Being Korean in Japan

There were around 1.5 million registered non-Japanese people living in Japan at the end of 1997, of whom around 645,000 have legally declared themselves as Korean. Most of them have spent their whole life in Japan, but they are not entitled to vote. The Japanese government and much of the media seek to present Japanese society as homogenous, but in fact there is considerable ethnic discrimination, both formal and societal. Many Japanese fail to take account of the fact that they have obtained a significant part of their cultural heritage from China through the Korean Peninsula.