Zainichi Korean identity and belonging

Zainichi Korean identity and belonging is explored through Akira Kido’s life as a third-generation Zainichi Korean who becomes a naturalized Japanese citizen. His experience is neither a simple story of concealed origins nor one of secure assimilation: for years, ancestry seems distant from everyday life, then public hostility makes it newly consequential. The novel traces that shift through family memories, legal identity, political unease, and Kido’s growing awareness that citizenship and personal belonging cannot guarantee safety or acceptance.

Family Name, Heritage, and Citizenship

Kido grows up in Kanazawa, where his family runs an ordinary izakaya rather than a restaurant specializing in Korean food. His parents do not teach him that heritage should define him, and he is not raised in a Korean enclave. He is known first by the family name Lee, then begins introducing himself as Kido around the start of middle school. His parents never explain why they changed the name, leaving him to suspect that an incident may have prompted it. Even so, the change does not initially feel like a decisive rupture: Kido recalls little discrimination, whether he used Lee or Kido, and reaches adulthood without much conscious engagement with his ancestry.

The distance is also linguistic and familial. Kido is illiterate in Korean and cannot see his father’s relatives visiting from South Korea as anything other than foreigners. His parents regard Japanese naturalization as inevitable for him, and he is initially indifferent to citizenship. Before a school trip to Australia, however, his father advises him to naturalize so that passport problems will not leave him without protection. His father’s point is that, in an emergency, Kido can hope for the protection of Japan, whereas South Korea has no awareness of his existence. Kido becomes a Japanese citizen with his parents while in high school, relinquishing the Korean citizenship that had continued from before the end of World War II.

His father’s unusual choice of the word “sense” stays with Kido. He suspects his father meant that South Korea had no reality for him, but the wording suggests a reciprocal absence: the country cannot sense Kido, while the thought of it makes him sense the country for the first time. More than two decades later, he still wonders whether the word was an accidental substitution or an intentional way of expressing the distance between inherited nationality and lived attachment.

Marriage and the Limits of Easy Acceptance

Kido’s marriage brings his background into another family, but at first the encounter seems reassuring. When he asks Kaori’s father for permission to marry, the older man welcomes him, saying, “Zainichi or not, after three generations you’re a full-blown Japanese.” Kido bows and says he looks forward to joining the family. The acceptance contains no overt animosity, though its phrasing treats Japanese belonging as something conferred by generations and makes Kido’s ancestry the condition being set aside. Kaori’s mother, meanwhile, tries to show polite interest by asking about Korea during the Korean Wave of the 2000s. Once she learns that Kido can barely answer and cannot read the Korean alphabet, she stops asking.

For a time, these exchanges remain peripheral. Kido does not ask Kaori or her parents what they know about the history of Koreans in Japan, and the subject does not become an explicit part of his marriage. That silence changes after the Great East Japan Earthquake, when reports recall the massacre of Koreans following the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Kido learns that Yokohama, where Kaori’s family has lived for generations, was one of the main places from which false rumors of a “Korean riot” spread. His father-in-law’s earlier reassurance takes on a new ambiguity: Kido wonders whether it carried implications he had not then understood.

The family’s unasked history becomes more unsettling because it is so close. Kaori’s grandfather was a young child during the 1923 earthquake; her great-grandfather was an adult. The disaster reportedly destroyed 80 percent of Yokohama’s urban area by fire, and Kido finds himself wondering what his wife’s ancestors might have been doing amid the violence that followed. Yet he asks neither Kaori nor her parents. Since the more recent earthquake, he and Kaori have discussed the possibility of a major earthquake striking the Tokyo region, but they have not discussed the earlier catastrophe. The gap between the history that troubles Kido and the family conversation he cannot begin gives belonging a domestic as well as a public dimension.

From Distance to Exposure

Kido’s understanding of his heritage remains limited even after he moves to Tokyo for university. Hearing other third-generation Zainichi describe more severe bigotry, he feels embarrassed that he does not share their experiences. He has also paid little attention to political debates over historical revisionism or the backlash against the Murayama Statement, in which the prime minister apologized for Japanese atrocities in Asia. His earlier lack of discrimination is not proof that prejudice is absent; it has allowed him to regard the issue as remote and to dismiss occasional intolerant remarks as mistakes.

