranchised postcolonial minority. In contrast to these views, this article builds on racial formation theory to retrace the historical development of racism in Japan, and to reveal its continuing impact on the lives of Zainichi Koreans. It remarks that Zainichi Koreans have reacted to oppression in various ways, forging new identities and resisting using the means available to them. But it also contends that the persistence of discriminations and inequalities, as well as the recent rise of ultranationalist groups like Zaitokukai, are proofs of the ongoing marginalization and persecution of Koreans in Japan.

KEYWORDS:

• Koreans in Japan
• Zainichi Koreans
• Japanese colonialism
• ultranationalism
• racism

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to Professor Bernard Bernier for making this project possible. We would also like to thank members of the Zainichi Korean community of Osaka for sharing much insight with us. In particular, we are grateful to Myong-chol Lee and Jingwi Kawamoto for being so generous with their time and providing us with contacts. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on our manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Quoted after the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923. See Lee, “‘Malcontent Koreans’,” 156.

2. Our translation of Zaitokukai’s seventh ‘promise,’ available on the organization’s website.

3. Lee, “The Enemy Within,” 193; and Lee, “‘Malcontent Koreans’.” The Korean victims of the massacre are estimated at more than 6000 for the regions of Tokyo and Kanagawa alone, where approximately 20,000 Koreans were living at the time. See Weiner, “Koreans in the Aftermath,” 21–2; Ryang, “The Great Kanto Earthquake,” 732–3; and Lee, “‘Malcontent Koreans’,” 144–5.

4. Matthews, “Historicizing ‘Korean Criminality’.”

5. See inter alia Harlan, “New Enmity”; and Boyd, “Hate Speech in Japan.”

6. On ‘reactionary activism’ in Japan, see Shipper, “Activism for Harmony?” On Zaitokukai as part of the normal dynamics of Japanese society, see Yasuda, Netto to aikoku; Itagaki, “The Anatomy of Korea-Phobia,” 49–50; Higuchi, Japan’s Ultra-Right, 6; and Haag, “‘Hating Korea’ (Kenkan),” 115.

7. McCormack, “The Japanese Movement to ‘Correct’ History.”

8. Morris-Suzuki, “Freedom of Hate Speech”; and McCurry, “Japan’s Ruling Party Under Fire.” Abe Shinzo and most members of his cabinet are part of Nippon Kaigi, a nationalist organization that seeks to reclaim Japan’s lost imperial ‘glory.’ See Mizohata, “Nippon Kaigi.”

9. Fieldwork data collection took place in May and June 2018, chiefly in Osaka’s Tsuruhashi neighborhood, and consisted of about fifteen in-depth interviews of Zainichi Koreans.

10. Wetherall, “Nationality in Japan,” 12. See also Wetherall, “The Racialization of Japan.”

11. See Lie, Multiethnic Japan, 172–8; and Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan), 133–4, 146–7, 152–5.

12. On Zainichi ideology, see Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan), 98, 112–6. On Zainichi-ism, see Schreiber and Wetherall, “Tabloid Nationalism and Racialism in Japan.”

13. Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity, 75–6.

14. Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” 305; and Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States.

15. Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” 336. See also Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 13.

16. Peattie, “Introduction,” 6. See also Chae, “Japanese Colonial Structure in Korea,” 396.

17. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 6. For more on the adoption of Western colonial methods in Korea, see Duus, The Abacus and the Sword; and Dudden, Japan’s Colonization of Korea.

18. Kowner “Japan and the Rise of the Idea of Race,” 32. See also Duus, The Abacus and the Sword, 414; and Weiner, “The Invention of Identity.”

19. For example, see Kal, “Modeling the West”; and Lee, “Changing Faces.”

20. On some of the specificities of Japanese colonial discourse and racist ideology, see Ching, “Yellow Skin, White Masks”; and Iwabuchi and Takezawa, “Rethinking Race and Racism.”

21. Mitchell, The Korean Minority in Japan, 27–8; and Weiner, Race and Migration in Imperial Japan, 43–5.

22. Chee, “Japan’s Post-War Mass Denationalization,” 20–1. Suffrage in Japan was given only to men at that time.

23. Mitchell, The Korean Minority in Japan, 30.

24. Weiner, Race and Migration in Imperial Japan, 57, 114–5. See also Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble.

