South Korea

This article focuses on the case of anti-Korean sentiment and the rise of an ultranationalist “netizen” (a citizen of the Internet) movement in Japan—a topic which resonates particularly in South Korea, where images of anti-Korean attitudes in Japan abound exacerbating Japan-ROK relations. In particular, the article advances two objectives. First, it addresses the ambiguity in understanding the rise of Japanese right-wing extremism—namely, what issues triggered their emergence and breadth of influence. Some argue that emotional and extreme expressions of rage over history are recent—they point to trends of neoliberal market reform and the advent of the internet. Others argue that these sentiments are rooted in a long trajectory of resentment over colonization. Are the tensions triggered by increasing nationalism, or concerns over economic decline? Questions also abound as to who is driving this phenomenon and the nature of the impact they have on shaping the perceptions of mainstream Japanese. Is the movement propelled by a small group of economically precarious extremists who are largely isolated from Japanese society or is the scope of their influence much more expansive? Answers to these questions can shed light on Japanese extremism as well as Korean views of Japan.

Second, the article problematizes the tendency to examine this phenomenon primarily in terms of domestic politics and from the perspective of elite state actors. This limited analytical approach precludes researchers and pundits from seeing the wide-ranging flow of ideas connecting people from varying levels of civic and political engagement. Along these lines, I argue that the problem of ukeika (right-wing expansion) is not merely one of changing institutional configurations of state bureaucracy¹ or the “failure of the leftists,”² but rather, one of cultural legitimacy and changing perspectives of state morality during an era of neoliberalism. Thus, instead of dismissing netizen extremists as an exceptional phenomenon detached from the views of “ordinary” citizens, I argue that it is important to view ultranationalist netizens as a grassroots social movement, intermediating between civil society and elite state actors.

As South Koreans have observed the rise of anti-Korean sentiment in Japan, they have doubled down on perceptions that Japanese are intransigent in their views on colonialism and militarism. Such reactions have made it harder to accept agreements that presume that Japan is transformed from the pre-1945 era. A clearer understanding of how treatment of the zainichi (resident Koreans in Japan) has evolved could be helpful in managing troubled bilateral relations.

Postwar politics through the lens of neoliberal economics

By many accounts, the sudden emergence of anti-Korean sentiment in Japan in the past decade is puzzling. In contrast to the postwar era of the 1960s and 1970s when discrimination against Korean minorities was severe, the 1980s and 1990s heralded an era of unprecedented social and institutional reform in the human rights conditions of the Korean post-colonial minorities in Japan, otherwise known as the zainichi. With legal reform in the two decades that followed, increasing numbers of zainichi Koreans were inter-marrying with Japanese nationals, naturalizing to take on Japanese citizenship, finding employment in mainstream Japanese firms, and gaining access to social welfare benefits from which they had previously been excluded. By the 1990s amid talk of improving ROK-Japanese relations capable of addressing history issues, the zainichi problem worrisome to South Koreans appeared to be no longer a thorn in relations.

In the early 2000s, writers also pointed to the burgeoning popularity of the Korean Wave in Japan and the ascending economic status of South Korea as key factors in helping mollify previously tainted perceptions of Korea in the eyes of the Japanese. Korea was no longer associated with the stigma of colonization and war atrocities, but rather, reborn in the more palatable image of modernity and popular culture. The Korean Wave made kimchi popular in ordinary supermarkets and attracted Japanese consumers who had formerly shunned Korean ghettos to buy the latest K-pop paraphernalia. For even zainichi Koreans who felt little emotional attachment to their Korean heritage, the Korean Wave provided an alternative image of the Korean peninsula that conjured a sense of pride rather than shame.

