ABSTRACT
South Korea is an evolving country that encourages immigration, and which presents itself as a multicultural country. Nevertheless, multiculturalism has not gone as smoothly as the government would like us to believe, and discrimination and racism are serious issues, especially due to Korea’s self-imposed ideology of Korean purity and homogeneity. This complicates Koreans’ sense of identity, both at home and abroad, issues dealt with in this special issue, which features three articles that deal with the complexities of ethnicity and identity in the twenty-first century. These articles look at the transformative notions surrounding Korean identity in Korea, and how the lingering legacy of colonial history negatively frames this identity in Japan. Finally, there is an examination of Korean immigrant entrepreneurship in Argentina, looking at the Korean community there in a very different socio-historical reality, where people negotiate their identities beyond the structures of Japan’s colonial legacy.
Korea in the 21st century is a rapidly changing society with many different groups of people migrating there, but also more Koreans are migrating elsewhere. This means that there has been a great transformation taking place among Koreans, who have often considered themselves to represent one homogeneous people, an idea which is itself problematic. Koreans have been forced to deal with this inevitable change, encountering difficulties trying to negotiate its own growing ‘multicultural’ society, while attempting to integrate (with varying degrees of success) various minorities from places in Asia such as China and Vietnam, but also from Europe and the United States, and more recently, political refugees from Yemen. On the other hand, Koreans abroad, who sometimes form significant minority groups, are facing similar issues to minorities in Korea, with their rights compromised, facing discrimination and the challenges associated with such forms of marginalisation.
This special issues hopes to explore the plurality of modern Korean identities and minorities, both in terms of ethnicity and identity, shaped by historical legacies. The first paper by Timothy C. Lim highlights the issues surrounding and stemming from the ‘excessive emphasis’, for decades promoted by the South Korean state (and its governments), of Korean racial purity and the subsequent myth of the Korean homogeneous nation. Such notions were even encoded in law via the Nationality Act, which recognised Koreans as a single ‘unmixed’ race. This idea, Lim suggests, is only slowly receding, but it also explains Korea’s resistance to anti-discrimination legislation, much needed in a country trying to promote ‘multiculturalism’. This is further complicated by the racism faced by mixed-race children in Korea, an issue that has only relatively recently started to change due to the headlines garnered by NFL hero Hines Ward Jr., who was born to a Korean mother and African American father, but who was championed in Korea for his success, despite not being a ‘pureblooded’ Korean. Lim traces the issues that South Korea has slowly been attempting to change in order for it to be legitimately recognised as a multicultural society.
The second paper, authored by Xavier Robillard-Martel and Christopher Laurent, outlines the significance of the massacre of thousands of Koreans in Japan in the aftermath of the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923, which coincided with Japan’s colonial rule of Korea (1910–1945). It traces the continuous, though evolving, negative oppression and discrimination faced by Zainichi Koreans, described as ‘Japan’s disenfranchised postcolonial minority’, in a country which also has a recent history of i) viewing itself as a homogeneous nation (known as nihonjinron), while ii) discriminating against its own indigenous groups. Though some Zainichi have been born in Japan to parents who were born in Japan, and despite the fact that they sometimes only speak Japanese and have Japanese names, they are still oppressed in a country that refuses them their full civilian rites. The authors evaluate the resistance of Zainichi who face socioeconomic inequality, while the negative spectre of colonial history insinuates itself into their current lives. These issues, rather than abating, have sometimes increased due to a rise of ultranationalist groups in Japan, which is making matters worse, also dealt with in this article.
The third paper in this special issue, by Jijye Kim, then explores Korean immigration entrepreneurship in Argentina, where among some 20,000 ethnic Koreans, four fifths work in the apparel industry. Kim delineates how the role of Korean immigrants transitioned over time in Argentina, from initially being engaged in more menial work conducted in their own homes in the 1960s, such as sewing and knitting (often due to language barriers), to developing their businesses, eventually managing both the vastly increased production and distribution of garments during the 1980s and 1990s. This transitional trajectory has nevertheless remained in the hands of Koreans themselves who have worked together as a close community that now controls this ‘ethnocentric industry’, which the author outlines using the concept of mixed embeddedness. This examines the factors within the immigrant community itself, and its intersection with the larger socio-political contexts of Argentina and conditions shaped by the fact that it is a developing country.
I hope that this collection of papers, which represents the complexities of Korean identities in the twenty-first century, will inspire other researchers to approach this topic by looking at Koreans in Korea and the complexities that entails, while examining different groups of Koreans abroad in very different contexts. Through such scholarly transnational engagement, I hope that this in turn helps South Korea deal with its transition to a multicultural country in a more cohesive manner, making it more respectful of its own minorities and appreciative of evolving identities that must no longer be constrained by outmoded ideas on ethnic homogeneity, both at home and abroad.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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Kevin Cawley
Kevin Cawley is Senior Lecturer in Korean Studies and former Head of the Department of Asian Studies at UCC (2015–2019). He joined the department in September 2011 as the Director of the Irish Institute of Korean Studies. He is the founding and managing editor of the Irish Journal of Asian Studies (IJAS). He also set up the Irish Association for Asian Studies (IAAS) and is the current president of that association.