UC San Diego

My dissertation examines the negotiation of citizenship and belonging among Zainichi Koreans (Koreans in Japan) in contemporary Japan. My analysis focuses on the pro-North Korean schools that have become a target of state sanctions, racist hate crimes and media misrepresentation since the revelation of North Korean abductions of Japanese civilians on September 17, 2002. Situating Japan’s anti-North Korean sentiments in a broader context of the global War on Terror, my dissertation reveals how the War on Terror has shaped Japan’s national security discourses and practices, and how the United States has turned the issue of Japanese abductees into an “American” concern, together constructing North Korea as a military and moral threat and justifying various sanctions against North Korea and its associates including those in Japan including pro-North Korean schools.

Through ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews, as well as analysis on newspaper articles, government documents, court transcripts, blog entries and tweets, my dissertation examines various survival strategies and tactics that Korean schools have employed. In their efforts to bring life to the space that is meant to disappear, members of the Korean schools devote material, intellectual, cultural and affective labors. In order to navigate and defy the stigma as well as material and symbolic consequences of being labeled as “(potential) terrorists,” Korean schools have also mobilized cultural and political discourses and practices, specifically employing “multicultural coexistence” (tabunka kyōsei) and “students are innocent” narrative as viable frameworks to explain why they are legible and sympathetic subjects. I argue that Zainichi Koreans’ recent social movements on local, national and international levels challenge the traditional pathways to belonging, and disavow full inclusion as the basis of claiming civil rights, while at the same time illuminating the limits of liberal multiculturalism that seeks to depoliticize and dehistoricize Korean schools and education. Simultaneously Korean diasporic subjects and ethnic minorities of Japan, Zainichi Koreans (re)claim ideological and emotional ties with their homeland(s) while claiming full membership and equal rights in Japan, posing a radical alternative to imagining “minority politics” that is not simply about liberal incorporation, but also about engaging in unthinkable politics.