Japan No Longer Willing To Be Invisible

By Kumiko Makihara/Tokyo

Yuko Toyoda thought she was Japanese. After all, she spoke Japanese and looked like her other elementary school friends. But shortly before she entered the third grade, her parents told her that her real name was Kang Woo Ja and she was actually Korean. Woo Ja, surprised but not dismayed, announced her true identity to her classmates, and some of them promptly taunted her. It was her first encounter with Japan's lingering prejudice against Koreans, but it was not likely to be her last.

Roughly 677,000 Koreans live in Japan, the country's largest foreign contingent but still less than 1% of the country's 123 million people. Most are descendants of Korean laborers who came to the islands when Japan's 1910-1945 colonization of the peninsula took away their jobs and land. More than four decades later, there is little discernible difference between the two peoples, but Koreans still face discrimination. Those who retain their Korean citizenship are ineligible for most civil service jobs, such as public school teaching, and they cannot vote.

Far more pervasive are the subtle social prejudices that lead employers to refuse them jobs and Japanese parents to oppose mixed marriages. Behind the society's refusal to embrace this small minority are ignorance, a superiority complex toward Koreans rooted in the colonial era, and Japan's obsession with conformity.

To live comfortably, most Koreans use Japanese aliases and hide their origins. But many are beginning to resent such subterfuges. "We're just like Japanese, so how are we supposed to change?" asks Ha Jung Nam, deputy director of a Korean residents association in Japan. President Roh Tae Woo's scheduled visit to Japan this week ignited simmering anger in Seoul against the treatment of Korean nationals, and he was under pressure to cancel the trip unless the long-standing grievances were resolved.

During Japan's occupation of the peninsula, the ruling government naturalized all Koreans, forcing them to speak Japanese and take Japanese names. In 1965 Japan gave Koreans claiming allegiance to Seoul and their children a special permanent-resident status. The government later extended a similar status to Koreans loyal to Pyongyang. But most banks refused loans to these permanent visitors, and companies were reluctant to hire them. The government did not extend full social-welfare benefits to Koreans until the 1980s.

The status agreements left the position of third-generation Koreans in limbo. Seoul now demands that future generations be exempt from most restrictions applied to foreign citizens, such as one requiring them to carry identification cards bearing a fingerprint. Three weeks before Roh's visit, the government finally agreed to do away with the fingerprinting. But Japan says it cannot exempt the Koreans from all restrictions, pointing out that other countries draw a line between resident foreigners and their own nationals.

Korean residents can apply for Japanese citizenship but often do not, charging that the subtle prejudices against them do not disappear. "Every day I face invisible barriers," says Hong Dae Pyo, a language-school director who contends that he was fired from a salesman's position when his employer discovered he was Korean. "If Japan accepted me as Hong Dae Pyo, I would naturalize tomorrow."

In fact, discrimination is declining, but a reluctance to deal with Koreans persists. Earlier this month, an agricultural credit cooperative in Kawasaki, outside Tokyo, apologized in a national newspaper for refusing a job application from a Korean. When a couple house hunting in Osaka acknowledged that they were Korean, all the 24 real estate agents they visited told them they would face discrimination: sure enough, at half the rentals they looked into, their application was rejected.

$ Japan, however, can no longer afford to be complacent as it moves onto the global stage. South Korea's confidence is also growing, and it is no longer hesitant about expressing its impatience over an issue that should have been resolved long ago.

With reporting by K.C. Hwang/Seoul