Kang Sang-Jung (1950-) may well be the most prominent Zainichi Korean intellectual currently publishing in Japan. The first Zainichi Korean to become a faculty member at the University of Tokyo, Kang has written extensively on political issues concerning Zainichi Koreans and the social and historical circumstances that surround them. In the early 2000s, Kang embarked on two paths that have extended his readership to those outside the academy. One was that with the 2004 memoir Zainichi, he started to publish extensively on his family's and his own experiences of growing up as a Zainichi Korean. The other direction Kang took was that he increasingly came to write for non-Zainichi Korean Japanese, especially the young, offering them life advice and suggestions.

Sonia Ryang possesses “double vision” in that she is a U.S.-based anthropologist as well as a cultural insider who grew up as a Zainichi Korean. Her family supported Chongryun (the North Korea-affiliated Zainichi Korean organization), which stood in contrast to the twentieth century's other Zainichi Korean organization Mindan that was affiliated with South Korea., Zainichi Koreans during the last century was largely divided in their identification either with Chongryun or Mindan. She reached adulthood after attending Chongryun-run ethnic schools including the Korea University in Tokyo and worked as a journalist for a Chongryun newspaper before starting her graduate studies in the United Kingdom. This background endows her Zainichi Korean studies with depths, insights, and a distinctive ethos. In this article, she describes the contours of Zainichi Korean history after 1945 and why “Zainichi Korean” as an ethnicity separate from Koreans in Korea remains relevant today.

Despite centuries of subjugation by larger neighbours—Joseon Korea, Imperial Japan, and South Korea—Jeju island society has maintained a distinct identity and a measure of autonomy. Relations with both Korea and Japan have at times had devastating effects on the islanders, but also contributed to the dynamism of Jeju island society and opened up new routes for islanders to continue traveling as a vital part of their social life.

In March and April 1948 Koreans across Japan rose up in protest after the Japanese government began to enforce an order handed down to them by the American Occupation administration to close Korean ethnic schools. One such protest took place in Kobe on April 24 when Koreans stormed the Hyogo Prefecture offices in an attempt to get the governor to rescind the order to close the four Korean ethnic schools in the prefecture. American and Japanese administrations reacted harshly to the Korean actions. Police arrested thousands of Koreans and inflicted stiff penalties on the incident's leaders. As was often the case, the Occupation administration misinterpreted Korean intention to keep the schools open as a leftist attempt to disrupt U.S. occupations in Korea and Japan. Here the incident is examined through the eyes of one Occupation employee, Elizabeth Ryan, a 31-year old court reporter who included detailed information on the incident and its participants in personal letters that she sent to her family in the United States.

Whereas some Koreans were coerced to work in Japan and elsewhere in the Japanese empire, many others voluntarily migrated to the Japanese mainland. This trend continued on a more limited basis into the postwar era. Tessa Morris-Suzuki has written on postwar migrations across Japanese borderlines in Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War (2007) and Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era (2010). In Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, she has also offered her findings and thoughts on the subject; this article is one example.

Sociologist John Lie has written extensively on multiculturalism in Japan and elsewhere. He authored two books on Zainichi Koreans in 2008, and this article is adapted from a chapter in Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity. His other book is Diaspora without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan, which he edited with Sonia Ryang, whose article is also included in this course reader.

While other articles in this course reader treat the earlier forces that created and framed Zainichi, Rumi Sakamoto's article deals with the discourse in contemporary Japan concerning Zainichi Koreans. As John Lie recognizes in his article, many Japanese still view Zainichi Koreans with racist animosity; this is also the case in cyberspace.

In the 1990s East Asian experienced a turn toward nationalism that includes an extremist, xenophobic wing, which expanded further during the 2000s. This is true in all three of the major countries in the region; Japan, China, and South Korea. In Japan, for example, Abe Shinzo, whose platform calls for hawkish foreign policies and the rewriting of the postwar constitution based on cultural nationalism, returned as the prime minister in 2012. The anti-Korean slanders that were limited earlier to cyberspace, as discussed by Rumi Sakamoto in her article earlier in this reader, have since taken to the streets in Japanese cities. How to deal with such a phenomenon, described by Tessa Morris-Suzuki as a kind of “mass retreat to the psychological fortresses of ethno-nationalism and racism” (p. 5), is becoming an ever more pertinent issue for all East Asian countries and their nationals.