During the late stage of Japanese colonialism in Korea, around 700,000 Koreans were forcefully displaced to Japan to serve as laborers. Today, there are close to 450,000 Zainichi (“resident”) Koreans living in Japan. Hyewon Song describes the struggle against systemic and individual racism and harassment led by Zainichi Korean women today.
If you type the name of Choi Kang-ija, a third-generation Zainichi Korean (Korean “residents” in Japan) woman into a search engine, you will find more than 4.5 million articles about her—most of them defamatory. Choi is the director of Kawasaki Fureaikan, the municipal welfare center in Sakuramoto of Kawasaki City. Before World War II, Koreans were forced to work menial low-wage jobs in the city, and many Zainichi Koreans still reside there. The Kawasaki Fureaikan was established in 1988 to “promote mutual communication between Japanese and non-Japanese residents in Japan, mainly Koreans, under the philosophy of ‘helping everyone to live life to the fullest.’” Zainichi Koreans as well as newly arrived foreign residents, Japanese children, the elderly and people with disabilities use the facility daily.
Beginning in 2016, a Japanese man made around 70 defamatory posts about Choi Kang-ija on Twitter and on various blogs. One such statement reads:
“Japan belongs to us, the Japanese people, not to you! We cannot have a society where foreigners [Zainichi Koreans] can live peacefully, and we will not allow such a society anywhere in the world. Enough of your hubris. You are an enemy of Japan. Go back to your own country at once.”
“Your own country” to go back to no longer exists as such. Japan colonized Korea in 1910 and forced Koreans to accept Japanese citizenship. They were gradually deprived of their indigenous names and language. Many first-generation Korean women and girls, born in Korea and forcibly relocated to Japan, had little education in either country. According to a 1934 survey conducted by Osaka Prefecture, the largest Korean settlement in Japan, more than 95 percent of married Korean women could not read or write in Korean or Japanese.
After Japan’s defeat in World War II, Korea became independent again. The San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1952, however, stripped Koreans living in Japan of their Japanese citizenship. Without the rights of Japanese nationals, they were considered foreigners by the Japanese Government. All Koreans 16 years of age or older were fingerprinted and required to carry their alien registration card at all times.
With few exceptions, there are no official Japanese records of Issei (ilse in Korean) women, or first-generation Zainichi Korean women. It has been assumed that Issei women did not write about themselves. This is not true. After the liberation of Korea, Issei women learned to express themselves in writing despite their difficult lives. However, the language that they wrote in was not Japanese but Korean.
After the liberation of Korea on August 15, 1945, achieving literacy for women and the education of children were the top priorities of ethnic Korean groups in Japan.
Night schools for women were organized in the Korean communities of Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo, Kanagawa, and Tokyo, where women learned to read and write in Korean, and were sometimes instructed in Western dressmaking. However, this movement for Korean literacy could not escape the Cold War. The division of South and North Korea also split Japan’s Korean ethnic organizations. In the early postcolonial period, Zainichi Korean organizations that supported the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, aka North Korea) were the main forums for the ethnic movement, including culture, education, and the arts. These organizations were more reflective of popular ideas than Chaeilbon Taehan Minguk Kŏryu Mindan (aka Mindan), the Republic of Korea (ROK, aka South Korea)-affiliated organization in Japan. The possibility of repatriation to the DPRK—which tore many families apart, as once they crossed to the DPRK, they could never return to Japan—in 1959 gave Zainichi Korean women and students an incentive to learn Korean.
As the division of Korea became entrenched, the need for Issei women to become literate in Japanese became urgent. Almost 30 years after the liberation, these Issei women had their first opportunity to learn Japanese. They began taking night classes at Japanese junior high schools that had just opened for people from Buraku (the segregated communities in Japan which have suffered institutional discrimination), war orphans, disabled people, and Japanese civilian repatriates and returnees who had been forced to remain in South Korea and China after the war. When Tennoji Night Junior High School, the first public night school in Osaka, opened in 1969, Zainichi Korean women comprised most of the students. Alongside Japanese public schools, Japanese-language literacy classes were held mainly for Issei women in the Korean enclaves in Osaka, Tokyo, and Kawasaki. At the Kawasaki Fureaikan, literacy classes began in 1988, the same year as its opening, and are still being offered today.
In 2015, elderly Issei Zainichi women learning in Sakuramoto demonstrated against the “security” laws, which allowed the preemptive use of military force. The women chanted “Peace comes first, protect the peace.” Japanese media covered the rally.
Zainichi Koreans have no guaranteed right to an ethnic education, and they have been barred from working for Japanese companies or as civil servants. They cannot receive national health insurance or pensions. Some of these discriminatory policies were rectified in the late 1970s through protests and court battles, mainly due to the efforts of Zainichi Koreans themselves. In 1970, Park Jong-seok sued Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, alleging discriminatory employment practices. A support organization was set up in Kawasaki. Then, second-generation Zainichi Koreans in Kawasaki were the first to raise the nationality clause issue, a form of legal discrimination that prevents foreign nationals from receiving child allowances and residing in public housing, by sending an open letter of inquiry to the administrative authorities. Kawasaki was also the first city in Japan to have a campaign to abolish the fingerprinting requirement under the Alien Registration Law and the nationality clause in municipal employment policies. The establishment and operation of the Fureaikan is also part of this trend. The more recent protests of Issei women in 2015 cannot be described without mentioning this long affiliation Kawasaki has with civil rights movements.
