Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin (review)

Abstract

in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, SONIA RYANG, ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2000; 240 pp. Reviewed by CHUNGHEE SARAH SOH San Francisco State University in Japan is a valuable collection of critical yet sympathetic articles that explore from anthropological, sociological, literary, and/or cultural studies approaches the issues involved in the formation, reproduction, and transformation of ethnic identity among Koreans or living in Japan permanent alien residents. The book is both an elaboration and extension of the themes raised in the editor's earlier work, North in Japan. As a result of the postcolonial vision of Japanese nationhood culturally integrated under the emperor (p. 27) that guided the re-formation of nation-state in occupied Japan (1945-52), the myth of Japan an ethnically homogeneous nation has spread not only among the Japanese themselves, culminating in the popular discourse on their cultural uniqueness (nihonjinron) in the 1970s, but also virtually blinding the Western academy to the existence of a discriminated ethnic minority community in Japan. Based on her educational experience Melissa Wender gives personal testimony to the invisibility of in Western studies of Japan. She studied Japanese history at a reputable (but, in retrospect, conservative) university in the United States (p. 74) but she knew nothing about resident until her first stay in Japan in 1986 when she learned about their protest against the fingerprinting requirement of the Alien Registration Law. Wender as a different sort of foreigner (p. 101) gave her prints without a second thought (p. 74) when she registered an alien. How do we explain such different reactions to the same legal requirement? What are their implications for the issues of identity? The editor's Introduction provides a succinct overview of the colonial and postcolonial history of in Japan and their expatriate politics (polarizing the community into supporting North and Mindan supporting South Koreans), before outlining the subject matter of the volume. The contributors include Japanese scholars trained in English-speaking countries and teaching in Japan, an Australian, and Americans of Korean, Japanese, and non-Asian ethnic backgrounds (all with personal experiences of living in Japan aliens), well the editor who is herself a Japan-born, stateless Chongryun currently residing in the United States. From the volume, readers learn interesting details of major historical/political events and connotations of key terms, albeit somewhat redundantly, that have helped shape the evolving, ambiguous contours of the ethnonational identity of a diasporic people living in twentiethcentury Japan. The volume may be divided into three topically connected groups of three chapters each, plus a brief but provocative concluding chapter that questions the effectiveness of the socialscientific approach to ethnic identity. The first three chapters (by Chikako Kashiwazaki, Sonia Ryang, and Koichi Iwabuchi, respectively) highlight the historical, political, and sociocultural dimensions in the legal status of resident and their exclusion from Japanese society. Kashiwazaki analyzes the sociohistorical dynamics involving the alien status of resident in terms of the interactions between Japan's postwar reorganization of nationality regulation and the ethnonationalist politics of Korean organizations in Japan, and discusses the concept of denizen for resident aliens with partial citizenship rights (p. 14). Ryang explores the concept of home found among by examining the meaning of the past repatriation to North Korea (many of whom originated from southern Korea) and the contemporary reality of double homelessness (p. 51) for the second-generation overseas nationals of North Korea. …