Resident Koreans in Kyoto Today— Living on the edge

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Go to map of Kyoto in 1873
Much of the spatial underpinnings of the cultural geography of Kyoto in 1997 can be seen in this map from just six years after the Meiji emperor decamped.

For the most part, Kyoto’s Koreans who arrived since 1910 did not find housing in the city’s old neighborhoods, but rented spaces in the outlying areas: in Higashi-kujo, which before the war had been an agricultural district famous for its scallions; or in the new suburbs such as Yamashina, close to the camps built for Korean workers who dug the Higashiyama train tunnels. Their residential geography is today a map of the outer limits of Kyoto society. As Yoshida (1994) put it “Yonju banchi [the riverside area of Higashi-kujo] is the crystallization of Kyoto’s social problems.”

Of course, “Koreans” residing in Japan face similar legal and other constraints based on their lack of Japanese nationality. Here they are no different from other foreign nationals in Japan (including, for a time, myself), although their collective history—as a group that suffered through Japan’s colonization of the Korean peninsula—should have long ago provided them with a final, agreeable resolution to the issue of their status in Japan.

The interior of the main hall of the Kyoto International Conference Center. Photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/

The fact that Koreans born in Japan today are not automatically given the choice of Japanese citizenship can only be the result of a conscious program of exclusion¹, as other reasons for this are insufficient to explain its origin and continued practice.

As Fukuoka (1996a) argues, it makes little sense to see the practices of the Japanese government as leading either towards assimilation (with the aim of integration) or towards internationalization (with the aim of a multicultural state). Exclusion and geographic control are the operating logics, and these resemble very much the same logics that perpetuate Buraku places in Kyoto today.

Geographies of Exclusion

An internal geographical exclusivity is how the right of inclusion has long been enforced within Kyoto. Social status under the Tokugawa bakufu (the Shogunal government) was administered geographically. Physical residence became a synecdoche for social position (“you are where you live...”), and movement throughout the countryside was under strict control (avoiding or running a checkpoint was a capital offense).

The Buddhist temples became party to this, as their lists of parishioners became official residence documents, documents that served to place families socially and physically well into the 20th Century.

One of Kyoto city’s oldest universities, Doshisha University, unable to secure the property needed to expand within its primary campus, built this second campus outside of the city. Two other private universities in Kyoto have also created new campuses outside of the city. In the last few decades Kyoto city has lost every major opportunity to keep its higher education “industry” at home—at the same time as it failed to resolve the continued presence of buraku areas, several of which adjoin universities. One could certainly imagine a joint solution to both problems. Photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/

Today, long-term residential addresses in long-time upscale Kyoto neighborhoods are still given by proximity to important street corners and buildings, such as the (old) Imperial Palace.

Koreans and Japanese who dwell in buraku areas readily draw connections between their lack of social status and the status that is still granted to the imperial family in Japan. In large part this is because of the discourse of “blood” that connects the imperial family to a primordial “Japaneseness” and the same logic of blood that separates the Japanese body-politic from those outside groups (most specifically shunned buraku dwellers and Koreans, but logically extending to other “gaijin”) that share the city of Kyoto and other cities and neighborhoods in Japan. Through their custodial services some buraku-dwelling Japanese find themselves sweeping up Imperial properties. But tours of Imperial properties are not generally high on their recreational agenda.

On the other end of the scale, areas set aside for out-grouped families had no address at all, and so the families who dwelled within also had no permanent official address.

It was precisely this bureaucratically enforced lack of an address² that marked those who were excluded from society.

“When it comes to the hiring of high-school graduates, the public employment security office entrusts the school with the business of introductions...many times the application [made by the student to the school to pass on to prospective employers] seems to be withdrawn by the school at the point in time where it was understood that a foreign country family registration [was involved].”
Mayu 1994

Foreign residents, although required to register their address, and not to move or change jobs without notifying the city government, also do not have an official family residence, a central part of the family registration (koseki) laws³ that the Japanese government and police use to monitor their population. Foreign residents are located thus by their lack of official location. But Japanese citizens are also locatable to an extent that the citizens of many countries are not.

To say that the government tracks foreign residents in Kyoto is not to suggest that government does not also keep track of its own citizens.

One of the few remaining street scenes preserved from the pre-War period, this district today shows not only the urban vocabulary of an earlier time, but, by example, it shows how much the remainder of the city has lost in its post-War redevelopment. It is daunting to reflect on the fact that perhaps a majority of Kyoto streets could once have been easily renovated in this manner. Photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/

As in many other examples of Japanese government practices (such as when public schools monitor and intervene in the home life of their students), the overall effect of the spatial regulations that manage the activities of people living in Kyoto is felt by the Japanese citizen population, if for no other reason than demographic ones: less than three percent are either Japanese living in a buraku area, or persons holding foreign passports.

And so when the residents of Higashi-kujo speak of social change, they often speak of issues and conflicts that are not limited to, nor that only directly apply to either Koreans or buraku residents in Kyoto. In terms of state interventions into life-styles, citizens in state-nations such as Japan (see also: State-nation modernity) are not treated that much differently from resident aliens.

¹Japan is hardly alone as a state requiring infants born in the nation to also have one or more parents that are already citizens in order to automatically receive citizenship (it was only recently that the mother’s nationality was sufficient)—more than half of all states do not give citizenship on the basis of birth alone, although this is becoming more popular. But Japan today is a singularly exclusive nation in terms of the minuscule number of naturalizations it does annually. ISSHO, an NGO in Tokyo recently (November 1996 at
http://www.iac.co.jp/~issho) reported that Japan’s total naturalization for 1994 was about 11,000 (with more than half of these were resident Koreans born in Japan). By comparison, the United States now records more than one million naturalizations in a year (while automatically conferring citizenship on all infants born in the US), and the EU countries combined record more than one-third of a million in a year. Clearly, so far at least, “internationalization” in Japan has not included the welcoming of immigrants and refugees from other nations.

²With social reform movements in this century, buraku’s acquired addresses: but these addresses also were catalogued, and the lists widely distributed among potential employers, schools, and other interested parties (such as marriage brokers). So nothing really changed.

³This set of papers, which is held by the city government, forms the basis for an official history of family members, including a history of every past residence. The Chinese character “ko” in koseki is the term for “door.” There are no post-office boxes for mail in Kyoto, no addresses that are not official. Today the city is computerizing all of its residence records, for the “convenience” of its citizens. The consequences of the Family Registration Law on the continuation of buraku discrimination should be enough for this to be abolished, if, in fact the government is concerned about resolving this on-going abuse of human rights in Japan. But as much as the Japanese government (through its Ministry of Education and other organs of state) seems determined to forget recent history (such as war crimes and later environmental “crimes”), it seems more than willing to track the histories of its own citizens for its own purposes.