<ARTICLES>Young Zainichi Koreans' Strategies of Communicating the Self : Transitions under Implicit Forms of Discrimination

This paper is based on interviews to ten third generation Zainichi Korean students who have recently experienced job-hunting. By focusing on their identity management toward Japanese companies (when and how to "come out", and the meaning of doing so), this paper will show how Zainichi Koreans and Japanese society today face a new situation concerning discrimination and the possibility of its overcoming. Because of severe discriminatory practices of Japanese companies, Zainichi used to be excluded from normal job opportunities. However, we hardly see such explicit discrimination today. Instead, discrimination has become hidden and implicit. In this new situation, the Zainichi youth now have both the chance and the burden to tell who they are to the majority Japanese in the companies they apply to. This paper borrows the framework of discrimination studies, and pays attention to the asymmetric relationship between "us" (those who discriminate) and "not us" (those who are discriminated). Even when so-called discrimination does not take place, we can see the problematic relationships in which the majority can alienate the minority for certain purposes. In the first case recorded in this paper, for example, a Zainichi student's strategy is to let interviewers of companies (the Japanese majority) think that being Zainichi is nothing problematic, and that it actually means being more "global". However, she meets some interviewers who seem inclined to alienate her as a Korean, that is, someone who is not a member of Japanese society. As such strategy shows, today's third generation Zainichi undergo, on the one hand, newly emerging chances for overcoming historical discrimination by communicating their identity to the majority, and, on the other hand, a new risk of again being denied membership in society. There are persisting difficulties felt on the Zainichi side in communicating who they are to the majority. However, their present strategy of transition into communicable relationship is not without hope and can have certain potential