Japan's Second-Class Citizens
ABRAMS, ARNOLD
LOCKING OUT KOREANS Japan's Second-Class BY ARNOLD ABRAMS Tokyo She looked Japanese, spoke Japanese and lived less than 10 miles from the heart of Tokyo. Yet the middle-aged housewife did not...
...In addition, following the assassination attempt Japanese Koreans, particularly the young, began to openly display a heightened sense of outrage at their condition...
...Now he is suing to regain it, and explains: "For 50 years of my life I was Japanese in speech, in heart and in habit-that is, until all of a sudden someone said I was not...
...We are organizing, and the entire community is beginning to see what can be accomplished...
...I don't want to talk...
...Everything that American bigots say about blacks," he notes, "is said by Japanese about Koreans...
...Spurring the unrest are individuals like Lee Chong II, a 32-year-old activist from Osaka, where the largest concentration of Koreans, numbering about 180,000, lives...
...A 41-year-old Japanese born in California but raised and educated in Japan, Fukada spent several years in Boston, Kyoto's sister city and the scene not long ago of serious racial strife...
...Within two weeks the Korean Emperor signed a treaty with Japan...
...These Korean districts are this nation's equivalent of America's slums: collections of drab shacks squatting on junk-strewn streets, a world apart from the middle-class environs of most of the population...
...Arnold Abrams frequently reports in these pages on Asian affairs...
...They treat Koreans as second-class people...
...in Japan they are tagged by their national origins...
...For example, unless they are among the 5,000 or so each year who gain naturalized citizenship, Koreans are not allowed to vote, and they are barred from holding responsible civil service positions-as teachers, police officers or even postmen...
...According to surveys conducted by Korean community leaders and concerned Japanese, approximately 60 per cent of the Koreans able to work are unemployed or partially employed...
...They were of Korean descent, and their hostility reflected the underlying tension that exists among them...
...The roots of all this go deep...
...It ringed the most recently suggested site, on a picturesque hill, with banners and billboards denouncing the move...
...However grim their economic lot in Japan, they had even less in Korea...
...Many Koreans now in Japan are descendants of immigrants who journeyed to the conquerors' country after annexation seeking economic opportunity...
...Still, they remain underprivileged outsiders, shackled by government reluctance to grant naturalized citizenship, and restricted by discriminatory educational, employment and housing practices...
...Most were repatriated, but several hundred thousand remained...
...Those shots, aimed at South Korean President Park Chung Hee, were fired by Mun Se Kwang, a 22-year-old Korean born and raised in Japan who had entered Seoul by obtaining a false passport under a Japanese name...
...Yet the middle-aged housewife did not act Japanese as she opened her door...
...Word is currently being awaited from the authorities on this, and court action is planned should the reply prove unsatisfactory...
...society are largely marked by their skin color...
...In our shop we have a phrase, 'Korean spirit,' that refers to this...
...Initial efforts by Korean leaders in Ikuno Ward concentrated on education and housing, two major areas of discrimination...
...Lee's base is Osaka's Ikuno Ward, home of Mun Se Kwang, and a hotbed of political and social unrest...
...The unwillingness of quality educational institutions to accept them in most instances has further virtually locked them out of well-paying positions in large business and industrial concerns...
...The priest has had ample opportunity for comparison...
...Significantly, increasing numbers of Koreans are starting to contemplate legal proceedings as a means of combatting discrimination...
...But Park and his supporters stress that the verdict was a victory only for one man, and that on the whole, Koreans still must contend with discriminatory practices...
...Unfortunately, Japanese contempt has kept them poor, producing a vicious cycle of poverty and discrimination...
...Backed by several Korean citizens' organizations, Park sued the firm, charging that his dismissal stemmed solely from racial prejudice, and last June he finally won a favorable decision...
...What do you want...
...Protests were successfully staged against Japanese nursery schools, which had been charging Korean children extra tuition, and a women's junior college that had refused to admit Korean students...
...Until now," he says, "my people have been dominated by a sense of resignation, a feeling that nothing could be done to alter the situation...
...But there's no question in my mind that prejudice, not protection, is the real issue here...
...They do not, at heart, consider Koreans worthy of a place in Japanese society-and they've shut them out...
...It was no different with other inhabitants in the area-a dismal, densely-populated strip sandwiched between railroad tracks and a chewing gum factory, dotted with seamy-looking bars and flophouse hotels asking $1 per night and no questions...
...When I say I don't like Koreans, it's not because of their looks, or the way they speak, or anything that happened between their ancestors and mine...
...To the Japanese, any people who would capitulate so quickly, surrendering so much, were unworthy of respect and undeserving of humane treatment...
...Japanese invaders were rampaging through Korean territory as early as the 4th century a.d., and a series of bloody incursions in the 16th century molded a pattern of ill will that has persisted between the two countries to this day...
...Told that we were seeking information about her neighborhood, she snapped: "I don't know anything...