When a group of netizens established an ultranationalist organization known as the “Zaitokukai” (abbreviated for Zainichi Tokken o Yurusanai Shimin no Kai, or Citizens against the Special Privileges of the Zainichi) in 2006, it seemed as if the favorable impact of the Korean Wave in Japan had come to an abrupt halt. The Zaitokukai demanded an end to social welfare “privileges” granted to Koreans, as well as other foreigners, in Japan. Although most of their early activities primarily took place in the online world, they organized their first high profile demonstration in 2009 in front of the Kyoto No. 1 Korean elementary school. On three separate occasions between 2009 and 2010, members of the ultranationalist group gathered in front of the school, taunting students with racial slurs while banging and shaking the metal gates at the school’s entrance for over an hour. Despite the Kyoto District Court’s decision in 2013 to fine the far-right group $120,000 in damages, the incident marked the beginning of a sharp surge in hate rallies in Koreatowns in Japan, such as the Shin Okubo district of Tokyo, the Sakuramoto district of Kawasaki, and the Ikuno district of Osaka. According to the Japanese Ministry of Justice, factions of the far-right had organized 1,152 hate rallies between April 2013 and September 2015.

Understanding when extreme forms of ultra-nationalism started to spread in Japan is inextricable from understanding its key triggers. Debates, however, over how to understand the surge of right-wing politics in Japan and hostility towards Korea and Koreans in recent years remain unresolved. Some have harped on the significance of Japan’s controversial colonial legacy and historical revisionism, while others have focused on the changing structure of domestic politics.

Many who view the Zaitokukai as primarily xenophobic nationalistic, portray the phenomenon as ideologically driven, region-specific, and long-standing in a manner that verges on essentialism. That is, on one end of the spectrum, “there is a tendency to interpret Japan’s conservative shift as… not only tilting toward the right but also attempting to become a military superpower and return to the aggressive state of the prewar period.”³ By connecting the rise of the Zaitokukai to Japan’s legacy of imperialism, some scholars perceive the rightist movement as unique to Japan.⁴

According to this perspective, right-wing tendencies and historical revisionism in Japan had simply been less visible in the media. They point to the inadequacies of the Tokyo War Crime Trials in seeking justice and reconciliation, and the long-term impact it has had in forming a collective memory on Japan’s role in colonization and the war.⁵ Even as early as the 1970s, studies show for instance, that right-wing religious groups such as Seichō no Ie (the House of Growth) and Jinja Honchō (Association of Shinto Shrines), mobilized ordinary citizens to pass a law requiring imperial-era names and dates in official documents. They also push for the revival of Japan’s military through revision of Article 9 of the Constitution.⁶ Moreover, scholars in this camp point out that the supposed heyday of South Korean-Japanese diplomatic relations culminating in Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei’s acknowledgement of military sex slaves in 1993, and Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi’s 1995 formal apology for Japan’s role in the war, also triggered the formation of the Society for History Textbook Reform in 1996 and Japan Conference (Nippon Kaigi), the country’s largest umbrella organization of the right wing responsible for bringing together groups such as the Association of War-Bereaved Families and the religious right, in 1997.⁷

In stressing the ideological motivations of the net-right, some researchers point to evidence that members are diverse in socioeconomic background, age, and gender.⁸ While it is hard to ascertain who is involved in the Zaitokukai given the anonymous nature of netizen activity, if the net-right were economically motivated, one might expect their supporters to be disproportionately members of the working class.

But by underplaying the impact of economic decline and increasing labor market precariousness on the surge of right-wing nationalism, those who stress the imperialistic underpinnings of the net-right overlook the structural similarities characterizing the proliferation of populist politics in other parts of the world. Conservative right-wing groups and nationalist movements, for instance, have rapidly spread in postindustrial economies in the West—such as the Tea Party in the United States, the Northern League in Italy, and the Swedish Democrats—as well. As Bennett argues, “these late modern hybrids invite followers to define ‘true citizens’ as ‘people like me’ (e.g. a white, hard-working native-born citizen and not those immigrants who come to live off my hard-earned tax money.”⁹ The contentions of these ultranationalist groups share many rhetorical similarities to those of the Zaitokukai, who play upon the widespread anxieties of economic decline in the midst of an aging crisis in Japan. That similar grassroots movements of right-wing activists have spread across the globe points to evidence that over-reliance¹⁰ on Japan’s historical legacy of imperialism to explain the Zaitokukai fails to capture how changing economic and social circumstances continuously shape the ways people interpret and make sense of their place in the world.

