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Session 47: To Be Korean in Japan: Constructing Identity at the Intersection of Citizenship, Ethnicity, and Nation

Organizer: Erin Aeran Chung, Northwestern University

Chair and Discussant: John J. Lie, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This panel approaches the topic of Korean identity politics in postwar Japan from an interdisciplinary array of methodological and theoretical approaches. While the concept of identity, in its multiple forms, has regained popularity in the social sciences and humanities over the past few decades, its conceptualization, epistemology, and methodology continue to be topics of heated debate. Reflecting the parameters of this debate, the papers in this panel examine different expressions of identity in the Korean community with distinct interpretive gazes and often conflicting conclusions. Chikako Kashiwazaki draws on Japanese documents to examine the postwar construction of Korean identity by Korean community leaders in Japan in relation to formal Japanese citizenship policies. Erin Chung applies ethnographic research to analyze movements by new generations of Korean activists to transform conventional conceptions of citizenship in Japanese civil society. Youngmi Lim focuses on Japanese-language literature by Korean intellectuals to discuss the social construction of "Korean-ness" in relation to the changing significance of Korean education in Japan. Jeffrey Bayliss uses archival materials to explore the identity politics and interminority relations between Koreans and the Burakumin in one community during the postwar decades to the 1970s. As a leading scholar of Korean diasporic politics and contemporary Japanese society, John Lie will provide keen commentary and contribute to a lively discussion on the politics of identity and its analysis. The panel aims to broaden our understanding of the dynamic identities of Koreans in Japan and the shifting contexts of their construction and reconstruction.

Chikako Kashiwazaki, Sophia University

This paper discusses the role of nationality, or formal citizenship status, in shaping the identity of Korean permanent residents in Japan. Koreans in Japan make up a national minority group without citizenship in Japan. After 1952, the legal status of Koreans as resident aliens in Japan was consistent with their prevailing self-definition as an integral part of Korean national self-determination. As life in Japan prolonged, however, the significance of being resident aliens shifted to the disparity in citizenship rights in the society of their residence. Rather than seeking the acquisition of Japanese citizenship, dominant Korean organizations and opinion leaders have sought to expand the scope of their rights as permanent resident aliens. Their negative evaluation of Japanese nationality was also a reaction to restrictive and assimilationist Japanese citizenship policies. In this paper, I argue that Koreans in Japan have maintained their identity as a national group by not possessing Japanese nationality. Although acquisition of full Japanese citizenship would allow them to participate fully in a democratic polity, it would also result in "ethnification," or transformation of a national group into an ethnic minority group. I use published official documents and other secondary sources to explore the interactions between Japanese citizenship policies and the interests of leaders in the Korean community in Japan. I will also consider the theoretical implications of the Korean case to the current debates about immigrants and citizenship policies.

Erin Aeran Chung, Northwestern University

This paper analyzes the mutually constitutive relationship between postwar Japanese citizenship policies and Korean community voluntary associations. I will discuss the institutional factors that have mediated the construction of Korean collective identity in Japan through the lens of Korean community voluntary associations and, in turn, the ways these organizations have re-conceptualized possibilities for the exercise of citizenship as foreign residents in Japan. How have transformations in state-generated policies regarding Korean community members affected their conceptions of their rights, obligations, and civic identities? What role do Korean residents, as members of a long-term foreign community, play in the organization of Japanese civil society? Whereas Korean citizenship signified the temporary nature of the community in the early postwar period, this shifted to the permanent nature of their residency as a minority group in Japan during Korean movements for civil and social rights in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, however, new generations of activists in the Korean community have attempted to expand the boundaries of citizenship, not only as a dynamic identity in the Korean community, but also as an active practice in Japanese civil society. Focusing on the vibrant discourse produced by Korean activists on diasporic, local, and cosmopolitan citizenship, this paper will explore the political opportunity structures created by postwar Japanese citizenship policies for the particular forms that Koreans can exercise their citizenship in Japanese civil society. Moreover, I will propose an interactive model of citizenship as political incorporation, performance, and participation that problematizes formalistic, state-centered approaches.

Youngmi Lim, City University of New York, Graduate Center

This paper examines how ideal Korean-ness has been constructed by resident Korean intellectuals and activists. I will focus on the transformation of Korean-ness within Japanese social and language contexts during the past three decades (1970s–1990s). By tracing the changes of the meanings attached to the purpose of Korean education in opinionated essays authored by resident Koreans in Japanese language, I will analyze the ways in which resident Korean intellectuals have adapted their visions of Korean-ness. Responding to their solidified permanent presence in Japan and the accelerating Japanization of their younger generations, resident Korean authors are increasingly substituting the "ethnic" for the "national" when they argue the significance of Korean education, i.e., the meanings attached to Korean education.

Jeffrey P. Bayliss, Harvard University

Japan’s two largest minority groups, the Koreans and the Burakumin, have received much scholarly attention over the years, but relatively little notice has been given to the fact that these two groups have often resided side-by-side in the same communities, facing similar problems, poverty, and discrimination. Bearing this fact in mind, questions arise as to how the two minorities viewed one another, interacted, and came to view themselves vis-à-vis one another over time. Taking the example of one such community, this paper explores how interminority relations between these groups developed during the postwar decades up to the mid 1970s; years during which the Buraku minority became the object of intensive state-sponsored efforts toward socio-economic improvement and incorporation into majority society, while the Koreans were marginalized as the Japanese state redefined citizenship in light of its reduced boundaries and changed interests. Specifically, it will focus on the way in which minority-based organizations, local government agencies and policies, and members of both minorities within the community interacted to shape interminority relations and Korean identity. Despite setbacks and conflicts of interest along the way between the two groups, their mutual involvement in efforts to improve the community allowed for each to learn from the other’s attempts at combating discrimination. This association eventually produced a kind of "grass-roots" multiculturalism in the community, in which Korean identity is ethnically different from, but at the same time integrally linked to, the community and its Buraku identity.