Zainichi Koreans II

While Osaka has the highest concentration of Zainichi Koreans in Japan, the influence of the Dear Leader reaches the most unlikely of places.

Thanks to Mike @ FCI London for the heads-up!

Zainichi Koreans: Foreign in Japan?

Yeong Jin speaks in the same staccato Kansai-ben as the other three ossans at the small izakaya table in the bowels of an Umeda hotel.

He sups his draught beer and chews his kushiage skewers with the same satisfaction as Messrs Tanikawa, Nishiguchi and Tsunoda, and  (as he admits) has the same love for the Hanshin Tigers as any self-respecting Osakan.

Yet despite being the archetypical Kansai man, Jin is certainly not the same as other Japanese.  Despite being born and bred in Amagasaki, west Osaka, he doesn’t have the right to vote, and must carry a registration card whenever he leaves his house.  He is a Zainichi Korean, one of the 515,000 who cannot take the citizenship of the country of their birth.

In Japan, where nationality is determined by blood, the lottery of one’s ancestry still determines much.

Jin’s parents were brought to Osaka during the war to work in the factories of Kansai, and, like many, did not return to the Korean peninsula on its independence.

“I can’t hide who I am,” he says “I am Korean by blood but Japanese by breeding.”

Such confused identity – and the discrimination which accompanied it – was borne with dignity and stoicism by Jin’s generation.   From the 1960s to 1980s Zainichi Korean groups gradually secured basic rights to social welfare and pensions, and exemption from fingerprinting on re-entry to Japan.

Director of the Osaka Zainichi Foreigner Association, Jin has been involved for over thirty years in the struggle for Zainichi Korean rights. But as he approaches retirement, the battle for equal rights has still not yet been won.  He worries that his children – like he unable to participate in political life – will still face the same feeling of exclusion as him.

“There is a problem inherent in Japan that leads to foreigners being treated as they are.  The attitude of law and politics must change.”

Yet here is the rub: for the necessary legislative and political change to come the Zainichi Korean movement, as a voice for all foreign residents in Japan, must remain strong and continue to lobby the government.  Yet despite being “motivated by their experiences of discrimination” its leaders are ageing.  It is unclear how regeneration will occur, and seems certain that as the ancestral identity of the third and fourth Zainchi Korean generation fades, youth participation in groups such as the Mintōren and Mindan will decline.

The movement is weakening, and with it hopes for the securing of the most basic of human rights: suffrage.  Jin’s good mood darkens slightly at the thought.  “The Zainichi problem won’t be solved in my time.”

Names changed at request of interviewees