Discrimination; underclass; social capital; economic history
JEL: J12, J15, K38, K42, N35
Address Correspondence to:
J. Mark Ramseyer
Harvard Law Schoolramseyer@law.harvard.edu
January 24, 2020

A Monitoring Theory of the Underclass:With Examples from Outcastes, Koreans, and Okinawans in JapanBy J. Mark Ramseyer*
Abstract: When members of a minority group can monitor and constrain each other, they canleverage their internal social capital to financial gain. When they live within dense networks of personal
contacts, they will more often have the information necessary to learn whether potential trade partners have
kept their word and to punish those who have not.
When members of a minority group lack that social capital, they not only lose these advantageoustransactions but become vulnerable to their own self-appointed leaders as well. Lacking a network of close
ties, they can neither monitor nor constrain others in the group. This vacuum creates an opening foropportunists to purport to act on their behalf (perhaps to obtain ethnic subsidies or other group preferences),but actually to divert rents to themselves -- and incite hostility toward the group in the process.
Arrovian statistical discrimination and selective out-migration follow. The opportunists raise thelevel of dysfunction within the group. Faced with an outside majority that treats minority members by theobserved group mean, those minority members with the highest outside options will now leave and abandon
the group to the opportunists. Any ethnic subsidies will offset the discrimination in part, of course. The
higher the level of subsidies, the fewer the number of minority members who will find it advantageous toleave; the higher the level of subsidies, the slower the pace at which the dysfunctional minority will merge
into the mainstream
I illustrate these dynamics with examples from the burakumin outcastes in Japan, the Korean
residents in Japan, and the Okinawans.

* Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, Harvard University. I gratefully acknowledge thehelpful comments and suggestions of Jason Morgan, Eric Rasmusen, and Daniel Smith.

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Ethnic lines have no significance in themselves. They acquire significance only by theway a community responds to those lines. Sometimes, members of an ethnic minority will develop
dense webs of cross-cutting social ties among themselves, ties that build what sociologists andpolitical scientists call "social capital." Sometimes, they will then use the resulting access to
information about each other, and the ability to punish anyone who violates group norms, to theircollective economic advantage. Scholars like Janet Landa (1981), Lisa Bernstein (1992, 2019),
and Avner Greif (1989, 2012) detail the way some groups invest heavily in these internal ties, andfrom that investment earn significant financial returns.
As political scientists James Fearon and David Laitin (2000) note, however, sometimes
opportunistic entrepreneurs within a group will exploit its lines to capture private economic or
political advantage. In the process, they often adopt violent and extortionate behavior. Thatbehavior will increase the wariness of the outside community toward the group. Their behavior,in other words, will raise the level of what modern scholars -- drawing on Kenneth Arrow (1971)-- call "statistical discrimination." Faced with that statistical discrimination, those minority
members best able to thrive within the outside community (those with higher than mean
productivity, for example, or lower than mean criminal propensity) will then leave.
Opportunistic entrepreneurs can most successfully hijack a minority group when the groupitself lacks high levels of social capital -- call it, for our purposes, an "underclass." Thoseminorities whose members maintain dense webs of social ties by which to monitor and constraineach other would not let these opportunists manipulate the group; those minorities that Landa,
Bernstein, and Greif describe would not let a member dominate the group if he raised the level of
discrimination against all of them in return. Groups without those ties, however, can neither
monitor nor punish each other. Ultimately, they cannot stop members who would jeopardize theircollective welfare for private advantage.
Sometimes, these entrepreneurs will successfully extract ethnic subsidies or other grouppreferences from private firms or the government. When they do, of course, those preferences willoffset at least in part the discrimination. The lower the preferences, the greater the number ofminority members who will leave. At higher preference levels, only the very able will find it
advantageous to leave the dysfunctional underclass. The higher the level of preferences, the slower
the pace at which the underclass will merge into the social mainstream.
These phenomena are obviously related to the colloquial observation that the worst
enemies of an underclass are often its own elites. In the article that follows, I illustrate this logic
with three examples from Japan: the burakumin "outcastes," resident Koreans, and Okinawans. I
avoid the well-known ethnic disputes in the U.S. and elsewhere deliberately but reluctantly -- forthe simple reason that the hyper-polarization within the academy has made candid discussion of
ethnic politics extraordinarily hard. Perhaps otherwise unfamiliar examples will permit freer
discussion.
I begin by noting the way in which ethnic lines have no significance in themselves. Instead,the nature of their significance will turn in part on the level and character of social capital within
the group (Section I). I turn to the connection between Beckerian and Arrovian discrimination andselective out-migration (Section II). And I illustrate the resulting logic with examples from theRamseyer: Page 3
burakumin "outcastes" (Section III), the Japan-resident Koreans (Section IV), and Okinawa(Section V).
I. Ethnicity and Social Capital
A. The Endogenous Significance of Exogenous Lines:
Ethnic lines can be exogenous. People are born with the skin color their parents bequeathedto them, the religious community within which their parents raised them, and the language theirparents taught them. To be sure, they can marry into another group. They can learn a different
language, accept a new religion. But most ethnic lines -- particularly, the most important ethniclines -- turn on characteristics people acquire at birth.
Yet if ethnic lines are usually exogenous, their significance never is. Instead, the lines
acquire whatever significance a community chooses to assign them -- usually by a mix of custom,
deliberation, and the rational (if instinctive) response to observed behavior that economists call"statistical discrimination." A skin color, a faith, a language has no social significance in itself. It
acquires that significance only when community members choose to treat it as important.
Again, take the obvious example of skin color. A person has the skin color he inherits fromhis parents. For him, that color is a given, a characteristic he acquired at birth. It is exogenous.
The significance that the color holds, however, is never exogenous. Instead, that significance iscommunity-specific. It is a result of decisions (sometimes customary, sometimes deliberate, andoften in response to observed behavior) by members of the community to ascribe to the color agiven significance.
B. Cohesive Minorities:
Consider several cases where minority members reinforce the significance of their ethnic
status by the financial returns which that status earns them. Suppose members of a small groupfind it cheaper to obtain information about each other than it would cost members of the larger
group. Suppose too that members of the smaller group find it cheaper to punish each other.
Sometimes, these factors generate efficiencies that minority merchants and producers can exploit
through trades.
One of the earliest examples in law & economics turns on the work of Janet Landa. Landa(1981) examined Chinese middlemen in the south-east Asian rubber market. In this market, she(1981, 350; see Landa & Cooter 1984) found the trade dominated by four clans bound together
through "a tightly knit kinship structure" and "linked in complex networks of particularistic
exchange relations." These "ethnically homogenous middlemen groups," she and Robert Cooter(1984, 15-16) suggested, traded within "a repository of trust which reduces the probability ofbreach on a contract between insiders."
A decade later, Lisa Bernstein (1992; see Richman 2006, 2017) studied the New Yorkdiamond market. There, she (1992, 141) noted that "the diamond industry has long been
dominated by Orthodox Jews." Their ethnic ties, she posited, gave the men both access to relatively
high levels of information about their contracting partners and an ability to punish those who
reneged on their promises. The Orthodox Jewish community provided, she (1992, 140) explained,"geographical concentration, ethnic homogeneity, and repeat dealing."
Avner Greif (2012, 445) studied the agency contracts among "eleventh-century (Jewish)
Maghribi[] traders who operated in the Muslim Mediterranean." These traders "deterred
opportunism in bilateral agency relations [through] a credible threat of losing future profitable
relations in the traders' broader community," wrote Greif (2012, 445). As Bernstein (2019) moreRamseyer: Page 4
recently explained, they could punish opportunism because they traded within "small-scale
networks."
These are the three examples best-known in the law & economics literature. But the logic
applies more broadly, of course. In the medieval Europe, guilds could provide the wide-ranging
web of ties necessary to provide the information and punishment mechanism necessary to police
opportunism. Often enough, so do ethnic groups more generally. As political scientists James
Fearon and David Laitin (1996, 718-19) put it, "ethnic groups are often characterized by relatively
dense social networks and low-cost acces to information about the past history of individuals'
behavior." After all, they write, "[a]t bottom, the problem is informational."
Within Japanese history, the pre-modern Omi traders illustrated a similar phenomenon.
Based near Kyoto along the eastern coast of Lake Biwa, the Omi merchants traded primarily inpottery, medicines, sake, soy sauce, and textiles (Uemura 2014, 2). Crucially, they came fromthree towns -- Yahata, Hino, and Gokasho -- near the intersections of the several highways. Theseroutes connected the Kyoto-Osaka area with nearby Ise; with Edo (Tokyo); with the mountainous
but prosperous Shinano (Nagano) area; with the Japan Sea coast; and with the more distant Tohoku
region to the northeast.
The traders recruited their staff from Omi, and stationed their home offices there. Alongthe various highways, however, they maintained a vast network of branch offices -- by the late
1920s, more than 1,100 (Suenaga 1997, 2 tab. 1). Not only did they staff these branches with
officers from Omi, they required them to return to the home office every few years for extended
postings (Uemura 2000, 639-54).
The merchant families held their sprawling commercial empires together through precisely
this dense network of Omi ties. They were born into their community. They expected to die in it.
Within the community, they each held elaborate social obligations. They held religious
responsibilities tied to their common Jodo-shin (True Pure Land) Buddhist faiths. Theyintermarried within the broader Omi merchant network. And they made decisions throughconsensus among their senior Omi managerial ranks (Uemura 2000, 639-54).
C. Monitoring and Social Capital:
1. Introduction. -- In each of these examples, merchants lived and contracted withincommunities held together through dense networks of multi-stranded kinship, social, religious,and economic bonds. Because of these ties, they could acquire information about the reliability of
their potential partners. And they could punish non-conformists. They succeeded in commerce
precisely because they drew functional lines around their communities -- precisely because they
themselves treated the ethnic lines as significant.
2. The theory. -- In each of these examples, the community members had invested heavily
in "social capital." As political scientist Robert Putnam (1995, 2000; see Murray 2012) articulated
the idea, people invest in social capital within their communities by building, maintaining, andstrengthening their ties with each other. They volunteer with the PTA. They join the Rotary Club.
They coach soccer leagues. They attend churches and synagogues.
In the course of doing all this, Putnam's citizens create social capital: the byzantine
network of reciprocal favors and obligations that let them overcome the collective-action problems
that would otherwise plague their communities. With social capital intact, they urge young men
and women to wait to have children until committed to a long-term relationship. They stay withintroubled marriages. They arrive at work even for boring or stressful jobs. They punish those whoRamseyer: Page 5
break the law. With social capital intact, they monitor each other and encourage each other follow
the norms that they collectively expect of each other.
Build ties, and people behave. Integrate themselves into large and crosscutting social
networks, as Saegert & Winkel (2004, 220) put it, and they come to "share a sense of mutual
obligation, shared norms, and trustworthiness." Make friends, and "[i]nformation flows freely andfrom multiple channels." Convey that information, and people know what they need to know topunish those who misbehave: "norms of behavior are reinforced in many settings and sanctions
for violating these norms can be effectively brought to bear."
The Landa-Bernstein-Greif case-studies represent the polar case. Each of the three captured
a world with high levels of social capital. Each constituted a community bound together througha network of overlapping, intertwined social connections, a community where information
travelled extensively, a community where members collectively enforced expectations of proper
behavior on each other.
3. Observable proxies. -- Within any society, the level of social capital itself is obviously
unobserved. Several easily measured phenomena, however, reliably proxy for those levels.
a. Crime rates. Where social capital is high, community members can monitor each otherand encourage each other to follow everyday norms. Necessarily, crime rates will be low. Putanother way, the formal crime rate will correlate with the extent to which members can monitor
each other and induce each other to live within communal expectations. Where levels of social
capital are high, members can more easily monitor and punish. Necessarily, where the levels are
high, crime rates will tend to stay low.
b. Employment. On the one hand, social capital is a function of employment. Putnam(2000, 87-88) notes that "[m]any people form rewarding friendships at work," and "feel a sense ofcommunity among co-workers, and enjoy norms of mutual help and reciprocity on the job." As aresult, those with low job tenure enjoy less "trust and social connectedness in the workplace."
Those who lose work completely withdraw psychologically from the community itself. Where
unemployment rises, social capital falls.
On the other hand, employment is itself a function of social capital. Closely knit
communities expect family members to care for each other. Toward that end, they expect parents,
particularly fathers, to sacrifice personal satisfaction from time to time to keep their children fed,
clothed, and housed. Where social capital is high, community members encourage each other tostay in their jobs even when the work itself generates high levels of stress or offers relatively little
reward.
c Family cohesion. Communities with high levels of social capital will also encourage
their members to raise their children within intact families. The reason is straightforward: associal scientists have shown for decades, children do better in two-parent families than in oneparent ones. Accordingly, communities with high levels of social capital encourage each other toinvest in their marriages at levels that promote long-lasting relationships. They encourage eachother to stay within a marriage despite the strains that inevitably develop. Necessarily, where
social capital is high, divorce rates will be low.
Communities with high levels of social capital will also encourage young men and women
to wait to give birth until they marry. In almost all societies, children born out of marriages do notRamseyer: Page 6
fare well. What is more, if mothers are bearing their children outside of marriage, then families
are necessarily playing a smaller role in the community. Where levels of social capital are high,rates of non-marital births will be low.
II. Ethnic Discrimination
A. Taste-Based and Statistical:
Within economics, discussions of ethnic bias begin with Gary Becker (1957). To
understand discrimination, Becker posited a non-pecuniary "taste" for the behavior amongmajority groups. Becker then observed -- from the most basic economic principles -- that majority
members who deliberately choose not to trade with a substantial fraction of the population will
earn lower profits. For much of the first half of the 20th century, governments and labor unions
enforced much of the racial discrimination in the U.S. Beyond those restrictions, however,discrimination did not help the discriminating majority. Instead, it harmed it.
All this is right as far as it goes, but tastes for discrimination do not appear exogenously inthe sky, and "people are not born imprisoned by their cultures," as Fearon & Laitin (2000, 860)
put it. Instead, people develop their discriminatory tastes for a reason, in response to the world
within which they live. Suppose a largely unobservable characteristic (such as labor productivity)
correlates with an ethnic marker. Sometimes, as Kenneth Arrow (1971) who first formalized thephenomenon notes, members of the majority group will discriminate along ethnic lines not out ofa concern for the ethnic status as such, but for the relevant but otherwise unobservable correlate.
As Marianne Bertrand and Esther Duflo (2016, 3) put it, "the differential treatment of members ofthe minority group is due to imperfect information." In other words, "[w]hen the person-specificinformation is limited, group-specific membership may provide additional valuable information
about expected productivity" (Bertrand & Duflo 2016, 3).
1

