Kido's Zainichi identity and naturalized citizenship

Kido’s Zainichi identity and naturalized citizenship are not a settled personal label but a history he understands only gradually: he grows up with a Japanese name, becomes a Japanese citizen in high school, and initially feels little connection to either Korean heritage or the discrimination experienced by others. That apparent distance is unsettled by his father’s practical warnings, his in-laws’ attempts to welcome him, and, eventually, the violence of public hostility. Through Kido, the novel links private belonging to the names people use, the records that make them legible to the state, and the risks of being marked as Korean in Japan.

Family Background and Naturalization

Kido is third-generation Zainichi, descended from an ethnically Korean family that had settled in Japan before the end of World War II. His family operated an ordinary izakaya rather than a restaurant specializing in Korean food. He grew up in a typical area of Kanazawa, not a Korean enclave in a larger city, and was known to teachers who regularly visited the family business. His parents did not teach him that he should be especially conscious of his heritage, and he remembers little direct racism from childhood.

The change from the family name Lee to Kido had happened by the time he began introducing himself as Kido around the start of middle school. His parents never explained why they had adopted the Japanese name, leaving him to wonder whether some incident lay behind the decision. The transition helped him move through ordinary life without much attention to his ancestry, but it also left a gap in his understanding of how the family had negotiated identity and safety.

In high school, Kido and his parents became naturalized Japanese citizens, relinquishing the Korean citizenship claim that had descended from the period before the end of World War II. His parents regarded naturalization as practically inevitable for him: he could not read Korean and experienced visiting relatives from South Korea as foreigners. At the time, Kido himself was largely indifferent to citizenship. His father made the choice more consequential by advising him to naturalize before a school trip to Australia, so that passport problems would not leave him without protection. In an emergency abroad, his father said, Kido could hope for help from Japan; South Korea had no “sense” of him, and its government did not even know he existed.

Kido later wondered whether his father had meant that South Korea had no “reality” for him, rather than no “sense.” The wording stayed with him for more than two decades. He imagined the nation as lacking awareness of his existence, while the peculiar phrase had, in turn, made him newly aware of the nation. That lingering uncertainty captures the distance between a formal citizenship choice and the more complicated question of what a country means to someone whose family history crosses its borders.

His Father’s Warnings and Marriage

Kido’s father raised ethnicity with him on only a few occasions, but each discussion influenced a major decision. When Kido was unsure what to do after high school, his father advised him to acquire a national professional license because discriminatory hiring practices could limit his opportunities. Kido initially found the warning difficult to believe, especially as a naturalized citizen, but his father was serious. Kido eventually drifted into law school and, while there, made a firm decision to pursue a legal career. His father’s warning helped give that choice practical urgency.

Ethnicity also shaped the arrangements for Kido’s marriage to Kaori. His parents proposed an overseas wedding because his maternal grandmother desperately wanted to attend in a jeogori. Kido saw little point in the idea and at first refused, calling it too much trouble. He reconsidered after learning that Kaori’s parents were also concerned about how the marriage might be received. The couple held a small wedding in Hawaii with relatives, combined it with their honeymoon, and later celebrated with a restaurant party in Japan. Kido remembers his parents’ pronounced nervousness when they met his in-laws, and felt both ashamed and sorry for them.

Kaori’s family, whose roots were in Yokohama, welcomed him warmly. When Kido asked her father for permission to marry her, her father reassured him that after three generations he was fully Japanese, regardless of being Zainichi. Kaori’s mother tried to express polite interest by asking about Korea during the Korean Wave of the 2000s, but stopped when she realized that Kido could barely answer and could not read the Korean alphabet. The family’s generosity, including help with the down payment on Kido and Kaori’s condo, sits beside the awkwardness of these exchanges: acceptance is sincere, yet it does not erase the distance between Kido and the heritage others expect him to explain.

