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by Shida, lchiro
Many things have been argued about white racism. But racism is also seen among the non-white people. We Japanese have a certain stereo-typed image of the white or the black, too. But here. I would like to show you another example, the discrimination against Korean people in Japan. To be accurate, I wonder if I can call it racism because both Japanese and Korean belong to the same race. But the discrimination between these two peoples is by no means weaker than that between different races. Korea was a colony of Japan from 1910 to 1945. Japanese rulers thought that the best way to rule Korea was assimilation. They tried to destroy the uniqueness of Korean culture. It was arbitarily neglected. As the result, Japanese people know almost nothing about their neighbour. Nevertheless, they have a certain stereotyped image of Koreans, including the younger generation born after the liberation of Korea. The 'Image is somewhat different from the images of other foreign peoples. This paper aims to make clear this difference as well as the process in which it was formulated. I would like to refer to a paper which openly reveals the stereo-typed image of the Koreans held by Japanese. It is the report published in 1971 by the Association of Junior High School Principals in Osaka. Its title is "the Practical Situations and the Problems of foreign Children" The term "foreignh means Korean here. It is used to indicate indirectly the Koreans who form almost ninty percent of foreign residents in Japan. This report says that foreign children are egoistic, emotional, violent and sexually premature. They are so unconscious of their repeated misdeeds. They can' t understand logical advices. Their families are poor. Their parents have no interest in their childrens' education. Their daily life is irregular and the home training is impossible. To sum it up, the tone of the argument in the report is that Japanese schools are suffering from the increase of foreign (Korean) children because they break the rules and order of the schools. I think you could get the outline image of the Koreans in Japan. Here I want to make it up with my own two experiences. When I was a high school student, a science teacher said in the class that he had met a foreigner on the previous day. Students asked the nationality of the foreigner. After the nationalities like American, Frenchman and German, the word Korean was mentioned by a student. This caused a loud laughter at once. This. incident shows that Japanese people regard a Korean as foreigner with certain conditions. Their feeling is that a Korean is not a foreigner but a subordinated kind of Japanese. In the report I have refered to above the word "foreign" meant Korean, but Japanese ordinary people generally don' t think of a Korean by that word. Recently, I made a trip to Korea. On board of the plane bound for Seoul. I heard a conversation between two Japanese men. One of them said that he had been "troubled" with commercial boards written in Korean letters in Seoul. His words represent a dominant opinion among Japanese that it is natural for the Koreans to write Chinese Characters for the convenience of the Japanese. Korea is still a colony of Japan in the depth of Japanese minds. @Now I will explain the process through which the stereotyped image was formulated. Such a bad image of the Koreans as I mentioned earlier is rather new. For about one thousand years, the Koreans had been respected by the Japanese. It was the Koreans who introduced to Japan Buddism and the way of writing for the first time. Japan owes its rapid progress in pottery, paper manufacture, printing and confucianism to Korea in the feudal days. It was the colonization of Korea in 1910 that caused the drastic change. Thereafter Korea was regarded as a peninsula to be ruled by Japan. But the Koreans were not so obedient. They repeated armed and non-armed resistance incessantly. The Japanese police and the military forces hated the Koreans. After 1910, the number of Korean immigrants to Japan increased. Their everyday life was severely checked by the police. Sometimes, they were used as scape goats. In 1923, there was a big earthquake in Tokyo area. Amid the panic, false rumors flew about such as "Korean threw poison into drinking water" "Koreans are killing Japanese everywhere'. About a half of the Koreans living around Tokyo (5,000) were killed by Japanese ordinary people threatened by these rumors. It is established today that the rumors were circulated by the police to prevent the riot. During the period of military regime, education was completely controlled by the government. Teachers tried to make their children patriots. Modern Japan has been suffering from the inferiority complex vis-a-vis the West and this complex feeling was sustained by the poverty of Japanese ordinary people. The easiest way to get rid of it was to speak ill of the. Koreans. But what did they teach? Did they