• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.20-39
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• 2020

In order to overturn the exclusion of Korean schools from the newly implemented free tuition program (2010) as part of sanctions against North Korea, members of Korean schools and Japanese supporters have focused on "students' innocence" and "multicultural coexistence" as viable frameworks to explain why the students are sympathetic and legitimate subjects who deserve equal rights. Examining different political strategies employed by the Korean schools and their supporters through ethnography and media analysis, the article pays close attention to how they claim their eligibility for these rights while they negotiate state surveillance and intervention in the process. I argue that in their efforts to gain recognition as deserving and sympathetic subjects, Korean schools are trapped in what political theorist Patchen Markell calls a "permanent temptation" in pursuing "recognition." Anti-North Korea sentiments in Japan have made the desire for good recognition even more urgent among Korean school community members. The paper will demonstrate that the search for recognition unwittingly reinforces and perpetuates existing relations of subordination and state dominance over their education as it has forced the Korean schools to accept various "conditions" that would radically alter the core principle, mission, and pedagogy of Korean school education that is rooted in decolonizing theory and praxis. This paper will shed lights on dilemma of multicultural coexistence the Korean minority population faces in Japan today.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.17-39
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• 2011

As recent inflows of foreign immigrants to relatively advanced countries in Northeast Asia have rapidly increased, Japan in particular uses 'multicultural coexistance' as a key concept for developing both discourse and policies on them. This paper is first of all to suggest a new typology of multicultural societies in the world ill order to differentiate the case of Northeast Asian countries from those of Western countries. And this paper is to suggest that foreign immigrants in Japan have different positions in labor markets and living experiences according to historical and social backgrounds as well as their nationality. The transformation process towards multicultural society is not only historical and social but also geographical and spatial, as foreign immigrants have made different spatial distribution and regional segregation in types. In order to control this socio-spatial process towards multicultural society, Japan has developed the concept of 'multicultural coexistence' similar with that of multiculturalism in Western countries. This concept seems to be quite significant as it has been initiated by local communities for symbiotic relationship between foreign immigrants and native Japanese dwellers. But it can be regarded as a strategic ideology to control foreign immigrants as it targets mainly on Nikkeijin, and is usually concerned with the cultural aspect. Seen from a theoretical point of view, this concept can be seen as closed with liberal multiculturalism as opportunity equity, but far from corporative multiculturalism as outcome equity, and it is on the process transferring from the first stage of tolerance to the second stage of legislation of nondiscrimination, while being distant from the third stage of legislation paradigmization of recognition, and hence appears to be easily reverted to assimilationism.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.181-203
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• 2011

Transformation towards multicultural society requires discussion on new concepts of citizenship which would overcome some limits of national citizenship developed on the basis of the nation-state. Citizenship can be defined as a relationship between individuals and their community, and conceptualized in a relation with identity. Citizenship also includes its spatial elements such as site and movement, place and public/private space, boundary and territory, flow and network, level and scale, etc. and in particular implies a multi-scalability of local, national, and global level. A new discussion on citizenship has emerged in Japan in shift to multicultural society, especially focusing on activities of local governments and grassroots social movements to support and ensure welfare services to and human rights of foreign immigrants in local communities, hence develops a concept of local citizenship. This concept seems to be highly significant for both foreign immigrants and Japanese dwellers for multicultural coexistence, but raises serious problems of separating local citizenship from formal national citizenship and from universal global citizenship. In order to resolve these problems, a new multiscalar concept of glocal citizenship which links interrelationally local, national and global citizenship. The concept of glocal citizenship is suggested to lead academically a new version of cosmopolitanism which embraces the universal and the particular in a dialectic manner, and to give strategically an alternative to multicultural coexistence policy and discourse and local citizenship discussion in Japan.