Kazuko Suzuki - Divided Fates: The State, Race, and Korean Immigrants Adaptation in Japan and the United States

Divided Fates

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Suzuki, Kazuko

Title: Divided fates : the state, race, and Korean immigrants' adaptation in Japan and the United States / Kazuko Suzuki.

Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016008133 (print) | LCCN 2016009340 (ebook) | ISBN 9780739129555 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9780739129562 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: KoreansJapanSocial conditions. | KoreansUnited StatesSocial conditions. | ImmigrantsJapanSocial conditions. | ImmigrantsUnited StatesSocial conditions. | Adjustment (Psychology)Japan. | Adjustment (Psychology)United States. | JapanRace relationsPolitical aspects. | United StatesRace relationsPolitical aspects. | Social surveysJapan. | Social surveysUnited States.

Classification: LCC DS832.7.K6 S89 2016 (print) | LCC DS832.7.K6 (ebook) | DDC 305.8957/052dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008133

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

When I was a child, around the age of seven or eight, I had a Zainichi Korean friend. His name was Lee-kun (kun is a suffix for boys in the Japanese language). We often played in his apartment after school. He did not have a father and his mother worked outside the home all day, so it was just the two of us in the apartment. We did not do anything special, just things like working on homework and watching TV together. We both liked this after-school time. It was a time for us when we could forget that he was Zainichi Korean and I was a woman. Being Korean or being female was not easy in Japanese society; it was often humiliating at that time. But in that small apartment, there was nobody to discipline us for who we were.

My parents and neighbors kept telling me not to play with him because he was Korean. Sometimes our classmates threw stones at us with humiliating words. Chon! Chon! Youre also Chon because you play with him. (Chon is a derogatory Japanese term to refer to Koreans). I usually picked up the stones and threw them back at them. I said to Lee-kun. Fight! Throw them back! He did not cry, but he sat down and bent over to protect his head. He never resisted the violence. It became inevitable that one day after this happened, I was called upon by the teacher and scolded: Miss Suzuki, you are a girl. Behave like a girl!

I could not understand why he did not fight at that time: I had yet to know what despair meant in life and I was too immature to share such pain with him. The harassment against his mother and him escalated, and they soon left the town. Years later, when I interviewed Mr. Kim Kyeung-duk, who became the first certified Korean lawyer in Japan, he told me, We are not stupid. Suppose someone stepped on your foot. You know that the person will step on your foot even worse if you say it hurts; so you will try not to say ouch. Japanese society has gradually changed, and we became able to at least say ouch. Now I can understand Lee-kun much better at the deepest emotional level, having had work experience in Japan as a woman and being a minority member in the United States, in particular in rural Texas.

Koreans in Japan are now in the fourth generation and are culturally Japanese. Just like Lee-kun, they look like the Japanese. However, they have been severely discriminated against in Japanese society. As a child, I wondered if Koreans (and immigrants more generally) have to encounter similar kinds of obstacles and discrimination in other parts of the world. This later turned into an academic question that I wanted to address: what distinguishes the fate of the same ethnic group in different locations after migration? What is the long-term effect of state policy and ideology on immigrant adaptation, including their collective identity formation? Can immigrants move up or even survive in larger society, when mobilization of their human capital is institutionally blocked?

Having grown up, and lived in three different countries (Japan, Russia, and the United States), I now have some answers to these questions. What I found in these countries was that the fates of Koreans who originally belonged to a single ethno-cultural group were significantly affected by when, where, and in what context they migrated. While there are variations in terms of adaptation among Korean immigrants at the individual level across the destinations (mainly because of the human capital of each immigrant), what stunned me first and foremost were the distinctive adaptation patterns among Koreans at the collective level in each country, dependent on the particular context of reception and ideology of nationhood of the receiving country. This book explores this phenomenon in depth.

This cross-national project started initially as a comparison of Korean diasporic groups in Japan and the former Soviet Union. Koreans who lived in the Primorsky krai were deported to Central Asia (formerly a territory of the USSR) by Stalin in the 1930s, due to national security reasons, while Zainichi Koreans were forcibly brought to Japan as colonized subjects, owing to labor shortages during WWII. But how they adapted in new destinations was very different in these countries: Koreans in the former Soviet Union maintained their ethnic Koreanness and became a much less politicized ethnic minority group, while Koreans in Japan have become thoroughly Japanized, yet have been denigrated as a negative minority in Japan and are even regarded as a potential security risk for the country. As is often reiterated in diaspora studies of Jewish, Armenian, and African people, the shared experience of tragic historical events such as forced migration, genocide, and slavery can forge a strong ethnic identity and solidarity among a people. I was interested in the impact of the tragic experiences of ethnic history among Koreans (as well as on their original culture) in their adaptation in Japan and the former Soviet Union. Despite having experienced similar policies of forced ethnic migration, their adaptation patterns in these countries were very different. Therefore, I thought I could focus on other structural factors that differentiated the adaptation of colonized Koreans in two countries that had very different ethnic policies growing out of different political systems and ideologies of nationhood.

As the title indicates, however, this book compares the Korean diasporic groups in Japan and the United States, not in Japan and the former Soviet Union. I did conduct fieldwork in Russia, which was thrilling and dangerous, yet inspiring. But for various reasons that I did not have much control over, I had to give up including Koreans in the former Soviet Union in my comparative study. In the immediate post-9/11 period, censorship within the United States became more rigorous: the postal service even started to inspect research materials written in foreign languages. In this process, they confiscated a lot of my research documents that I had collected during my fieldwork. For instance, they took all the statistical and internal reports distributed among a limited number of Russian officials written in the Russian language that I obtained through my own means. These materials were never returned to me. They contended that the postal service had the authority to inspect the contents of any package, and as long as the package is deliveredeven if things are missing insideone cannot complain about it. The paranoia among Americans after 9/11 indeed affected my life and my research. Even after having become a permanent resident of the United States, I still fear being stopped for interrogation at international borders, something that still happens to me. It is precisely this power of the state which intrigues me. The puzzle of why and how those of Korean descent are severely discriminated against in Japan kept fascinating me profoundly, and I chose to pursue this topic in comparative perspective with the case of Koreans in the United States.