S Capital and the Pb of Opp Leadership: Koreans in Japan by Ramseyer

Social Capital and the Problem of Opportunistic Leadership: The Example of Koreans in Japan by J. Mark Ramseyer :: SSRN

Social Capital and the Problem of Opportunistic Leadership: The Example of Koreans in Japan

Harvard Law School John M. Olin Center Discussion Paper No. 1043, 2020

31 Pages

Posted: 20 Nov 2020

J. Mark Ramseyer

Harvard Law School

Date Written: October 2, 2020

Abstract

Through webs of cross-cutting ties, groups can build "social capital" -- the ability to use the resulting access to information and collective punishment to enforce on each other their norms of appropriate behavior. Yet not all minorities maintain such networks. And groups without them sometimes find themselves manipulated by opportunistic entrepreneurs who capture private benefits for themselves while generating massive hostility and (statistical) discrimination against the group as a whole. As one adage puts it, sometimes the worst enemy of a minority group is its own leadership.

Consider the Korean residents of Japan. Koreans had begun to migrate to Japan in the 1910s. They were poor, single, male, young, uneducated, and did not intend to stay long. As one might expect given those characteristics, they maintained only very low levels of social capital, and generated substantial (statistical) discrimination against themselves.

After the Second World War, most Koreans returned to their homeland. Among those who stayed, however, a self-appointed core of fringe-left opportunists took control and manipulated the group toward their private political ends. 

Lacking the dense networks that would let them constrain the opportunists, the resident Koreans could not stop them. Those with the most talent, sophistication, and education simply left the group and migrated into Japanese society. The opportunistic leaders exploited the vulnerable Koreans who remained, captured private benefits for themselves, and generated enormous hostility and (statistical) discrimination against the rest.

Keywords: discrimination; collective action; social capital; economic history

JEL Classification: J12, J15, K38, K42, N35

Suggested Citation

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104 References

Kazuhiro Abe

Race Relations and the Capitalist State: A Case Study of Koreans in Japan, 1917 through the mid-1920s

Korean Studies, volume 7, p. 35 - 60

Posted: 1983

-------------------------------

Crossref

Keiji Abe

Nikkyo no buso toso to zainichi Chosenjin [The Armed Struggle of the JCP and JapanResident Koreans

Hirotaka & Sozo Akashi, Matsuura

Showa Tokko danatsu shi [History of the Oppression by the Showa Period Special Police

Tokyo: Taihei shuppan sha

Posted: 1975

Goetz Aly

Why the Germans? Why the Jews?

Posted: 2015

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  ISSN 1936-5349 (print)  

  ISSN 1936-5357 (online) 

 HARVARD 

JOHN M. OLIN CENTER FOR LAW, ECONOMICS, AND BUSINESS 

 

 

 

 

 ==========

 

SOCIAL CAPITAL AND THE PROBLEM OF OPPORTUNISTIC LEADERSHIP: 

THE EXAMPLE OF KOREANS IN JAPAN 

 

J. Mark Ramseyer 

 

------------

 

 * Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, Harvard University.  I gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions of Jason Morgan, Eric Rasmusen, Sun-Joo Shin, Daniel Smith, Henry Smith, and the editors and referees of this journal. 

 

 =======  

 

 

 

 Members of some ethnic minorities develop among themselves dense webs of cross-cutting social and economic ties.  Through this network, they build what scholars like Putnam and Coleman call "social capital" -- the ability to use the resulting access to information and collective punishment to enforce on each other their norms of appropriate behavior.  Yet not all minorities maintain such networks.  And groups without them sometimes find themselves commandeered by opportunistic entrepreneurs.  In turn, those entrepreneurs then capture private benefits for themselves while generating substantial hostility and Arrow-Phelps statistical discrimination against the group as a whole.   

 Social capital is the means by which socially coherent minorities mitigate the collective action problems that otherwise plague any group.  Minorities without that capital cannot necessarily control a  self-appointed leadership.  And without that control, they leave themselves vulnerable to opportunistic leaders who would manipulate the group to transfer private benefits to themselves -- even as they generate large costs to the group as a whole.  Sometimes, as one adage puts it, the worst enemy of a minority group is its own leadership.   

 Consider the Korean residents of Japan.  Koreans had begun to migrate to Japan in the 1910s.  They were poor, single, male, young, illiterate, and did not intend to stay long.  As one might expect given those characteristics, they maintained only very low levels of social capital and generated substantial statistical discrimination against themselves. 

 After the Second World War, most of these Koreans returned to their homeland.  Among those who stayed, however, a self-appointed core of fringe-left opportunists took control and manipulated the group toward their private political ends.  The most talented, sophisticated, and educated Koreans responded by leaving the group and merging into Japanese society.  They had no reason to stay and try to restrain the opportunists. 

 The vulnerable Koreans who remained lacked the web of cross-cutting ties among themselves by which they might have overcome their own collective action problems and expelled the self-appointed leaders.  Instead, the opportunists exploited the vulnerable Koreans who remained, and captured private benefits for themselves -- all the while generating hard-edged hostility and statistical discrimination against the remaining rank-and-file. 

 Consider this short essay a simple and informal extension of the law & economics of statistical discrimination -- one that ties ethnic tension to the economics of information, the logic of collective action, and the effect of social capital.  I illustrate the reasoning with an example from one of the better known cases of ethnic hostility in Japan. I first explain the economic logic tying together ethnic tensions, collective action, social capital, statistical capital, and opportunistic leadership (Section I).  I summarize the application to Japan-resident Koreans (Section II).  I then apply the analysis to a short history of the Koreans before (Section III) and after (Section IV) the Second World War. 

 

I.  The Economics of Ethnic Bias  

A. Gary Becker: 

 Gary Becker (1957) began the modern economic study of discrimination and ethnic bias.   He first posited a majority group whose members had a "taste" for discriminating against members of the corresponding minority.  From basic economic principles, he then reasoned that majority members who choose not to trade with the corresponding minority will suffer an economic loss.  

 

What is more, given that the inter-racial trade constituted a larger part of the minority's economic activity than the majority's, that drop in trade would hurt members of the minority group more than it hurt those in the majority.  

 Becker did not explore how any discriminatory "taste" might have come about.  He took the taste as exogenous, and traced its economic consequences. Most writers outside of economics have been less careful.  Most straightforwardly assume that members of an ethnic majority discriminate because they hold an unreasoned animus against the minority group; simultaneously, they argue that the discrimination demonstrates the animus.  The argument, of course, is entirely tautological:  they (i) purport to explain discriminatory behavior by positing an anti-minority animus, and then (ii) prove the existence of that animus by citing the discriminatory behavior. 

 

B. Statistical Discrimination: 

 1.  Why does a majority discriminate? -- 

(a) Arrow. Positing exogenous "tastes" (like ethnic animus) to explain behavior is not science, and together with George Stigler Gary Becker would write the classic manifesto against such an approach.  Rather than suppose that differences in "tastes" explain behavior, Stigler and Becker (1977, 76) urged scholars to adopt as their working hypothesis "the proposition that one may usefully treat tastes as stable over time and similar among people." Anything else, they write, is "a convenient crutch to lean on when the analysis has bogged down." (id., 89).  Indeed, they conclude (id., 89), "no significant behavior has been illuminated by assumptions of differences in tastes."   