know Korea well? Not at all. For their purpose, the Koreans had to be inferior. The actual situation was not important. They described the Koreans with all the negative adjectives they could think of. Thus the discrimination against the Koreans was the result of the colonialization. Those directly responsible for it were policemen and teachers. But the problem is why Japanese ordinary people accepted their words. Now I want to show another example of discrimination. It Is the discrimination within the Japanese people themselves. In the early feudal days, there was a group of people looked down upon because of their jobs. The Tokugawa Shogunate, the feudal government from 1603 to 1868, placed them into two fixed statuses called the 'hetah (the dirty) and the ghinin" (the non-human). The Japanese society at that time was a society of the status system ruled by the samurai (the Japanese warriors) class. The rulers of the Tokugawa Shogunate were so clever as to divide the lowest class of the society into the two groups. The "eta" was a hereditary status but the ghininh was not. One becomes a ghininh for some reasons such as a crime or an illegal marriage etc. The "eta" was the higher rank of the two, so they discriminated the ghinin". The "hininh had once been common men and could return to common men again, so they discriminated the "etah. Hatred spread within the lowest strata of the society, and thus rule of the samurai class could be stable. Modern Japanese rulers expected the Koreans who migrated to Japan since 1910 to play the role of "hinin" because after the Meiji Modernization the geta" and the "hininh were unifies into one status named the "shin-heimin" (the new commoners). The shln-heimin discriminated Koreans as lowest class Japanese. Koreans discriminated the shin-heimin because there were people named gpaekcheongh discriminated like gshin-heiminh in Korea, too. @These discrimination within the same ethnic
group still exists today in Japan.
The terms
such as "eta" ghinin"
and
"shin-heimin" are regarded
as derogatory
words except in historical references.
But
this kind of discrimination still exists
now. It formed so to speak an artificially
created ethnic groups in countries
where
a single ethnic group with the exception
of minimal number of ethnic minorities
has
lived for more than one thousand years.
As
was explained above, discrimination
was purposely
planted according to the needs of the
feudal
rulers. The rulers made even the facts
distorted
to justify discrimination. Those lowest
class
people were restricted in their living
places,
jobs and even their foods and costumes.
In
the case of Koreans the difference
of foods
and cultures was not a problem. But
the living
conditions created by the Japanese
became
the cause of discrimination. Most of
the
Korean Immigrants were farmers. Korean
farm
villages had been rather richer than
Japanese
villages before the colonization. However,
as the cultivated fields were confiscated
by Japanese colonists, they became
impoverished.
Both the Koreans and the Japanese live
on
rice. While the rice production in
Korea
increased only by twenty percent, the
export
of rice to Japan became fourfold. Korean
rice farmers could not eat rice and
had to
eat wild plants. Korea was a country
of diffused
education even in feudal days. But
Japanese
rulers closed the schools run by Koreans
one after another as "uncivilized"
because they taught independence of
Korea
there. Moreover, the Japanese rulers
did
not set up enough new schools replacing
the
closed ones. Only twenty percent of
the population
could finish elementary education in
the
colonized Korea. The Koreans came to
Japan
looking for a better life. But the
jobs given
to them were laborious , dangerous
and dirty
ones. They worked for much smaller
wages
than Japanese labourers. The inspectors
ruled
them with violence. The Japanese people
discriminated
the Koreans because of their poverty,
illiteracy
and rudeness, without any consciousness
that
they were forced to come to Japan.
What is
the essence of racism? Is it the difference of skin colour? I donft think so. It is nothing but an excuse
used by those who discriminate. I think
the
essence of racism on discrimination
is the
formation of some stereotyped image
of a
group of people, which prevents normal
human
relations. These people were required
to
be inferior regardless of their actual
situation.
An unjust society needs them. Many
kinds
of social conditions are imposed upon
some
people by birth. If they hate those
conditions,
they must fight against the dominant
people.
But in most cases, they comfort themselves
by persecuting the weaker. Where there
is
a difference of colour, it can be the
excuse
for persecution. But among the people
of
the same skin colour , the ethnic difference
is substituted for that. And in society
where
even an ethnic difference does not
exist,
an artificial difference is created.
Discriminations
against the Koreans and that among
the Japanese
themselves are good examples . |
