Presentation Schedule
Shared Descent, Different Grammars of Belonging: Narrating Co-ethnic Return Migrants in Japan and Korea (113861)
Session Chair: Wei-Lin Chen
Tuesday, 10 November 2026 13:50
Session: Session 2
Room: Room D (4F)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
Whether a state extends preferential legal status to co-ethnics abroad is a familiar question in the study of ethnic nationalism. Less examined is how a state narrates that population once it grants such status. Some states treat co-ethnics as a historical people whose past is repeatedly invoked to ground present belonging. Others manage them through the present-tense vocabulary of residency. This study examines that difference through the recent co-ethnic politics of Japan and Korea. In Korea, Koryoin are addressed as a historical collective. The Korean Association of Koryoin has petitioned the Overseas Koreans Agency to treat Koryoin citizenship as restoration rather than naturalization, tracing the community's standing back to its role in the 1919 Provisional Government. A presidential culture-city development committee has recently begun developing a Koryoin settlement in Gwangju into a national diaspora heritage site organized around the community's history of deportation, exile, and return. In Japan, Nikkei Brazilians are instead governed through the de-ethnicized vocabulary of residency. National discourse folds them into the general category of "foreign residents" within a "multicultural coexistence" framework that applies irrespective of ethnic origin, visible in how cities such as Hamamatsu now describe their foreign populations, Nikkei Brazilians included, as partners in city-building rather than members of a shared national history. Both populations entered under policies premised on ethnic preference, yet the grammars of belonging that developed around them subsequently diverged. Legal admission and the grammar of belonging, this study suggests, are separable sites of ethnic boundary-making.
Authors:
Seung Min Lee, Aichi Shukutoku University, Japan
About the Presenter(s)
Ms Seung Min Lee is a University Doctoral Student at Waseda University in Japan
See this presentation on the full schedule – Tuesday Schedule
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