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MULTIETHNIC_JAPANESE_KOREAN

                                             October 11, 2016


From "Multi-Ethnic Japan" (2001) by John Lie:

  "It was commonly said among Korean Japanese parents in the 1960s,
  'If it's a boy, make him a baseball player; if a girl, then a
  singer.'  The Korean ethnics in Japan play the functional role of
  African Americans-- as sports stars and singers-- whereas Koreans
  in the United States are feted as a model minority (Abelmann and
  Lie 1995:165-170).

  "The paradox of ethnic overrepresentation and ethnic invisibility
  is by no means unique to Japan.  Although few would deny the
  multiethnic constitution of the United States in the late
  twentieth century or the Jewish influence on American cultural
  life, Jewish Americans attempted not so long ago to pass as
  ordinary white Americans." (p.81-81)


  "That the facts of multiethnic Japan still remain occluded,
  then, is in part because of monoethnic ideology.  In spite
  of the proliferation of books on ostensibly every topic in
  publisher-happy Japan, there is, for example, still no
  serious history of pachinko.  Korean Japanese owners of
  pachinko parlors are wary of researchers who may harm their
  business, whether because of ethnic discrimination or
  because of the Japanese tax bureau (Nomura 1996:94-95)."



  "When I look back on my childhood in Tokyo ...  My classmates
  often beat me up after school because of my Korean name.
  Excluded from our usual after-school baseball game, I would
  walk over to the shopping district near Shibuya Station.  My
  favorite haunt was Seibu, which remains a fashionable
  department store.  It hardly occurred to me then that the
  owner of Seibu (and its corporate parent Saison Group) was of
  Korean descent (Downer 1994:11-12)."



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