Zainichi identity and stigma

Zainichi identity and stigma are presented through Kido’s reflections on being a third-generation Zainichi person who naturalized as a Japanese citizen in high school. The subject is not simply a question of heritage or legal status: it is the pressure of having a many-sided life reduced to one label, and Kido’s resistance to that reduction shapes both his understanding of discrimination and his uneasy response to political solidarity.

Identity and the ordinary home

Kido describes his upbringing as broadly ordinary, while noting that the interior of his family home differed in small but telling ways from what was then treated as a typical Japanese household. It contained Korean calligraphy and commemorative photographs of his grandmother and mother wearing jeogori. He presents these details not as an exotic inventory, but as parts of a family life whose significance depends on who is looking and what they take “normal” to mean.

That distinction becomes sharper when Kido considers an artwork depicting a home. He imagines that visitors overseas might connect it to their own memories of early childhood in other countries, while viewers in Japan could criticize its portrayal of the supposedly “normal home.” The same image can therefore invite recognition across different personal histories and provoke debate about whose domestic life is treated as the norm. Kido links this interpretive gap to a Japan with more residents whose roots lie in different countries, as well as a widening divide between rich and poor; in his view, the work prompts thought about these conditions rather than offering a neutral picture of ordinary life.

Stigma and reduction

Kido defines stigma as a trait that becomes the basis for discrimination, hostility, or attack, regardless of whether the trait is inherently bad. His examples range from circumstances of birth and upbringing to a facial birthmark or a criminal record. The harm lies in the reduction that follows: everything else about a person is ignored, and a complex life is collapsed into one aspect. In the case of a Zainichi person, that aspect can be made to stand for the whole person.

For Kido, the reduction is unfair not only because the label can attract negative treatment, but because it lets other people decide which single feature will define someone. He resists being treated as representative of Zainichi people and says that he does not like it when other Zainichi claim him as though they were a separate and special group. The same discomfort applies to his origins in Ishikawa, to being a lawyer, and even to being Japanese: each can become an imposed summary if others insist that one affiliation explains the person in full.

His example of Ishikawa carries its own discomfort. The prefecture has traditionally been called “the Beggar” in a self-deprecating nickname, and Kido allows that there may be something to the label, yet objects to people bringing it up at every opportunity. The tension is not between having an identity and having none. It is between acknowledging that identities and histories matter and surrendering the right to be more than any one of them.

Speaking with Misuzu

Kido’s willingness to explain this complexity develops in conversation with Misuzu. When they first met, he had been extremely guarded about his ethnic background. Here, while discussing art and what counts as a normal home, he talks about it openly and only realizes after he has begun that he is doing so with unusual ease. The narration connects this change to the artwork they have encountered and to the familiarity he has gained with Misuzu’s sentiments and way of thinking over the preceding months.

Misuzu does not answer his account with the shallow pity he is accustomed to hearing. She describes recent hate speech as disgusting, and her unambiguous detestation differs from responses that frame the abuse as merely Kido’s personal problem. He feels the tension he had been holding onto fall away. The exchange offers a form of recognition that does not require Misuzu to claim his experience as her own: she takes the hostility seriously, and he can speak without first having to defend the legitimacy of his reaction.

Kido says that when abuse becomes extreme, including shouts of “Die!” and “Cockroach!”, he does not feel hurt or angry so much as tired of it. His weak smile accompanies neither a declaration of immunity nor a denial that the language is abusive. Rather, his response complicates the expectation that a person targeted by prejudice must display a particular injury in order for the prejudice to count. Misuzu, in turn, wonders how such speech became possible when it would have seemed unthinkable only a few years earlier.

Antipathy to categories and political action

Kido’s resistance to being classified also shapes his relationship to collective activism. He says he does not consider himself representative of most Zainichi people. Although he believes he should do something against hate speech, online videos of racist abuse leave him reluctant to enter spaces where he might encounter the people responsible. He is not interested in joining a counter-demonstration. If he acts, he imagines offering legal advice to victims; he also mentions the recent verdict in a civil case concerning an attack on a Korean primary school in Kyoto.

The obstacle is not indifference to the victims. Kido explains that he has organized his life to avoid places where he would interact with such people, and his daily routines do not expose him to racist remarks. A demonstration would require him to hear a sustained stream of abuse that his ordinary life allows him to avoid. His position thus holds together a desire to oppose hate speech and a reluctance to make himself directly present in the hostile setting. He considers one form of help—legal advice—more bearable than participation in a counter-demonstration.

Later, Misuzu acts on a promise Kido had not taken seriously. Near the Yokohama Museum of Art, she had told him she would attend a counter-demonstration in his place. They have since been out of touch, and he has almost forgotten the conversation before learning that she fulfilled the promise without telling him. He recognizes the act as characteristic of Misuzu and feels both gladness and dismay: her choice confirms that he occupies an important place in her world, but he cannot approve of her participation without reservation. His mixed reaction exposes the strain between caring about her commitment and wishing to keep her away from the confrontation he himself avoids.

Kido’s ethical discomfort

The narrative places Kido’s hesitation beside his sense that people with whom he shares ideological sympathies sometimes approach Zainichi issues as a distinct category. It invokes Konstantin Levin’s inability in Anna Karenina to say simply that he liked or disliked the peasants as a group: Levin regards himself as part of the people rather than as someone standing outside them and judging them collectively. The comparison helps explain Kido’s own refusal to treat Zainichi people as a category whose members can be collectively praised, disliked, or represented.

A second passage from the novel sharpens the contrast. Levin criticizes his brother for valuing peasant life in opposition to a class he dislikes, just as Kido distrusts a solidarity that depends on setting one group apart for special approval. The point is not that discrimination should be ignored or that people should avoid opposing it. Kido’s objection is to treating a population as internally uniform, even when the categorization appears sympathetic. He expects good and bad individuals within any group, and differences within individuals that group membership cannot settle.

This resistance makes Kido’s position deliberately uncomfortable. He recognizes that his background can expose him to discrimination, yet dislikes being claimed by others on the basis of that same background. He believes action against hate speech is necessary, yet hesitates to join a public counter-demonstration and imagines giving legal advice instead. His reflections do not resolve those tensions by providing a single representative account of Zainichi life. They show why he objects to representation that turns a person into a category, and why solidarity, for him, must not erase the particular person it intends to defend.