Aug 26, 2021 (news.nd.edu) - Studies show that anti-Korean sentiment in Japan has grown steadily in the past decade, despite the growing acceptance of more visibly “foreign” Southeast Asian migrants in Japan.
A University of Notre Dame researcher conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a historic Korean ghetto in Osaka, Japan, to shed light on the legacy of discrimination that third- and fourth-generation Korean minorities have faced as the descendants of labor migrants under Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945. As Sharon Yoon, assistant professor of Korean studies at Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, and her co-author, Yuki Asahina, at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, point out in their recent paper in the journal Politics and Society, Korean minorities were deemed a danger to the political stability of Japan by the American Allied Forces and the Japanese government, and discriminatory laws excluded them from social welfare benefits, citizenship rights and mainstream employment throughout the postwar era. Until the 1980s, the vast majority of Korean minorities lived in squatter settlements where crime, poverty and mental illness abounded. These xenophobic policies were overturned following Japan’s ratification of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1979; and the U.N. Refugee Convention in 1982. Members of Japan’s new far right known as the “Zaitokukai” (short for Zainichi Tokken wo Yurusanai Shimin no Kai, or Citizens Against the Special Privileges of Koreans in Japan) are angry that Koreans are granted what they believe is unfair access to “public assistance not available to other foreigners, by positioning themselves as victims of the Japanese empire.” The far-right group aims to undo the legal apparatus granting Koreans these so-called special privileges. Since 2012, the new far right has moved from spreading hate on online forums to organizing anti-Korean street protests. The Japanese Ministry of Justice reported that the hate group organized 1,152 hate rallies in Japan between April 2013 and September 2015. The group has also frequently targeted Korean schools and in 2009 and 2010; “far right activists were filmed taunting Korean children with racial slurs while banging on the metal gates at the [Kyoto No. 1 Korean elementary] school’s entrance for over an hour,” the authors wrote. Ultimately, a group of human rights activists and concerned parents at the school sued the Zaitokukai. The Japanese Supreme Court ruled in the school group’s favor and fined the Zaitokukai $120,000 in 2013.