 Within economics, scholars most commonly explain inter-ethnic discrimination in modern democracies through a concept introduced by Kenneth Arrow (1971), and known as "statistical discrimination."  Arrow noted that ethnic markers can correlate with other relevant characteristics -- whether labor productivity, criminal behavior, or anything else.  Sometimes members of the majority will find it hard to observe those relevant characteristics.  Faced with the correlation between the observable group identity and the unobservable relevant characteristic, they rationally treat minority members by the mean value of the unobservable characteristic. 

 

(b) Economic competition. 

Statistical discrimination is hardly the only source of discrimination consistent with a rational-choice account.  For example, some scholars locate the source of some ethnic tension in economic competition:  two groups competing in the same industry may use ethnic status as a proxy for economic rivalry.  The attacks on Chinese merchant communities in Indonesia (in 1965-66) and Malaysia (1969) (Robinson 2018; Melvin & Pohlman 2018, 38-42; von Vorys 1975, ch. 13), the Hutu attacks on the Tutsi during the Rwandan civil war of 1990-94 (Prunier 1995), even the Ottoman attacks on Armenian communities (Carlton 1995, 223) seem to have had their roots in economic rivalry.   

 The Holocaust itself obviously goes far beyond the scope of this paper.  Even here, however, economic motives were not irrelevant.  Goetz Aly (2015), for example, attributes some of the German anti-Semitism to hostility toward successful Jewish entrepreneurs by their displaced Christian rivals in the wake of the early 19th century emancipation (Aly 2015). Similarly, Becker and Pascali (2019) find the most intense German anti-Semitic violence four centuries earlier in regions where Christians competed in the same industry as Jewish merchants. 

 

(c) Phelps. 

That said, to date statistical discrimination remains the focus for most economic research that looks to explain the source of ethnic discrimination.  At roughly the same time as Arrow, Edmund Phelps (1972, 659) gave the same rationale for discrimination: 

 [T]he employer who seeks to maximize expected profit will discriminate against blacks or women if he believes them to be less qualified, reliable, long-term, etc. on the average than whites and men, respectively, and if the cost of gaining information about the individual applicants is excessive.  Skin color or sex is taken as a proxy for relevant data not sampled. 

 In their respective discussions, Arrow and Phelps outline a logic behind a form of ethnic discrimination consistent with rational wealth-maximizing behavior. They never claimed their mechanism explained all discrimination.  Rather, they suggested that ethnic bias may sometimes represent a rational response to imperfect information.  As Jonathan Guryan and Kerwin Kofi Charles (2013, F418) put it: 

 In the absence of perfect information, the employer's optimal prediction of productivity is a weighted average of the individual-specific signal he receives and the average productivity of the workers in the same group as the applicant.  The more informative the signal of the individual applicant is -- the more complete the information is -- the greater the weight the employer places on that information; the less informative the signal is, the more weight he places on the average productivity of other workers from the same group.   Fundamentally, it is a lack of information that leads the employer to treat individuals as members of groups. 

 Note that employers may also engage in statistical discrimination if they can more accurately gauge people in one group than in the other.  Guryan & Charles' explanation addresses how an employer might respond to two groups of applicants with different levels of average productivity.  In fact, an employer may also discriminate where two groups have the same average productivity, but the employer can better judge the productivity of members his own group than of those in the other (Black 1995, 310).  In such a world, the employer will evaluate each potential worker within his own ethnic group by that particular worker's ability.  Unable to judge potential workers in the other ethnic group, he will assign them the average productivity of the group as a whole.  He will treat other-ethnic members with above-average productivity less favorably than their ability warrants.  He will treat below-average other-ethnic members more favorably than that ability justifies. 

 

 2. Why does the minority invite the discrimination. --

 (a) Minority choice. 

Arrow and Phelps posited an employer who faced two groups of applicants.  He knew the average productivity of members of the minority, but could not accurately gauge their individual ability.  Unable to distinguish among them, he treated all minority applicants by the group mean. 

  Yet most productivity differences among groups are not biologically hard-wired.  At least in part, most result from deliberate choice.  To the extent that they do, a troubling question arises:  why do the members of the less productive group make the choices that they do?  

 For example, suppose that the productivity difference between two groups resulted from differential investment in human capital (like education).  Within a rational choice framework, scholars face the question of why members of the two groups would invest in human capital at different rates.  In addressing the racial tensions within the U.S., for example, scholars like William Julius Wilson (1987) explain the lower investments in education among African Americans by the lack of job opportunities.  Other scholars like Shelby Steele (2015) trace the phenomenon back to welfare programs.  Op-ed writers suggest hypotheses that change by the month.   

 

 (b) Blaming the victim.  

With reason, this is a path many scholars hesitate to tread.  Suppose members of a majority discriminate against minority members because the minority group exhibits lower levels of educational investment, higher violent crime rates, or less cohesive families.  Those levels reflect choices that the minority members deliberately made.  The majority discriminates against the minority because minority members chose to invest less in education. They chose to engage in violent crime.  They chose to have children before marrying. 

 The logic obviously invites a blame-the-victim retort.  The rhetorical exchange dates to the early 1960s when the young Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1965) drafted a confidential White House report on African-American family. He found it close to collapse, and predicted severe consequences -- consequences that soon came to be.  With the high illegitimacy rates, wrote Moynihan, children grow up without a father.  Without a stable framework that includes both biological parents, they fail to internalize basic social norms. 

 The report promptly leaked, and Moynihan found himself attacked mercilessly.  He was "blaming the victim," and that his colleagues and journalists would not abide.  As Moynihan (1968: 31) himself described it, he faced "a near-obsessive concern to locate the 'blame' for poverty ... on forces and institutions outside the community concerned."   

 

 3.  Collective action and social capital. -

- 

(a) Collective action. 

 The obvious challenge is to explain why minority group members make these self-destructive choices:  why minority members find it rationally utility-maximizing to choose to behave in ways that generate broadranging statistical discrimination in response.  Often, the answer lies in the classic logic of collective action:  behavior that increases an individual's welfare does not necessarily raise his group's collective welfare.    

 The dilemma of collective action is straightforward:  each member of a group can find it individually rational to behave in a way that generates for the group a large collective cost that more than offsets the sum of the individual gains.  As an example, take theft. If a young man can successfully steal from a home of a majority member, he himself earns a positive return.  If all young men in his group steal from homes of majority members, they may generate statistical discrimination against their group in response.  The total loss from that statistical discrimination could be massive.  To any one of the young men, however, the marginal costs (the incremental increase in the level of statistical discrimination) of one more theft will be modest.  The marginal returns to him from that single theft could be large.  Each young man will steal.  The community collectively will suffer. 

 

 (b) Social capital.  

Sometimes, tightly knit groups can prevent these collective action disasters; chaotic groups seldom can.  Tightly knit groups can monitor their members.  They can identify those who violate their collective norms.  And they can impose a wide variety of painful yet extra-legal sanctions.  Hit a malefactor hard enough, and he will no longer find the discrimination-inducing behavior individually advantageous. 

 The term for the webs of cross-cutting ties that enable some groups to overcome their collective action problems, and monitor and control their members is "social capital." Political scientist Robert Putnam (2000) popularized the concept, of course, but the idea has its roots in sociology.  Groups can most effectively enforce their norms on their members, wrote sociologist James Coleman (1988, 1990) when they maintain a cross-cutting networks of relationships (Coleman 1988, S105–S107):  

 Norms arise as attempts to limit negative external effects [by some members] or to encourage positive ones. But, in many social structures where these conditions exist, norms do not come into existence. The reason is what can be described as lack of closure of the social structure. 

