The East Asian Studies program and the Sociology department hosted a talk on Korean identity and citizenship by Jaeeun Kim on March 30. Kim, an assistant professor of Sociology and the Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at the University of Michigan, specializes in international migration and citizenship.
Kim presented a chapter, “Cold War Competition Over Zainichi Koreans in Japan,” from her book Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea which was published last year.
Kim described her book as a comparative and historical analysis of the relationship between the Korean peninsula and the ethnic Koreans who immigrated to northeastern China and Japan during the Japanese colonial era. During the first half of the 19th century, Japan held colonies on the Korean peninsula and Manchuria.
She highlighted the stories that she had collected during 18 months of field study in Japan, South Korea and northeast China and explained how their experiences fit into a larger context.
“These experiences include a series of border crossings spanning multiple generations, forcible separation from or persecution by their state of origin and a shifting sense of loyalty and belonging to the multiple states involved,” she said.
One of the themes of the book is how these “transborder” Koreans, who have migrated to other East Asian countries, have attempted to define their transborder ties on their own terms.
“Each story also describes painstaking efforts to maintain, retain, appropriate or build cross-border family ties,” she said. “Other common features in these stories are the complex dealings with various official and unofficial documentation practices as they attempt to reclaim membership in their putative homeland.”
She also described how the idea of transborder membership politics has evolved in the recent years and how it has shaped the focus of her analysis and research.
“Scholars have long examined the challenges that various types of internal others, such as immigrants and ethnic minorities, pose to the idea of the modern nation-state, which is the idea that the boundaries of territory, citizenry and nation must coincide with each other,” she said.
Kim explained that scholars have become interested in ethnic identity as it relates to ethnic groups outside the nation.
“Over the last decade or so, scholars have shown growing interest in the membership politics engendered by the shifting relationship between the state and external others... such as emigrants, diasporas and ethnic populations,” Kim said.
The colonial Japanese occupation of Korea and China set in motion a massive migration of the colonized population to other parts of the empire. As a result, even after the disintegration of the Japanese empire, there were six million ethnic Koreans left in Japan and 1.2 million left in China.
After the Korean War and the split of the Korean peninsula into North Korea and South Korea, both countries competed fiercely for the repatriation, or the process of returning people back to their own country, of ethnic Koreans as a nation-building strategy.
While North Korea branded itself as a sort of safe haven for ethnic Koreans and invested in Korean enclaves and schools, South Korea branded itself as a “broker” — offering passports or certificates to nationals abroad as well as other valuable paperwork and documentation.
“Instead of shaping the soul of the people through schools, which is the classical nationalist strategy adopted by North Korea, South Korea targeted their paper identity,” Kim said. “The formalistic and minimalistic strategy enabled South Korea to press conversion, and prevent defection.”
Overall, Kim asserted that South Korea’s process of repatriation is an interesting case study of ethnic nationalism. She believes that transborder kinship ties have served as a way to exclude some people, while creating fake kinship ties on paper in politics.
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