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conuly
Which is more interesting than my synopsis makes it appear.
Born to Be a Foreigner in Her Motherland
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
TOKYO
CHUNG HYANG GYUN'S news conference was a sight seldom seen in Japan, the raw anger written across her face, the fury in her voice and words, the palpable feeling that these last words would somehow redeem the futility of her actions.
"I want to tell people all over the world that they shouldn't come to Japan to work," Ms. Chung said in the perfect Japanese befitting someone who has lived nowhere else but Japan. "Being a worker in Japan is no different from being a robot."
After a decade-long battle, the Supreme Court ruled recently that Ms. Chung, the daughter of a Japanese woman and a South Korean man, who was born in Japan and has lived all her life here, could not take the test to become a supervisor at her public health center because she is a foreigner.
"I have no tears to shed," said Ms. Chung, a 55-year-old nurse. "I can only laugh."
Ms. Chung is what the Japanese call a Zainichi, a term that literally means "to stay in Japan," but that is usually shorthand for Koreans who came here during Japan's colonial rule, and their descendants. Considered outsiders both in Japan and on the Korean peninsula, they have, over the years, adopted different ways of living in Japan.
In a Japan that has softened its attitudes toward the Zainichi, many have become citizens and taken Japanese names, melding into the larger population. Others have taken citizenship, but kept their Korean names. Others still, like Ms. Chung, have taken neither citizenship nor name. Disagreements exist, even within the same family, including Ms. Chung's.
Reaction to the court's ruling - that local governments can bar "foreigners" from holding official positions where they exercise "government power" - was split along political lines. Liberals said an aging Japan with a shrinking workforce would lose by shutting out people like Ms. Chung, who could hardly be considered a true foreigner. Conservatives said foreigners like Ms. Chung should simply become Japanese citizens.
The morning after Ms. Chung's news conference, her boss asked her whether she regretted her words, she recalled in an interview, one recent evening after work, at her apartment here. "No way," was her answer. "I didn't say enough."
Ms. Chung's story begins, as do all the stories of the Zainichi of her generation, with her parents. Her father, Chung Yeon Gyu, an author and Korean nationalist who opposed Japanese colonial rule, arrived in Japan in the 1920's. According to Toshio Takayanagi, a historian at Hosei University here who researched Mr. Chung's life, Mr. Chung published novels and essays critical of the Japanese government through the end of World War II; his writings were often censored here, and in 1944 he was put on a watch list by a special police unit.
DURING Japan's colonial rule, from 1910 to 1945, some Koreans came here seeking economic opportunities while others were brought as forced laborers. By 1944, nearly two million Koreans lived in Japan, though most were repatriated after Japan's defeat, and the number fell to under 600,000 by 1947. In 1952, the Zainichi here were made to choose between South or North Korean citizenship, and were recognized as permanent residents of Japan.
Ms. Chung's father and mother settled in Iwate Prefecture in northern Japan. Growing up there, Ms. Chung remembers, most of her classmates were told by their parents not to associate with her; a few, though, who came to play at her house are still friends.
When she entered junior high school, a teacher ordered her to adopt a Japanese name, complaining that she could not read her Korean one. Other Zainichi in her class, who used Japanese names and hid their real ethnic background, faced anguish at graduation ceremonies when certificates were handed out in their Korean names.
Unwanted in Japan, she had dreamed of finding acceptance in South Korea, where she headed to study after graduating from college in Japan. "But what I faced was terrible discrimination," she said.
South Korea, under the military rule of Park Chung Hee from 1961 to 1979, was fiercely suspicious of Zainichi, many of whom were pro-North Korea. (A Zainichi would, in fact, later try to assassinate Park in Seoul, killing his wife instead.) What is more, Zainichi like Ms. Chung, who barely spoke Korean, were not considered Korean at all, she found.
"I was told that Zainichi are the people who did not come back to Korea because they did not want to spend money," she said, recalling what would be her first and last trip to South Korea. "If I said my mother was Japanese, they looked at me as if they were looking at a dirty thing."
Eventually, Ms. Chung became a public health nurse and in 1988 was hired by the Tokyo metropolitan government. Given the traditional Japanese respect for civil servants, her daily life became easier. For once, she faced no discrimination and even considered getting Japanese citizenship.
But everything changed in 1994 when she applied to take a test for a managerial post. After she was told that managers had to be Japanese, she filed the lawsuit that was recently rejected by the Supreme Court.
In recent years, general civil service positions have been opened to non-Japanese, including in 11 out of 47 prefectures and most big cities. But only a few municipalities, like Kawasaki City near here, have opened management-level positions to non-Japanese, and the Supreme Court ruling now makes it less likely that other municipalities will follow suit.