2

B. Selective Exit:
Whether the resulting Arrovian "statistical discrimination" harms or helps a member of theminority depends on how his stock of the otherwise unobserved variable compares to the groupmean. "[W]hether an applicant is above or below the mean of this group," explains David Autor(2009, 21), determines whether he is "differentially helped or harmed" by the discrimination.
Suppose the unobserved variable in question is productivity. Because an employer will treat allminority job applicants as though they had mean (for the minority group) productivity, workers
who are more productive than average will suffer. For precisely the same reason, however,workers with below-average productivity for the group will benefit from the statistical
discrimination.
This dynamic, in turn, will drive migration into and out of the group. The logic follows
from Albert Hirschman's (1970) distinction between "exit" and "voice." Posit, again, a lowinformation employment market: minority workers with above-average productivity will1

A thoughtful review of the literature appears in Chakraborty (2016).

Becker (1971, ch. 4); Epstein (1992, ch. 6); Ashenfelter (1972). Becker (1957, 21) noted "a remarkableagreement in the liberature on the proposition that capitalists from the dominant group are the major beneficiaries ofprejudice and discrimination in a competitive capitalistic economic system." Outside of economics, of course, thisremains the case 60 years later. For an explanation of this essentially "Marxist" theory, see Chakraborty (2016,205).
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disproportionately choose to leave the group. Posit a low-information policing environment:
minority members with below-average criminal propensity will choose to leave the group.
The dynamic can apply even to apparent race discrimination. Obviously, one cannotchange one's skin color, and one cannot migrate from one race to another. Yet that potential
objection belies the question of the form the discrimination actually takes: whether thediscriminator is responding to the race itself, or to a more precise index of underclass status thatloosely correlates with race (like speech patterns, dress, behavioral tics). To put it another way, itbelies the question of whether the majority bias represents statistical discrimination triggered by
the observable race variable, or one triggered by underclass markers that more closely correlatewith the unobserved variable. When the members of the majority base the statistical discriminationon these underclass markers, even members of the minority race can avoid the discrimination if
they abandon the more closely correlated underclass markers.
C. Violence Against Prosperous Minorities:
The bias and discrimination against underclass groups differs fundamentally from theviolence and pogroms against socially coherent, economically prosperous communities. The
former can result from Arrovian statistical discrimination. The latter sometimes involve economic
competition or perceived mistreatment. They almost always involve theft and expropriation.
The best-known violence against socially coherent groups, of course, involves the Jewish
pogroms and holocaust. Yet Jewish communities have rarely constituted an underclass. Instead,their members have lived and worked within worlds with extraordinarily high levels of social
capital, and many have lived more prosperous lives than those in their surrounding communities.
Indeed, two of the three earlier examples of tightly knit and successful groups involve Jewish
communities.
Other instances of ethnic violence have similarly involved successful commercial groups.
Surrounding majorities attacked wealthy Chinese merchant communities in Indonesia (in 196566) and Malaysia (1969). The Hutus massacred the richer Tutsi during the Rwandan civil war of
1990-94 (Chretien 2003; Prunier 1995). The Armenians slaughtered by the Ottomans had
sometimes worked in commercial roles (Carlton 1995, 223).
Many of these attacks on successful commercial groups have reflected the way that
financial and middlemen transactions inherently generate tension. These transactions tend torequire extensive person-to-person negotiation. They rarely involve a clear market price, and areinstead non-standardized and idiosyncratic. Such transactions, suggests Dennis Carlton (1995),
can easily leave the parties feeling cheated. As a result, "[t]hroughout the centuries, middlemen
who happen to belong to a minority in a country have been singled out for hatred and had theirproperty destroyed" (Carlton 1995, 221).
More obviously, however, the attacks on high-social-capital groups provide a direct
opportunity for theft. As Fearon & Laitin (2000, 869, 874) put it, "on the ground, what is describedas ethnic violence looks very much like gang violence with no necessary ethnic dimension." Theethnic tension can serve as a "cover" for "looting, land grabs, and personal revenge." Successful
as they usually are, members of these groups tend to own readily appropriable property. Ethnic
inspired violence offers majority members the chance to take that property for their own.
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D. Exploitative Elites:
3

Robinson (2018); Melvin & Pohlman (2018, 38-42); von Vorys (1975, ch. 13).