That distance begins to erode after the earthquake. The revived memory of the Korean massacre in Yokohama makes Kido uneasy about being perceived as a member of the so-called “Korean race.” Reports of rising nationalism and far-right demonstrations the previous summer, following President Lee Myung-bak’s landing on the disputed island of Takeshima, sharpen the unease. Kido realizes that there are people in the country where he lives whom he does not wish to meet, and places he does not wish to visit. The discovery is not simply that prejudice exists, but that it changes the terms on which he can inhabit the country he has made his own.

A university acquaintance later contacts him after finding an elementary-school yearbook photograph of Kido posted online with the caption “Zainichi Minted as Lawyer!” The post connects the childhood photograph to an old assault-and-robbery case Kido had handled before he was married. Because the suspect he defended was Zainichi, the author mixes facts with distortions and directs racial abuse at Kido. The attack also identifies him as married and as a parent. What unsettles him is not only the abuse but the public conjunction of his name, his childhood image, his professional work, and his family: the post turns aspects of his private life into material for racial targeting. Kido has still not told Kaori. He has grown tired of monitoring prejudice and misses the ease with which he once dismissed it.

Political Affiliation and Uneasy Solidarity

Kido’s response to North Korea is not reducible to ethnic loyalty. He condemns its authoritarian government, is appalled by the abduction of Japanese citizens, and feels for the victims and their families. He also understands, from a somewhat distant perspective, that the abductions have left deep wounds in the Zainichi community, and he resents the Japanese government’s inaction. When he imagines a hypothetical relative of his own generation living under the North Korean regime, however, the issue becomes personally charged: he is drawn into fatalistic speculation about a connection he cannot make concrete.

He thinks he would soberly support reunification of North and South Korea, and Japan’s eventual payment of war reparations and normalization of relations with the North, without being able to explain fully why. These positions coexist with his recognition of the North Korean regime’s abuses and with his sense of distance from South Korea. The novel presents belonging not as a settled political program but as an attachment that can emerge through hypothetical kinship, inherited history, and uncertainty.

When Takagi raises the possibility that Daisuké Taniguchi might have been kidnapped by North Korea, Kido resists letting the speculation pass unexamined. He has looked into a historical abduction while investigating Daisuké’s disappearance: a bachelor working as a cook at a Chinese restaurant in Osaka was lured from Miyazaki by a supposed job interview, taken to North Korea, and later impersonated in Japan by a spy who adopted his past and career. The spy obtained official documents and was eventually apprehended while visiting South Korea. The case gives Kido a concrete historical comparison, but it does not make the present disappearance evidence of a kidnapping. When the conversation shifts to claims about anti-Japanese education, Kido objects that North and South Korea are being conflated. He distinguishes criticism of Japan’s imperial past in South Korean history classes from the accusation that such teaching is anti-Japanese propaganda. His insistence on the distinction is both factual and personal: ethnic affiliation does not oblige him to accept careless generalizations about either country.

Public Order and the Precariousness of Belonging

The novel’s account of Kido’s identity intersects with his professional faith in law. As a lawyer, he works to preserve a judicial order that sustains ordinary life and protects his family’s human rights and status as citizens. But he recognizes how easily that protection could fail if a crisis temporarily displaced the order, or if lies stirred people to violence. At anti-Korean demonstrations, the cry “Death to Koreans!” makes the subtleties of legal status, personal history, and individual character seem powerless against collective hostility. Kido’s reflections on who he is cannot guarantee that a crowd will recognize him as an individual.

This realization brings together the narrative’s central contrasts. Kido has Japanese citizenship, a Japanese name, a Japanese family, and a legal profession; none makes his ancestry disappear, and none ensures that others will accept him as belonging. Conversely, his limited connection to Korean language and relatives does not erase the way public hostility assigns him a Korean identity. Belonging is shown as a relation between lived self-understanding and other people’s acts of classification, shaped by memories that can remain unspoken until political events force them into the present. Kido’s changing awareness does not resolve that tension. It makes visible the distance between being legally included and feeling secure, and between personal indifference to inherited identity and the moment when society insists that identity matters.