From slavery to success in Japan

The Korea Times

The Korea Times

Opinion

Donald Kirk

From slavery to success in Japan

Posted : 2023-06-15 16:35

Updated : 2023-06-15 16:39

By Donald Kirk

Koreans living in Japan form a huge minority in a society that alternates between discriminating against them and providing them with opportunities. The fate of Koreans in Japan often rests on whether they came, essentially as slaves before and during World War II, whether they are students or professional workers, whether they have adopted Japanese citizenship, with Japanese names or have chosen to remain Korean with their original Korean family names.

The place of Korean Japanese is so confusing that it's hard to be sure of their precise numbers. I have seen statistics ranging from one to two million, the figures vary wildly depending in part on how many have returned to Korea. Officially, the Japanese say there are more than 820,000 Korean residents in Japan, but that figure accounts only for those who retain Korean citizenship. An equal number have faded into the mass of Japanese, bearing Japanese names, speaking Japanese as their first language and often marrying Japanese.

Stories of the Korean experience in Japan are filled with successes, failures, triumphs and tragedies. No story is sadder, but finally successful, than that of more than 1,000 Koreans who were forced to come to Japan as de facto slave laborers consigned to constructing an airfield on the southern fringes of Kyoto. After the war ended, they were on their own, living in the same slum-like shacks in the Utoro neighborhood where they had made their homes since arriving in Japan.

While they were scrounging for jobs after the war, the mysterious owner or owners of the land on which they lived demanded they leave. In Kyoto, the ancient city that's famed as the one-time imperial capital, full of shrines, temples and museums, saw that conservative nationalist forces were hostile to the influx of Koreans. Nearby Osaka, Japan's third largest city after Tokyo and Yokohama and home of the country's largest Korean community, was even more hostile toward indigent Koreans.

The people, including descendants of the original slave workers, persevered. They had no plumbing, no easy source of water and no ordinary services, but they had managed to build what they needed and would fight stubbornly for what they believed was theirs. Eventually, they won enough sympathy and support for the government to construct a complex of apartment blocks in place of their old homes.

A visit to a new museum next to the apartment blocks reveals the history of the Korean workers of Utoro. Photographs and mementos conjure memories of the lives the people led as slave laborers, as tight-knit families and, finally, as victors in a long struggle for survival in a harsh, alien environment.

In one of the apartments, a woman described the long rise of her family from poverty. Down below, in a cluster of abandoned houses, lay the ruins of homes that a young right-winger had set ablaze. Still, more homes were destroyed in another fire. Luckily, they had already been abandoned. Heaps of charred wood and concrete walls exposed the fanaticism of the ethnocentric Japanese nationalists who resented the presence of the poor Koreans in their midst.

In about a month or so, said an official, showing me around with a group of Korean visitors, led by a sympathetic Japanese professor, the ruins would be gone, but one old shack was left as a reminder of the conditions under which the original slave workers had to live. Outside was an old pump of the sort that families had to use in those days in the absence of pipes carrying water from the city. Inside the museum, a small generator built by the workers testified to their ingenuity.

One had to wonder, though, how typical was the rise of the Utoro community from the agonies of slavery, personal hardship and racist discrimination. How many similar communities harbored Koreans who had come to Japan against their will and toiled away in factories, mines and farms from the 1930s to the time of Japan's surrender in 1945, and how representative was Utoro in a society where many are still regarded as members of a minority ― as second-class citizens?

Such questions are sensitive. No one at the museum seemed to know of the existence of similar clusters where poor Koreans had worked against their will under Japanese masters. Clearly, the rise of the Koreans of Utoro is a source of pride, an example for scores of other enclaves where Koreans scrape by years after their forebears spent what should have been the best years of their lives working for the Japanese empire.

Donald Kirk (www.donaldkirk.com) now visiting Japan, writes from Seoul as well as Washington.