Structural similarities in the rapid proliferation of ultranationalist movements all over the world also problematize the disciplinary tendency among political scientists to focus nearly exclusively on the inner workings of state bureaucracy to explain the rise of ultra-nationalism in Japan.  Certainly, when studying the dominance of right-wing politics following Prime Minister Abe’s inauguration in 2012, it is important to recognize the shifting balance of power between the right and left, and the subsequent “shrinking of ideological parameters” that started in the 1990s.¹¹ The critical turning point that culminated in a landslide victory for the Abe administration and the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 2012, corresponded with the rise of the Japan Restoration Party (JRP) under the leadership of two right-wing politicians, each known for his flamboyant media presence: Osaka mayor Hashimoto Toru and Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintarō.

Portraying Japan’s right-wing turn as “an elite-driven process,” reflecting the interests of second- and third-generation politicians who have a personal stake in salvaging the tarnished legacies of their fathers and grandfathers, misses an understanding as to how the masses were won over.¹² What subsequently emerges is a fragmented story of how powerful state actors have single-handedly pushed progressive politicians out of office to gain dominance by taking advantage of a sense of fear and precariousness pervading society. Along similar lines, these works also tend to easily discard the influence of right-wing netizens as outliers who wield negligible influence on society.

This model of state-civil society relations has long been criticized by cultural sociologists, who argue that “the masses” are not passive consumers of elite ideology, but rather, active consumers who are capable of interpreting new information according to a “tool-kit” of ideas.¹³ Elites are, thus, powerful not in that they have complete control over how the masses think, but because they are empowered in shaping how certain messages are more provocatively or frequently presented than others. According to this field of scholarship,

This perspective of the individual-as-consumer has spawned a prolific body of work on how knowledge is packaged for consumption. According to this body of work, members of civil society are presented with a limited number of alternative narratives to choose from and through the simultaneous repetition of selective facts and the exclusion of contradictory strands of information, a dominant narrative, which often is in line with the interests of the elite, emerges as the most compelling interpretation. In particular, during periods of crisis, when lives feel “unsettled,” people tend to question norms and ideas that they had taken for granted—crises instigate a proactive search for an alternative worldview that can better explain their surroundings. These periods trigger “bursts of ideological activism,” propagated by rivaling social movements, compete to “offer not multiple answers, but one unified answer to the question of how human beings should live.”¹⁴

Thus, while it is important to recognize, on the one hand, that the Zaitokukai are indeed extremists—the vast majority of Japanese citizens do not march through Korean enclaves chanting “Kill all Koreans!”—on the other hand, a top-down approach that ignores the role of the Zaitokukai fails to capture the Durkheimian notion of society as an organism. That is, in order to fully understand how society moves and changes, we must clarify the interdependent roles that actors in different levels of society play.

Accordingly, I argue that the Zaitokukai must be treated, methodologically and analytically, as a meso-level social movement, intervening between non-state actors and elite politicians. The net-right provide an alternative means of interpreting the marginalization of the Korean minorities within a moral discourse that valorizes self-sufficiency as a quintessential aspect of citizenship. Indeed, a dominant theme in hate speech rallies and blogs comprises criticism towards the notion of zainichi tokken (special privileges). Netizens argue that Koreans in Japan have an easier time gaining access to a slew of government “handouts” and are, subsequently, creating a heavy strain on an economy that is already struggling to provide its “own” citizens with stable work. One of the major goals of the Zaitokukai is to repeal the Special Act on Immigration Control, which grants zainichi Koreans tokubetsu eijūken (special permanent residency), a legal status created specifically for the zainichi as a result of bilateral negotiations following South Korean-Japanese normalization of ties in 1965. The status granted zainichi Koreans who had South Korean nationality, with the rights to claim compulsory education, livelihood protection, and national health insurance, and eventually, paved the way for the expansion of a wide range of social security benefits such as inclusion in the national and private pension plans.

