Historiography of Zainichi Koreans: review of topics and trends

Abstract

Abstract Zainichi Koreans have been attracting and recently attract more and more attention from the scientists and journalists. This tendency is welcoming, because Zainichi Koreans, as a socio-political phenomenon, have to be investigated and presented not only to the fellow researchers, but to the mass audience as well. Nevertheless, the constantly growing amount of literature still has not been analyzed in historiographical manner. The lack of such works makes it quite difficult for other researchers to start working on Zainichi Koreans’ issues. Social scientists usually do not conduct their own separate historiographical research; therefore, the understanding of a particular issue is a matter of one’s own efforts. Researches on Zainichi Koreans have been conducted since the early sixties and ever since then there have been changes in mainstream theories, approaches or methodologies. In order not to repeat the mistakes of other researchers, or conduct what has already been done, it is crucial for the scientists to be aware of the previous progress. In this paper I provide the review of the present historiography on Zainichi Koreans, including publications since 1962 till 2009. It is important to mention, that this review does not contain all possible positions of Zainichi historiography - only a certain part of them was taken to present the tendencies throughout the aforementioned period of time.