THE easiest route toward the managerial posts is, of course, to acquire Japanese citizenship, a choice more and more Zainichi are making. In 2003, there were only 470,000 officially recognized Zainichi, a drop of about 100,000 since 1993. Most became naturalized Japanese, no longer counted as Zainichi.
One of them is Ms. Chung's older brother, Tei Taikin, a professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University specializing in Japan-Korean relations and Zainichi issues. He became a naturalized Japanese in 2004 and changed his name. He has written about his agonizing choice and urged his sister to do the same.
A Zainichi is confined to an uncertain existence, he wrote in Chuo Koron, a conservative monthly. "In order to remove such uncertainty, you need to get your nationality closer to your identity - that is, acquire Japanese nationality and, hopefully, you can live as a Korean-Japanese."
After getting citizenship, he said, he felt as if he had passed through a tunnel. He did not feel as if he had sprung "suddenly into the bright world when I got out of the tunnel."
"But, nonetheless," he said, "I feel a kind of relief or lifting of burden."
Ms. Chung said she had not read her brother's essays.
"Zainichi who get Japanese nationality do so feeling, 'What else can I do?' " she said. "They do so because they do not want to be discriminated against."
And a very loosely related article on racism and starvation.
Another Kind of Racism
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
LUBIMBI, Zimbabwe
The hardest place in the world to be an optimist is Africa.
Much of Africa is a mess, and no country more so than Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. The continent has been held back by everything from malaria to its nonsensical colonial boundaries, but the two biggest problems have been lousy leaders and lousy economic policies - and Zimbabwe epitomizes both.
What makes Robert Mugabe a worse oppressor of ordinary Zimbabweans than the white racist rulers who preceded him is not just the way he turned a breadbasket of Africa into a basket case in which half the population is undernourished. It's also the fact that he's refusing to let aid organizations provide food to most of his people. He prefers to let them starve.
In one western Zimbabwean village, I found a woman, Thandiwe Sibanda, who is trying desperately to keep her family alive. "I'm the only one left to care for the children," she said. "My husband died, along with his other wife."
So now she is trying to provide for her own four rail-thin children as well as the two children of the other wife (who presumably died of AIDS along with the husband - so Mrs. Sibanda will very likely die of it as well). "All we can eat is corn porridge," she said, "and there isn't nearly enough even of that."
Mrs. Sibanda is adopting the same survival strategies as nearly every other peasant family I spoke to - they are down to one or two meals a day. She pulled her children out of school last fall to save the $2.25 in annual school fees, as are many other families. Her daughter just had a baby a few days ago but has no milk to feed it. The infant may be the first to die.
Jealous Sansole, a member of Parliament who opposes Mr. Mugabe, told me that in his district, people are already beginning to die of hunger. I didn't see that, but malnutrition is probably speeding up deaths from malaria, diarrhea and certainly AIDS.
The only reason more haven't died is food aid. Mrs. Sibanda's village, for example, until recently received regular food distributions from the World Food Program and the Save the Children Federation.
But last year, President Mugabe declared that Zimbabwe did not need food assistance. This was a lie, but Mr. Mugabe ordered the World Food Program and the aid groups it works with to stop handing out food to the general population.
Some groups continued to distribute food that was in the pipeline, and I visited some villages that received food until January. But now the food aid has all ended. At an elementary school I visited, the principal said that three-quarters of the pupils could not afford breakfast and came to school hungry. Along the border with Mozambique, poor families are marrying off their daughters at very young ages so they will no longer have to feed them.
If the old white regime here was deliberately starving its people, the world would be in an uproar. And while President Bush should be more forceful in opposing Mr. Mugabe's tyranny, it's the neighboring countries that are most shameful in looking the other way.
There's a liberal tendency in America to blame ourselves for Africa's problems, and surely there's far more that we should do to help. We should encourage trade, forgive debts, do research on tropical diseases and distribute mosquito nets that protect against malaria. But some problems, such as Mr. Mugabe, are homegrown and need local solutions, like an effort by South Africa to nudge him into retirement.
One of Africa's biggest problems is the perception that the entire continent is a hopeless cesspool of corruption and decline. Africa's leaders need to lead the way in pushing aside the clowns and thugs so their continent can be defined by its many successes - in Ghana, Mali, Cape Verde, Mauritius, Uganda and Botswana - rather than by the likes of Idi Amin, Emperor Bokassa and Robert Mugabe.
There's a twinkle of hope, for Nigeria and other West African countries have shown the gumption to denounce seizures of power in Togo and São Tomé. But South Africa is still allowing Mr. Mugabe to cast a pall over the entire continent out of deference for his past fight against white oppression.
Frankly, Zimbabweans have already suffered so much from racism over the last century that the last thing they need is excuses for Mr. Mugabe's misrule because of the color of his skin.
