From Korea to Kyoto— Strangers on a Japanese street

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Today, this diasporic community is caught between two exclusions: they are divorced from affective ties to Korea (their “official” nationality) by their Japanese language mother-tongue and life-long residence outside of the Korean peninsula; and they are excluded, by their foreign (Korean) names, social/economic marginality, and their lack of citizenship, from identity with the larger Kyoto society.

It is against these twin exclusions that one group of Koreans living in South Kyoto has struggled, and their struggle has recently taken the form of a cultural festival. The tactical use of this festival in creating an opening—both to an imagined Korean culture, and also within Kyoto society and the Japanese “public sphere”—brings to the fore the notion of the public sphere as a space of inclusion/exclusion, and of the sites of practice where inclusion can be tactically attained.

Who are the Koreans living in Kyoto? Why are they there? Why are they called “Korean” even though the great majority of them were born in Kyoto? Why are there no “Korean-Japanese” (or “Korean Japanese”) in Kyoto? What are the histories that can inform their present?

“Koreans¹” in Kyoto are a sub-population with a highly diverse makeup: economically, they range from wealthy families who have ridden the Post-War economic “boom” into conspicuous prosperity to families who have lived for generations in conditions of underclass poverty that most families in Japan would be greatly surprised existed within the nation (this surprise would also reflect a denial of the life-style conditions of many Buraku dwelling Japanese).

Today the Kansai area of Japan is home to several large concentrations of Koreans: Ikunoku in Osaka, Nagataku in Kobe, Utoro, south of Kyoto, and Higashi-kujo in Kyoto city. All of these districts have organizations that represent the major political divisions in the resident Korean communities, and there are multiple similarities and also many local differences between these neighborhoods.

“The life-style of the Koreans was always very difficult. In addition to the body-punishing [labor], there was a great difference between their wages and those of the Japanese. Even the 8-10% of those who were doing the same work as Japanese made only 50% of the [Japanese] wages...”
(Mizuno 1994, 69)

The resident Korean population (“zainichi kankoku-/chosen-jin” [persons with either North or South Korean citizenship permanently residing in Japan]) in Kyoto traces its origins to the “annexation” of the Peninsula by Japan in 1910. In 1913 there were only 87 Koreans living in Kyoto-ku, but by 1941, this number had risen to more than 80,000 (Mizuno 1994, 68). Their occupations were listed as “earth-construction” (55%) and “fabric industry” (44%). Earth-construction meant manual labor in the many public works projects of the time (notably the Higashiyama train tunnels). At first the workers were mostly men (80%), who worked on contracts and then returned home. But by the beginning of the War, a third of the population were women, and most families had created homes in Kyoto. This was the beginning of the community of Koreans that still makes their homes in Kyoto.

“It is in Japanese society, one where the myth of society as mono-racial and mono-ethnic is deeply embedded, that zainichi youths live their lives. An enormous amount of invisible pressure is at work to assert that being ‘the same as others’ is both vital and a matter of course. Even a slight deviation from the norm could render one a potential target of ostracism, bullying, and abuse.”
(Fukuoka, 1996)

Politically, Kyoto’s “Koreans” today are equally diverse, from party-line communists who have visited and admire North Korea, to ultra-conservative capitalists bemoaning the current economic conditions that may limit their portfolio futures. Local individuals and families are affiliated with a variety of religions, from ecstatic traditional shamanic practitioners to Methodist Protestant Christian churches. And they also exhibit the fissures that tend to occur between generations of immigrant families: gaps in language and background that pull apart parents and children into spheres of mutual incomprehension.

Because they are physically identical as a group with the surrounding Japanese community, and because they have spoken Japanese from birth, special practices are required to isolate and mark resident Koreans as outsiders. This is an actively applied racial/national identity, which, in many ways resembles a gendering rather than a racial distinction. Just as many lesbians, for example, have little difficulty passing in everyday circumstances (assuming they so desire), the simple fact is that resident Koreans in Kyoto can easily pass as Japanese on the street. This fact decenters the notion of Japaneseness as being the product of a unique, shared blood- and place- based heritage.

In terms of their self-conscious identification with “being Korean,” this group of permanent residents (zainichi) is also strung along a wide spectrum, from passionate affirmation to equally passionate denial. As Fukuoka (1996) noted, much of this internal spread of identities and affinities is due to the conflicting logics at play in local identity formation. For as much time as it is possible, many of the young adult zainichi in the Higashi-kujo community, as well as other Koreans I met in Kyoto, simply tucked away the fact of their Koreanness during interactions on the street.

Being physically indistinguishable from other, “Japanese,” locals (despite the fact that many of the Japanese persons I spoke with about this claimed to be able to make such a distinction²), and raised in homes where the local variety of Japanese is spoken, they have no difficulty in “passing” as long as this interaction does not require them to show their official residence records. But this ability to “pass” on trains and in stores and restaurants serves also to remind them of the arbitrariness of their official outsider status.

Given that there is as yet no final way of either constantly asserting a positive “Korean” identity, nor in assembling a durable “Japanese” identity—the former because of the widespread negative stereotypes assigned to a Korean “national character,” and the latter because there is no broad support for a total assimilation of foreign nationals as “Japanese” in Kyoto—there will be times when any one identity position taken will not fit into the expectations of others, who expect a full measure of either “foreignness” or of “Japaneseness” but not something in between. And these expectations arise mostly from the way that “Japanese” identity is conferred and legitimated.

¹I begin with the word Korean in quotes to make the point that this designation is highly problematic. This chapter and part of the next attempt to explore some of the problems associated with the term “Korean” as this is applied (from the outside or by the individual) to tens of thousands of persons born in Kyoto, Japan.

²I attempted to test this ability using a set of random street photographs I took in Osaka, but the experiment failed completely. Nearly all of the persons who volunteered to evaluate the photographs—after saying that they had no difficulty recognizing Koreans on the street— stopped mid-test, and requested that the test not continue. My interpretation of this pragmatic failure is that the person faced unacceptable consequences if the test were completed, such as the following: 1) an ability to distinguish Koreans may be perceived as a desire to socially discriminate against them; and 2) the actual task was far more difficult than they realized, and they risked publicly failing in this skill.