25. Weiner, Race and Migration in Imperial Japan, 187–208.

26. Hisako, “Korean Forced Labor.”

27. Note that the first brothels were established in Shanghai in 1932.

28. Min, “Korean ‘Comfort Women’.”

29. Wagner, The Korean Minority in Japan, 27. See also Morita, Suji ga kataru zainichi kankoku-chōsenjin no rekishi.

30. Wagner, The Korean Minority in Japan, 1.

31. Ryang, “Introduction,” 4.

32. Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan), 42. See also Ryang, “The Rise and Fall of Chongryun.”

33. Wagner, The Korean Minority in Japan, 2.

34. Matthews, “Historicizing ‘Korean Criminality’,” 31–7.

35. Ching, “‘Give Me Japan and Nothing Else!’,” 145. See also Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan), 12–7.

36. The notion of erasure is put forward by Ryang, “Visible and Vulnerable,” 63.

37. See most notably Weiner, Japan’s Minorities; Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity; and Lie, Multiethnic Japan.

38. Yoshino, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan, 22–32; and Kowner and Befu, “Ethnic Nationalism in Postwar Japan.”

39. Chee, “Japan’s Post-War Mass Denationalization”; and Caprio, “Resident Aliens.”

40. See for example Hicks, Japan’s Hidden Apartheid; and RAIK, Japan’s Subtle Apartheid.

41. Ryang, “Introduction,” 11.

42. This similarity is discussed in RAIK, Japan’s Subtle Apartheid, 21–2.

43. See Lie, “The Discriminated Fingers”; and RAIK, Japan’s Subtle Apartheid, 1990.

44. Tsutsui and Shin, “Global Norms, Local Activism.”

45. Chung, Immigration and Citizenship in Japan.

46. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 124–5.

47. As the formation of social identities is far from a static process, in the following sections, the analysis of the scholarship was juxtaposed with recent in-depth interviews of Zainichi Koreans.

48. Ryang, North Koreans in Japan, 10; and Chapman, Zainichi Identity and Ethnicity, 2.

49. Arudou, Embedded Racism, 93.

50. For the official number of 598,687 Zainichi Koreans, see Chapman, Zainichi Identity and Ethnicity, 3. For the 243,762 naturalized Koreans, see Asakawa, Zainichi gaikokujin to kika seido, 14–5. For the estimated 107,000 ‘newcomers,’ see Fukuoka, Lives of Young Koreans in Japan, 21. For the 153,129 children of mixed heritage, see Lee, “Towards a New Perspective,” 64.

51. Lee and De Vos, “On Both Sides of Japanese Justice,” 256.

52. On chōsen mizokusei or Korean ethnicity, see Chapman, Zainichi Identity and Ethnicity, 45.

53. Chung, Immigration and Citizenship in Japan, 53–9. To illustrate the perceived necessity of passing, one of our interviewees in Osaka explains that when he switched from using his Japanese alias to his Korean name on one of his social media profile, he was promptly blocked by several of his Japanese contacts.

54. Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan), 20.

55. Tai, “Korean Japanese,” 364.

56. According to our interviewees, about 90 percent of Zainichi Koreans still use their Japanese names in their daily life. This is verified by surveys conducted in Osaka. See Kawai, “Deracialised Race, Obscured Racism,” 25.

57. Tai, “Korean Japanese,” 356.

58. Suzuki, Divided Fates, 57–8.

59. Won, Nihon no naka no chōsenjin mondai, 17.

60. Chapman, Zainichi Identity and Ethnicity, 54; and Suzuki, Divided Fates, 70. The 1990s saw a sharp increase in Korean naturalization, but it reached a peak in 2003 and declined afterward.

61. Chapman, Zainichi Identity and Ethnicity, 113; and Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan), 190.

62. Ryang, “The Rise and Fall of Chongryun.”

63. On Mindan as a ‘glorified passport agency,’ see Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan), 70. Note that the legal status of ‘foreign residents’ does not always reflect political affiliation, according to Ryang, North Koreans in Japan, 5; and Ryang, “Visible and Vulnerable,” 68.

