Local Spaces and Identities— Hypercorrect behavior

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“The derogatory epithet commonly used by the Japanese characterizing Koreans as futei senjin (rebellious Koreans) is said to have originated in this [colonial] period. In the eyes of many Japanese, the alienated behavior of Koreans supported the belief that Koreans were unwelcome intruders incapable of being assimilated into Japanese society. The stereotype of a Korean was related to “badness,” not only moral but even in respect to physical comportment. Even today, it is not uncommon to find a grandmother scolding her grandchild by saying, ‘Don’t sit like “Chosenjin” do’”
(Lee and DeVos 1981c, 41).

While some residents in Kyoto are quick to assume that Koreans are (for reasons that seem to attach to “Koreanness”) more violent, less responsible, and in other ways not as reliable as Japanese, Resident Korean life is Kyoto is most often based on behavioral norms keyed to those available to their Japanese neighbors. The stigma associated with being Korean and living in a stigmatized neighborhood in Kyoto does not release Koreans from reacting to expectations on behavior in public. In fact, among the hundred or so most active Madang organizers there were very few individuals, one or two, who would, by their individual public behavior, perhaps attract notice in, say, an up-town department store. And the streets and homes in Higashi-kujo, although modest in content, were no less modest in their formal public presentation than homes in my own neighborhood.

For many families, the best response to the stigma is through hypercorrect behavior. By acting correctly according to the standards of the majority Japanese population in Kyoto, these families seek to distance themselves from the stigma of being Korean. However, this also makes them aware of their inability to be accepted as Japanese.

“I think we are better Japanese than most Japanese,” Ms. Yamasaki said once, “because we have to try harder.” I asked her to explain.

“People outside think that people living in Higashi-Kujo are, you know, not capable of proper living. So my father always makes sure that everything is proper, that the street is clean outside our house, and that nobody can say anything against us.”

“The Man from Earth did not answer. But as the days went by, he began to see the details in the streets far below his room on the fourteenth floor of a new hotel. The people came into focus; they were not earthlings, but native to this star. Faces were kin to each other in a gentle absence of expression.
Change, too, was so much faster in the city about him. As a plant mushrooms in a hothouse, the city was growing faster than his eyes could record. Where there had been one factory, now there were two. His hotel had been 14 stories; now it had silently risen to 15, and atop the new height sprouted a roof-garden where there had been only a roof.”
Visit to a Green Star 1964 n.p.

But again, acting correctly is, in itself, insufficient to join the general Kyoto population for whom acting correctly is also connected to “Japaneseness.”

Popular perceptions of Koreans in Kyoto mark their “rough” ways. “In my primary school,” a Japanese friend told me, “All the Koreans were bullies. It’s true. They frightened me.”

This perception of Koreans as prone to violence underplays the role of violence in working class Kyoto, and so it hides the notion that working-class Japanese also, on occasion, use physical violence or its threat. One of the arenas where violence is now undeniable is in the schools. In Japan, bullying has been recognized as a general problem in all compulsory public schools. This is not limited to any nationality, class, or gender, although there may be occasions where the differential exit criteria for students might promote tough behavior (see: learning to roudou).

“...and so we being to look down on and to suppress the Korean things [in our life]. When I graduated from junior high school and took the employment exam, if I used my real, Korean name, I could have sent off 30 applications without getting one response...”
Mr. Smith¹, second generation resident Korean.

Because they face a barrage of (now mostly informalized) barriers to university entrance, along with a general lack of adult mentorship to help them through these, more young Koreans than young Japanese choose to find other, non-university futures for their lives. School then becomes also a space of involuntary disciplinary confinement².

Like bullying, street crime in Kyoto is a topic that is difficult to summarize, in part because of a general under reporting³ of such crime in the city (a friend who worked in 7-11 convenience store on the west side of Kyoto spoke of almost daily shoplifting and occasional strong-arm robbery, never once were the police called. Signs outside of convenience stores in Kyoto demand that motorcycles helmets cannot be worn into the store, as these hide the wearer from the surveillance cameras).

“Although the problem of juvenile delinquency in Yao [Osaka] was not confined to the Korean community, it was recognised that a disproportionately high number of the troublemakers were in fact Korean and that furthermore the Koreans tended to be the ringleaders. Most of the Japanese people living in the area put the problems down to the youngsters’ ‘family backgrounds’ and were reluctant to accept that discrimination might have had a role to play”
(Leveille and Nuttall 1997).

In neighborhoods where there is a visible presence of resident Koreans, these are apt to be targeted as the “usual suspects” in investigations of local street crime, and the visible presence of Koreans living in a neighborhood may trigger an expectation among Japanese that the vicinity is a furyoujuutakuchiku (slum) neighborhood (See also: Yoshida 1994). While the city avoids a blanket racial explanation, “family problems” and “cultural deficiencies” are provided as reasons for street crime as this is attached to Koreans in Kyoto.

“Racism took shape at this point (racism in its modern, “biologizing,” statist form): it was then that a whole politics of settlement (peuplement) family, marriage, education, social hierarchization, and property, accompanied by a long series of permanent interventions at the level of the body, conduct, health, and everyday life, received their color and their justification from the mythical concern with protecting the purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race”
(Foucault 1990, 149)

This also serves to isolate and define Koreans as prone to delinquency (see quote at the left). These are the same alibis that allow corporations to reject Korean applicants for salaried positions. In other words, however such alibis might help to maintain a notion that Japanese nationals (again, 99% of the population) in Kyoto are naturally prone to lawfulness (the flip side of the Korean lawbreaker stigma) there is far too much crime in Kyoto to pin this all on the Koreans, or on some temporary juvenile delinquent phase (see: bosozoku) that will, like measles, heal all by itself.

The social/cultural discrimination that moves Koreans out of the general economy does not re-move them from the surrounding discourse that articulates norms for behavior in public. In fact, in the pre-war era, Koreans in Kyoto were subjected to formal instruction on proper public behavior, as were (and are) all school children in Japan. But again, these behaviors are also overcoded with meanings relating them to a nationalized history of Japanese culture.

¹The names used to designate local persons who advised me or participated in the event and who desired to remain anonymous are chosen randomly from English names. Why English names? I have avoided using Korean names as these tend to be few in number (Kim, Lee, etc.) and might resemble an actual person. Many of the Koreans I worked with have a Japanese name they use when this is convenient. But these names are also loaded as signifying the inability to use their real, Korean name. English will have to do.

²As the Higashi-kujo Madang takes place on public school yards (the only spaces large enough for it in the district), it was particularly poignant for those Koreans who had attended the school to see it decked with Korean artwork, and ringing with Korean drums.

³For example, in the years I was living in Kyoto there were virtually no rapes recorded in the local crime statistics, while Sato [1991, 86] described gang rape as one of the activities of bosozoku, and certainly one would guess that various types of rape or of molestation would be present in Kyoto. The stigma of rape on the female victim in Japan still seems to preclude legal redress. And in general, calling the Japanese police into any personal situation is not something that merchants and individuals do unless this is unavoidable. Bicycles and umbrellas are regularly “borrowed,” and most of my neighbors had elaborate security systems against robbery.