Living as a Zainichi in Japan and Korea: Between Discrimination and Multiculturalism

-Adj. Prof. Dr Sung-sook Lim (Chungnam National University)

Abstract:

In this lecture, based on her own experiences living in South Korea and Japan, she attempts to show how a Korean diaspora has grappled with various life possibilities and limitations in times when both Japan and South Korea had promoted their own types of ‘multiculturalism.’ In Japan where the colonial legacy remains, she has become a subject of “being (in)visible” in everyday life based on her background such as education, ethnicity, and citizenship. In South Korea, so-called her ethnic homeland (technically a divided space due to the cold-war), she found herself as “an overseas Korean” which is regarded as neither a foreigner nor Korean citizen. Since the 1980s and the 1990s, the two nation-states have claimed that they are no longer culturally(ethnically) homogeneous countries. However, she will offer a critical analysis of how state powers operate in the name of multiculturalism by “universalizing” differences, which prevents tracing specific historical and cultural backgrounds of various ethnic groups of people. Finally, she will suggest that transnational lives are highly contested even in the global era.

About the lecturer:

Lim Sungsook is an adjunct professor in the department of Japanese language and literature at the Chungnam National University, South Korea. As a Korean resident, she was born and grew up in Japan. After completing B.A. degree in Japan (J. F. Oberlin University), she started to study cultural anthropology at Hanyang University, South Korea, where she conducted research on ethnic Korean Chinese, most of whom migrated to South Korea to work. Then she continued to study anthropology at the University of British Columbia where she completed her Ph.D. Her research was about return migration among elderly Koreans on Sakhalin Island (Russia) to South Korea within the context of post-colonial transformations. Her research interest is in transnational migration and kinship (gender), nation-state, citizenship, post-socialism, everyday life, and Korean diasporas in Northeast Asia.