During the peak of Japan’s economic boom in the 1970s and 1980s, when books such as Japan as Number One: Lessons for America were topping bestseller lists,¹⁵ the country was concerned with bolstering its global image as an advanced industrialized nation that was just as socially progressive as its economy would portend.¹⁶ Politicians and ordinary citizens alike were more susceptible to succumbing to external pressures from the international community—and most notably, the United Nations—to reform their legal structure to grant Korean postcolonial minorities the same rights and “privileges” that other Japanese citizens had.

What then, accounts for the abrupt shift in reframing the “human rights” of the zainichi as “special privileges” among the net-right? If the 1970s and 1980s heralded an era of sympathy towards the minorities, the past decade has triggered resentment such that the zainichi are perceived as “freeloaders” who, rather than pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, “complain” of discrimination. In the past decade, coverage of alleged tax fraud and social welfare abuse among the zainichi, despite making up less than two percent of the population, have been disproportionately represented in the news.  

Thus, more than the actual burden that the zainichi place on the welfare system—which, given their numbers, is minimal—parts of the media have capitalized on the symbolic and emotional currency of the zainichi. When compared to foreign migrants who have a shorter history and less visible presence in Japanese society, the zainichi have historically represented Japan’s underclass and long-time scapegoat during periods of crisis and instability. Past research demonstrates that prior to the years of legal reform in the 1970s and 1980s, Korean minorities were characterized by high rates of unemployment, mental illness, alcoholism, and crime.¹⁷ In the 1950s, when discrimination was at an all-time high, up to 80 percent of Koreans were unemployed.¹⁸  Unemployment rates continued to be high even as the Japanese economy started to recover from the devastation of the war. According to 1974 statistics of gainfully employed Koreans in Japan, 30 percent of the adult male population were unemployed. Those who were employed worked primarily as manual laborers in construction and manufacturing.¹⁹ Even in 1986, at the height of the bubble economy, 42.6 percent of Korean families in the Ikuno district, where the largest Korean enclave in Japan is located, received public assistance.²⁰ Furthermore, compared to other wards in Osaka, Ikuno had higher rates of juvenile delinquency as Koreans accounted for 70 percent of cases of youth misconduct in the region.²¹  

In the 1970s, left-leaning politicians created Japanese community programs in areas with large Korean populations in an effort to provide public aid to the disadvantaged minorities. In the case of Kawasaki, a well-known Korean ghetto that had acted as a hub for the production of military goods during World War II, Ito Saburo, a labor activist who was later voted into office as the city’s mayor in 1971, called for the “creation of a humanitarian city (ningen toshi no sōzō).” Eager to establish a reputation as a leader in progressive politics, Ito expanded social welfare programs by building more nursery schools, schools for the disabled, and cultural centers for the elderly. The same neighborhood that had become known as the “bastion of Korean residents’ struggle for equal rights” in the early 1970s, became the target of 12 hate demonstrations organized by the Zaitokukai between 2013 and 2015.²²

In the past decade, with increasing economic precariousness, “old” problems are increasingly reinterpreted within the lens of neoliberalism. This shift is exemplified in the ways zanryu koji—or Japanese “war orphans” who were left behind by their Japanese parents in Manchuria after World War II—were depicted by the mass media and state bureaucrats. In December 2002, 637 Japanese war orphans filed the first of 15 lawsuits against the Japanese government for neglecting its duty to secure their return, and thus, abandoning them in a foreign country with little means of survival. The case represented the largest compensation claim in Japan’s history. Of the estimated 2,500 war orphans who have resettled in Japan, the vast majority have struggled with joblessness, marital problems, and mental health. In addition, as many “returned” in their forties and fifties, average retirement pensions amounted to an average of $300 dollars a month in 2003 and 2004, they subsequently, faced poverty in their old age.²³  

