Koreans in Japan
Pre-war Japan and the Origins of the Korean Diaspora
At the time of Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910, only
several thousand Koreans lived in the main Japanese
islands. This population largely consisted of students,
merchants, and workers who entered Japan during the first
four decades or so after the Meiji Restoration in 1868.
In the 1920s, the Japanese economy experienced a shortage
of labor. In response, Koreans seeking better educational
and employment opportunities migrated to Japan. Until
the late 1920s, most were male migrant workers who
frequently shifted occupations. Most ethnic Koreans were
farmers from three southern provinces in Korea (North and
South Kyongsang and South Cholla, including Chejudo).
Since many were poorly educated and illiterate, Korean
workers engaged in manual and menial work, along with
Burakumin and Okinawans. In particular, Korean workers
dominated jobs in construction and mining. By 1930,
ethnic Koreans constituted a recognizable social group in
major Japanese cities. They often received much lower
wages than ethnic Japanese and congregated in Korean
ghettoes because of poverty and discrimination. In the
1930s, Korean families began to settle down in Japan
and the demographics expanded to include women and
children. By the mid-1930s, almost a third of Koreans
were born in Japan. Between 1920 and 1930, the number
of Koreans in Japan increased over tenfold to 419,000.
World War II and Enforced Migration
While Korean immigration to Japan prior to World War II
was largely voluntary, wartime labor shortages led to
enforced migration. Both ethnic Japanese and Koreans
colluded in the conscription of Koreans, men and women,
to work in factories and mines. Between 1939 and 1945,
the Japanese government brought 700,000-800,000
Koreans to work in Japan. Over 200,000 ethnic Koreans
fought for the Japanese empire. By 1945, the number of
Koreans peaked at approximately 2 million. Many
Koreans in Japan suffered war-related injuries and deaths
(approximately 239,000 according to some scholars).
Up to 30,000 ethnic Koreans died in the atomic bomb
explosion in Hiroshima.
Following Japan’s defeat in World War II, the majority of
ethnic Koreans (1-1.4 million) left Japan. By 1948, the
population of ethnic Koreans settled around 600,000.
These Koreans and their descendants are commonly
referred to as Zainichi (literally “residing in Japan”), a term
that appeared in the immediate postwar years. Since the
end of World War II to the present, the number of Zainichi
Koreans has lingered around the same figure.
Ethnic Koreans who remained in Japan did so for diverse
reasons. Koreans who had achieved successful careers in
business, the imperial bureaucracy, and the military
during the colonial period or who had taken advantage of
economic opportunities that opened up immediately after
the war—opted to maintain their relatively privileged
status in Japanese society rather than risk returning to an
impoverished and politically unstable post-Liberation
Korea. Some Koreans who repatriated were so repulsed
by the poor conditions they observed that they decided to
return to Japan. Other Koreans living in Japan could not
afford the train fare to one of the departure ports. For
ethnic Koreans who had ethnic Japanese spouses and
Japanese-born, Japanese-speaking children, it made more
sense to stay in Japan rather than to navigate the cultural
and linguistic challenges of a new environment.
Ethnic Discrimination of Koreans in Japan
Although Koreans in Japan prior to World War II suffered
racial discrimination and economic exploitation, the
Japanese authorities nonetheless counted ethnic Koreans as
Japanese nationals and sought to fully assimilate Koreans
into Japanese society through Japanese education and the
promotion of intermarriage. Following the war, however,
the Japanese government defined ethnic Koreans as
foreigners, no longer recognizing them as Japanese
nationals. The use of the term Zainichi, or “residing in
Japan” reflected the overall expectation that Koreans were
living in Japan on a temporary basis and would soon return
to Korea. By December 1945, Koreans lost their voting
rights. In 1947, the Alien Registration Law consigned
ethnic Koreans to alien status. The 1950 Nationality Law
stripped Zainichi children with Japanese mothers of their
Japanese nationality; only children with Japanese fathers
would be allowed to keep their Japanese citizenship. As of
1952, former colonial subjects—the majority of whom
were Korean--whose homeland was not recognized by
Japan as a legitimate nation-state (including Korea) were
rendered stateless. In 1955, a law required that all
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registered foreigners be fingerprinted. Ethnic Koreans
were even excluded from the rights granted to nonnationals
in Japan’s postwar constitution. Employment
policies excluded Koreans from all “Japanese” jobs
after 1945. Barred from all public and private-sector
employment, Koreans pursued jobs in the informal-sector
and engaged in illegal or marginal economic activities
such as illegal alcohol production, scrap recycling, and
racketeering.
Repatriation to North Korea and Normalization of
Relations with South Korea
Postwar ethnic Korean organizations provided economic
assistance and fought for ethnic Korean rights. The proNorth
Korean, pro-Communist organization, the General
Federation of Resident Koreans in Japan, usually called
Soren or Chongryun—became one of the most influential.
In addition to providing loans for ethnic businesses, Soren
established ethnic schools that taught Korean language
and history to prepare students for eventual return to
Korea. In contrast to the miserable status of Zainichi in
Japan and the lagging economy and autocratic dictatorship
in South Korea, Soren projected North Korea as a
Communist paradise to which all Koreans would one day
return, a vision that seemed viable in the 1950s given the
Communist Party’s support for Koreans before and after
World War II and the economic success of North Korea
over South Korea during that period. Throughout the
1950s, Soren won the support of more than 90 percent of
ethnic Koreans in Japan.