Posit, wrote Coleman (id.), a group in which the relationships that members maintain with each other do not overlap. A might know B and C, but B and C do not know each other.  Neither do B and C have any other common acquaintance. Without those mutual relationships, they will have more trouble enforcing their norms on each other:  

 In an open structure . . ., actor A, having relations with actors B and C, can carry out actions that impose negative externalities on B or C or both. Since they have no relations with one another, but with others instead (D and E), they cannot combine forces to sanction A in order to constrain the actions. Unless either B or C alone is sufficiently harmed and sufficiently powerful vis-a-vis A to sanction alone, A’s actions can continue unabated.  

 Should a group have a network of densely intertwined relationships, writes Coleman, it is “closed.” If anyone violates the group's common norms, others in the network will know. “In a structure with closure”, continues Coleman (id.), “B and C can combine to provide a collective sanction, or either can reward the other for sanctioning A”. 

 

 (c) Variations.  

In the wake of pioneering work by scholars like Coleman and Putnam, others have detailed a variety of extensions.  Some have noted that social capital need not advance any broader social good.  The concept refers to the ease with which a group can monitor and control its members.  If the group collectively decides to pursue social welfare broadly conceived, fine and good.  But in inter-war Germany, the tight webs of social capital actually facilitated the spread of Nazism (Berman 1997; Satyanath, Voiglaender & Voth 2013). 

 Given this welfare indeterminacy, Putnam suggests that scholars distinguish between "bridge" and "bond" civic associations.  An association that connects the members of multiple groups "bridges" a social divide.  An association that more tightly "bonds" together members of a group may cause the larger society to fragment (Stolle & Rochon 1998; Knack 2002; Knack & Keefer 1997; Patulny & Svendsen 2007).   

 Several scholars have explicitly explored the role that social capital can play in the growth of businesses within ethnic groups -- e.g., Deakins, Ishaq, Smallbone, Whittam & Wyper (2007).  Closely related classic studies that did not use the term "social capital" include Landa (1981), Bernstein (1992), Greif (2012). 

 

 4.  Dysfunctional leadership. -- 

Leaders of a minority group potentially have the greatest ability to influence the scope of any responsive statistical discrimination.  The point simply follows the definition of a "leader."  These are the men and women who can most strongly influence the way others in the group behave.  They can cause the others to behave in a way that decreases statistical discrimination (e.g., invest in education, avoid violent crime, marry before having children).  Or they can cause them to behave in ways that exacerbate that discrimination. 

 Leaders can also manipulate a group to personal ends.  They can use the threat of minority violence to extort subsidies from the majority or to pursue their ideological goals.  They can divert minority resources to their private accounts.  They can leverage their control over the group to increase their social standing more generally. 

 The ease with which an opportunistic leader will be able to manipulate a minority group toward his personal ends will rise as social capital within the group falls. With low levels of social capital, members find it hard to monitor each other.  They find it hard to punish members who violate broad social norms. By definition, their group lacks the dense networks of information and reciprocal favors and obligations necessary to overcome their collective action problems and control each other.   

 As a result, opportunistic leaders will find it easiest to manipulate minorities with the lowest levels of social capital.  Where the group cannot stop them, they can manipulate the group in a way that benefits them personally (sometimes economic, sometimes social, sometimes political), but in ways that simultaneously generate intense hostility toward the group as a whole.   To stop these opportunists, the other members of the group would need access to information and collective punishments.  In groups with high levels of social capital, members may have that information and means of collective punishment.  In groups with low levels, they do not.   

 Hence the popular observation that dysfunctional groups have leaders who are the group's own worst enemy.  Groups with high levels of social capital can monitor each other.  They can control each other.  And -- potentially -- can stop opportunists from manipulating the group to their private benefit but to the group's collective loss.  Groups with low levels of social capital can do this only haphazardly.  Necessarily, low social capital groups will constitute an easier target for an opportunist intent on self-promotion. 

 

II.  The Argument Applied: 

A. The Exercise: 

 In the article that follows, I illustrate these dynamics with a short history of the Japanresident Korean community.  The logic is simple, and provides a straightforward explanation for the ethnic tension.  I begin with a short summary of the argument. 

 

B. The Inter-war Years: 

 During the first four decades of the 20th century, young Korean men migrated from destitute agricultural villages to Japan.  They came to work.  Young men are a relatively highcrime demographic everywhere, and these young Korean men committed crimes at high levels.    The young men made little effort to integrate themselves into Japanese society.  They did not even organize themselves into a stable community.  They intended only to stay a few years and then return to Korea.  Most of them did exactly that, and returned to Korea in short order.    The young men brought very little education.  Many could not even speak Japanese.  At a time when most Japanese attended school for at least six years, a majority of the Korean men brought no education at all.  Neither did they have experience working in a job outside the home.  Instead, they came straight off the farm.   

 Note the straightforward implications.  First, the Koreans were a group with low average productivity:  they had little education or work experience.  Second, Japanese would found it hard to distinguish individual abilities within the group:  many of them knew no Japanese.  Third, the Koreans made no effort to integrate themselves into Japanese society: they planned only to work a few years and then return to Korea.  Last, the group made no effort even to organize themselves:  intending soon to return, they had no reason to build or maintain any network of social capital.   

 

C. After the War: 

 Dominated by transient, poor, young men, the Japan-resident Koreans presented opportunists with an extraordinarily vulnerable target.  At the close of the war, most Koreans in Japan returned to Korea.  A minority stayed, but did little either to integrate themselves into Japanese society, or to build their own social capital.   

 The communists among the Koreans immediately exploited this vulnerability. Within a year of the end of the war, they took complete control of the new association of Japan-resident Koreans.  The group would reorganize several times during the next several years, but would eventually take the popular name of Soren.  

 During the Korean war, Soren leaders recruited their members to open a second front within Japan.  For several years, they carried on a violent campaign of bombings and sabotage.  Obviously, this did not promote the social or economic success of Koreans within Japanese society.  Later in 1950s, Soren leaders encouraged members to emigrate to North Korea.  North Korean wanted men and women they could hold hostage in order to extort foreign currency from family members still in Japan.  Word quickly travelled that the emigrants were simply volunteering for the gulags.  But North Korea was subsidizing the Soren, and the emigrants left their property with the organization when they left.  For years, Soren leaders steadfastly promoted the emigration.    Soren leaders continue to maintain a network of schools to which they encourage members to send their children.  They do not teach the students Japanese, mathematics, or sciences at the levels that they will need to succeed within Japanese society.  Instead, they largely teach the quasireligious North Korean ideology centered on the Kim family.  Effectively, they create a class of Koreans who cannot leave the Soren orb.   

 In effect, the Soren leaders prey on the most vulnerable of the Japan-resident Koreans.  Leaving the ethnic Korean community and merging into Japanese society is not hard.  All one needs is a serious education.  Japanese schools offer all residents (including Koreans) that education.  And those Koreans who mastered that education have left the Korean world, married Japanese, and merged into the larger society.   

