A Comparative Study of Muslim Migrants in Korea and Japan: Their Social Networking and Practice of Islamic way of life

Korea and Japan have similar history in Islam and common experience in dealing with recently established Muslim migrants in many aspects. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia started to bring Central Asian Muslims to Korea and Japan. Among many Turks of various races who had sought political asylum under the Japanese government, some 200 persons succeeded in entering Korea and 200 others moved to Japan. This is the first experience for Korea and Japan to deal with foreign Muslim migrants. Now two countries have similar number of Muslim migrants (about 100,000) and their social networking,acculturation process, practice of Islamic way of life. In this sense, this study is to dig out Muslim migrants' social networking and the practice of Islamic way of life in Korea and Japan,which is based on comparative survey results done by Academy of Human Science of Waseda University in 2006 and Anthropological Team of Hanyang University in 2011. Compared to migrants overall, the Muslim migrants in Korea and Japan are more likely to be isolated from host culture mainly due to negative image on Islam and Muslims, and on their religious tenets. This spotlight focuses on Muslim migrants residing in Korea and Japan, examining the historical background, population's size, inter-marriage, money expenditure, difficulties for social life, halal food, frequence of regular prayer, Dawa'h activities and socioeconomic characteristics using comparative survey data from two sources. In general, Muslim migrants in Japan stay longer than Korean respondents. In Japan there are much more migrants than in Korea who have stayed more than 10 years and in occupation Muslims in Japan has more professional job and trade business. It means that Muslims in Korea send more money to their family in home country, while Muslim migrants in Japan spend more money for child education, rental expenses, car purchase and other daily life. Moreover Muslims in Korea clearly showed higher ratio in their community activities which are isolated from the host Korean society. The community-focused solidarity is stronger than Muslims in Japan. Muslim migrants in Korea show more positive tendency than Japan's partners in practice of such religious matters as keeping regular prayers and frequence of using halal restaurants. However, Muslim migrants in Korea responded higher ratio in some factors for social networking. They feel more seriously than Muslims in Japan in the matter of health care, local language communication, lodging and job opportunity. Meanwhile Muslim migrants in Japan listed lack of leisure time, economic condition of home country, child education and others as the obstacles for their social life. The comparative survey shall contribute to designing future multicultural plan for Korea and establishing more adequate strategies in dealing with Muslim migrants in Korea