In the late 1950s, Soren launched a repatriation project
that dispatched a total of 93,340 people to North Korea,
including 6,731 Japanese. Approximately 70,000 Zainichi
repatriated during a two-year period from 1960 through
1961. The numbers dropped dramatically the following
year, however, and the repatriation project effectively
ended in the early 1960s (Officially, the project ended in
1984). When North Korean poverty, corruption, and
autocracy became apparent, Soren membership began to
decline. Membership declined even further when Japan
established formal diplomatic relations with South Korea
through the 1965 Normalization Treaty. The treaty
provided incentives for Koreans in Japan to seek South
Korean citizenship, including a functional South Korean
passport, freedom to travel, and access to Japanese medical
and welfare benefits.
Large-scale repatriation to South Korea, however, did not
occur. Many Zainichi living Japan—a democratic
country that had just entered a period of rapid economic
growth and prosperity—found life in South Korea under
the autocratic military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee in
the 1960s and 1970s an unattractive alternative. Also,
Zainichi Koreans had by then become too entrenched in
Japanese society. Ethnic Koreans in Japan were culturally
and linguistically Japanese. In addition, Zainichi Koreans
who returned to North Korea in the late 1950s and early
1960s (during the repatriation project) or to South Korea in
the late 1960s (following the 1965 Normalization Treaty)
experienced suspicion and rejection by the respective
governments as well as homeland compatriots. In the
North Korean class system, Zainichi were treated as
second-class citizens and suspected as spies for the South
or Japan. Second-generation Zainichi travelers to South
Korea in the 1960s and 1970s often received hostile
treatment by South Korean immigration authorities and
co-nationals.
Choosing between Koreanization or Japanization
Despite the prospect of permanent settlement in Japan, few
ethnic Koreans chose to naturalize as Japanese citizens.
Only 233 Koreans were naturalized in 1952. In the 1950s
and 1960s, the figure fluctuated between the 2,000s and
3,000s. This was because naturalization was considered
taboo among the Zainichi population; it was an act of
ethnic betrayal, a rejection of Zainichi experience and
identity, and tantamount to treason. Naturalized or mixed
Zainichi often suffered double exclusion. Since the
Japanese government portrayed Japan as an ethnoracially
homogenous society, ethnicity became synonymous with
citizenship. Until the late 1980s, naturalization required
the adoption of Japanese-sounding names and compliance
with the Japanese practice of household registration (or
koseki). Moreover, naturalization did not guarantee
protection from anti-Korean discrimination or eliminate
fear of exposure of one’s Korean ancestry.
Post-War Exclusion and the Zainichi Civil Rights
Movement
In the first quarter-century following World War II, ethnic
Koreans in Japan continued to face systematic exclusion
and discrimination—in education, employment, housing,
and marriage. Barred from all public-sector jobs and
prestigious professions and occupations, the Zainichi
population created an ethnic economy in self-employed,
service, and entertainment sectors that targeted principally
Japanese customers (such as yakiniku restaurants and
pachinko parlors). Until the 1980s, despite their equal
treatment as taxpayers, Zainichi faced barriers to receiving
medical, welfare, pension, and other safety nets and public
services.
In the 1970s, new social movements and intellectual
currents encouraged ethnic mobilization and the assertion
of a Zainichi identity. For example, Koreans led an
anti-fingerprinting movement and a “real-name” initiative
that asserted the ethnicity of naturalized Koreans. Some
sought to create a Koreatown. Others sought to win local
suffrage rights. After more than a decade of Zainichi
political activism, local authorities started to hire Korean
nationals for civil service positions by the early 1980s. By
the mid-1980s, the proportion of ethnic Koreans in medical
and scientific fields was twice that of the ethnic Japanese
population. In 1985, revision of Japan’s nationality laws
eliminated the patrilineal descent of citizenship. In 1987,
it became possible for naturalized Koreans to keep their
ethnic Korean names. By 1991, permanent residency
status was granted to almost the entire Zainichi population.
By 1993, the demeaning practice of forced fingerprinting
during alien registration for permanent residents was
abolished. Educational and employment gaps between
ethnic Japanese and ethnic Koreans narrowed considerably
by the 1980s.
The Rise of a Post-Zainichi, Korean-Japanese Identity
By the 1990s, the legacy of colonialism and racism had
clearly waned. Sports, tourism, and Korean popular
culture raised Japanese interest in South Korea. Both
pressure from the international community as well as from
domestic social groups increased awareness and changed
Japanese attitudes about discrimination towards ethnic
minorities. In the 2000s, South Korean celebrities and
third-generation Zainichi openly and proudly announced
their Korean heritage. By the early twenty-first century,
over 10,000 Zainichi chose to naturalize every year. In
contrast to first-generation Zainichi who had experienced
the darkest decades of exclusion and discrimination in the
1950s and 1960s, successive generations who came of age
no longer took for granted that naturalization was an act
of ethnic betrayal. Rather, many Zainichi today consider
naturalization as a matter of individual choice and embrace
the possibility of a Korean-Japanese identity.
References
Chapman, David. 2008. Zainichi Korean Identity and
Ethnicity. New York: Routledge.
Lie, John. 2008. Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic
Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Lie, John. Zainichi: The Korean Diaspora in Japan.
Education About Asia. 14 (2): 16-21.
Ryang, Sonia and John Lie, eds. 2009. Diaspora without
Homeland: Being Korean in Japan. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Ryang, Sonia. 1997. North Koreans in Japan: Language,
Ideology, and Identity. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.