Ramseyer: Page 8
1. Introduction. -- Sometimes, ethnic lines can acquire the significance that they havebecause of actions taken by members of the minority group itself. Indeed, this is much of the story
behind statistical discrimination. To be sure, we tend to skirt the question in many sectors of theacademy. We recall the fate of Daniel Patrick Moynahan and reflexively blanche when anyone
seems to "blame the victim."
Yet sometimes, minority behavior matters crucially. Members of some minority groups(like Jewish diamond merchants) police opportunistic behavior within the group in order to capture
the economic advantages that accrue. Not only does the in-group monitoring and policing facilitate
intra-group trade, in the Fearon-Laitin (1996) model, it facilitates trade with outside groups as well.
Yet not all minority groups possess the ability to police that behavior. Instead, in some groups themost opportunistic among them violate broadly held social norms and generate the Arrovian
statistical discrimination in response.
2. The vulnerable underclass. -- Take "underclass" to refer to residents who have notintegrated themselves into any wide-ranging social network. Living within an anomic world withlow levels of social capital, they have few social connections, weak religious commitments, andonly haphazard family ties. Absent those connections, they cannot post any reputational bond, andcannot evaluate the performance of many people with whom they might transact.
Most members of an underclass are poor. Without information and reputational capital,
they cannot profitably trade. Living lives unintegrated into social, religious, and business networks,
they cannot establish reputations for keeping their promises, and cannot evaluate others. Given
this definition, however, most underclass members will -- necessarily -- also lack the ability tomonitor and constrain other members of their own group. After all, the resources and informationnecessary to monitor business partners overlap heavily with the resources and informationnecessary to monitor others in their own society. If they cannot monitor and constrain their trading
partners, they likely cannot monitor and punish anyone else.
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3. The rise of opportunistic elites. -- This dynamic leaves an underclass peculiarly
vulnerable to exploitation by its own self-appointed leaders. Given the absence of an effective
monitoring and sanctioning mechanism, opportunists can declare themselves group leaders.
Sometimes, they can then adopt tactics that transfer rents to themselves but harm the group as awhole. Ethnic lines most often lead to tension, write Fearon & Laitin (2000, 846) when the elites
intentionally "construct[] group identies in more antagonistic and ways." They do this, when it
enables them "to gain, maintain, or increase their hold on political power."
The strategies by which an underclass elite exploits its membership might involve threatsof violence against the majority group, followed by extortion. The members of the elite might
accuse majority group members of bias and discrimination, for example. They might threaten
retaliation. And they might settle for compensation for that purported bias, which they might thendivert to private gain.

I realize that this is an idiosyncratic definition; I also realize that even a simple definition can carry with it
potential political implications. Difficult as it may be, however, I table the obvious political debate about the causal
direction between behavioral patterns (e.g., culture of poverty) and economic status (e.g., poverty andunemployment). For my purposes, the fact that there is a clear correlation between the two phenomena suffices.
The literature is immense. For a simple introduction to the literature, the debates, and the politics, see Heisler(1991).
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By threatening group violence to their private advantage, the underclass elite can cause
exogenous but otherwise trivial ethnic lines to take on massive significance. If the majority grouptransfers subsidies or other preferences to a minority ethnic group, the lines around that group
matter. On the one hand, the lines now define access to the politically generated rents. But on theother, they now also define the people that those in the majority will try to avoid when they can.
If self-styled minority leaders couple violent accusations of bias with demands for cash or otherperquisites, the ethnic lines will define those whom members of the majority will do their best to
avoid.
Hence the dynamic at issue here: Elites within the underclass couple accusations of bias
with demands for appropriable benefits. The dominant group responds by steering clear of theunderclass -- and lowering the welfare of the class as a whole. The elite denounces this new
response as "racist" and "discriminatory." The dominant group further marginalizes the group -and decreases the already low opportunities for trade by the underclass. Members of the dominantgroup respond with Arrovian statistical discrimination against the underclass and the otherwise
exogenous ethnic lines acquire significance -- precisely because of the self-interested, strategic
rent-seeking by the minority group's own self-appointed leaders.
4. The exiting talented. -- Necessarily, the higher level of statistical discrimination against
a minority will drive many of the most successful minority members out of the group. To theextent that members of the majority cannot accurately gauge important characteristics of theminority members, they will treat them by the group mean. Those with characteristics morefavorable than the mean (e.g., higher productivity, lower criminal proclivity) will then find it
advantageous to leave the group.
This migration, however, will increase further the group's vulnerability to an opportunistic
leadership. The reason is straightforward: those members of the underclass who have theresources and information to thrive elsewhere are precisely those who might be able to monitor
and constrain an opportunistic leadership. Yet those are precisely the members most likely toleave.
Underclass elites routinely over-state the difficulty of out-migration. In their own effort toextort appropriable benefits from the majority, the elites will claim pervasive -- largely
exogenously given -- bias. So strong is the bias, they will assert, that their fellow-members of theunderclass are caught in bonds from which they cannot escape.
The underclass leaders make these claims in each of the three Japanese groups discussed
below. The buraku leaders posit Japanese hostility so strong that members who try to "pass"routinely find themselves "outed" and forced back to the group. The leaders of the Japan-resident
Koreans argue that they find integration into Japanese society stymied by national hostility.
Leaders of Okinawan community sometimes assert that mainland Japanese hold such strong antiOkinawan bias that even ambitious young men and women who immigrate to the mainland findtheir way blocked by bias. As I show below, in none of these cases is the claim true.
E. The Mechanism behind the Selective Out-Migration:
1. The logic. -- Before turning to the three examples from Japan, consider a simple
statement of the mechanism behind the selective out-migration. For expositional ease, assume thatminority members are born with either high or low levels of ability (HA or LA). Second, assume
that they are born into worlds with either high or low levels of social capital (HSC or LSC). Third,

Ramseyer: Page 10
assume that those outside the group will discriminate in such a way as to treat its members as
having performance equal to the group mean.
Each individual faces two choices. First, he can choose whether to invest in his humancapital (investments that pay off only in a legitimate career) or not to invest. Second, he can choose
either to stay in the group or to leave.
Now suppose that human capital investments earn higher returns to HA than to LA people.
After all, the most expensive educations tend to pay off only for students with high levels of ability.
And suppose further that investments in human capital earn higher returns in HSC than in LSC
environments. After all, only in a HSC world will information about a person's high level of
performance travel widely.
Several very simple propositions obviously and directly follow:
1. HA people are more likely to invest in a legitimate career than LA.
2. HSC residents are more likely to invest in a legitimate career than LSC residents
3. HA residents of an LSC group are more likely to exit the group than LA residents.
Finally, suppose (as is often the case) that the government offers members of the minority
group ethnic subsidies or other group preferences. Whether minority members exit will now
depend on the cost of any Arrovian discrimination net the value of the group subsidies. Should
one move from the binary world of high- and low-ability members to a more realistic world where
members hold a range of ability levels, a further proposition follows.
4. Whether minority residents choose to invest in their human capital and exit thegroup will depend on (a) the level of the ethnic subsidies and (b) their expected returns in
the outside world. The higher the subsidies, the higher the required outside returns before
a member will exit the group.
2. The examples. -- In the rest of this article, I apply these very simple propositions tothree underclass groups in Japan. First, given the low levels of social capital, buraku residents
were unable to prevent criminal entrepreneurs from hijacking the group. Those entrepreneurs
raised the observed level of dysfunction within the group, but they also generated offsetting groupsubsidies. As long as the subsidies continued, low-ability group members stayed -- indeed, thehigher the level of subsidies, the greater the fraction of burakumin who found it profitable to stay.
When the government terminated the subsidies in 2002, the remaining group members began toleave as well.
Second, given the similarly low levels of social capital, Japan-resident Koreans wereunable to prevent political entrepreneurs from hijacking the group. Like the BLL, these
entrepreneurs raised the observed level of group dysfunction and the statistical discrimination
against the group. Unlike the BLL, however, they generated no off-setting ethnic subsidies. Group
members earned virtually no returns to staying in the group -- and steadily left.
In Okinawa as among the Koreans, given the low levels of social capital, residents havebeen unable to prevent political entrepreneurs from hijacking the group. Here, however, theentrepreneurs have generated substantial subsidies for the residents -- and these subsidies persist.
The residents with the highest ability apparently leave for university and rarely return, but low
ability residents continue to stay in the prefecture and collect the subsidies.
III. The Burakumin
A. The Academic Tradition:

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In the discussion below, I take what may be the three most prominent minority groups inJapan. Should anyone ask about ethnic bias in Japan, he will hear first about the burakumin. He
will then learn about the resident Koreans. And from time to time, he will hear about the residents
on the southern island of Okinawa.
Descendants (it is said) of a pre-modern leather-workers guild, the burakumin remain -according to U.S. scholars -- relentlessly shunned in employment, marriage, and almost any othersocial tie that matters. In so characterizing the group, scholars echo its self-styled "human rights"
leadership at the Buraku Liberation League (BLL). And the account the BLL leaders tell is among
the oddest taste-based discrimination stories ever told. As New York Times columnist Nicholas
Kristof (1995) put it, the burakumin were "discriminated against simply because they were thedescendants of people whose jobs were considered ritually unclean, like butchering animals,tanning skins, making leather goods, digging graves and handling corpses."Virtually none of this is true. The discrimination against the burakumin instead constitutes
routine statistical discrimination driven by the violent and corrupt leadership itself. At the openingof the 20th century, the term buraku had referred to the largely inchoate underclass primarily on
the fringes of farming villages and in the new urban slums. In the mid-1920s, Bolshevik-inspired
leftists invented for these underclass neighborhoods an ethnic identity (Kyoto 1922, 3; Hasegawa
1927, 12-13, 17). Within a few years, criminal entrepreneurs hijacked the group for their own
purposes (Hasegawa 1927, 1-2, 56-62).
These self-appointed leaders (operating after World War II through the BLL) thenembarked on a long-term shakedown strategy. Accusing firms and local governments of racism
and bias, they made (and periodically carried out) violent threats -- and settled for money. By thetime the national government finally stopped its subsidies in 2002, it had paid the group $125
billion (Kadooka 2012, 38, 69; Ichinomiya & Group k21, 2012, 126). The self-appointed leaders
at the BLL determined where the money would go, of course, and diverted massive amounts totheir personal accounts.
The BLL leaders could carry out their violent shakedown strategy because the group itself
was so inchoate and anomic. The buraku had no social capital. Instead, it had a population of
uneducated transient men and women who drank, gambled, stole, fought, and serially moved frompartner to partner as they gave birth to children. The buraku had no internal organization, and theresidents themselves had little information about the rest of the world. Certainly they had no way
to constrain anyone who might purport to act on their behalf.
English-language writers miss this account entirely. They miss it because they have noserious Japanese scholar to whom they can turn. Serious scholars do not work on the buraku.
Instead, they studiously avoid the topic. In connection with the organized crime syndicates, theBLL ruthlessly enforces its preferred "party line." Real scholars have better things to do than toquarrel with the BLL and the mob.
5

6

7

The discussion that follows is based on Ramseyer & Rasmusen (2018) and Ramseyer (2019). See thesestudies for a fuller discussion, for empirical verification of the contested points, and for a complete set of citations to
the Japanese literature and historical documents.
5

6

A fuller literature review appears in Ramseyer (2019).