 The Soren leaders have worked instead to retain a cohort who cannot leave -- and whom they can relentlessly exploit to their private benefit.  The vulnerable Koreans lack the resources to build the social capital that would let them control the Soren leaders.  The Koreans who do have the resources (social, educational, economic) by which to control them find it easier simply to leave the group and join Japanese society (a dynamic nicely modeled by Kim & Loury 2019I). 

 

III.  Koreans in Japan Before the War 

A.  The Japanese Interest in Korea: 

 As the 19th century drew to a close, the Korean peninsula was poor.  The northern half of the peninsula held more by way of a potential industrial base than the south. But entrepreneurs had not yet made the investments necessary to exploit those resources effectively.  The southern half was better suited to agriculture.  But farmers had not yet made the technological changes that would double production by 1940.  

 The Joseon dynasty had governed the peninsula since the 14th century.  Yet the dynasty was weak, and presented an easy target to a rapidly modernizing Japan.  In 1894-95, Japan fought China and won.  In the ensuing treaty, it demanded that China renounce any claims it had on Korean tribute.  In 1904-05, Japan fought Russia and won.  This time, it demanded that Russia recognize Japan's influence over Korea.  Five years later (1910), it formally annexed the peninsula.  

  

Koreans were now Japanese citizens, and government in Tokyo would administer the peninsula through a Tokyo-appointed governor general. 

 

B.  Pre-war Immigration: 

 1.  Where Koreans went. -- 

With their new Japanese citizenship, Koreans began to emigrate to Japan. In 1910, 2,200 Koreans lived in Japan (Table 1).  By 1925, 130,000 lived there.  By 1930 298,000 Koreans lived in Japan, and by 1940 the number had soared to 1.2 million. 

  [Insert Table 1 about here.] 

 Koreans moved to Japan for the money.   There were jobs in Japan, and the jobs paid well. In 1930, unemployment in Korea stood at 12.5 percent.  Within Japan, it was 5.9 percent.  By 1937, 

Korean unemployment had fallen to 10.1 percent in the cities and 7.3 percent in the countryside.  In Japan, it had fallen to 3.6 percent in the cities and 0.5 percent in the countryside (I 2018, 21).  For this work, Japanese firms paid higher wages.  In 1923. the average Osaka wage in 1923 was 1.54 yen per day.  In Korea it was 0.91 yen (Miki 1933, 45). 

 The Korean migrants came overwhelmingly from the southern coastal provinces.  From the port of Pusan on the Korean southern coast to Fukuoka on the northern coast of the Japanese island of Kyushu was all of 120 miles.  In Fukuoka, Koreans would encounter a thriving industrial community with a large coal mining sector.  In these mines, the young men off the Korean farms found the work they could not locate at home (Rekishi 2015, 33; I 2018, 50). 

 In 1922, a Japanese firm launched a ferry service to Osaka from Jeju, a large island off the southern coast of Korea.  The second largest city in Japan, Osaka was home to a booming commercial and industrial economy.  Young men from Jeju now began arriving in large numbers (Park 2017, 22; Rekishi 2015, 33).  From these initial stops in northern Kyushu and Osaka, many of them would continue their eastward move in search of ever-better jobs (I 2018, 50-53). 

 Destitute Koreans did not move just to Japan.  Instead, they fanned out widely across northeast Asia. As of 1935, 626,000 Koreans lived in Japan, but 792,000 lived in north-east China (I 2018, 26).  About 200,000 lived in the eastern USSR (Chosen 1933, 290).  Increasingly, Koreans also settled in Japanese-controlled Manchuria.  With its own plans for the area, the Japanese government encouraged the moves.  It subsidized the Korean migration, and actively taught Korean immigrants modern farming techniques (Chosen 1933, 188). 

 

 2.  Which Koreans came. -- 

Unfortunately, the young Korean men who moved to Japan brought neither the work skills nor the education required in the rapidly industrializing country.  The new factories needed workers who came to work every day.  They needed workers who arrived at the same time of day, who put in steady effort, and who moved the product along expeditiously.  These were not habits of life that pre-modern peasants needed on the farm, and they were not habits that the young Koreans (raised as they were on premodern farms) necessarily brought with them (Miki 1933, 43). 

 What is more, many Koreans could neither read nor calculate. Even as late as 1939, 58 percent of the Korean immigrants were entirely illiterate.   By contrast, already in 1897 67 percent 

  

of Japanese elementary-age children were in school, and by 1902 that figure had reached 92 percent (Ogasawara 1979, 60).   

 Because of the Korean lack of work skills and education, Japanese employers avoided Koreans when they could.  Many larger factories found that they could not profitably integrate Korean workers even at wages lower than those they paid their Japanese employees (Niii 1927, 42).  Smaller factories were willing to hire Koreans at those lower wages, but still complained that the Koreans did not bring the work habits they needed of their workers (Miki 1933, 45; see also Niii 1927, 43). 

 The Koreans in Japan were not just young; they were also transient.  Very few of them planned to settle in Japan.  Instead, they came for the high wages, sent money back to Korea, and returned after a few years.  Necessarily, they did not try to adopt Japanese norms, invest in the society, or integrate themselves into the local community.  Instead, they earned what they could, and left.   

 Although the total Japan-resident Korean population in Table 1 shows a steady increase, the total misleads.  Turn instead to Table 2.  In 1921, 38,000 Koreans moved to Japan, but 26,000 returned to Korea; in 1925 131,000 Koreans moved to Japan, but 112,000 returned to Korea; and so it continued throughout the pre-war period.  Over the course of the 1920s, the total in Japan rose from 39,000 to 298,000, but in any given year, somewhere between 62 percent to 113 percent of the number who came to Japan that year left to go back. 

  [Insert Table 2 about here.] 

 

3. What Koreans did. --

 Young single men are a high-crime demographic in most societies, and they were a high-crime demographic in Japan.  Overwhelmingly, the first Korean immigrants to Japan were male.  Of the 148,000 Koreans in Japan in 1927, for example, 121,000 were men (Niii 1927, 3).  In 1932, more than twice as many Korean men as women still lived in Japan, and even in 1938 the ratio stood at 150 percent.  At least when they initially arrived, the Koreans were also young.  Of the 36,000 Korean men in 1920, 5,300 were age 15-19, 11,500 were 20-24, 8,400 were 25-29, 5,000 were 30-34, and only 2,100 were 35-39 (Somu sho, Kokusei 1920). 

 Predictably given the preponderance of transient young men, the Koreans in Japan committed crimes at high rates. To consider the 1930s, take Table 3.  In 1932, the arrest rate for Japan-resident Koreans (all crimes) was 9.06 percent.  For Japanese, the rate was 1.75 percent.  In 1938, the arrest rate among Koreans was 5.48 percent.  Among Japanese, it was 1.73 percent.  For the generally more serious Criminal Code crimes, the Korean rate during the period ranged from 5.37 percent (1932) to 3.17 percent (1938).  In 1937, the Korean rate was 3.25 (1937); the Japanese rate was 0.43 percent.  

 The transient young Koreans engaged in a wide range of opportunistic behavior beyond the crimes reflected in these rates.  Within the housing market, they behaved in ways that soon caused Japanese to avoid renting units to Koreans whenever they could.  Some tensions were predictable, of course.  One would expect urban Japanese landlords to find the much poorer young Korean peasant men prone to habits they considered unsanitary, and so they did.  One would expect some young men surreptitiously to sublease their unit to a large number of other young men, and so they did.  And one would expect the young men to drink heavily, brawl, make massive noise, and so they did.  

