Earlier this year, over 600 academics from around the world signed an online petition urging the South Korean government to grant a visa for Chong Yong-hwan, an associate professor at Meiji Gakuin University. Although Chong had been formally invited by researchers in Seoul to give a keynote speech on his most recent monograph, he was denied entry to South Korea at the last minute due in part to his Chōsen-seki (“Korean registry”) status in Japan. Chong was by no means the first individual to be denied a South Korean visa for this reason. Since 1952, the year the Chōsen-seki designation went into full effect, Chōsen-seki Koreans from Japan have consistently been refused entry into South Korea and/or monitored closely by both governments, simply because of an ambiguous legal category that represents neither nationality nor citizenship, only resident status.
It is impossible to understand what the term Chōsen-seki means without first understanding the complicated trajectories of imperialism that produced it. With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Japan officially embarked on an enterprise of territorial expansion. Acquisition of Taiwan occurred in 1895, soon followed by the annexation of Korea in 1910. During the colonial period, the Korean peninsula was referred to in Japanese as Chōsen (Kr. Chosŏn). Following its defeat in the Asia-Pacific War, Japan was stripped of its colonies and placed under the control of the U.S.-led Allied Forces. Although Korea was considered “liberated,” it too found new borders imposed on the peninsula, as the intervention of foreign powers led to the creation of the thirty-eighth parallel in August 1945 and the establishment of two competing governments by 1948. By that point, the South had adopted the name “the Republic of Korea” (Kr. Taehan min’guk) and the North, “the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (Kr. Chosŏn minjujuŭi inmin konghwaguk).
Colonial subjects in the Japanese empire were legally considered “Japanese” — second-class citizens in relation to their mainland Japanese peers, but citizens nonetheless. If they traveled abroad, for example, they did so with Japanese passports. This continued to be the case for Koreans and Taiwanese who remained in Japan, whether by choice or necessity, under the Allied Occupation. During this time Chōsen-seki was employed by the government as an ad hoc designation meant to indicate Korean ethnicity but not nationality, as Koreans in Japan were still technically counted as “Japanese” unless they actively specified otherwise. The signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1951 (which went into effect in 1952) ended the Allied Occupation of Japan, but it also stripped all former colonial subjects of their Japanese citizenship — thereby rendering Koreans in Japan stateless, as Japan did not have diplomatic relations with either North or South Korea at the time.
The word zainichi (lit. “residing in Japan”) came to be used as a catch-all term to refer to the minority communities (including Taiwanese and Chinese communities) formed in Japan due to these transformations in status. In 1965, Japan and South Korea signed a normalization treaty that established diplomatic relations between the two countries. This meant that zainichi Koreans who affiliated themselves with South Korea were allowed to obtain permanent residency status in Japan, giving them access to a number of legal and social benefits they had previously been denied. In 1981, legislation was finally passed that extended the possibility of permanent residency status to all former colonial subjects living in Japan. A new category called “special permanent resident” (tokubetsu eijūsha), which offered wider rights and more unified protection, was introduced in 1991.
Because Japan still does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea, Chōsen-seki is used by default for individuals who self-identify as North Korean. This is one of the reasons why Chōsen-seki Koreans encounter so many difficulties when attempting travel to South Korea. Moreover, such difficulties are not exclusive to travels to South Korea. Because there is no longer any country called “Chōsen,” resident Koreans with Chōsen-seki status have no way of being issued a passport; instead, they must gain special permission from both the Japanese government and the government of the country they wish to visit. However, Chōsen-seki does not always and automatically equal North Korean affiliation. It is more accurate to say that it is a designation that indicates Korean ethnicity, but not necessarily nationality.
The zainichi Korean community now consists primarily of second, third, or even fourth-generation Koreans who were born in Japan, lived their entire lives in Japan, and speak Japanese as their first (and sometimes only) language. Many of them have Japanese names and are indistinguishable from their Japanese peers. Some have South Korean nationality; some have Chōsen-seki status; some have naturalized as Japanese. Indeed, in my time living in Japan I have met several individuals who grew up without realizing that they even had Korean antecedents, because their parents or grandparents had carefully buried their family history for fear of discrimination. It was only when they looked up their koseki — family registry, or an official record of all members of a household, including information such as births and deaths, changes in resident status, and so on — that they learned the truth about their heritage.
As a Korean-American woman born and raised in the U.S., I am used to thinking about my own sense of ethnicity in terms of hyper-visibility: no matter how I might wish to define myself, I am made to be defined through race, every single day, in a myriad of different ways, as a “person of color” — a term that is most often coded as a difference, lack, or excess of the invisible norm of whiteness. For my zainichi Korean friends, however, theirs is a problem of a different sort. The myth of homogeneity that is still so prevalent in Japan has meant that there is immense societal pressure on them to “pass” as Japanese — whatever that means. As many scholars have pointed out, the politics of passing is paradoxical: on the one hand, it presupposes an unalterable, internal identity that needs to be hidden; on the other hand, it also depends upon an understanding of ethnic/racial/gendered boundaries as mutable, porous, and performative. To rephrase the issue through Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation, Japanese assimilation is a contradictory hailing: “Hey, you! You must be and always have been not-you!” This injunction of “not-you” ensures that any response will be tortuously fissured: the call demands the full assimilation of the ethnic minority, but it is precisely by the act of responding — by the very necessity to respond — that the minority is made to feel her own difference.
Despite their marginalized status, therefore, many Chōsen-seki resident Koreans — including Chong Yong-hwan — have maintained their status in order to protest such brutal, state-imposed forms of bodily control in general, and the division of the Korean peninsula in particular. It is important to remember, though, that while the patterns of discrimination in Japan can be traced all the way back to Japan’s colonization of Korea and earlier, they are also intertwined with the larger history of modern imperialism in the world. Japanese imperialists in the 19th century appropriated Western discourses on race and civilization in order to justify their own colonizing projects, for example, while the division of the Korean peninsula and subsequent creation of a stateless zainichi population were direct consequences of Cold War antagonisms between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Paying attention to the voices and experiences of Chōsen-seki Koreans can thus help us to explicate in full those coercive, global systems of nation and empire in which we are all implicated to one degree or another. As the poet Derek Walcott once ironically put it: “either I’m a nobody, or I’m a nation.”