Kagawa (1915, 1919; Takahashi (1924); Yanagida (1913); Kohara (1910); Endo (1912); Nakano (1923);
Suzuki (1888); Sakurada (1893).
7

Ramseyer: Page 12
Instead, western scholars and journalists visit the BLL. BLL affiliates supply them the data
they have created. They teach them the narrative they would like told. Western writers convey
that story, and we have the situation that we have today.
B. The Roots of the Group:
As the 19th century drew to a close, most Japanese used the predecessor terms for"burakumin" (including the pejorative "eta") to refer to a loosely identified group of obviously
underclass neighborhoods. They used the terms primarily to identify people who lived on theheavily dysfunctional outskirts of rural villages or in the new urban slums. Most of these men andwomen did not have leather-working ancestors, and many leather workers did not live in theseareas (Usui 1991, 20; Higashi 2018, 115).
Instead, at the close of the 19th century, Japanese used the predecessor terms to refer toneighborhoods that had traditionally (how long was never clear) been dysfunctionally poor (Fujino
2009, 23-29). For the most part, they were neighborhoods without a strong sense of trust. They
were communities with very high crime rates. They were communities where men and womeninvested only haphazardly in their families, and which exhibited high rates of illegitimacy anddivorce. Bonds of trust, lawful behavior, and ties of marriage depend on social context: they
depend on stable neighborhoods, steady work, solid role models, and a common religious faith.
Japanese sometimes called communities that lacked these characteristics "buraku."
Consider the term by which other Japanese referred to the group. "Buraku" is a modern
euphemism meaning simply "village." As of the mid-19th century, most Japanese instead called
the burakumin "kawata." Buraku activists claim it meant "much leather," and "kawa" can indeed
mean leather while "ta" can mean much. But "kawa" can also mean river, and "ta" can mean paddy.
When poor migrants settled in a new village during the Tokugawa period, they took the land thatwas left. Given the risk of flooding, that was usually the land by the river. There, the new settlers
built their houses and constructed their paddies. Modern buraku neighborhoods still tend to belocated near the river. And so it is that the other villagers called them "the farmers by the river"(Watanabe 1977, 257-58). The idiomatic American equivalent is not "leather worker." It is "thewhite trash on the other side of the tracks."
Within the buraku, many men lived by what they (including burakumin themselves) called"eta konjo" -- the "eta essence." Put idiomatically again, they lived by what Americans would call"cracker" norms. Like the poor whites of the 19th century south, men in the buraku were quick totake offense. They escalated disputes to violent levels. They committed crimes at unusually highrates. They fathered children with serial chains of women. And they only haphazardly invested
in either education or work.
If this description seems a loose definition at best, that is the point: nothing turned on theterm, so no one took much care with it. As of the last few decades of the 19th century, the line
between buraku (or "kawata") and non-buraku was anything but clear -- for nothing depended on
the line. The buraku were simply those neighborhoods and towns where nothing seemed to work.
Some members of the traditional buraku did take jobs in the leather industry, but most were just
8

9

10

Ramseyer (2019, tabs. 5, 7, 8); Kagawa (1915, 1919; Takahashi (1924); Yanagida (1913); Kohara (1910);
Endo (1912); Nakano (1923); Suzuki (1888); Sakurada (1893).
89The etymology of the pejorative "eta" is unclear.

10

Takahashi (1924, 223-24); Yanagida (1913, 93); Kohara (1910, 1440); Kyoto (1924, 258).

Ramseyer: Page 13
not-very-resourceful farmers. Within the cities, most burakumin were just haphazardly employed
day laborers.
But not all. Within some villages, some mid-19th century men from buraku backgrounds
created thriving financial operations, lending to buraku and non-buraku neighbors alike. Within
the cities, some operated profitable industrial operations. Within one Kyoto buraku, some ran athriving bank (Shigemitsu 1991). Some men from buraku backgrounds earned enough to qualify
for the wealth-based voting rights (Uesugi 2010, 101-02). And at least one studied at Columbia,
and returned to take a professorship at Kyoto Imperial University (Torigai 1988, 70).
Crucially, nothing turned on buraku status. Because the status did not matter, definitions
varied from place to place and exceptions were routine. Most buraku were poor, but not necessarily.
Many lived self-destructive lives, but not all. Talented burakumin who invested in their careers
did well. Those who invested in their families raised successful children. And those who adopted
traditional Japanese mores succeeded by perfectly mainstream metrics.
C. The Invention of an Ethnic Identity:
1. The intellectuals. -- In the early 1920s, several young intellectuals in the buraku elite
decided to organize a "liberation" movement. The Bolsheviks had wrested control over Russia in
1917. Comintern had met to organize world revolution in 1919. Across Japan, young intellectuals
were forming communist, socialist, and anarcho-syndicalist cells. In 1922, young intellectualsfrom the buraku decided to organize a cell for their own group.
The young intellectuals held their first meeting in Kyoto in 1922. They named their neworganization the "Zen-Nihon Suiheisha" -- the "All-Japan Levelers." Obviously echoing theCommunist Manifesto, they urged their compatriots to "unite!" Within the group itself, young
anarchists and young Bolsheviks vied for control. Within a few years, the Bolsheviks had won.
The young intellectuals now declared that they -- the burakumin -- traced their ancestry toa pre-modern guild of leather workers. Marx had pronounced pre-1868 Japan "feudal," after all,and had explained that feudal societies had structured their economies through guilds (Minegishi
1996, 224-25). To be sure, during the Tokugawa period, some of the wealthier burakumin had
held lucrative village monopolies over the body parts of dead horses and cattle. In the early 20th
century, some of the poorer burakumin had joined poor non-burakumin in the foul-smelling
tanning factories.
Yet this focus on historical roots fundamentally misses the nature of the buraku. Put moststarkly, the burakumin were not impoverished because they were burakumin. Instead, otherJapanese called an impoverished neighborhood a buraku if a large fraction of its residents lived byheavily dysfunctional norms (Fujino 2009, 23-29). In turn, those residents were poor precisely
because they lived by those norms: they showed little interest in education, for example; took acavalier attitude toward work; gambled and drank heavily; adopted a cracker-style tendency topick fights; and showed a casual approach to sexual liaisons, along with an associated tendency togive birth to children outside marriage.
1112

2. The criminals. -- Within a very few years, control over the Suiheisha passed from theBolshevik intellectuals to criminal entrepreneurs. Tellingly, in their own much broader
comparative work, political scientists Fearon and Laitin (2000, 869) find that "a necessary
11

Kyoto (1922, 3); Hasegawa (1927, 12-13, 17, 93-94, 102-03, 148); Takayama (2005, 199-204)

12

Watanabe (1977, 104, 114, 304); Mae (1975, 217-18, 204, 225); Saito & Oishi (1995, 67, 72, 120).

Ramseyer: Page 14
condition for sustained 'ethnic violence' is the availability of thugs (in most cases young men who
are ill-educated, unemployed or underemployed ... ) who can be mobilized." So too in Japan:
systematically, the criminal entrepreneurs within the buraku launched a violent shakedown
strategy that would last 80 years. They would accuse a business or government bureau of bias anddiscrimination. They would threaten -- and occasionally enforce -- brutal violence. And theywould settle for cash. Over the decades that followed, they would implement these shakedowns
on ever-increasing scale.
Chief architect of the shake-down strategy was a Fukuoka construction firm owner, Jiichiro
Matsumoto. When a rival contractor insisted in 1923 that Matsumoto share the customary cut of
the government contract they had rigged, Matsumoto's men beat the don of the rival contractor todeath. In 1927, Matsumoto would send a young man to Tokyo with a gun to assassinate the heir
to the Tokugawa dynasty. His ancestors had treated the burakumin too harshly, explained
Matsumoto. And when Matsumoto found himself in a dispute with a local army base, he set out
to settle the dispute with dynamite (Hasegawa 1927, 30, 39).
Matsumoto became head of the national Suiheisha in 1925. Almost immediately, local
Fukuoka firms reported burakumin accusing them of bias and discrimination -- and demanding
money. But Matsumoto's Suiheisha quickly realized that governments offered a softer target, andbegan to shift their shakedowns toward the public sector
The typical incident began with an insult on an elementary school playground. One childcalled a buraku child "eta." The buraku child's parents went to the other child's parents anddemanded an apology. Under Suiheisha leadership, however, the burakumin then went to thechildren's teacher and demanded an apology for not teaching the children properly. They
demanded an apology from the principal for not supervising the teachers properly. They demanded
an apology from the police for not maintaining order properly. And they then demanded anapology from the mayor for not supervising the principal and police appropriately -- and settled
for money.
13

14

D. The Result of the Invented Identity:
As the Suiheisha expanded its shakedown strategy, mainstream Japanese responded withstatistical discrimination: by avoiding burakumin when they could. Businesses that had earlier
employed burakumin, reported the Kyoto police, refused to hire them any longer. Some firms told
their employees they faced financial constraints and would need to close. They laid off all of theiremployees, waited a short while, and then restarted the business after rehiring only their nonburaku employees (Kyoto 1924, 258-60).
As the shakedown strategy and the responsive statistical discrimination grew, burakumin
who had earlier stayed within their communities began to leave. In Figure 1, I use 13 censuses ofthe buraku population from 1868 to 1993. I then index buraku and overall Japanese populations
by 100 as of 1922. From 1868 to about 1936, the buraku population grew in tandem with that of
the rest of the Japanese population.
[Insert Figure 1 about here.]
15

13

Takayama (2005, 46, 144-47); Buraku (1987, 74); Fukuoka (2003, 68).

14

Hasegawa (1927, 43-45); Takayama (2005, 182-98, 203); Fukuoka (2003, 68).

15

I omit the 1942 census as an obvious outlyer. See Ramseyer (2019).

