POPULATION: Young Koreans Shed Past to Embrace Modern Japan

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Feb 25 2005 (IPS) - The controversial identity of Japan’s Korean population, the largest ethnic minority in the country, is undergoing drastic changes these days given new security threats from North Korea and the emergence of a fledging multicultural society at home.

”Being Korean in Japan has become a complex issue these days,” says Lee Hyonsuk, 36, a third generation North Korean who recently applied for a South Korean passport after years of living without a nationality.

An estimated one million ethnic Koreans live in Japan. Most of them are descendants of labourers forcibly brought to the country before and during World War II and who decided to stay after the conflict ended. More than 600,000 of them keep North or South Korean citizenship. But Japan doesn’t recognise North Korean citizenship.

The vast majority of Japan’s North Koreans came from what became South Korea when the peninsula was partitioned after World War II. So their support for the communist North over the U.S.-backed South was a choice, not a geographical circumstance.

Japan’s policy of forced assimilation saw radically discriminative policies directed at the Koreans – both from the North and South. They were only accepted in society if they took on Japanese names. Also, they had to submit themselves to be finger-printed by the authorities. Government jobs were out of bounds for them and neither could they vote in district or national elections.

As a result, the Korean population was split between those who opted to give-up their identity and become Japanese or, as Lee and her parents opted for, fiercely defending their ethnic roots by attending Korean schools, refusing to give up their Korean names and, as many of them did, returning to either North or South Korea.

But author Sonia Ryang, an anthropologist at the U.S.-based Johns Hopkins University argues in her book ‘Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin’ that Koreans themselves are to be blamed for their predicament in Japan.

”They were more concerned with Korean nationality and national identity than life in Japan. As such, at a time when ‘aliens’ in most developed countries are becoming more empowered, one does not find such a trend in Japan,” says Ryang, herself a product of the North Korean schooling system in Japan.

The students that went to North Korean schools learned an uncompromising brand of North Korean communism and were taught clichés like the United States was ”an imperialist wolf” and South Korea ”a puppet clique”. Also it was drummed into their young minds that the Soviet Union ”would control the world”.

Now that the Soviet Union no longer exists and North Korea is a famine-ridden pariah state, the old rhetoric has lost its appeal.

Experts explain recent political changes both in Japan and on the Korean peninsula have seen the rise of a search for a Korean identity but on different terms.

”Korean identity in Japan has changed from the strong unwavering commitment possessed by the first and second generations to a more individual outlook among the younger people who now comprise ninety percent of the Korean population,” explains Pae Choryun, spokesperson for Mindan, the official organisation representing the ethnic South Korean population in Japan.

Posters at Korean high schools now ask students whether they’ve been practicing their English. These days, the schools focus simply on trying to keep Korean language and culture alive in a community that becomes more Japanese every day.

According to Pae, ethnic Koreans living in Japan are now marrying Japanese nationals, and these inter-marriages seem to be changing the identity of the group.

Japanese immigration laws now have eased with regard to nationality for children. If one of their parents is Japanese, they are eligible to become Japanese citizens – compared to previously where both had to be Japanese nationals. And this has certainly opened the door to younger Koreans taking up Japanese citizenship.

Moreover, says Pae, more Koreans have become deeply disenchanted with North Korea following harrowing revelations of the abduction of Japanese nationals by Pyongyang to teach its spies about Japan, in order for them to infiltrate into the country.

Groups estimate there are hundreds of Japanese who have been kidnapped by North Korea in the past. On Feb. 11 the Association of Families of People Abducted by North Korea, backed by a petition signed by more than five million Japanese, demanded that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi impose sanctions against the communist nation after North Korea publicly declared it had nuclear weapons.

”This has resulted in many young ‘stateless’ Koreans, whose parents were first generation North Koreans in Japan, wanting to apply for South Korean passports in order to legitimise themselves in the country,” adds Pae. ”The first step for this group of people to move away from the old ways of preserving their identity at all costs in Japan, is to take South Korean identity. The next step will be Japanese nationality,” he explains.

More than 8,000 applications for South Korean passports are now filed annually. At the same time about 12,000 Koreans, a year, are taking up Japanese citizenship.

Prof. Chung Daekyun, at Tokyo Metropolitan University, says Koreans in Japan should no longer feel the need to hide their background to avoid stigma.

”The Koreans in Japan speak and read Japanese and many hardly speak their own native language anymore. It is natural to take Japanese nationality by accepting this fact,” he tells IPS.

Last year Chung became a Japanese citizen. He points out that even though Koreans carry ‘alien’ identity cards they do not think of themselves as foreigners.

”This is a healthy sign that they are assimilating,” he points out.