Diaspora without Homeland is a cross-disciplinary collection of articles that brings together different, at times conflicting, perspectives on Koreans in Japan under a shared acknowledgment of the necessity to respond to the rapidly changing conditions surrounding them. Much has been written on Koreans in Japan since Changsoo Lee and George De Vos’s pioneering work Koreans in Japan: Ethnic Conflict and Accommodation (University of California Press, 1981), partly as a reaction against the proliferation of Nihonjinron (literally ‘theories on the Japanese,’ popular literature that emphasizes the uniqueness of Japanese culture) in the 1980s. The historical presence of the approximately 600,000 Koreans in Japan, particularly that of the so-called 460,000 “oldcomers” (colonial subjects brought to Japan before 1945 and their descendents) became a living proof for scholars aiming to counter Nihonjinron theorists and their belief in Japan’s homogeneity. The book’s framing of the Koreans in Japan as a diasporic group marks a departure from the traditional treatment of them as Japan’s minorities. Due to Japan’s jus sanguineous nationality law, even Japan-born descendents of “old comer” Koreans are excluded from national membership which renders the term “Japan’s minority” problematic. The turn to “diaspora” stresses the group’s exteriority to Japan, but also offers an escape from the discourse that prescribes assimilation and naturalization as the condition for any improvements of the group’s status. The co-editors Sonia Ryang and John Lie insist on the book’s heterogeneity which purportedly resists an “academic resolution” over political differences. Faithful to this spirit, the book opens with Ryang’s introduction and her separate chapter which stress the vulnerability that comes with Koreans’ exclusion from Japan’s polity and ends with Lie’s counter-argument that urges the readers to look beyond the cliched image as “the oppressed and pathetic” colonial victims toward their future that exists in Japan. The book draws its strength from its highly ambiguous definition of diaspora that highlights the discontinuous relation Koreans in Japan have to existing nation-states as well as to the very label of “Koreans in Japan.” Most contributors thus engage the discourses of diaspora critically, which marks the book’s departure from its closest predecessor, the special issues of Korean and Korean American Studies Bulletin (Vol 11,12, 2000, 2001), also featuring Ryang and Lie, which literally mapped out the Korean diaspora – the fourth largest in the world as the issue editor Hesung Chun Koh stresses – in sections that are divided according to four large Korean diasporas in the United States, Japan, China, and Central Asia. Ryang qualifies the book’s turn to diaspora by defining diasporic discourses as heterogeneous, or “promiscuous” sets of theories that destabilize their own parameters (2).