Ramseyer: Page 15
After 1923, successful burakumin started to find other districts in which to live. As
Matsumoto's criminal elite commandeered the Suiheisha and embarked on its ever more aggressive
criminal strategy, the more functional burakumin started to leave. As long as "buraku" had simply
referred to communities with relatively higher fractions of dysfunctional families, they had foundno need to leave. They had stayed, and helped provide the leadership that the buraku would haveneeded to thrive.
Once Matsumoto and the Suiheisha elite adopted the shakedown strategy that triggered
statistical discrimination in response, matters changed. Now, burakumin with the talent andbehavioral norms necessary to survive in the majority society left. The shakedowns had put the tie
between the buraku and violent crime front and center of the public discussion. Those majority
Japanese who were unable to distinguish accurately the criminal burakumin from the non-criminal
began to rely on burakumin status as an observable correlated variable. Necessarily, thoseburakumin with lower-than-mean levels of criminal proclivity found it advantageous to leave.
After the Second World War, the BLL (as the Suiheisha's successor organization) pushed
the shakedown strategy to increasingly violent levels. Within a few years, it had extracted
generous subsidy programs from local municipal and prefectural governments. BLL leaders
quickly realized, though, that they could only redistribute so much from their neighbors. To
capture larger rents, they needed to tap the national fisc.
In 1969, the BLL obtained that national subsidy program. It obtained much of the moneyin the form of construction projects. Here, the BLL intimidated -- again, through violence andthreats of violence -- local governments into delegating to it the power to allocate those contracts(Nakahara 1988, 128-29; Ichinomiya & Group K21 2013, 96-97, 270). Sometimes, local BLL
leaders would buy the land for a project and then resell it to the government at massively inflated
levels (Kadooka 2012, 85-86; Asahi 1982). Often, they would also form a shell firm that would
partner with an actual construction firm, award that partnership the contract, take a cut of the funds
through their shell firm, and leave the actual firm to do the construction.
The collateral consequences were huge. The Japanese mob -- the yakuza -- have long beenmajority buraku institutions. The BLL leadership during this period overlapped with the mob
membership, and the mob grew massively during the years of the ethnic subsidies. For highschool age males, the subsidies changed the relative returns to legal and illegal careers. Given themoney in the subsidies, buraku teenage boys found it more attractive to drop out of school and join
the mob. They found it less attractive to stay in school, leave the neighborhood for college, andmigrate into the legal sector.
Ironically perhaps, the massive buraku-specific subsidies induced mainstream firms to join
the buraku as well. Rather than remain part of the Japanese majority, they began appointing
burakumin to senior corporate offices and bribing BLL officials to certify their buraku status. Dulycertified, they could share in the buraku-specific subsidies.
Much the same thing happened with tax administration. In 1967, 400 burakumin arrived
at the Osaka tax office. They accused the tax office of discrimination, and demanded new policies.
More specifically, they terrorized the tax office until it agreed not to audit any return certified by
16

17

18

See generally Ichinomiya & Group K21 (2012, 83-84, 125, 238-39; 2013, 271-72); Mori (2009);
Nakahara (1988, 28-44).
16

17

Keisatsu Hakusho (1989); Kadooka (2012, 20); Miyazaki & Otani (2000, 73).

18

Mori (2009, 78, 180-83); Kadooka (2012, 96).

Ramseyer: Page 16
the BLL. Again, mainstream firms began bribing the BLL to certify them as part of buraku. The
chance for successful tax fraud, in other words, made it worth their while to join the buraku.
In effect, the subsidies grew the mob and induced teenage boys to stay in the buraku. For
young men, the subsidies shifted the relative returns to legal and illegal careers. When thesubsidies increased after 1969, more young men found it advantageous to drop out of school andjoin the mob. When the government finally stopped the subsidies in 2002, more young men seemto choose to stay in school, leave for university, and join a mainstream firm. The mob, in turn,
atrophied. Steadily its numbers shrank: from 91,000 in 1991 to 46,900 in 2015. As it shrank, itaged. By 2015, only 5 percent of the members of the yakuza were under age 40.
1920

E. Summary:As the 19th century drew to a close, Japanese still used the term buraku (and its various
alternatives) loosely. They called a neighborhood a buraku if its members were poor, if they
avoided work, if they drank too much, gambled, picked fights, regularly switched sex partners,
and raised their children outside marriage. In 1922, several Marxist intellectuals from theseneighborhoods declared themselves heirs to a pre-modern leather working guild. They created an
ethnic group where none had existed before. Soon, criminal entrepreneurs ousted the intellectuals
and began using claims of bias to extort increasing amounts of money from firms, municipal andprefectural governments, and eventually the nation. Through their control over the allocation of
those funds, they then manipulated the process to their private gain.
Self-appointed elites within a vulnerable population, in other words, had invented an ethnic
identity. They weaponized it to extract massive rents to themselves. And in the process, theygenerated statistical discrimination that left the group subject to far greater prejudice than everbefore.
The criminal elites had been able to do this because the other members of the group lacked
the resources and ties to monitor and constrain each other. Given the resulting statistical
discrimination, those burakumin able to live their lives according to mainstream Japanese norms
left. As the subsidies ballooned, however, other burakumin increasingly found it advantageous tostay. Indeed, to capitalize on the subsidies, young men increasingly dropped out of school, joined
the mob, and stayed in the buraku. Only with the end of the subsidies in 2002 did the process
begin to reverse itself
IV. The Resident Koreans
A. Introduction:
The history of the Korean residents in Japan resembles the buraku history -- but with selfappointed leaders who substituted idiosyncratic political goals for economic rents. Koreans had
begun to migrate to Japan in the 1920s. They were poor, they were single, they were male, they
had no education, and they did not intend to stay long. As one might expect given thosecharacteristics, they maintained low levels of social capital and committed crimes at high rates.
After the war, a self-appointed core of opportunists took control of the largely inchoate
immigrant population. But where the buraku leaders took control to generate subsidies to divert
to their private accounts, the Korean leaders manipulated their inchoate population for their private
political goals. The self-appointed Korean leaders were communist. Together with the Japan
19

Buraku (1978, 106-26); Ichinomiya & Group K21 (2013, 34); Nakahara (1988, 147); Kadooka (2012, 92).

20

Keisatsu, Heisei 27 (2015, 2); Kadooka (2009, 113-14).

Ramseyer: Page 17
Communist Party (JCP), they drafted young Korean residents for a second front to the Korean War
within Japan. After the war, they continued to maintain their control, and for several decades sent
people and money to North Korea.
Like the BLL, the Korean communists generated statistical discrimination toward theirgroup in response. And as they did, those Koreans best adapted to modern Japanese society left.
Some adopted Japanese nationality. Others married Japanese men and women and raised children
who chose Japanese nationality.
B. The Japanese Interest in Korea:
As the 19th century drew to a close, the Korean peninsula was poor. The northern half ofthe peninsula held more by way of a potential industrial base than the south. But entrepreneurs had
not yet made the investments necessary to exploit those resources effectively. The southern half
was better suited to agriculture. But farmers had not yet made the technological changes thatwould double production by 1940.
The Joseon dynasty had governed the peninsula since the 14th century. Yet the dynasty
was weak, and presented an easy target to a rapidly modernizing Japan. In 1894-95, Japan fought
China and won. In the ensuing treaty, it demanded that China renounce any claims it had on
Korean tribute. In 1904-05, Japan fought Russia and won. This time, it demanded that Russia
recognize Japan's influence over Korea. Five years later (1910), it formally annexed the peninsula.
Koreans were now Japanese citizens, and Japan would administer the peninsula through a Tokyoappointed governor general.
21

C. Pre-war Immigration:
1. Where Koreans went. -- As soon as they acquired Japanese citizenship, Koreans began
to emigrate to Japan. In 1910, 2,200 Koreans lived in Japan (Table 1). By 1925, 130,000 lived
there. By 1930 298,000 Koreans lived in Japan, and by 1940 the number had soared to 1.2 million.
[Insert Table 1 about here.]
Koreans moved to Japan for the money. There were jobs in Japan, and the jobs paid well.
In 1930, unemployment in Korea stood at 12.5 percent. Within Japan, it was 5.9 percent. By 1937,
Korean unemployment had fallen to 10.1 percent in the cities and 7.3 percent in the countryside.
In Japan, it had fallen to 3.6 percent in the cities and 0.5 percent in the countryside (I 2018, 21).
For this work, Japanese firms paid higher wages. In 1923. the average Osaka wage in 1923 was
1.54 yen per day. In Korea it was 0.91 yen (Miki 1933, 45).
The Korean migrants came overwhelmingly from the southern coastal provinces. Fromthe port of Pusan on the Korean southern coast to Fukuoka on the northern coast of the Japaneseisland of Kyushu was all of 120 miles. In Fukuoka, Koreans would encounter a thriving industrial
community with a large coal mining sector. In these mines, the young men off the Korean farms
found high-paying (if dangerous) work they could not locate at home (Rekishi 2015, 33; I 2018,50).
In 1922, a Japanese firm launched a ferry service to Osaka from Jeju, a large island off thesouthern coast of Korea. The second largest city in Japan, Osaka was home to a boomingcommercial and industrial economy. Young men from Jeju now began arriving in large numbers(Park 2017, 22; Rekishi 2015, 33). From these initial stops in northern Kyushu and Osaka, manyof them would continue their eastward move in search of ever-better jobs (I 2018, 50-53).
21

Kanmei & Mizoguchi (2000, 28); Lee (1986); Cumings (1984).