  

But the Korean men also adopted straightforwardly opportunistic strategies in this housing market.  Sometimes, the young Korean men built shacks on land without permission.  Ordered by the owner to leave, they refused.   At other times, they promised to pay rent, reneged, and refused to leave.  Worse, they sometimes deliberately created a nuisance and still refused (Miki 1933, 55).   The Korean men agreed to leave only if the landlord paid massive amounts in cash (Miki 1933, 58, 254, 213).  The more ambitious even turned tenancy itself into a job of sorts.  They rented strings of apartments never intending to pay rent or even to live long-term in any of them.  Instead, they took each unit solely in order to extract a large cash payment in exchange for leaving.  Toward that end, they might deliberately create a nuisance.  They might sublease the unit to 10 or more other Koreans.  They might hang signs offering to lease the unit to other Koreans.  If an owner complained, they accused him of discrimination and demanded even more cash (Miki 1933, 217; Naimu sho 1938, 1024). 

 

4. Terrorism. -- 

On March 1, 1919 and the days and weeks following, Koreans took to the (Korean) streets in large protests.  They demanded independence from Japan.  Within a month, self-proclaimed Korean leaders organized a government-in-exile in Shanghai.  

 The most militant of the anti-Japanese Koreans divided themselves into terrorist and saboteur squads.  Operating out of Beijing and elsewhere, they orchestrated a series of bombings and attacks against Japan.  Most of these they carried out on the Korean peninsula.  But not all.  By the early 1920s, militantly anti-Japanese Koreans were plotting in Japan with Japanese anarchists and communists (Miki 1933, 481; Chosen 1933, 28).  Over time, the Shanghai-based government-in-exile would itself turn communist as well (Miki 1933, 445). 

 In 1920, militants tried to assassinate the Korean crown prince in Japan. They thought him too pro-Japanese, and planned to kill his Japanese wife-to-be and the Japanese governor general of Korea too.  Police foiled all three assassinations.  In 1921, assassins did successfully kill Min Won-sik in Tokyo.  The journalist and politician had pushed for Korean rights, but extremists thought him too moderate.  In 1922, militants tried to assassinate Japanese army general (and eventual prime minister) Giichi Tanaka in Shanghai.  

 In mid-1923, Korean anarchist Pak yol and his Japanese lover Fumiko Kaneko apparently (some historians dispute the charge) plotted to kill the Japanese crown prince (later Showa emperor).  A Japanese anarchist would indeed shoot (but not kill) the crown prince in December 1923.  But on September 3, the police arrested Pak and Kaneko, and eventually charged them with attempted regicide.   

 

C.  The Earthquake: 

 On September 1, 1923, a massive earthquake hit the greater Tokyo area.  At magnitude 7.9 (Richter scale), the shock toppled buildings and smashed homes.  Together with the resulting fires, the quake destroyed 40 percent of Tokyo and left 60 percent of its residents homeless. One hundred five thousand people died or disappeared across the plain.  The death toll was particularly high within the crowded slums where most Koreans lived.   

 

  

1. Korean sabotage? -- 

Three hours after the earthquake, survivors began to hear rumors of marauding Korean gangs.   The Koreans torched buildings, people said.  They planted bombs, they poisoned water supplies, they murdered, they pillaged, they raped.   

  Korean militants had moved up a planned terrorist attack, reported the newspapers.  The 

Kahoku shimpo newspaper detailed a confession taken from a Korean caught carrying a bomb (Kahoku 1923a, 1923b).  He and other activists, he said, had planned a massive terrorist attack on the wedding of the crown prince (later the Showa emperor) scheduled for that fall. In the face of the earthquake, they had accelerated their plans.  

 For the fires that broke out after the earthquake, Korean leftists took credit.  In Shanghai, they celebrated the disaster. "When told the theories about the violence by anti-social Koreans," reported the Korean Governor General's office (Chosen sotoku 1923a), the leftists "found the theories reasonable."  Indeed, they forthrightly claimed responsibility.  According, again, to the Governor General's office (Chosen sotoku 1923b):  

 Communists, along with the various labor groups organized by the communists, observe that the harm from the disaster was caused less by the earthquake than by the accompanying fire.  They then declare that their ideological compatriots had lit the fires.  Their brothers lit the fires for the sake of revolution, they explain.  They rejoice in their heroic accomplishment, and look forward to the chance to participate themselves. 

 Newspapers reported a wide range of eyewitness accounts of Korean crime.  To be sure, they competed in a world of yellow journalism.  But to take a few examples, on September 3 the Osaka Asahi (1923a) newspaper reported that Korean mobs were advancing on Tokyo from neighboring Yokohama, torching houses as they came. On September 4, it reported that the Korean mobs were carrying explosives and oil (probably kerosene) as they ran through the city (Asahi 1923b).  Several Koreans, wrote a Nagoya paper, upon their arrest confessed to planning to blow up a train (Nagoya 1923).  The Tokyo Nichi Nichi (1923) newspaper detailed first-hand accounts of Korean arson, dynamite, and general rampage.  

 In the end, the government concluded that some Koreans had used the chaos to loot, burn, rape and poison, but far fewer than claimed in the rumors (Keibi 1923; Naito 1923).  As the Korean Governor General's office (Chosen sotoku N.D., 1923b) put it, the reports "were not without some truth."  They "had facts at their root," but became exaggerated in the course of their repetition. 

 

 2. Japanese massacres? -- 

Upon hearing these accounts of Korean sabotage, private security bands began to scour the Kanto plain for Koreans gangs. The same sensationalist newspapers that detailed rampant Korean violence also repeated accounts of widespread Japanese slaughter.      The newspapers report both Korean sabotage and Japanese slaughter.  A century later, we have little reason to think either set of accounts more reliable than the other.  On October 20, 1923, the Osaka Asahi newspaper actually reported both phenomena: that day, it published two articles side by side -- in one, it detailed Koreans looting burned buildings and beating and killing anyone who blocked their way (Asahi 1923c); in the second, it detailed Japanese security squads slaughtering 120 Koreans -- laborers, male and female students alike (Asahi 1923d).  

  

The evidentiary morass that plagues any attempt to determine the scope of Korean sabotage also plagues any attempt to determine the scope of the retaliatory murders.  The earthquake and fire killed 100,000 people.  Wherever they went, police officers found piles of dead bodies, most of them badly burned.   

 The Ministry of Justice counted the Koreans it knew to have been murdered.  In November of 1923, it identified 231 Koreans murdered in the greater Tokyo area, and 59 Japanese mistaken for Koreans and killed.  For these murders, it prosecuted 325 Japanese.   In December that year, the police reported 422 killed in the general metropolitan area.   In one account, the Korean Governor General's office estimated the number of Koreans killed by the Japanese private security squads at 300 (Zaikyo N.D.).  In a second account (Chosen sotoku 1923b), it estimated the total Koreans deaths from all causes at 832. It then suggested that 20-30 percent of those deaths were caused by the security squads:  a number in the range of 170 to 250. 

