THE STORY GOES that the Japanese imperial family, which claims the world’s longest unbroken royal lineage, is descended from a sun goddess, Amaterasu. That’s common lore. But what’s less discussed is that another famous ancestor, Emperor Kammu, who ruled from 781-806, was a descendant of a Korean king.
In the rest of the world — where Korean restaurants, music and film have transformed popular culture — the discovery of Korean antecedents might be something to celebrate. And Japan owes significant parts of its religion, cuisine and art to Korea: Buddhism, fermented soybeans and a certain style of ceramics all arrived from Korea.
But in the 19th century, Japan began to embrace imperialism, culminating in the brutal annexation of Korea. From 1910 to 1945, Japan occupied Korea, compelling women into prostitution, banning the native language in schools, forcing Koreans to take Japanese names and relocating hundreds of thousands of Koreans to Japan as laborers or army conscripts. To this day, some of their offspring, known as Zainichi, do not possess Japanese citizenship despite having lived in Japan for generations. (South Korea will accept them as nationals.) Many Japanese today aren’t fully aware of the brutality of their country’s occupation of Korea; textbooks have tended to gloss over or elide the imperialism that brought Japanese soldiers to much of East Asia. While Japan’s claim to a shared ancestry with Korea was used to legitimize the annexation of its neighbor, it took more than half a century after World War II for the imperial family to formally recognize its Korean heritage. In 2001, shortly before Japan and South Korea co-hosted the FIFA World Cup, then-Emperor Akihito acknowledged the Korean link to his eighth-century forefather.
Despite this history of erasure, a number of Zainichi — there are estimated to be about 400,000 people of Korean descent living in Japan — have become prominent artists or cultural figures in the country, among them the designer Sonya Park, the actress and model Kiko Mizuhara and the filmmaker Tetsuaki Matsue. “I consider myself to be neither Japanese nor Korean,” says Yu Miri, 56, a Zainichi novelist and playwright who won Japan’s most prestigious literary prize in 1997. Her works concern otherness, including that of the Zainichi. “Since I chose to pursue writing as a career at the age of 18, I have answered the question ‘Who do you write for?’ with ‘I write for people who have no place in the world,’” she says.
The Zainichi identity struggle also animates the work of Soni Kum, an interdisciplinary artist who was born and raised in Tokyo but was stateless until she received South Korean citizenship when she was in her 20s in the mid-2000s. Kum tried living in various countries but eventually ended up back in Japan. Some Zainichi trace their roots to what is today North Korea, and teachers from their community portrayed the country as a socialist paradise. As a result, tens of thousands of Zainichi emigrated to North Korea between 1959 and 1983. (In the ’70s and ’80s, at least 17 Japanese were also kidnapped by North Korean agents and taken by boat to North Korea.) “I remember that whenever a political dispute was raised between Japan and Korea, our bodies were targeted as a form of retaliation and violence,” Kum says. “My artwork has been an emanation of those missing pieces, of deprived voices, regardless of race and ethnicity.”
THESE DAYS, THE rappers Verbal, 49, and Yuki Chiba, 35, claim their Japanese Korean identity as a kind of street cred. It also informs the work of the Osaka-born filmmaker Yang Yonghi, 60, who has made three documentaries and a feature film based on her family’s struggles with its North Korean heritage.
The South Korean-born actress Kang Ji-young, 31, whose career took flight in Japan when she moved there about a decade ago, says this growing acceptance of Korean artists is “like a bridge between two cultures,” reflecting a shift in Japanese attitudes toward a close neighbor.
The new openness may in part reflect demographic realities. The country’s population, now 124 million, is shrinking each year, projected to be half of its 2008 peak of 128 million by 2100. For the country to survive and flourish, Zainichi and others once considered foreign will have to be woven into the Japanese national tapestry, even if their passports say otherwise. It also reflects how old prejudices have eased: Japan is no longer the same country it once was, and younger Japanese haven’t been raised with the same anti-Korean racism as their grandparents.
Yoon Ahn, 48, a Korean American designer who lives in Tokyo and, along with Verbal, is a co-founder of the fashion label Ambush, says she hopes that Koreans of all kinds have a place in contemporary Japan. The country, she says, is a far different place than it was when her grandparents were suffering on the Korean Peninsula. “Tokyo is changing, Japan is changing,” she says. “It’s becoming much more international. It’s the Korean wave, but it’s not only that. It’s just an exciting place to be.”
Production: Beige Company
Hannah Beech is a Times reporter based in Bangkok who has been covering Asia for more than 25 years. She focuses on in-depth and investigative stories.
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