Nevertheless, prejudice and discrimination against Zainichi Koreans persist in Japanese society. It goes without saying that this is the responsibility of the Japanese government, which has failed to end colonialism for almost 80 years since its defeat in World War II. Postwar Japan’s foreign policy originated in the control and regulation of Zainichi Koreans, who initially constituted a large portion of the foreign population in Japan. Rallies against Zainichi Koreans began in their neighborhoods and downtown areas around 2012. In 2014, 378 of these racist protests were held across the country. They took place under police protection, as Japan had no laws regulating hate speech and hate crimes. On November 8, 2015, a Japanese man in his fifties living in Kawasaki posted an announcement for a “Japan Cleansing Rally” of “the heavily anti-Japanese polluted Kawasaki” to be held in Sakuramoto. He claimed that he would “exterminate the rubbish, maggots and ticks living in Kawasaki.” Shockingly, it had been the peace rally by elderly Issei Zainichi women that led to the planning of this hate rally in a quiet neighborhood. The moment these Korean women, who until then had been kept silent, summoned up the courage to speak out, Japanese racists shouted abuse and threats at them.
On the day of the protests, 300 people in and outside Kawasaki stood at the entrance to Sakuramoto and blocked the protesters from entering the town. The following January, the racists announced a second “Japan Purification Rally” in Sakuramoto. Kawasaki Citizens’ Network against Hate Speech was formed immediately, with the participation of 61 citizens’ groups, NGOs, labor unions, and city councils. When a racist rally in Sakuramoto was planned for January 31, about 1,000 citizens gathered to prevent it. Some conducted a sit-in to stop the racists from entering the area. The rally, however, took place as scheduled, under police protection.
Two days after the enactment of the Hate Speech Act, racists held a third “Japan Purification Rally,” taking advantage of the Act’s lack of penalties or other forms of enforcement. This time, over a thousand Koreans and Japanese citizens gathered and successfully shut down the demonstration after protesters had marched only ten meters. This incident caught public attention and was regarded as a rare victory in the civil rights movement in Japan. This sequence of events led to a decline in racist rallies against Zainichi Koreans.
In 2018, the Tokyo Metropolitan government and Kunitachi City enacted an ordinance against hate speech. The following year, Kawasaki City enacted the Ordinance for Creating a City Free of Discrimination and Respectful of Human Rights, Japan’s first ordinance penalizing hate speech. The enactment of these ordinances is the result of the efforts of Choi Kang-ija, who is a strong advocate against hate speech. She has since been relentlessly attacked by anonymous online posters.
Women and other people subjected to structural violence are more likely to encounter online harassment, and the harassment tends to be more severe than with other people. This is true for Zainichi Koreans, in particular women. However, there is no law regulating online hate speech in Japan yet.
In fact, Japan does not have any comprehensive anti-discrimination law. Japanese government officials have been prevented from passing such legislation by vigorous opposition from the Jimintō.
Still today, the Japanese government claims that there is no outright racism in Japan, and that, consequently, there is no need for a law prohibiting racial discrimination. What this means is that there is no accountability for hate speech based on origin or nationality, unless it constitutes a breach of another law, such as defamation.
Choi Kang-ija is not the only Zainichi Korean woman to be a victim of extreme online harassment. Lee Shin-hye, a freelance writer, was attacked online for more than a decade by people insulting her appearance and personality. An anonymous female Zainichi Korean lawyer who filed a motion for a temporary restraining order in 2016 to prevent racists from roaming around Sakuramoto was subsequently subjected to multiple disciplinary claims by approximately 1,000 Japanese nationals. The blog calling for disciplinary action against her is filled with invective against Zainichi Korean people. Natsuki Yasuda, a photojournalist with a Zainichi Korean father, published an article about her roots in December 2020 and was subsequently attacked over the internet.
Unlike the Issei women, Zainichi Korean women today have no difficulty expressing themselves in Japanese. However, Japanese racists have done their best to silence them. It is dangerous for Zainichi Korean women to use social media. This perpetuates Japan’s oppression of colonized Korean women.
Yet the generations born in postwar Japan have taken online racists to court. In August 2014, Lee Shin-hye won her defamation lawsuit case against the perpetrators and the administrators of the internet forum. The anonymous Zainichi Korean female lawyer has filed a series of court cases since 2018 against about 1,000 individuals who have filed disciplinary claims against her. So far, she has won all of the court cases. In January 2021, Natsuki Yasuda filed a court case to identify the person attacking her online. That November, Choi Kang-ija filed a court case seeking damages against a Japanese man who repeatedly made racist comments about her. Many Koreans and Japanese citizens now support these trials. While Japan as a whole is moving towards the far-right and some Japanese people are complicit in discrimination, there are also many citizens, such as Japanese lawyer Hajime Kambara and Morooka Yasuko, fighting alongside the victims.
In March 2021, Choi Myeongran, a 92-year-old Issei woman studying Japanese literacy at Fureaikan, read a threatening letter addressed to Fureaikan, which stated that Koreans should be eradicated and that they would hopefully all die of COVID 19. She replied, “I have lived hard for more than 70 years in Japan. I was even thinking about my afterlife. What’s the use of fighting now? Let’s all get along.” Japan still has a long way to go to achieve gender equality. In fact, Japan ranked 120th out of 156 countries in the Global Gender Gap Report 2021.
Japan’s discriminatory policies toward foreign nationals, which have remained deeply rooted in colonialism, are a burden on the country’s multi-national foreign residents.
Mistreatment of foreigners at Japan’s immigration detention centers and widespread exploitation and human rights abuses in the Technical Intern Training program are only two examples.
Under such circumstances, the “double colonization” arising from imperialism and feudal ideology has continued. It is only in recent years that Zainichi Korean women have begun to wage legal battles against social injustice and that fellow Zainichi Korean female lawyers have supported these battles. It is remarkable that Zainichi women, who have been silenced for so long, are finally speaking out. However, the responsibility for confronting Japan’s government-led xenophobia, racism, and gender discrimination must not be placed solely on their shoulders. Instead, this is a problem for Japanese people to solve. ■