Korean Diaspora Series

 
Caught between the demands of a globalizing economy and the reality of a steadily falling birthrate, Japan—long famous for its ethnic homogeneity—is admitting a new wave of foreign workers. Integrating them into mainstream Japanese society will be an almost unprecedented challenge. This is illustrated by the zainichi—longtime Korean residents of Japan that make up the country's largest ethnic minority—and their ongoing struggle for equality and integration.

Soo Im Lee, a professor of business administration at Ryukoku University and co-editor of the recently published Japan's Diversity Dilemmas: Ethnicity, Citizenship and Education, spoke to an audience at The Korea Society about the zainichi experience. That experience began shortly after Japan's annexation of Korea. Japanese authorities drew laborers from the Korean Peninsula to fill empty jobs. As labor shortages grew more acute during WWII, the Japanese deceived and coerced Koreans into emigrating. Most Koreans in Japan returned home following the war, but 650,000 remained permanently.

Settled in a country where ethnicity and citizenship were nearly synonymous, long-term Korean residents of Japan were treated as a social and legal class apart. Zainichi were not allowed to hold government jobs or participate in Japanese politics. They were required to carry special identification cards at all times and, until 1992, all zainichi had to be fingerprinted by the police.

Beginning in the 1960s, Lee continued, zainichi activists began demanding that discriminatory laws be repealed and social institutions opened. They also demanded that ethnic Korean students receive equal access to Japan's educational system. This proved to be a pivotal move. Once Koreans were integrated into the educational establishment, it became more difficult for authorities to find grounds on which to exclude them from other arenas of public life. Today, though activists still continue to press for greater recognition, many zainichi speak only Japanese and marry into Japanese families.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007 

About the speaker

Soo Im Lee is a professor in the Department of Business Administration at Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Japan. In 2003 and 2004, she was a visiting fellow at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University and a visiting researcher at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. Recent publications include: "Koreans: a Mistreated Minority in Japan: Hopes and challenges for the country's true internationalization," in R. Donahue, (Ed.), Exploring Japaneseness: On Japanese Enactments of Culture and Consciousness, Ablex Publishing (March 30, 2002). Lee is a member of the Osaka City Committee for Policies on Foreign Residents. She holds an Ed.D. in education from Temple University.

Original Announcement:

Japan represents a prime example of a society undergoing a dramatic transformation due to demographic changes and globalization. For the past few decades, an extremely low birth rate has resulted in a rapidly decreasing labor force. To secure the future of the economy, the government has allowed the influx of a large number of foreign workers. As these newer populations begin to find a permanent place in Japanese society, issues of nationality, citizenship and suffrage are receiving greater attention. These are the very issues that have been raised for years by Japan's largest minority, the zainichi-ethnic Koreans residing permanently in Japan. As these newer immigrant groups struggle to attain health care, education, and political participation, the struggle of the zainichi has come into clearer focus.

At the forum, Soo im Lee will speak about the history of the zainichi-Korean community, as examined in Japan's Diversity Dilemmas: Ethnicity, Citizenship, and Education, which she edited with Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu and Harumi Befu. Ms. Lee will explore the decades-long experience of Koreans in Japan: the early migration during the colonial period; the loss of Japanese nationality at the end of World War II; and the current efforts to promote naturalization and the recovery of ethnic names. She will also look at how the forces of globalization undercut the notion of homogeneity and give raise to new notions of diversity and multiculturalism.