Born to Be a Foreigner in Her Motherland
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
TOKYO
CHUNG HYANG GYUN'S news conference was a sight seldom seen in Japan, the raw anger written across her face, the fury in her voice and words, the palpable feeling that these last words would somehow redeem the futility of her actions.
"I want to tell people all over the world that they shouldn't come to Japan to work," Ms. Chung said in the perfect Japanese befitting someone who has lived nowhere else but Japan. "Being a worker in Japan is no different from being a robot."
After a decade-long battle, the Supreme Court ruled recently that Ms. Chung, the daughter of a Japanese woman and a South Korean man, who was born in Japan and has lived all her life here, could not take the test to become a supervisor at her public health center because she is a foreigner.
"I have no tears to shed," said Ms. Chung, a 55-year-old nurse. "I can only laugh."
Ms. Chung is what the Japanese call a Zainichi, a term that literally means "to stay in Japan," but that is usually shorthand for Koreans who came here during Japan's colonial rule, and their descendants. Considered outsiders both in Japan and on the Korean peninsula, they have, over the years, adopted different ways of living in Japan.
In a Japan that has softened its attitudes toward the Zainichi, many have become citizens and taken Japanese names, melding into the larger population. Others have taken citizenship, but kept their Korean names. Others still, like Ms. Chung, have taken neither citizenship nor name. Disagreements exist, even within the same family, including Ms. Chung's.
Reaction to the court's ruling - that local governments can bar "foreigners" from holding official positions where they exercise "government power" - was split along political lines. Liberals said an aging Japan with a shrinking workforce would lose by shutting out people like Ms. Chung, who could hardly be considered a true foreigner. Conservatives said foreigners like Ms. Chung should simply become Japanese citizens.
The morning after Ms. Chung's news conference, her boss asked her whether she regretted her words, she recalled in an interview, one recent evening after work, at her apartment here. "No way," was her answer. "I didn't say enough."
Ms. Chung's story begins, as do all the stories of the Zainichi of her generation, with her parents. Her father, Chung Yeon Gyu, an author and Korean nationalist who opposed Japanese colonial rule, arrived in Japan in the 1920's. According to Toshio Takayanagi, a historian at Hosei University here who researched Mr. Chung's life, Mr. Chung published novels and essays critical of the Japanese government through the end of World War II; his writings were often censored here, and in 1944 he was put on a watch list by a special police unit.
DURING Japan's colonial rule, from 1910 to 1945, some Koreans came here seeking economic opportunities while others were brought as forced laborers. By 1944, nearly two million Koreans lived in Japan, though most were repatriated after Japan's defeat, and the number fell to under 600,000 by 1947. In 1952, the Zainichi here were made to choose between South or North Korean citizenship, and were recognized as permanent residents of Japan.
Ms. Chung's father and mother settled in Iwate Prefecture in northern Japan. Growing up there, Ms. Chung remembers, most of her classmates were told by their parents not to associate with her; a few, though, who came to play at her house are still friends.
When she entered junior high school, a teacher ordered her to adopt a Japanese name, complaining that she could not read her Korean one. Other Zainichi in her class, who used Japanese names and hid their real ethnic background, faced anguish at graduation ceremonies when certificates were handed out in their Korean names.
Unwanted in Japan, she had dreamed of finding acceptance in South Korea, where she headed to study after graduating from college in Japan. "But what I faced was terrible discrimination," she said.
South Korea, under the military rule of Park Chung Hee from 1961 to 1979, was fiercely suspicious of Zainichi, many of whom were pro-North Korea. (A Zainichi would, in fact, later try to assassinate Park in Seoul, killing his wife instead.) What is more, Zainichi like Ms. Chung, who barely spoke Korean, were not considered Korean at all, she found.
"I was told that Zainichi are the people who did not come back to Korea because they did not want to spend money," she said, recalling what would be her first and last trip to South Korea. "If I said my mother was Japanese, they looked at me as if they were looking at a dirty thing."
Eventually, Ms. Chung became a public health nurse and in 1988 was hired by the Tokyo metropolitan government. Given the traditional Japanese respect for civil servants, her daily life became easier. For once, she faced no discrimination and even considered getting Japanese citizenship.
But everything changed in 1994 when she applied to take a test for a managerial post. After she was told that managers had to be Japanese, she filed the lawsuit that was recently rejected by the Supreme Court.
In recent years, general civil service positions have been opened to non-Japanese, including in 11 out of 47 prefectures and most big cities. But only a few municipalities, like Kawasaki City near here, have opened management-level positions to non-Japanese, and the Supreme Court ruling now makes it less likely that other municipalities will follow suit.
THE easiest route toward the managerial posts is, of course, to acquire Japanese citizenship, a choice more and more Zainichi are making. In 2003, there were only 470,000 officially recognized Zainichi, a drop of about 100,000 since 1993. Most became naturalized Japanese, no longer counted as Zainichi.