Ramseyer: Page 18
Sometimes, the Korean immigrants settled in what had been buraku neighborhoods. Afterall, burakumin lived in urban slums and the newly arrived Korean immigrants needed cheap
housing. Northern Kyushu and Osaka both had traditionally contained large burakumin areas.
Indeed, in 1935 10.4 percent of all burakumin lived in Osaka, and 22.9 percent of the Korean
immigrants. Both groups also lived in the nearby prefectures of Kyoto and Hyogo (home of Kobe),
and in the northern Kyushu prefecture of Fukuoka.
Beyond those broad parallels, however, the geographical overlap largely disappears.
Outside of Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo and Fukuoka, the Korean immigrants settled mostly in
prefectures without major burakumin populations. What is more, within those cities that did haveboth buraku and Korean settlements, the two groups sometimes lived in different neighborhoods.
Table 2 compares the residential patterns of the 1935 Korean and burakumin populations in Osaka.
The burakumin lived primarily in Asahi, Naniwa, and Nishinari. Although many Koreans lived
there too, they also lived in a wide range of other places as well. Similarly, Akio Takano (2009)
studied pre-war Kyoto. Although both burakumin and Koreans lived in the city, he found that theytended to live in different parts. Having been in Kyoto many decades, the burakumin lived inslums close to city center. The Koreans arrived later, and found housing in slums farther out(Takano 2009, 30).
[Insert Table 2 about here.]
Destitute Koreans did not move just to Japan. Instead, they fanned out widely across northeast Asia. As of 1935, 626,000 Koreans lived in Japan, but 792,000 lived in north-east China (I2018, 26). About 200,000 lived in the eastern USSR (Chosen 1933, 290). Increasingly, Koreansalso settled in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. With its own plans for the area, the Japanese
government encouraged the moves. It subsidized the Korean migration, and actively taught
Korean immigrants modern farming techniques (Chosen 1933, 188).
2. Which Koreans came. -- Unfortunately, the young Korean men who moved to Japanbrought neither the work skills nor the education required in the rapidly industrializing country.
The new factories needed workers who came to work every day. They needed workers who arrived
at the same time of day, who put in steady effort, and who moved the product along expeditiously.
These were not habits of life that pre-modern peasants needed on the farm, and they were nothabits that the young Koreans (raised as they were on premodern farms) necessarily brought either(Miki 1933, 43).
What is more, many Koreans could neither read nor calculate. Even as late as 1939, 58
percent of the Korean immigrants were entirely illiterate. By contrast, already in 1897 67 percent
of Japanese elementary-age children were in school, and by 1902 that figure had reached 92
percent (Ogasawara 1979, 60).
Because of the Korean lack of work skills and education, Japanese employers avoided
Koreans when they could. Many larger factories found that they could not profitably integrate
Korean workers even at wages lower than those they paid their Japanese employees (Niii 1927,42). Smaller factories were willing to hire Koreans at those lower wages, but still complained that
the Koreans were irresponsible and unwilling to exert effort. As a result, the average Japanese
worker in Osaka in 1923 earned 2.02 yen per day. The average Korean worker earned 1.54 yen(Miki 1933, 45; see also Niii 1927, 43).
22

22

Naimu sho, Shakai (1939, 892); see also Naimu sho (1938, 933).

Ramseyer: Page 19
The Koreans in Japan were not just young; they were also transient. Very few of themplanned to settle in Japan. Instead, they came for the high wages, sent money back to Korea, andreturned after a few years. Necessarily, they did not try to adopt Japanese norms, invest in thesociety, or integrate themselves into the local community. Instead, they earned what they could,
and left.
Although the total Japan-resident Korean population in Table 1 shows a steady increase,
the total misleads. Turn instead to Table 3. In 1921, 38,000 Koreans moved to Japan, but 26,000
returned to Korea; in 1925 131,000 Koreans moved to Japan, but 112,000 returned to Korea; andso it continued throughout the pre-war period. Over the course of the 1920s, the total in Japan rosefrom 39,000 to 298,000, but in any given year, somewhere between 62 percent to 113 percent of
the number who came to Japan that year left to go back.
[Insert Table 3 about here.]
3. What Koreans did. -- Young single men are a high-crime demographic in most societies,
and they were a high-crime demographic in Japan. Overwhelmingly, the first Korean immigrants
to Japan were male. Of the 148,000 Koreans in Japan in 1927, for example, 121,000 were men(Niii 1927, 3). In 1932, more than twice as many Korean men as women still lived in Japan, andeven in 1938 the ratio stood at 150 percent (Table 4). At least when they initially arrived, theKoreans were also young. Of the 36,000 Korean men in 1920, 5,300 were age 15-19, 11,500 are
20-24, 8,400 were 25-29, 5,000 were 30-34, and only 2,100 were 35-39 (Somu sho, Kokusei 1920).
[Insert Table 4 about here.]
Predictably given the preponderance of transient young men, the Koreans in Japan
committed crimes at very high rates. To consider the 1930s, take Table 4. In 1932, the arrest rate
for Japan-resident Koreans (all crimes) was 9.06 percent. For Japanese, the rate was 1.75 percent.
In 1938, the arrest rate among Koreans was 5.48 percent. Among Japanese, it was 1.73 percent.
For the generally more serious Criminal Code crimes, the Korean rate during the period ranged
from 5.37 percent (1932) to 3.17 percent (1938). In 1937, the Korean rate was 3.25 (1937); theJapanese rate was 0.43 percent.
The higher rates of Korean crime did not just appear in arrests; they also appeared insentencing. Per 100,000 population, the sentencing rate for Criminal Code Crimes among Japanresident Koreans in 1921 was 595. This was higher than the comparable rate both among Korean
men in Korea, and among Japanese men in Japan: among Korea-resident Korean men the rate was
126; among Japan-resident Japanese men it was 280.
The transient young Koreans engaged in a wide range of opportunistic behavior beyond
the crimes reflected in these rates. Within the housing market, they behaved in ways that sooncaused Japanese to avoid renting units to Koreans whenever they could. Some tensions werepredictable, of course. One would expect urban Japanese landlords to find the much poorer young
Korean peasant men prone to habits they considered unsanitary, and so they did. One would expect
some young men surreptitiously to sublease their unit to a large number of other young men, andso they did. And one would expect the young men to drink heavily, brawl, make massive noise,and so they did.
But the Korean men also adopted straightforwardly opportunistic strategies in this housing
market. Sometimes, the young Korean men built shacks on land without permission. Ordered by
23

23

Miki (1933, 54); Shiho kenkyu 17 (xx, 211, 214-15); Naimu sho (1938, 931); Chosen (1933, 203).

Ramseyer: Page 20
the owner to leave, they refused. At other times, they promised to pay rent, reneged, and refused
to leave. Worse, they sometimes deliberately created a nuisance and still refused (Miki 1933, 55).
The Korean men agreed to leave only if the landlord paid massive amounts in cash. The
more ambitious even turned tenancy itself into a job of sorts. They rented strings of apartments
never intending to pay rent or even to live long-term in any of them. Instead, they took each unit
solely in order to extract a large cash payment in exchange for leaving. Toward that end, theymight deliberately create a nuisance. They might sublease the unit to 10 or more other Koreans.
They might hang signs offering to lease the unit to other Koreans. If an owner complained, theyaccused him of discrimination and demanded even more cash.
24

25

26

4. Terrorism. -- On March 1, 1919 and the days and weeks following, Koreans took to the(Korean) streets in large protests. They wanted independence from Japan. Within a month, selfproclaimed Korean leaders organized a government-in-exile in Shanghai.
The most militant of the anti-Japanese Koreans divided themselves into terrorist andsaboteur squads. Operating out of Beijing and elsewhere, they orchestrated a series of bombingsand attacks against Japan. Most of these they carried out on the Korean peninsula. But not all.
By the early 1920s, militantly anti-Japanese Koreans were plotting in Japan with Japanese
anarchists and communists (Miki 1933, 481; Chosen 1933, 28). Over time, the Shanghai-based
government-in-exile would itself turn communist as well (Miki 1933, 445).
In 1920, militants tried to assassinate the Korean crown prince in Japan. They thought him
too pro-Japanese, and planned to kill his Japanese wife-to-be and the Japanese governor generalof Korea too. Police foiled all three assassinations. In 1921, assassins did successfully kill Min
Won-sik in Tokyo. The journalist and politician had pushed for Korean rights, but extremists
thought him too moderate. In 1922, militants tried to assassinate Japanese army general (andeventual prime minister) Giichi Tanaka in Shanghai.
In mid-1923, Korean anarchist Pak yol and his Japanese lover Fumiko Kaneko apparently(some historians dispute the charge) plotted to kill the Japanese crown prince (later Showaemperor). A Japanese anarchist would indeed shoot (but not kill) the crown prince in December
1923. But on September 3, the police arrested Pak and Kaneko, and eventually charged them withattempted regicide.
D. The Earthquake:
On September 1, 1923, a massive earthquake hit the greater Tokyo area. At magnitude 7.9(Richter scale), the shock toppled buildings and smashed homes. Together with the resulting fires,the quake destroyed 40 percent of Tokyo and left 60 percent of its residents homeless. One hundred
five thousand people died or disappeared across the plain. The death toll was particularly highwithin the crowded slums where most Koreans lived.
27

24

Naimu sho (1938, 1025); Miki (1933, 57); Shiho kenkyu 17 (xx, 215).

25

Miki (1933, 58, 254); Shiho kenkyu 17(xx, 213)

26

Shiho kenkyu 17 (xx, 217); Naimu sho (1938, 1024).

27

Naikaku fu, Saigai (2005); Yoshida (2016, 205); Tsuchida (xxxx, 61).

