Even though many Koreans seem to have completely immersed in Japanese society, an even greater number of Koreans continue to resist assimilation, and strive to preserve their cultural heritage and language, and to combat the discrimination they face in Japanese society, mainly by joining one of many Korean residents’ organizations. Yet, rather than galvanizing the Korean community in Japan, the two largest organizations, Chongryun and Mindan, have actually served more to polarize it, as they represent the political concerns of North and South Korea respectively—the division of the peninsula thus mirrored, at least on the surface, within the microcosm of the Korean minority in Japan. The North Korean affiliated Chongryun in many ways still remains the most prominent organization of Koreans in Japan, largely due to its maintenance of the only significant system of Korean education.
I would like to use the question of organizational success as a framework to examine the underlying assumptions, historical determinants, and mechanisms of cultural identity formation and perpetuation at work in Chongryun. Many readers will likely find it quite contradictory that such a significant portion of the Korean minority in Japan should pledge allegiance to the communist totalitarian state of North Korea, even though they now lead rather prosperous lives in a democratic and pluralistic Japan.
In the first section I hope to clarify how Chongryun was legitimized through its historical role in the struggle of Japan’s Korean minority and how the organization has since been able to extend its legitimate identity through strong ideological control and through a unique structure of isolated co-existence within the Japanese state.
The second section will examine the perpetuation of Chongryun’s discourse of Korean identity in its education system, and how reforms in the education system have affected the stability of this discourse.
In the last section the causes of Chongryun’s gradual decline as the dominant representative of Koreans in Japan will be examined. Both long term causes related to Chongryun’s organizational immobility through its totalizing ideological orientation and short term developments in North Korea-Japan relations that have recently put Chongryun under pressure will be identified.
- 5