From Obliviousness to Unease

For years, Kido’s awareness of his roots remained limited. After moving to Tokyo for university, he heard accounts from other third-generation Zainichi who had faced more severe bigotry and felt embarrassed that he could not share their experiences. He was also largely inattentive to political debate, including the backlash against the prime minister’s apology for Japanese wartime atrocities in Asia on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. His relative lack of personal experience had made it easy to treat prejudice as something remote.

That distance began to narrow after the Great East Japan Earthquake, when news coverage brought the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and the massacre of Koreans in its aftermath into Kido’s attention. He learned that Yokohama had been one of the places where false rumors of a “Korean riot” had originated. The history unsettled him partly because it was local to his wife’s family: Kaori’s grandfather had been a young child at the time, and her great-grandfather had been an adult. Kido began to reconsider whether his father-in-law’s reassuring words about his being Japanese had carried implications he had not understood.

Reports of rising nationalism and far-right demonstrations, following the previous summer’s landing of President Lee Myung-bak on the disputed island of Takeshima, further changed Kido’s sense of his surroundings. He came to recognize that there were people he did not want to encounter and places he did not want to visit because of how they might regard someone of Korean ancestry. For him, this recognition was new: citizenship had not protected him from having to confront the possibility that others would see him through a racial category rather than as an individual.

An old university friend later contacted him to say that a childhood yearbook photograph had appeared online beneath the caption “Zainichi Minted as Lawyer!” The post revived an assault-and-robbery case Kido had handled before his marriage because the defendant had been Zainichi, and presented a distorted account alongside racial slurs. Kido was initially dumbfounded by the language, which was so archaic that he had never heard some of it. What angered him most was seeing his childhood image and name placed beside accusations such as “spy” and “North Korean agent,” with the post also disclosing that he was married and had a child. The attack made prejudice intimate: it reached beyond his ancestry and professional history to identify his family as well.

Kido has not told Kaori about the episode. Though he knows he might tell her, he both does not want to and feels unable to. His silence is not simply a response to her concern about hate speech; he has grown tired of his own heightened sensitivity to it. Earlier, he could dismiss intolerant remarks as mistakes. After the online attack, he finds himself wishing he could return to that former ease, even as he knows that his awareness has changed.

Belonging, Records, and Narrative Significance

Kido’s response to North Korea is also divided between public judgment and private implication. He condemns its authoritarian government, is appalled by the abduction of Japanese citizens, pities victims and their families, and is angry at the Japanese government’s inaction. He understands that the issue has left deep wounds in the Zainichi community, though from a somewhat distant perspective. But when he considers it through his own ancestry, the subject becomes harder to resolve: he imagines a hypothetical relative of his generation living under the regime and cannot avoid fatalistic speculation. He would probably support Korean unification and Japanese reparations and normalized relations with North Korea, yet cannot explain the basis for that inclination or say when any such changes might occur.

His legal work gives this uncertainty an institutional counterpart. Confronted with the case of a man whose identity had been accepted by officials in marriage, death, driving, medical care, and pension records despite not being the person named, Kido is struck not merely by the false name but by the authority of the public record. In another part of his work, he considers children left without family registers under the three-hundred-day rule: although eligible for Japanese citizenship, they may go unrecorded, leaving the state unable to account for their lives or deaths. The family register’s history, from early administration and religious surveillance to modern identity and tax systems, makes visible the power to include people in official life—and the long-standing gaps through which people can disappear.

Kido’s own naturalization is therefore neither a simple rejection of Korean ancestry nor a complete resolution of belonging. His father’s pragmatic reasoning made Japanese citizenship a means of securing protection, while Kido’s later reflections show that legal recognition cannot determine how a person feels toward a nation or how others will classify him. The novel places that tension beside his family’s changing surnames and his professional encounters with identities that the state can validate, erase, or fail to register. Kido’s history remains unsettled: he has become more alert to what it means to be perceived as Korean, but that heightened awareness brings discomfort rather than a ready-made sense of solidarity or home.