Ramseyer: Page 21
1. Korean sabotage? -- Three hours after the earthquake, survivors began to hear rumors ofmarauding Korean gangs. The Koreans torched buildings, people said. They planted bombs, they
poisoned water supplies, they murdered, they pillaged, they raped.
Korean militants had moved up a planned terrorist attack, reported the newspapers. The
Kahoku shimpo newspaper detailed a confession taken from a Korean caught carrying a bomb
(Kahoku 1923a, 1923b). He and other activists, he said, had planned a massive terrorist attack on
the wedding of the crown prince (later the Showa emperor) scheduled for that fall. In the face ofthe earthquake, they had accelerated their plans.
For the fires that broke out after the earthquake, Korean leftists took credit. In Shanghai,
they celebrated the disaster. "When told the theories about the violence by anti-social Koreans,"
reported the Korean Governor General's office (Chosen sotoku 1923a), the leftists "found thetheories reasonable." Indeed, they forthrightly claimed responsibility. According, again, to theGovernor General's office (Chosen sotoku 1923b):
Communists, along with the various labor groups organized by the communists,
observe that the harm from disaster was caused less by the earthquake than by theaccompanying fire. They then declare that their ideological compatriots lit the fires. Their
brothers lit the fires for the sake of revolution, they explain. They rejoice in their heroic
accomplishment, and look forward to the chance to participate themselves.
Newspapers reported a wide range of eyewitness accounts of Korean crime. To be sure,they competed in a world of yellow journalism, and modern Western historians apparently preferto believe none of this happened. Yet to take but a few examples, on September 3 the Osaka Asahi(1923a) newspaper reported that Korean mobs were advancing on Tokyo from neighboring
Yokohama, torching houses as they came. On September 4, it reported that the Korean mobs werecarrying explosives and oil (probably kerosene) as they ran through the city (Asahi 1923b).
Several Koreans, wrote a Nagoya paper, upon their arrest confessed to planning to blow up a train(Nagoya 1923). The Tokyo Nichi Nichi (1923) newspaper detailed first-hand accounts of Koreanarson, dynamite, and general rampage.
In the end, the government concluded that some Koreans had used the chaos to loot, burn,rape and poison, but far fewer than claimed in the rumors (Keibi 1923; Naito 1923). As the Korean
Governor General's office (Chosen sotoku N.D., 1923b) put it, the reports "were not without sometruth." They "had facts at their root," but became exaggerated in the course of their repetition.
28

2. Japanese massacres? -- Upon hearing these accounts of Korean sabotage, private security
bands began to scour the Kanto plain for Koreans gangs. The same sensationalist newspapers thatdetailed rampant Korean violence also repeated accounts of widespread Japanese slaughter. Here,western scholars seem happy to take the newspapers at face value. Peter Bates (2006, 17), Jinhee
Lee (2008, 206), Kazuhiro Abe (1983), Yoshiaki Ishiguro (1998, 332), and Miriam Silverberg(2005) each suggest Japanese bands killed 6,000-7,000 Koreans. In one article, anthropologist
Sonia Ryang claims that the Japanese patrols may have killed 10,000 (2003: 746 n.2; also Neff
2016). Elsewhere, she suggests 20,000 (Ryang 2007).
The newspapers report both Korean sabotage and Japanese slaughter. A century later, wehave little reason to think either set of accounts more reliable than the other. On October 20, 1923,
the Osaka Asahi newspaper actually reported both phenomena: that day, it published two articles
side by side -- in one, it detailed Koreans looting burned buildings and beating and killing anyone
28

Yoshida (2016, 230-32); for details of the rumors, see, e.g., Naikakufu (2005).

Ramseyer: Page 22
who blocked their way (Asahi 1923c); in the second, it detailed Japanese security squads
slaughtering 120 Koreans -- laborers, male and female students alike (Asahi 1923d).
The evidentiary morass that plagues any attempt to determine the scope of Korean sabotage
also plagues any attempt to determine the scope of the retaliatory murders. The earthquake andfire killed 100,000 people. Wherever they went, police officers found piles of dead bodies, mostof them badly burned.
The Ministry of Justice counted the Koreans it knew to have been murdered. In Novemberof 1923, it identified 231 Koreans murdered in the greater Tokyo area, and 59 Japanese mistaken
for Koreans and killed. For these murders, it prosecuted 325 Japanese. In December that year,
the police reported 422 killed in the general metropolitan area. In one account, the Korean
Governor General's office estimated the number of Koreans killed by the Japanese private security
squads at 300 (Zaikyo N.D.). In a second account (Chosen sotoku 1923b), it estimated the total
Koreans deaths from all causes at 832. It then suggested that 20-30 percent of those deaths werecaused by the security squads: a number in the range of 170 to 250.
Given the destruction and chaos of the post-earthquake days, the best a scholar can do is
calculate a plausible range. The minimum number is easy. The Japanese government limited its
counts of Korean sabotage to the most credible claims, and seems to have done the same with themurders of Koreans. If the police in December 1923 reported 400 Koreans killed, we can bereasonably sure that the security bands killed at least 400 Koreans.
The maximum is harder (I detail the calculations in Ramseyer 2019b). Start with thenumber of Koreans in the greater Tokyo area at the time of the earthquake. Historian Shoji
Yamada (2012-2013, 4) has done some of the most careful work on the topic. He concludes that
8,600 Koreans lived in Tokyo, 3,600 in Kanagawa, and another 1,900 nearby -- for a total 14,100
on the Kanto plain. Of the Tokyo Koreans, 1,000 to 3,000 were students. Some of them had not
yet returned from vacation.
Many Koreans died in the earthquake and fire. According to the Director General, about
4,000 Koreans laborers lived in the Honjo and Fukagawa wards (Chosen sotoku 1923b; NaikyoN.D.). The areas suffered an extraordinary casualty rate: about 20 percent (Keishi cho 1923). Ona Honjo Korean population of 4,000, that ratio yields a death toll of 800.
Once the rumors of the killings by the Japanese security squads began to circulate, thepolice took 5,000 to 9,000 Koreans into protective custody.
Shortly after the earthquake, the Japanese government helped about 7,000 Koreans fromthe Tokyo area return to Korea.
Now combine these numbers. Suppose 14,000 Koreans lived in the greater Tokyo area,that 1,000 students had not yet returned, and that 800 Koreans died in the fires. If police placed
7,000 in protective custody and helped them return to Korea, that leaves 5,200 Koreans as potential
murder victims. If the marauding gangs had successfully identified and killed every surviving
Korean not in police custody, in other words, they would have killed 5,200.
Apparently, the mobs killed more than 400 Koreans, and fewer than 5,200. Recall,however, the number of immigrants on Table 3. If Japanese mobs had slaughtered thousands of
29

30

31

32

29

Shiho sho (1923, 9-363 to -64, 9-374).

30

Keiho (1923, 6-187, 6-188); Goto (N.D.).

31

Chosen sotoku (1923b); Rikugun (1923); Shinkasai (1923); Koyagi (1923); Naimu sho (1923).

32

Kaigun (1923, 3-38, 3-41, 3-45 to 3-48, 3-57); Chosen sotoku kanbo (1923a, 1923b, 1924).

Ramseyer: Page 23
Korean immigrants, one might expect fewer Koreans to travel to Japan. In fact, however, after
1923 the number of Koreans coming to Japan does not fall, and the number returning to Korea
does not rise. Whatever happened in Tokyo, it seems not to have affected the eagerness of Koreans
to come to Japan.
E. Ideological Opportunism and Elite Control:
1. Politically selected immigration. -- A quarter-century after the earthquake, Japanresident Koreans would launch a decidedly real campaign of sabotage and terror. A quarter century
later, the exaggerated rumors of 1923 would start to come true.
The story begins with new, politically driven migration patterns. In South Korea, thestaunchly anti-communist Syngman Rhee came to power in 1948, and moved quickly to eliminate
his communist opposition. In turn, those domestic Korean politics would drive a distinctly
political pattern of cross-cutting migratory waves. Japan and South Korea were both capitalist
regimes, but Japan tolerated leftist dissent while Korea did not. Necessarily, apolitical Koreans inJapan were more likely than communists to return to South Korea. Conversely, communists inSouth Korea were more likely their apolitical compatriots to leave (albeit illegally, since Japan in1948 no longer allowed the immigration) for Japan.
At the close of the war in August 1945, 1.9 million Koreans lived in Japan. Most hadcome from the southern tip of the peninsula, and wanted to return. During the last four months ofthe year, 100,000 to 200,000 Koreans left Japan every month. As the months passed, however,Japan began a steady recovery. South Korea remained mired in chaos, and Kim Il-sung launched
his infamously brutal family dynasty in the north.
The political tensions turned to war in 1948. The fighting started on the Jeju island fromwhich so many Japan-resident Koreans had come. The anti-Japanese movement there had alreadyturned far-left before the war (Fujinaga 1999). On April 3, 1948, Jeju communists launched what
they hoped would become a people's revolution (Hyon 2016, 23-26). They attacked 12 police
stations, killed several dozen policemen, and then turned to families they thought sympathetic to
the government (Hyon 2016, 12).
The South Korean government responded brutally. Over the course of the next year,
according to modern accounts it slaughtered anyone on the island suspected of communist ties.
Estimates of the number it killed range from 15,000 to 60,000 -- this on an island with a populationof only 290,000. Given that the South Korean government suppressed news of the battle, theextent of the killing is hard to gauge (Zaishuto 2005). Almost immediately, however, surviving
Jeju leftists began to leave surreptitiously for Japan. Estimates range from 40,000 to 100,000(Osaka 2019; Ghosts 2000). Given that they migrated illegality, the number is hard to know. By
1957, barely 30,000 people still lived on the island (Zaishuto 2005)
33

34

35

Presumably, those Koreans drafted to Japanese factories and mines during the waning months of the war
would have been among the first to return. The recent controversy over "Korean forced labor," however, is amisnomer. Koreans were Japanese citizens, but had not been subject to a military draft. From 1939 to 1944, theJapanese government worked to recruit Koreans to positions left vacant by the Japanese it had drafted to the front -but there is no evidence that it recruited them forcibly. Only after September 1944 did it mobilize Koreans. As
Japanese citizens, Koreans were then "forced into labor," but no more than any other Japanese citizens. If Japaneseforced Koreans to come work in Japan between 1939 and 1944, there is no surviving evidence of this.
33

34

Sankei (2017, 109); Sasazaki (1955, 38-39); Ri (1980, 182).

35

Hyon (2016, 67); Choe (2019); Ghosts (2000).

