From Korea to Kyoto— Literature on
Resident Koreans

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CLICK on IMAGE to go to MAP of Korean Sites in Kyoto

There is an available literature on Koreans in Japan, and also Koreans in Kyoto. Most of this is in Japanese but other sources are available in English, and much of it is useful in detailing the personal hardships, institutional discrimination, and identity problems that Koreans in Japan face. Of great value to the Kyoto situation is a two volume set, Zainichi no ima—Kyoto hatsu [Resident Koreans Today—dateline Kyoto], published in Kyoto in 1993 by the Kyoto branch of the National Resident Korean Academic Research Association. Part One of Zainichi 1993 deals mainly with problems in the Japanese school system, Part Two emphasizes information about lifestyle and local Korean cultural practices (such as the Higashi-kujo Madang).

Weiner (1989) outlines the first 13 years of Korean immigration to Japan after annexation (1910-1923). He ends his work with a discussion of the massacre of thousands of Koreans by vigilante groups after the Kanto (Tokyo area) earthquake of 1923. Lee and DeVos (1981) is a large anthology about the situation of Koreans in Japan, but this is not as up-to-date as one would like. Harajiri (1989) updates this discussion (in Japanese).

Many of the recent writings on Koreans in Japan note the “coming of age” of third-generation resident Koreans, many of whom have moved “beyond” debates centered around either repatriation to Korea or assimilation to some acquired Japanese identity. Norma Field (“Beyond Envy...”, and “Resident Korean Literature...”) has written about how Koreans are addressing their alienation within an ambient lifestyle that is both viscerally coded for immediate and continuous conspicuous consumption, and as intimately “Japanese.”

Resident Koreans still face unwritten forms of exclusion from the workplace.
“In the case of interviews for jobs, the results from school [work] are less important than the materials that are ‘not said, not written, and not submitted’.”
(Mayu 1994)

Field notes, (in “Resident Korean Literature...”) that “internationalism” in Japan includes a continuing distancing of the archipelago from the Asian mainland, a place which has relatively low prestige on the locally negotiated global scale of cosmopolitan centrality. This so-called “internationalism” thus continues an “ethnicization” of Koreans as irremedially “esunikku” [ethnic]—Asian types, just one of several varieties of whom now supply off-shore (but not on-shore¹) labor to large Japanese multinational corporations.

Field looks at recent literary works of resident Koreans, but she does not consider their festival production, which overlaps (in its dramatic narratives) with this, and which also brings a group performance into play, a performance that offers therapy (A festival is a space of social therapy) for the bodies and the moods of resident Koreans.

¹The same companies that work around Japan’s unenforced labor laws to avoid hiring Koreans in Kyoto—but which will import “pure blooded Japanese” from South America— are building factories as fast as capital can move to China, Malaysia, and elsewhere.