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From 1959 to 1984, some 90,000 Koreans migrated from Japan to North Korea as part of the “repatriation movement.” Enduring severe deprivation in North Korea, in the last decade some 300 of these individuals have returned to Japan. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, this paper asks how gift giving and the attendant obligation to reciprocate impacts on relations between non-profit organizations (NPOs) and the people they seek to help. I answer this question by examining the resettlement of returnees from North Korea, and their relationship to members of Japanese civil society. The organizations working with returnees primarily consist of elderly Japanese men who aid returnees out of guilt for their support in the 1960s and 1970s of the socialist left, North Korea, and the repatriation movement. Their assistance engenders a feeling of debt in the people they help. Returnees try to mitigate this debt by performing acts of “flexible filial piety” toward NPO members. But returnees’ attempts to renegotiate the burden of the gift consequently endanger themselves and their families who remain in North Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article sets out to elucidate the role of Japanese Protestants in the education of Koreans during the early twentieth century. Scholarship has often assigned only marginal roles to Japanese Protestants within the history of Japanese imperialism, despite the remarkable success of western missionaries in Korea at the time. As imperial expansion progressed, Japanese Protestants intensified their efforts to take up a leading role in the education of Koreans in colonial Korea and in the metropole wishing to spearhead the assimilation of Koreans. By drawing on the colonial discourses of East Asian unity under Japanese leadership, Protestant churches strove to mediate and facilitate colonial policies in Korea. Yet there were also voices of dissent from prominent Japanese Protestants critical of the assimilation policies implemented by colonial authorities in Korea. This ambivalent stance of Protestantism towards Korea is further complicated by the fact that the Korean Young Men’s Christian Association in Tokyo served as an important venue of the Korean Independence Movement. Examining Christian magazines and journals of the time, this paper delves into the contentious debates among Japanese Protestants concerning the Korea Mission and the Japanese government’s strategy of assimilation through education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reformulates and extends Polanyi's main insights in The Great Transformations (2001 [1944]) and attempts to theorize the societal countermovement against neoliberalism by illustrating the cases of Korea and Japan. Polanyi's main approach was to synthesize three critical domains: the state, market, and society, and his notion of double movement should be understood as such. Predicated on his double movement, I analytically decompose the mechanism of societal countermovement, emphasizing the importance of social organizations that aggregate people's insecurities and translate them into a political voice capable of acquiring social protection. Applying this analytical framework of the double movement to Korea and Japan reveals that the problem with the conventional understanding of the double movement is that it necessarily arrives at social compensation equilibrium. This paper implies that a highly contentious society, like Korea's, and a highly docile society, like Japan's, may both hinder social welfare provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on performances of Korean folk culture in Japanese schools and communities to analyse how minority identities are constructed. Korean minority education in Japan has taken up the challenge of reversing the stigma attached to former colonial subjects, employing a range of tangible props what Twine (1999) calls ‘racial literacy’ which prepares racial minority children to cope with and challenge racism at large. While embodying identity expression through Korean folk dance performances is an effective strategy, it faces constraints from larger social forces. Korean dance and music performances do little to challenge the dominance of mainstream values. These performances are embedded in everyday family, school, and community practices and paradoxically reproduce existing gender roles, broader pedagogical ideologies, and social structures. This ethnographic case study disentangles contradictions in minority education and shows commitment to alterity accompanies disavowal of alterity in relation to the hegemonic Japanese culture and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the macro-determinants of Korea's persistent bilateral trade deficit with Japan but her trade surplus with the US using Johansen's cointegration-error correction model, which includes bilateral trade balance and real exchange rate, domestic and foreign incomes and relative money supply. The empirical results show that all variables included affect bilateral trade balances and there exists a long-run equilibrium among them. Especially, Korean won depreciation improves Korea-US trade balance according to the Marshall-Lerner condition while the J-curve effect between Korea and Japan exists with a little improvement of deterioration of trade balance followed by Korean won depreciation. In addition, domestic economic growth is found to improve persistent trade deficits against Japan and mitigate trade surplus with the US. The short- and long-run effects of monetary policy on Korea-US trade balance are opposite to those on Korea-Japan. The exogenous US income contributes to increase Korea-US trade balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]