After world war II Japanese life expectancy has been improved remarkably, and reached the highest level in the world around late 1970's. The life expectancy of Korean has also shown tremendous improvement in recent years with about 20 year's gap from the Japanese. The reason of rapid improvement of life expectancy can be explained by changes in the structure of cause of death due to health system, living standard, social welfare, health behavior of individuals and so on. Korean in Japan is placed under different situations from both Korean in Korea and Japanese in these regards, and expected to show different picture of cause of death pattern. The objective of this study is the comparision of changing patterns of cause of death of three population groups, Korean in Japan, Korean in Korea and Japanese, and to investigate the reasons which effect to the structural difference of mortality cause with special emphasis on health ecological aspects. One of the major limitations of the Korean causes of death statistics is the under-registration which ranges about 10% of the total events, and inaccuracy of the exact cause of death. Some 20% of registered deaths were unable to classify by ICD. However, it is concluded that the Korean data are evaluated as sufficient to stand for over-viewing of trends of cause of death pattern. The evaluation is done by comparing data from registration and field survey over the same population sample. Population data of Korean in Japan differ between two sources of data; census and foreigner's registration. Correction is done by life table method under the assumption that age-specific mortality pattern would accord with that of the Japanese. The crude death rate was lowest among Korean in Japan, 5.7 deaths per 1,000 population in 1965. The crude death rates of Korean in Japan and Japanese are increasing recently influenced by age structure while Korean in Korea still shows decreasing tendency. The adjusted death rate is lowest among Japanese, followed by Korean in Japan, and Korean in Korea. The leading causes of death of Korean in Korea until 1960's was infectious diseases including pneumonia and tuberculosis. The causes of death structure changed gradually to accidents, neoplasm, hypertensive disease, cerebro-vascular disease in order. The main difference in cause of death between Korean and Japanese if high rate of liver diseases and diabetes for both Korean in Japan and Korea. A special feature of cause of death among Korean in Korea is remakably high rate of hypertensive disease, which is assumed to be caused by physicians tendency in choosing diagnostic categories. The low ischemic heart disease and high vasculo-cerebral disease are the distinctive characteristic of the three population groups compared to western countries. Specific causes of death were selected for detailed sex, age and ethnic group comparisons based on their high death rates. Cancer is the cause of death which showed most dramatical increase in all three population groups. In Korea 20.1% of all death were caused by cancer in 1990 compared with 10.5% in 1981. Cancer of the liver is the leading cause of cancer death among Korean in Japan for both sexes, followed by cancer of the lung and cancer of the stomach, while that of Korean in Korea is cancer of the stomach, followed by cancer of the liver and cancer of the lung for male. Causes of infant mortality were examined among the three population groups since 1980 on yearly bases. For both Japanese and Korean in Japan, leading cause of death ranks as conditions originating in the perinatal period, congenital anomalies, accidents and other violent causes. Trends since 1980 for these two population groups in the leading cause of infant mortality showed no changes. On the contrary, significant changes in leading cause of death structure in Korea were observed : the ranking of leading cause of death in 1981 were congenital asnomalies, pneumonia bronchitis, infectious disease, heart disease, conditions originating in the perinatal period, accident and other violent causes ; in 1990 the ranking shifted to congenital anomalies, accident, pneumonia bronchities, conditions originating in the perinatal period, infectious disease. The mortality rate by congenital anomalies in Korea continuously grew than any other causes. Larger increase ocurred during the 1990's