 "So," one lawyer dryly noted in 1924, "it seems we can be certain that it was more than 2 and fewer than 10,000" (Yamazaki 1924).  Sarcastic as he surely was, he points to the only sensible approach:  to try to calculate a plausible upper and lower bound.  The minimum number is easy.  The Japanese government limited its counts of Korean sabotage to the most credible claims, and seems to have done the same with the murders of Koreans.  If the police in December 1923 reported 400 Koreans killed, we can be reasonably sure that the security bands killed at least 400 Koreans.  The maximum is harder (I detail the calculations in Ramseyer 2019b).  Start with the number of Koreans in the greater Tokyo area at the time of the earthquake.  Historian Shoji Yamada (2012-2013, 4) has done some of the most careful work on the topic.  He concludes that 8,600 Koreans lived in Tokyo, 3,600 in Kanagawa, and another 1,900 nearby -- for a total 14,100 on the Kanto plain.  Of the Tokyo Koreans, 1,000 to 3,000 were students.  Some of them had not yet returned from vacation.   

 Many Koreans died in the earthquake and fire.  According to the Director General, about 4,000 Koreans laborers lived in the Honjo and Fukagawa wards (Chosen sotoku 1923b; Naikyo N.D.).  The areas suffered an extraordinary casualty rate: about 20 percent (Keishi cho 1923).  On a Honjo Korean population of 4,000, that ratio yields a death toll of 800.   

 Once the rumors of the killings by the Japanese security squads began to circulate, the police took 5,000 to 9,000 Koreans into protective custody.  

 Shortly after the earthquake, the Japanese government helped about 7,000 Koreans from the Tokyo area return to Korea.  

 Now combine these numbers.  Suppose 14,000 Koreans lived in the greater Tokyo area, that 1,000 students had not yet returned, and that 800 Koreans died in the fires.  If police placed 7,000 in protective custody and helped them return to Korea, that leaves 5,200 Koreans as potential murder victims.  If the marauding gangs had successfully identified and killed every surviving Korean not in police custody, in other words, they would have killed 5,200. 

  Apparently, the mobs killed more than 400 Koreans, and fewer than 5,200.  Recall, however, the number of immigrants on Table 3. If Japanese mobs had slaughtered thousands of Korean immigrants, one might expect fewer Koreans to travel to Japan.  In fact, however, after 

  

1923 the number of Koreans coming to Japan does not fall, and the number returning to Korea does not rise.  Whatever happened in Tokyo, it seems not to have affected the eagerness of Koreans to come to Japan. 

 

IV.  War and Post-War 

A.  Ideological Opportunism and Elite Control: 

 1.  Politically selected immigration. --

 A quarter-century after the earthquake, Japanresident Koreans would launch a decidedly real campaign of sabotage and terror.  A quarter century later, the exaggerated rumors of 1923 would start to come true.   

 The story begins with new, politically driven migration patterns.  In South Korea, the staunchly anti-communist Syngman Rhee came to power in 1948, and moved quickly to eliminate his communist opposition.  The steps he took would now drive a distinctly political pattern of cross-cutting migratory waves.  Japan and South Korea were both capitalist regimes, but Japan tolerated leftist dissent while Korea did not.  Necessarily, apolitical Koreans in Japan were more likely than communists to return to South Korea; communists in South Korea were more likely than their apolitical compatriots to leave (albeit illegally, since by 1948 Japan no longer allowed the immigration) for Japan.   

 At the close of the war in August 1945, 1.9 million Koreans lived in Japan. Most had come from the southern tip of the peninsula, and wanted to return.  During the last four months of the year, 100,000 to 200,000 Koreans left Japan every month.  As the months passed, however, Japan began a steady recovery.  South Korea remained mired in chaos, and Kim Il-sung launched his infamously brutal family dynasty in the north.  

 The political tensions turned to war in 1948.  The fighting started on the Jeju island from which so many Japan-resident Koreans had come.  The anti-Japanese movement there had already turned far-left before the war (Fujinaga 1999).  On April 3, 1948, Jeju communists launched what they hoped would become a people's revolution (Hyon 2016, 23-26).  They attacked 12 police stations, killed several dozen policemen, and then turned to families they thought sympathetic to the government (Hyon 2016, 12).   

 The South Korean government responded brutally.  Over the course of the next year, according to modern accounts it slaughtered anyone on the island suspected of communist ties.  Estimates of the number it killed range from 15,000 to 60,000 -- this on an island with a population of only 290,000.   Almost immediately, however, surviving Jeju leftists began to leave surreptitiously for Japan. Given that they migrated illegality, the number is hard to know. But by 1957, barely 30,000 people still lived on the island (Zaishuto 2005) 

 

  2. The rise of the Communist left. --

 The communist refugees from Syngman Rhee's South 

Korea soon took control over the most destitute and vulnerable of the Japan-resident Koreans.  The Japan-resident Koreans constituted a group with very low levels of social capital -- and with very low levels of the information and control over group members that they would need to stop any self-appointed leaders.  The communist refugees took over the group, and turned it to their own political agenda.  They did so violently, and in a way that generated massive Japanese hostility.    Almost immediately upon the end of the war, communists commandeered the formal 

Korean organizations. Kim Chon-hae would play perhaps the most prominent role.  Kim had spent 

  

the war in a Japanese prison as a political prisoner, and upon release joined the Central Committee of the Japan Communist Party (JCP; Ri 1980, 3).  As representatives of the Koreans in Japan gathered in the fall of 1945 to form an encompassing organization, Kim maneuvered himself into the role of "Supreme Adviser."  From there, he and his allies purged the non-communists from the group's leadership, and brought it under the direct control of the JCP.   

 Over the next several years the groups through which the Korean communists operated would shift structure and names.  Eventually, however, the key group took the name of Soren (Zai Nihon Chosenjin so rengo kai). This group focused on  the most vulnerable of the Japan-resident Koreans, such as those who still spoke the Korean language.   

 The violence began almost immediately.  Police counted 5,000 violent incidents involving 50,000 Koreans in 1946 -- including violence against Japanese government agencies and the police.  The brutality ebbed for a few years, but police again counted massive violence in 1949 -- this time involving 20,000 Koreans (Sasazaki 1955, 198-99, 205).   

 In 1950, the fringe-left Korean violence turned more aggressive still.  That January, Stalin ripped the JCP for insufficient militancy (Abe 2019, 31; Ko 2014, 154), and in June the North Korean army invaded the south.  Duly chastised, the JCP went underground and embarked on a multi-year guerrilla campaign of terror and sabotage (Abe 2019, 32, 38).  For its front line, it recruited Japan-resident Koreans.    

 In effect, the JCP and its allied Japan-resident Koreans had started a second front to the Korean War.  The Koreans trained under surreptitiously infiltrated North Korean military officers 

(Sasazaki 1955, 101-03).  They then attacked government offices.  They set cars on fire with Molotov cocktails.  They turned to American military installations and personnel.  They disrupted munitions production for the Korean front, and the transportation of those munitions to the Korean peninsula.   

 

 3.  Out-migration. -- 

Those Koreans who had learned to make their way within Japan (those already integrated into Japanese social capital networks) would have none of this, of course.  They created a rival organization that in time would become the Mindan (Zai Nihon Daikan minkoku mindan).  The Communists found it easiest to dominate those Koreans who lacked the resources and talent to survive in Japan.  The Mindan catered to the Japan-resident Koreans who had largely forgotten their Korean (if they ever knew it), and could weather Japan on their own (Ko 2014, 54, 59).  