It is thus, noteworthy that a representative from the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, in his rationale for refusing the war orphans government assistance, argued that “the people who returned from China aren’t the only war victims” and that “in one form or another, all Japanese citizens suffered due to the war.”²⁴ War orphans were, thus, encouraged to “‘reform their consciousness’ and see welfare dependence in a more positive light.”²⁵ The government framed the issues they faced as kojin no mondai (private matters) that were up to the responsibility of the individual to resolve.²⁶ The state pressure that the war orphans felt securing their own destinies despite the challenges they faced is reflected in interview transcripts like those of Ikeda Sumie, a war orphan who led the Tokyo district court lawsuit. She argued that “If [the government] didn’t invade, would we be able to go there ourselves? The Japanese government always says, ‘That’s the past!’ But the reality is that we’re all still alive. Your war is the past, but don’t we still bear the scars you left?” She went on to question whether the state had fulfilled its responsibility in providing them the circumstances to become “self-sufficient”:
Because now no matter how hard we work, when we return we are already 40 or 50. We can’t speak the language. If I work like this until I’m 60, my state pension is just 67,500 JPY per month. The state should think about this. We come back to Japan: ‘Work! Work!’ [they say]. But they don’t arrange it for us. They make us look on our own. We’re this old, we can’t speak the language—where are we going to look? When we are on welfare, they say it’s like we are taking the blood and sweat of the working people. Well, we don’t have work; if we don’t take welfare, how are we going to live? Why doesn’t the state take the initiative to find us work?²⁷ 

The issue reemerged in 2010, when 32 Chinese migrants were granted social welfare assistance in Osaka. The sponsors were two war orphan sisters in their 70’s who helped 48 of their relatives enter Japan. Of the 46 who eventually applied for social welfare assistance, 32 applications met the necessary requirements and were accepted. The city of Osaka was cited in newspaper articles noting how they had never before encountered such a large number of applications for public assistance from foreigners so shortly upon entering the country. The experience was described “extremely unnatural” (hijō ni fushizen). According to an NHK documentary referenced in The Japan Times, in 2011, the number of welfare recipients in Japan was over 2 million, amounting to a total of 3.4 trillion JPY a year—an all-time high since the system was established in 1950.²⁸ This trend was purportedly most acute in Osaka, where 17 percent of the city’s budget, or 286.3 billion JPY a year, was allocated to welfare spending.

Concerns about public spending, on the one hand, and the reverence for self-sufficiency, on the other, also help explain Mayor Hashimoto Toru’s meteoric rise to fame in the past decade. His rags-to-riches story was emblematic of the moral fable of neoliberalism. Hashimoto was not born into the political elite, but was instead, raised by a single mother who ran two jobs and lived in an impoverished buraku (caste of untouchables) neighborhood. He pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, gaining acceptance into Waseda University and later beating the odds (when the rate of passing the bar was just 3 percent) to become a lawyer. While his radical plans to unify Osaka by merging the prefecture’s 43 districts into one city failed to gain support in the recent election, his party’s neoliberal agenda of cutting “excesses” in public spending—including “welfare, transportation, and cultural programs”—won astounding support.²⁹ Notably, he has also fought for the closure of Liberty Osaka, a human rights museum in the city, in order to “reduce alleged wasteful spending.”³⁰

Broader implications: Shifting understandings of “state responsibility”

By reframing the marginalization of zainichi post-colonial minorities within the language of neoliberalism, the net-right were able to repackage pre-existing social issues in a way that was more palatable and politically correct. Though their more radical expressions of hate were still stigmatized, the Zaitokukai had access to an alternative discourse of morality—they mobilized a new vocabulary of self-sufficiency that resonated with the sense of precariousness that pervaded everyday life in Japan. Heightened interest over the public spending and changing notions of the state’s responsibility on the welfare of individuals can also help illuminate increased sensitivities surrounding the “comfort women” controversy and other incidences attached to Japan’s historical legacy that have worsened diplomatic tensions between South Korea and Japan.

