“Zainichi Koreans”: think for a moment about the sheer oddity of the name for Koreans “residing in Japan.” For most of the past century, Zainichi Koreans, or simply Zainichi, have comprised the largest foreign population in Japan, thanks to the legacy of Japan's colonial rule, which triggered a very sizable flow of immigrants to Japan from the 1910s to the 1940s. Because of that history, Zainichi usually denotes Koreans rather than just any group of non-Japanese residents, as the term would seem to imply (thus, John Lie can title his book on the subject: Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity [Global, Area, and International Archive, University of California Press, 2008]).
I speak of this “oddity” as an American who lives in a country that professes to be concerned less with one's national origins than with one's assimilative ability; we are supposed to ask not who one is...
