How the Zainichi Story Began

In my first post, I shared something I had kept quiet for most of my life: I am a third-generation Zainichi Korean.

Many people wrote afterward to say, “I had no idea about the existence or history of Zainichi Koreans.”

I understand why. This history is rarely taught, and for a long time, it was not openly discussed — even within our own community.

A few people also mentioned the novel Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. She is a Korean American author, not Zainichi Korean. Quite frankly, one of my former clients gave me the book when it first came out, but I still haven’t read it, so I cannot speak to how it portrays Zainichi life. I do, however, have thoughts about how Zainichi stories are represented in fiction and media, and I will save those for a future post.

Today, I want to explain how this history began.

Before I do, I want to be very clear: everything I am sharing here is grounded in historical fact. I am not writing from anger, blame, or resentment toward any nation or people. I am writing as someone telling the truth about where I come from — a truth that has been buried for a long time.

The Colonial Origins of the Zainichi Community

People often point to 1910 as the moment everything began because that was when Japan formally annexed Korea. But the groundwork had been laid decades earlier.

In 1876, Japan pressured Korea to open its ports through the Treaty of Ganghwa, an agreement Korea did not enter willingly. From there, Japan’s presence grew steadily. After Japan defeated China in the 1890s and Russia in the early 1900s, its control over Korea deepened.

By 1905, Korea had become a Japanese protectorate. This essentially meant that Japan controlled the country’s major decisions even though Korea continued to exist on paper.

By the time 1910 arrived, annexation was neither a shock nor a sudden takeover. It was the moment Japan made official what had already been unfolding for years. The Korean Peninsula became part of the Japanese Empire.

I want to emphasize this because it is often misunderstood: Koreans did not move to Japan in the way we understand immigration today.

Under colonization, Koreans were considered imperial subjects of Japan — not equal citizens and not foreigners, but something in between. They had been absorbed into an empire they never asked to join.

As Japan expanded and prepared for war during the 1930s and 1940s, Korean labor was mobilized across factories, mines, shipyards, and construction sites. Some people left Korea because the economic conditions created by colonial rule made survival nearly impossible. Some were recruited. Many were pushed or forced.

None of this followed the ordinary logic of migration. It followed the logic of empire.

This is how hundreds of thousands of Koreans came to be living throughout the Japanese islands before the war ended — not simply as newcomers seeking opportunity, but as members of a colonized population whose movements were shaped by a system they did not choose.

When the Empire Disappeared but the People Remained

Then 1945 arrived.

Japan surrendered, and the empire collapsed. But the people did not disappear.

Hundreds of thousands of Koreans who had been living and working in Japan remained there. Suddenly, the category that had defined them — imperial subjects — vanished.

They were no longer considered Japanese nationals, but they were not yet protected by either Korean state. They continued to live in Japan without a secure or clearly defined legal status.

Japan was rebuilding itself as a homogeneous nation — a nation based on the idea of sameness. Within that vision, there was no clear place for a community brought into the country through empire.

Japan, the Allied occupation authorities, and the newly forming governments in South and North Korea all struggled over what would happen to this population.

Everything crystallized in 1952, when the San Francisco Peace Treaty went into effect. Japan regained its sovereignty, and Koreans living in Japan lost the limited nationality status they had held under imperial rule.

They did not become Japanese citizens. They did not automatically become citizens of South or North Korea. An entire community became effectively stateless.

My grandparents’ generation lived through that transformation. One day, they had been part of an empire — unequal, but legally recognized within it. The next, they belonged nowhere on paper.

They lived in Japan, worked in Japan, paid taxes in Japan, and raised children in Japan. Yet legally, they existed in a kind of void.

This shaped everything that came afterward: identity, safety, silence, and how we learned to move through the world.

The Division of Korea Reached Across the Sea

The division of the Korean Peninsula made everything even more complicated.

When South and North Korea split, that fracture did not remain on the peninsula. It reached across the sea and reshaped how Zainichi Koreans imagined home, understood dignity, and carried their history inside a country that did not fully see them.

The consequences were not merely philosophical or emotional. They shaped everyday life.

For decades after the war, many Zainichi Koreans faced employment restrictions and exclusion from large parts of the formal workforce. Access to stable, full-time employment remained limited because of legal status, documentation requirements, and widespread hiring discrimination.

Building a stable life under those conditions was structurally difficult — not because of a lack of ability, ambition, or effort, but because the systems in place did not allow Zainichi Koreans to participate equally.

An Identity Created by History

This is what makes the Zainichi story so distinct.

It is not simply a story of immigration. It is not a conventional refugee story. It is not a simple story of diaspora.

It is the story of a community shaped by colonialism, displacement, legal exclusion, rupture, decades of adaptation, abandonment, and erasure.

There is another difficulty people rarely discuss: the assumptions placed upon us.

Some people insist that we must be fully Korean. Others assume that we are simply Japanese. Neither description captures the full reality. To make matters even more complex, many Zainichi people today choose to identify fully as Japanese, adding another layer to how our identities are perceived and understood.

We inhabit an in-between space created by history, not by personal choice.

I sometimes struggle to explain this. I am still learning about my own ancestry through this project because I did not grow up with access to this knowledge. Although I feel its weight in my bones, I do not always have the perfect, polished language to express it.

Yet.

The complexity of this history does not fit neatly into the simplified categories people expect. Explaining it can be difficult when the broader public has so little awareness of the context. People sometimes respond with assumptions or misunderstandings, treating this history as something distant, foreign, or irrelevant.

Those reactions reveal the larger gap in public knowledge.

The Zainichi Music Project exists to address that gap. It is not about eliciting sympathy or assigning blame. It is about presenting the historical record clearly and giving long-overlooked experiences the recognition they deserve.

This history also explains everything that comes next: the two names many of us were given, the pressure to assimilate, the silent rules we learned to follow, and the statelessness that shaped entire generations.

In future posts, I will explore what this history created in everyday life, who Zainichi Koreans are today, and why names — especially the two names so many of us carried — became such a defining part of our identities.

Please support the Zainichi Music Project through my NYFA project page.