The past summer, in particular, saw an escalation of hostilities following Aichi Governor Hideaki Omura’s decision to close the exhibit, “After ‘Freedom of Expression’” only three days after opening its doors in August 3, 2019. Among the pieces that were showcased, the “Statue of a Girl of Peace” by Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung—the iconic symbol of military sex slaves (or “comfort women”)—triggered the most controversy. Omura decided to close the exhibit after receiving a handwritten fax from a 59-year-old Japanese truck driver from Inazawa, who threatened to set the museum on fire if the comfort woman statue was not removed. Even before the terrorist threat, the governor had already been under significant pressure to shut down the exhibit. In addition to receiving a number of intimidating phone calls and emails from angry citizens, Governor Omura was threatened by the mayor of Nagoya, Kawamura Takashi, who hinted that if did not shut down the exhibit in the face of terrorist threats, he would pull public funding of 33 million yen earmarked for the event. In a press conference in late August, Kawamura criticized the “Statue of a Girl of Peace” for “trampling on the feelings of the Japanese” and questioned the appropriateness of using tax dollars to fund the art festival.

If the Aichi Triennale closure was illustrative of Japanese politicians and netizens upset over the use of public funding and facilities to showcase the country’s “shameful” past, the incidents that followed were similarly demonstrative of changing notions of state responsibility and state spending. Works that rely too heavily on theories of nationalism to explain worsening diplomatic ties between Japan and South Korea fail to fully capture the global scale of economic decline that has aroused similar forms of grassroots extremism in other parts of the world. Instead, I argue that the rise of ultra-nationalism needs to be understood as a multi-level phenomenon of ideological dispersion, mobilized by radical right-wing activists who act as self-appointed gatekeepers of state interests, mediating between the elites and the masses.

A more holistic framework that conceptualizes the distinct roles that social movement actors, state elite, and civil society take in perpetuating new cultural norms of how to live helps to illuminate why on July 19, only ten days preceding the closure of the Aichi Triennale exhibit, a South Korean man in his 70s, would set himself on fire inside his vehicle at 3:30 AM in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. Or why, South Korean citizens angered by Japan’s decision to not compensate Korean victims of forced laborers conscripted by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, mobilized on the streets, protesting the boycott of Japanese goods and travel to Japan.

Conclusion

Whereas Middle Eastern refugees have drawn the most persistent vilification in Europe and Latin American migrants have become the most glaring scapegoats in the United States, Korean minorities have acted as the primary targets of discrimination in Japan since the last century. When the Japan dream was to be accepted into the world community and internationalization, treatment of the zainichi improved along with hopes for reconciliation with South Korea through acceptance of historical responsibility, albeit on the basis of the 1965 bilateral normalization treaty. However, as that dream as well as promise for the future was fading, Japanese again turned to the most convenient, familiar scapegoat in the modern history of their country.

South Koreans see Japanese treatment of zainichi as emblematic of failure to come to grips with the legacy of anti-Korean attitudes and refusal to accept the rise of their country to be Japan’s equal. They fixate on the connection between right-wing intolerance of zainichi and government revisionism toward history. They discern a more direct connection between foreign policy and treatment of a minority than is usually observed in European or US handling of migrants and the countries from which they come. The ongoing downward spiral in Japan-ROK relations deepens hostility to zainichi, as happened when the “comfort women” issue was at its peak spurring “hate Korea” literature in 2013-15. Without Japanese officials and opinion leaders responding far more seriously to the way zainichi are being treated and to “hate Korea” more generally, the emotional foundation of the 2019 breakdown in Japan-ROK relations will remain even if some way can be found to resume normal trade. Allowing the emotional roots of distrust to keep growing does not bode well for resolving the current crisis, let alone for refocusing relations on shared, universal values. Such values can be eclipsed by other values at times of social unease, as is occurring now.