64. Fukuoka and Tsujiyama, “Young Koreans Against Ethnic Discrimination.”

65. Chapman, “The Third Way and Beyond.”

66. Translates as korian japanniizu or kanjinkei nihonjin. See Tai, “Korean Japanese,” 367.

67. Ha, Dai-yon no sentaku. See also Hester, “Datsu Zainichi-ron.” This possibility materialized with one of our interviewees who was born with the Japanese citizenship but conserved her Korean identity. She did not identify as ‘Korean Japanese,’ however, but simply as Zainichi Korean.

68. RAIK, Japan’s Subtle Apartheid, 32–3; and Chung, “In the Shadows and at the Margins.” One of our interviewees speculates that patriarchal attitudes persist among Zainichi Koreans because they have been inherited from colonial migrants who left the peninsula when gender relations were more unequal.

69. Suzuki, Divided Fates, 144. In Osaka, many of our interviewees trace back their roots to Jeju island. As a point of pride, they emphasize the cultural difference between the island and the peninsula, while still considering themselves part of the greater Korean diaspora in Japan.

70. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 125.

71. Matthews, “Historicizing ‘Korean Criminality’.” See also Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan), 146–52.

72. Wagatsuma, “Problems of Self-Identity,” 337.

73. Tales of discrimination while looking for an apartment are common among our young interviewees, just like they were in the life stories collected by Fukuoka, Lives of Young Koreans in Japan.

74. Kim, “Ethnic Stratification and Inter-Generational Differences.” Cf. Kim, “Bringing Class Back In.”

75. The influential study by Kim and Inazuki, “Zainichi kankokujin no shakai idō,” was cited by Chapman, Zainichi Identity and Ethnicity, 80 and Takenaka, “How Ethnic Minorities Experience Social Mobility,” as proof of the social mobility of Zainichi Koreans. However, this study only takes working men of South Korean nationality into account, excluding most of the Zainichi Korean population from its calculations. Note that the unemployment rate for Zainichi Koreans is among the highest of any groups in Japan, according to Tamura, “The Status and Role of Ethnic Koreans,” 91.

76. Suzuki, Divided Fates, 124–30.

77. Nomura, Korian sekai no tabi, 44; and Miyatsuka, “Yakiniku,” 31.

78. Chon, “Nihon no shokubunka to ‘Zainichi’,” 319.

79. The expression kimchi kusai, which means ‘stink of kimchi,’ is a common slur used by the Japanese to despise Koreans living in Japan. See Yamaguchi, “Xenophobia in Action,” 109.

80. Our interviewees in Osaka emphasize the importance of Korean funeral rites linked to ancestor worship. See also Hardacre, The Religion of Japan’s Korean Minority.

81. Participant observation in one such school revealed how young Zainichi Koreans still build support networks through language and cultural education. See also Maher and Kawanishi, “Maintaining Culture and Language.”

82. Rosen, “The Strange Rise and Fall.” Public funding for Korean schools in Japan was provided only by municipal administrations, since the national state never formally recognized these schools.

83. Hester, “Datsu Zainichi-ron,” 143.

84. Chapman, Zainichi Identity and Ethnicity, 36.

85. Itagaki, “The Anatomy of Korea-Phobia”; and Shibuichi, “Zaitokukai and the Problem with Hate Groups.”

86. Higuchi, Japan’s Ultra-Right, 10–23.

87. Osaki, “Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike.”

88. Yasuda, Netto to aikoku; and Yamaguchi, “Xenophobia in Action.”

89. Shibuichi, “The Struggle Against Hate Groups,” 80. According to many of our interviewees, even though laws have been put in place to limit hate speech, the surge of online abuse indicates that anti-Korean sentiment is still widespread because online forums are visited in great part by ordinary Japanese people.

90. Raddatz, “Hating Korea, Hating the Media”; and Haag, “‘Hating Korea’(Kenkan).”

91. McLelland, “‘Race’ on the Japanese Internet.”

92. Osaki, “Different Disaster, Same Story.”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2017-0700].

Notes on contributors

Xavier Robillard-Martel

Xavier Robillard-Martel is a PhD student at the Department of Anthropology, Cornell University. He obtained his BSc and MSc from the Université de Montréal. His research focuses on historical and comparative processes of racial formation.

Christopher Laurent

Christopher Laurent is a PhD candidate at the Department of Anthropology, Université de Montréal. He obtained his MA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Japanese food culture and anti-Korean discrimination in Japan.