One of them is Ms. Chung's older brother, Tei Taikin, a professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University specializing in Japan-Korean relations and Zainichi issues. He became a naturalized Japanese in 2004 and changed his name. He has written about his agonizing choice and urged his sister to do the same.
A Zainichi is confined to an uncertain existence, he wrote in Chuo Koron, a conservative monthly. "In order to remove such uncertainty, you need to get your nationality closer to your identity - that is, acquire Japanese nationality and, hopefully, you can live as a Korean-Japanese."
After getting citizenship, he said, he felt as if he had passed through a tunnel. He did not feel as if he had sprung "suddenly into the bright world when I got out of the tunnel."
"But, nonetheless," he said, "I feel a kind of relief or lifting of burden."
Ms. Chung said she had not read her brother's essays.
"Zainichi who get Japanese nationality do so feeling, 'What else can I do?' " she said. "They do so because they do not want to be discriminated against."
And a very loosely related article on racism and starvation.
Another Kind of Racism
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
LUBIMBI, Zimbabwe
The hardest place in the world to be an optimist is Africa.
Much of Africa is a mess, and no country more so than Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. The continent has been held back by everything from malaria to its nonsensical colonial boundaries, but the two biggest problems have been lousy leaders and lousy economic policies - and Zimbabwe epitomizes both.
What makes Robert Mugabe a worse oppressor of ordinary Zimbabweans than the white racist rulers who preceded him is not just the way he turned a breadbasket of Africa into a basket case in which half the population is undernourished. It's also the fact that he's refusing to let aid organizations provide food to most of his people. He prefers to let them starve.
In one western Zimbabwean village, I found a woman, Thandiwe Sibanda, who is trying desperately to keep her family alive. "I'm the only one left to care for the children," she said. "My husband died, along with his other wife."
So now she is trying to provide for her own four rail-thin children as well as the two children of the other wife (who presumably died of AIDS along with the husband - so Mrs. Sibanda will very likely die of it as well). "All we can eat is corn porridge," she said, "and there isn't nearly enough even of that."
Mrs. Sibanda is adopting the same survival strategies as nearly every other peasant family I spoke to - they are down to one or two meals a day. She pulled her children out of school last fall to save the $2.25 in annual school fees, as are many other families. Her daughter just had a baby a few days ago but has no milk to feed it. The infant may be the first to die.
Jealous Sansole, a member of Parliament who opposes Mr. Mugabe, told me that in his district, people are already beginning to die of hunger. I didn't see that, but malnutrition is probably speeding up deaths from malaria, diarrhea and certainly AIDS.
The only reason more haven't died is food aid. Mrs. Sibanda's village, for example, until recently received regular food distributions from the World Food Program and the Save the Children Federation.
But last year, President Mugabe declared that Zimbabwe did not need food assistance. This was a lie, but Mr. Mugabe ordered the World Food Program and the aid groups it works with to stop handing out food to the general population.
Some groups continued to distribute food that was in the pipeline, and I visited some villages that received food until January. But now the food aid has all ended. At an elementary school I visited, the principal said that three-quarters of the pupils could not afford breakfast and came to school hungry. Along the border with Mozambique, poor families are marrying off their daughters at very young ages so they will no longer have to feed them.
If the old white regime here was deliberately starving its people, the world would be in an uproar. And while President Bush should be more forceful in opposing Mr. Mugabe's tyranny, it's the neighboring countries that are most shameful in looking the other way.
There's a liberal tendency in America to blame ourselves for Africa's problems, and surely there's far more that we should do to help. We should encourage trade, forgive debts, do research on tropical diseases and distribute mosquito nets that protect against malaria. But some problems, such as Mr. Mugabe, are homegrown and need local solutions, like an effort by South Africa to nudge him into retirement.
One of Africa's biggest problems is the perception that the entire continent is a hopeless cesspool of corruption and decline. Africa's leaders need to lead the way in pushing aside the clowns and thugs so their continent can be defined by its many successes - in Ghana, Mali, Cape Verde, Mauritius, Uganda and Botswana - rather than by the likes of Idi Amin, Emperor Bokassa and Robert Mugabe.
There's a twinkle of hope, for Nigeria and other West African countries have shown the gumption to denounce seizures of power in Togo and São Tomé. But South Africa is still allowing Mr. Mugabe to cast a pall over the entire continent out of deference for his past fight against white oppression.
Frankly, Zimbabweans have already suffered so much from racism over the last century that the last thing they need is excuses for Mr. Mugabe's misrule because of the color of his skin.
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-03 09:26 pm (UTC)I wouldn't mind tying him down onto a bed and removing his feeding tube for a while... not to kill him. Just let him go hungry for a few days to learn something of what it is like. Then feed him minimally for a while.