 Necessarily, the Mindan constituted a way-station along the path to full assimilation.  Any exclusively Soren-Mindan comparison ignores what in time would become the largest Korean group of all:  those who had merged into Japanese society and disappeared from the ranks of Japanresident Koreans.  The Communists could successfully dominate the low-social-capital Koreans who lacked the resources and information either to control them or to leave the group.  Those who did acquire the resources and information joined the Mindan, but (for many of them) only temporarily. Instead, those Koreans with the intellectual and social skills necessary to merge into Japanese mainstream society disappeared.  Over time, they ceased to be Korean at all. 

  As Table 1 shows, the number of Japan-resident Koreans has steadily declined.  The 

Japanese population itself rose steadily during the half century after the war.  During the same 

  

period, however, the number of Koreans fell.  They did not have a lower birth rate.  Instead, those with the tools that best prepared them for joining Japanese society steadily left.  Some naturalized and became Japanese citizens. From 1952 to 1990, 156,000 Koreans became naturalized (Kim, Shin & Sonoda 1995, 22).  More commonly, they married Japanese.  Their children acquire dual citizenship, and virtually all eventually choose to become Japanese.  Some 80 to 90 percent of young Koreans now marry Japanese.  

 

 4. The Soren schools. --

 Within this world, the Soren leadership designed a Korean school system that taught hard-edged suspicion and hostility toward Japan. It taught less of the Japanese language and the scientific, economic, and mathematical skills that graduates would need to thrive in modern Japan.  They designed and maintained a school system, in short, that strengthened kept Japan-resident Koreans unproductive (or even completely unemployable) and invited statistical discrimination. 

 These Korean schools teach a curriculum ruthlessly tied to North Korean orthodoxy.  Until the 1960s, they apparently taught standard Marxist scholarship, much like many Japanese universities at the time.  In mid-1960s, however, Kim Il-sung's heir Kim Jong-il began to consolidate his power by creating an ideology centered on the Kim family.  Soren and the NorthKorean-allied schools followed suit.  Orthodox Marxists teaching at Soren's university left the school.  Their courses disappeared from the curriculum, the library discarded non-conforming books, and the remaining students and faculty met regularly for self-criticism (Sankei 2017, 4042).   

 For Koreans within the Soren orb, the school system continues to play a central role.  Should a child hesitate to attend Soren's university, his family can face serious pressure.  The Soren might ostracize the entire family.  Should someone in the family work at Soren, he might find his very job in jeopardy (Sankei 2017, 86-87).  Rather than Japanese jobs, the Soren schools prepare students primarily for positions at the Soren schools or within Soren itself.  That said, they do also train their students and teachers to spy for North Korea within Japan and South Korea (Sankei 2017, 131, 142-43).  

 

B.  The Residual Dysfunction: 

1. Introduction. -- 

To understand the dysfunctional nature of the post-war Korean community in Japan (because dysfunctional it was), bear in mind the historical context.  The community had begun in the 1910s, as uneducated young men off the farm came to Japan to earn money.   They never intended to stay long, and never intended to integrate themselves into Japanese society.  They never created the cross-cutting web of social networks that would give them access to information about each other and the means to enforce social norms on each other.    After 1945, the fiercely anti-communist Syngman Rhee gave the cross-cutting repatriation patterns a distinctly ideological cast.  Disproportionately, conservative or apolitical Koreans returned to (or stayed in) South Korea.  Communist Koreans stayed in (or moved to) Japan.  To these hard-left entrepreneurs, the low-social-capital Japan-resident Korean society offered an easy target.  They quickly commandeered the encompassing Korean organization in Japan, allied themselves with the JCP, and opened a violent Japanese front to the conflict on the peninsula.  In turn, Japanese responded to the Korean minority with suspicion and hostility. 

  

 Over the course of the next several decades, Japan-resident Koreans with the social, intellectual, and linguistic resources necessary to thrive in Japanese society would increasingly choose to merge into that society.  Disproportionately, those who remained were those without those resources.  And just as those who remained Korean lacked the resources necessary to thrive in competitive modern Japan, they also lacked the resources necessary to stop opportunistic political entrepreneurs from within their own ranks.  Much to the detriment of the collective Japanresident Korean community, the violently hard-left political opportunists would become the face of the Japan-resident Korean population. 

 

2. Dysfunction. -- 

As a reflection of that dysfunction, consider crime rates (measured by the number of people sentenced by a court) by nationality in the late 1950s.  The difference between Japanese and Japan-resident Koreans was huge.  Where the rate of sentencing for Japanese citizens for Criminal Code crimes was 63.6 per 100,000 population, the rate for Koreans was 608.  The murder rate for Japanese was 1.4.  The rate for Koreans was 10.4.   In 2015, Japanresident Koreans still commit crimes at very high rates (see Table 4).  Where the arrest rate for Japanese citizens for Criminal Code crimes is 188 per 100,000, the rate for Japan-resident Koreans is 615.  The murder rate for Japanese is 0.72.  The rate for Japan-resident Koreans is 2.65 (see also Suganuma 2015, 5, 126). 

  [Insert Table 4 about here.] 

 Some of the pre-war real-estate problems have continued.  The war devastated many urban areas, and into these neighborhoods Koreans sometimes moved as squatters.  When the owners reappeared and demanded their land back, some Koreans refused.  They demanded money before they would leave (Umeda 2017; Osaka ekimae 2008; Bando 2016, 39).   

 As the Japanese economy began to recover, Japanese voters also noticed a large fraction of resident Koreans on public assistance.  Indeed, as Table 5 shows, the fraction of Korean households on welfare could be twenty times the fraction for Japanese households.   

  [Insert Table 5 about here.] 

 In truth, however, these were not phenomena that Japanese "noticed."  Rather, during the 1950s, the resident Korean associations had aggressively demanded the public assistance, and had sometimes negotiated applications as a group (Higuchi 2002, 183).  The Ministry of Public Welfare attributed the resulting high Korean dependency rate to "violent group-based intimidation."  It counted close to 10,000 cases of intimidation connected to welfare applications (Higuchi 2002, 184).  Indeed, in some cases the Japan-resident Koreans arrived in the welfare office en masse, and beat officials who hesitated to enroll them in the program.   

 

 3.  Repatriation. --

 During the 1960s and 70s, Soren leaders displayed their opportunism most brutally in the way they encouraged their rank-and-file to emigrate to North Korea.  Recall that the Soren membership represented the most vulnerable and least socialized of the Japanresident Koreans.  Recall too that the Soren leaders had designed the Korean schools precisely to prevent their socialization.  This made its rank-and-file the most ill-informed of anyone, and a group with few good outside options. 

  Soren leaders encouraged these members to move to North Korea.  When they arrived, 

North Korea then used them to induce family members remaining in Japan to send foreign 

  

exchange.  Once a Japan-resident Korean arrived in the North, he began writing a stream of letters to his family still Japan, pleading with them to send him funds.  He wrote the letters under duress -- he was starving, after all, and escape was hard.  Eventually, about 200 did manage to escape and return to Japan (Zai Nihon 2018, 83; Sankei 2017, 115), but the rest remained hostages for the rest of their lives. 