...Adding to the tension, Kyoto's Japanese inhabitants have formed a citizens' committee to block the school's relocation...
...Few have ever been to their ancestral homeland, and many are physically indistinguishable from the 108 million indigenous Japanese...
...Within a year his government was being run by Japanese "advisers" while Tokyo's military ruthlessly suppressed all opposition...
...At present, 110 students and 20 teachers are housed in an antiquated structure built shortly after World War II...
...Everyone made it clear that an inquisitive outsider was not welcome...
...Although there are some exceptions, Inoue says, his Korean customers are a generally disagreeable lot...
...One can quickly see why in talking to people like Masaharu Inoue, the Japanese owner of an automobile repair shop in Kyoto, where Koreans number about 40,000...
...I'm talking about my experiences with them and the problems they give me...
...Another illustration of the problem of breaking the depressing cycle is the long-simmering controversy over relocating the Kyoto Korean High School, whose curriculum is designed to foster cultural identity and nationalistic pride among Koreans...
...School officials have sought for 15 years to secure a site where they could erect a new building, but each of several proposed locations has been rejected by the government...
...The majority were born in Japan and speak only Japanese...
...Acknowledging the validity of environmental matters, the Koreans have offered to undertake special protective measures, but the Japanese have not responded...
...Then, during World War II, approximately 1.5 million Koreans were brought to Japan as forced laborers...
...The economic dregs of U.S...
...Otherwise both groups are victims of virtually identical attitudes: They are viewed with contempt by many fellow countrymen, who consider them lazy, untrustworthy people lacking intelligence, harboring ill-concealed passions, and having foul body odors...
...While perhaps normal in New York, such behavior is strange in Tokyo, where one usually encounters unfailing politeness...
...Then she slammed the door...
...That is, if they are lucky...
...They can't be trusted, they often are nasty and they constantly try to chisel extra things out of us...
...But that is changing...
...Thus they generally work as manual laborers or in low-prestige, Korean-owned enterprises like bars, nightclubs and gambling establishments...
...After securing a job under his Japanese name-a common ploy many Koreans resort to-he was fired by the giant Hitachi Software Company when officials learned his true identity...
...In 1952, when Tokyo formally relinquished its claim to Korea under the U. S.-Japanese Treaty, he-along with most other Koreans in this country-was deprived of his citizenship...
...I don't consider myself prejudiced," the 30-year-old mechanic declares...
...And it is the issue plaguing Korean communities throughout Japan...
...The school committee can rationalize it any way they want, and they may even succeed in convincing themselves about the purity of their motives," says the Reverend Fukada...
...The reason for it was that, despite looks and language, these people were not Japanese...
...In housing, organizers mounted a major campaign against local government policies denying Koreans access to desirable public housing, although they are required to pay taxes...
...Aside from bringing diplomatic relations between the two countries to their lowest ebb since World War II, the incident-which took the life of Park's wife-succeeded in focusing widespread attention upon Japan's Korean population...
...The case of Song Tuk Hoc is fairly typical...
...A substantial portion of Inoue's customers are Korean, and generally he turns up his nose at them...
...Hitachi has had to rehire him, give him retroactive salary and pay substantial compensation...
...We no longer will blindly accept second-class status in this country...
...Until recently, the Koreans were not only Japan's largest minority, but also a forgotten one: a group whose grievances made no significant impact upon any segment of national life-or conscience...
...A pocket of ugliness, poverty and alienation in a land of esthetic precision, relative affluence and almost total homogeneity, their community is only one of many in the country...
...and in 1910 Japan took the final step by annexing Korea...
...she said suspiciously...
...They consider them insensitive and ignorant...
...They don't trust them, and they joke about their odor...
...With few exceptions the Koreans who came, either voluntarily or involuntarily, were unskilled farmhands and manual workers at the bottom of their own nation's social scale...
...This formalized the Koreans' relinquishment of sovereignty and justified-in the Japanese view-subsequent acts of repression...
...Once started, such a cycle is not easily broken...
...A committee spokesman insists the opposition stems solely from concern for "environmental protection...
...The Japanese think of themselves as decent and fair-minded, yet toward Koreans they are as cruel and bigoted as white Americans who dislike blacks...
...Modern Japanese attitudes toward Koreans may have been cemented in the wake of the 1904 invasion of Korea, the opening move in the Russo-Japanese War...
...Another case that has encouraged legal actions was initiated four years ago by 23-year-old Park Chung Sok...
...It's ironic," observes the Reverend Robert Fukada, a theology instructor at Doshisa University in Kyoto...
...Today, more than 600,000 persons of Korean descent live here, mainly on the fringes of major industrial centers...
...The denizens of these unhappy places, moreover, are Japan's counterparts of America's slum-dwelling minority groups...
...That was suddenly changed, however, by a series of pistol shots last August during National Day ceremonies in the South Korean capital of Seoul...
Vol. 58 • May 1975 • No. 10