 The first ship bound for North Korea with Japan-resident Koreans (and sometimes their Japanese spouses and children) left in December 1959.  That year, 2,942 people travelled from Japan to Korea.  The number soared to 49,036 in 1960, and 22,801 in 1961.  Thereafter, the numbers fell to under 4,000 per year.  Still, in 1972 Soren leaders sent 200 of their university students to the North on one-way tickets.  North Korea had ordered them to send the students in honor of Kim Il-sung's 60th birthday, and school leaders had complied (Sankei 2017, 36, 43).  The final boat for North Korea -- the 186th ship -- did not leave until 1984.  By then 93,339 Japanresident Koreans and family members had moved to North Korea.  

 After the first few trips, Soren leaders knew that the North Korean government would consign the immigrants to lowest rungs of their social ladder and use them as hostages.  The leaders sent their members anyway (Sankei 2017, 116).  To them, the benefit to sending their members was not just ideological. By the terms of the agreement between Japan and the North, each migrant could take only 45,000 yen in English pounds.  When they left Japan, the Soren rank-and-file entrusted the rest of their assets to the Soren (Ko 2014, 171; Sankei 2017, 115) 

 

V.  Conclusion 

 The pre-war Koreans in Japan had constituted an extraordinarily vulnerable group.  They were extremely poor, they had no education, they knew nothing about urban employment.  They were young and male, they drank and fought and committed crimes (as unattached, transient young men are wont to do) and had no intention of staying in Japan.  They planned to work for a few years, save some money, and go home.  Most did not even try to integrate themselves in Japanese society.  They maintained little social capital, and generated significant statistical discrimination against themselves. 

 After the war, most of the Japan-resident Koreans returned home.  As the post-war South Korean government increased its pressure on the communist opposition, many of the Korean communists left for Japan.  There, they commandeered the Korean groups and preyed on the most destitute of their Japan-resident compatriots for ideological ends.  Lacking the social capital by which to overcome their own collective action problems, those compatriots were unable to stop them.  Instead, the communists used rank-and-file Koreans as their private military force, and opened a second front to the Korean War within Japan itself.  In the process, they generated even greater suspicion, hostility, and discrimination against resident Koreans.  And through this all, they drove the most talented members of the group out of the group itself.  Over time, those residentKoreans with the education, economic resources, and social ties by which they might have kept the communists in check found it simpler just to leave the group and merge into Japanese society. Only the most vulnerable remained Korean. 

 The story of Japan-resident Koreans is an object lesson in the common aphorism:  the leaders of a dysfunctional group are often its worst enemy.  Koreans in Japan were not a tightly knit group with cross-cutting ties and access to information about each other.  They were not a group -- in the words of modern sociology and political science -- with high levels of social capital.  

Lacking that information and those ties, they could not monitor and constrain group members who would designate themselves leaders.  And so it is that opportunistic fringe-left entrepreneurs hijacked the group toward their private political ends, created enormous ethnic tension within Japan, and generated hostility and discrimination against their fellow Koreans. 

   

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Table 1:  Korean Residents in Japan 

 

 

 

1910     2,246 

1915     3,992 

1920    30,149 

1925   129,870 

1930   298,091 

 

1935   625,678 

1940 1,190,444 

1945 2,206,541 

1950 535,236 

1955 567,053 

 

1960 581,257 

1965 583,537 

1970 614,202 

1975 647,156 

1980 664,536 

 

1985 683,313 

1990 687,940 

1995 666,376 

2000 635,269 

2006 486,653 

 

2010 453,316 

2015 411,547 

2017 395,912 

 

 

 

  Notes:  Post-war figures total special and general permanent residents; pre-war figures are based on the Ministry of Interior. 

 

 Sources:  Higuchi (2002, 23, 206); Homusho (2018); Tonomura (2004, 42). 

 

 

 

   

 

Table 2:  Movement of Koreans to Japan, and Back to Korea, 1921-1930 

 

 

    (I)   (II) (III)  

  Korea to  Japan to Total in (II)/(I) (II)/(III) 

  Japan Korea Japan    %     %    . 

1921 38,118 25,556 38,651   67.0%   66.1% 

1922 70,462 49,326 55,851   70.0   88.3 

1923 97,395 89,745 80,617   92.1 111.3 

1924 122,215 75,427 120,238   61.7   62.7 

1925 131,273 112,471 133,710   85.7   84.1 

1926 91,092 83,709 148,503   91.9   56.4 

1927 138,016 93,991 175,911   68.1   53.4 

1928 166,286 117,522 243,328   70.7   48.3 

1929 153,570 98,275 276,031   64.0   35.6 

1930 95,491 107,706 298,091 112.8   36.1 

 

 

 

     Sources:   Miki (1933, 11); Chosen (1933, 190-92); Tonomura (2004, 46). 

 

 

   

Table 3:  Arrests (All Crimes) of Japan-Resident Koreans, 1932-38 

 

 

 

  Total  Korean  Arrests Male/ Arrests per 

  Koreans Arrests Per cap 100 Fem cap (Japanese) 

1932 390542 35411 9.06% 212  1.75% 

1933 456217 49471 10.84 204  1.72 

1934 537695 49881 9.27 184  2.07 

1935 625678 45022 7.19 166  2.37 

1936 ` 690501 48970 7.09  162  2.23 

1937 735674 45342 6.16  155  1.73 

1938 799878 45782 5.48  154  1.73 

 

 

 

  Sources:  Naimu sho (1938, 1037-40).  

   

 

Table 4:  Crime Numbers and Rates by Nationality, 2015 

 

 

  Number arrested   . Rate per 100,000          .  All Resid Other Chinese Mob All Resid Other Chinese Mob 

  Japan Kor  Kor  Japan Korean Korean   

 

Tot Criminal Code 239355 2321 444 2951 12690 188.33 615.06 290.79 459.23 32455.24 

Murders     913   10   5    6   115   0.72   2.65   3.27   0.93  294.12 

Rapes    933    6   1    9    48   0.73   1.59   0.65   1.40  122.76 

 

Intimidation    2720   29  10   19   592   2.14   7.68   6.55   2.96 1514.07 

Extortion    2187   35   6    7   865   1.72   9.27   3.93   1.09 2212.28 

Prostitution     538    7   7   44   104   0.42   1.85   4.58   6.85  265.98 

Meth related crimes 10785  165  17   33 5618   8.49  43.72  11.13   5.14 14368.29 

 

 

  Sources:. Resident Koreans are those designated as "special long-term residents."  Mob includes those counted as quasimembers.. Numbers give arrests.  Arrests are for 2015; population numbers are from 2012. 

 

 

 

  Sources:. Homu sho (2018); Keisatsu cho (2015). 

   

 

Table 5:  Japan-Resident Koreans on Public Assistance 

 

 A.  Kanagawa residents on welfare:  

  Total 

  Koreans 

Population 

  1952  33.6  2.2 

  1953  41.0  2.2 

  1954  47.1  2.3 

  1955  49.1  2.5 

  1956  20.6  2.0 

  1957  18.9  1.6 

 

 B.  Households on welfare in Japan, 2010:  

  Household  Households % on 

  Total on Welfare Welfare 

Japanese 50,857,365 1,321,120  2.6 

Korean    190,246    27,035  12.2 

Philipino     38,540 

Other     4,234  10.9 

foreign  1,093,139    40,029  3.6 

 

 

  Notes: Welfare is "seikatsu hogo." 

 

 Sources: Bando (2016, 79); Higuchi (2002).