Ramseyer: Page 24

2. The rise of the communist left. -- Consider the parallel to buraku history. Within theburaku, a criminal elite (i) invented an ethnic identity for a destitute and vulnerable population,and then (ii) manipulated that ethnic line as part of a brutal rent-seeking strategy. Among Japanresident Koreans, Communist refugees from Syngman Rhee's South Korea would soon (a) takecontrol over the most destitute and vulnerable of the Japan-resident Koreans, (b) use the group topromote their private political agenda, and then (c) build social institutions expressly to prevent
those vulnerable Koreans from migrating into mainstream Japanese society.
Quickly, communists commandeered the post-war Korean organizations within Japan.
Within that Japan-resident Korean world, Kim Chon-hae would play perhaps the most prominentrole. Kim had spent the war in a Japanese prison as a political prisoner, and upon release joined
the Central Committee of the JCP (Ri 1980, 3). As representatives of the Koreans in Japan
gathered in the fall of 1945 to form an encompassing organization, Kim maneuvered himself into
the role of "Supreme Adviser." From there, he and his allies purged the non-communists from thegroup's leadership, and brought it under the direct control of the JCP.
The violence began almost immediately. Police counted 5,000 violent incidents involving
50,000 Koreans in 1946 -- including violence against Japanese government agencies and the police.
The brutality ebbed for a few years, but police again counted massive violence in 1949 -- this time
involving 20,000 Koreans (Sasazaki 1955, 198-99, 205).
In 1950, the fringe-left Korean violence turned more aggressive still. That January, Stalinripped the JCP for insufficient militancy (Abe 31; Ko 2014, 154), and in June the North Koreanarmy invaded the south. Duly chastised, the JCP went underground and embarked on a multi-year
guerrilla campaign of terror and sabotage (Abe 32, 38). For its front line, it recruited Japanresident Koreans.
In effect, the JCP and its allied Japan-resident Koreans had started a second front of the
Korean War. The Koreans trained under surreptitiously infiltrated North Korean military officers(Sasazaki 1955, 101-03). They then attacked government offices. They set cars on fire with
Molotov cocktails. They turned to American military installations and personnel. They disrupted
munitions production for the Korean front, and the transportation of those munitions to the Korean
peninsula.
36

37

38

3. Communist control. -- The Koreans who arrived before the war had been poor andgenerally illiterate. Most of them had moved to Japan temporarily to make money, and thenreturned to Korea after several years. A few had stayed, however. Of those who did, the mostdestitute remained within their hermetic Korean world. Others acquired the information andresources necessary to thrive in Japan: they learned Japanese, adopted Japanese mores, took
Japanese names, sent their children to Japanese schools, and began to build their own thriving
businesses. At the close of the war, the Japan-resident Koreans comprised a range -- from theimpoverished families tied closely to their peasant roots, to the talented entrepreneurs moving
steadily into modern, urban, bourgeois Japan.

36

Sasazaki (1955, 50, 58); Ri (1980, 3); Ko (2014, 21); Sankei (2017, 11).

37

Sasazaki (1955, 4-9, 49, 102); Ri (1980, 16-21); Bando (2016,47)

38

Sasazaki (1955, 103); Bando (2016, 47); Suganuma (2015, 15, 24); Abe (xx, 35).

Ramseyer: Page 25
The communists moved quickly to try to control this distinctly heterogeneous Korean
world. Over the next several years the groups through which they operated would shift structureand names. Eventually, however, the key communist group took the name of Soren (Zai Nihon
Chosenjin so rengo kai). This group then targeted the most vulnerable of the Japan-resident
Koreans -- including the Koreans who still spoke the Korean language.
4. Out-migration. -- Those Japan-resident Koreans who had learned to make their way
within Japan would have none of this, of course. They created a rival organization that in time
would become the Mindan (Zai Nihon Daikan minkoku mindan). The Communists found it easiest
to dominate those Koreans who lacked the resources and talent to survive in Japan. The Mindan
catered to the Japan-resident Koreans who had largely forgotten their Korean (if they ever knewit), and could weather Japan on their own (Ko 2014, 54, 59).
Necessarily, the Mindan constituted a way-station along the path to full assimilation. Any
exclusively Soren-Mindan comparison ignores what would become the largest Korean group of
all: those who merged into Japanese society and disappeared from the ranks of Japan-resident
Koreans entirely. The Communists could successfully dominate the Koreans who lacked theresources and information to leave. Those who did acquire the resources and information joined
the Mindan, but (for many of them) only temporarily. As with the burakumin, those Koreans with
the intellectual and social skills necessary to merge into Japanese mainstream society disappeared.
Over time, they ceased to be Korean at all.
As Table 1 shows, the number of Japan-resident Koreans has steadily declined. Figure 1
shows that the Japanese population rose steadily during the half century after the war. During thissame period, the number of Koreans fell. This phenomenon loosely tracks the buraku as well:since 1931, the burakumin with the social and intellectual tools to join mainstream Japanesesociety have been migrating out of the buraku. So too with the Koreans: those with the tools thatbest prepare them for joining Japanese society have continued to leave.
5. Naturalization. -- Koreans who choose to become Japanese have two options. Most
obviously, they can naturalize and become Japanese citizens. Table 5 Panel A gives the dynamics.
From 1952 to 1990, 156,000 Koreans became naturalized Japanese citizens (Kim, Shin & Sonoda,
22).
[Insert Table 5 about here.]More commonly, Koreans marry Japanese. Their children will have dual citizenship, andvirtually all eventually choose to become Japanese. As table 5 Panel B shows, 80 to 90 percent ofyoung Koreans now marry Japanese.
39

6. The Soren schools. -- Within this world, Soren leaders designed a Korean school systemthat would strengthen the ethnic gulf between Koreans and Japanese. They designed andmaintained a school system that taught hard-edged suspicion and hostility toward Japan. It taught
less of the Japanese language and the scientific, economic, and mathematical skills that graduates
would need to thrive in modern Japan.
These Korean schools teach a curriculum ruthlessly tied to North Korean orthodoxy. Until
the 1960s, they apparently taught standard Marxist scholarship, much like many Japanese
universities at the time. In mid-1960s, however, Kim Il-sung's heir Kim Jong-il began to39

Zai Nihon (2018, 4, 132); Bando (xx, 87); Kim, Shin & Sonoda (xx, 22).

Ramseyer: Page 26
consolidate his power by creating an ideology centered on the Kim family. Soren and the NorthKorean-allied schools followed suit. Orthodox Marxists teaching at Soren's university left theschool. Their courses disappeared from the curriculum, the library discarded non-conforming
books, and remaining students and faculty met regularly for self-criticism (Sankei 2017, 40-42).
For Korean's within the Soren orb, the school system plays a central role. Should a childhesitate to attend Soren's university, his family could face serious pressure. The Soren might
ostracize the entire family. Should someone in the family work at Soren, he might find his very
job in jeopardy (Sankei 2017, 86-87).
Rather than Japanese jobs, the Soren schools prepare students primarily for positions at theSoren schools or within Soren itself. That said, they do also train their students and teachers to
spy for North Korea within Japan and South Korea (Sankei 2017, 131, 142-43). To celebrate theschool's own 60th anniversary in 2016, students and faculty read in unison a letter to Kim Jon-Un:
they pledged "fundamentally to correct the organization of thought ... within the university, [andto work] to destroy American and Japanese imperialism" (Sankei 2017, 63).
F. The Residual Dysfunction:
1. Out-migration. -- This selective migration into Japanese society explains the apparent
dysfunctionality of the world of Japan-resident Koreans. Here again, the Japan-resident Korean
population parallels the burakumin population: it represents the remainder -- those who lacked theresources and information to leave. Disproportionately, those Koreans who merged into thegeneral Japanese society were those with the social and intellectual resources necessary to thrivein competitive modern Japan. They had adopted standard Japanese mores. The modern statistics
about Korean dysfunction reflect instead the habits of life of those Koreans they left behind.
2. Dysfunction. -- For example, consider crime rates (measured by the number of people
sentenced by a court) by nationality in the late 1950s. The difference between Japanese and Japanresident Koreans was huge. Where the rate of sentencing for Japanese citizens for Criminal Codecrimes was 63.6 per 100,000 population, the rate for Koreans was 608. The murder rate forJapanese was 1.4. The rate for Koreans was 10.4.
Now turn to Table 6: the rate of crime (measured by arrests) by nationality in 2015. Japanresident Koreans still commit crimes at very high rates, though the difference between the Koreans
and Japanese is smaller than it was in 1958. Where the arrest rate for Japanese citizens for Criminal
Code crimes is 188 per 100,000, the rate for Japan-resident Koreans is 615. The murder rate forJapanese is 0.72. The rate for Japan-resident Koreans is 2.65 (see also Suganuma 2015, 5, 126).
[Insert Table 6 about here.]
Some of the pre-war real-estate problems have continued as well. Many areas of the cities
were devastated during the last years of the war. Into these areas, Koreans sometimes moved as
squatters and built homes. When the owners reappeared and demanded their land back, some
Koreans refused. They demanded money before they would leave.
As the years passed and Japan grew richer, Japanese citizens began to notice the remaining
Korean squatter neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were not just illegal. They were also areasof high crime. During the amphetamine and heroin epidemics in the 1950s, they were areas of
40

41

40

Homu sho (1960); see Kaneda (2018, 42); Bando (2016, 137).

41

Umeda (2017); Osaka ekimae (2008); Bando (2016, 39).

Ramseyer: Page 27
drug sales. They presented health problems and fire hazards. Again, however, the Koreans
typically left only after extracting financial payments (Motooka 2007a; 2007b).
As the Japanese economy began to recover, Japanese voters also noticed a large fractionof resident Koreans on public assistance. Indeed, as Table 7 shows, the fraction of Koreanhouseholds on welfare could be twenty times the fraction for Japanese households.
[Insert Table 7 about here.]In truth, however, this was not something Japanese "noticed." Rather, during the 1950s,
the resident Korean associations had aggressively demanded the public assistance, and had
sometimes negotiated applications as a group (Higuchi 2002, 183). The Ministry of Public
Welfare attributed the resulting high Korean dependency rate to "violent group-based
intimidation." It counted close to 10,000 cases of intimidation connected to welfare applications(Higuchi 2002, 184). Indeed, in some cases the Japan-resident Koreans arrived in the welfare
office en masse, and beat officials who hesitated to enroll them in the program.
Today, the fraction of Koreans on welfare remains high. According to Table 7, it is higheven compared to other immigrants. In 2017, 3.1 percent of all Japanese were on public assistance.
Of the Japan-resident Koreans, 15.1 percent remained on it.
42

43

3. Repatriation. -- Soren leaders showed their ruthless character most clearly, perhaps, inthe way they encouraged their rank-and-file to emigrate to North Korea. Recall that its
membership constituted the least socialized of the Japan-resident Koreans, and that the Soren
leaders had designed the Korean schools precisely to prevent that socialization. This made its
rank-and-file the most ill-informed of anyone, and a group with no outside options.
Soren leaders encouraged these members to move to North Korea. North Korea wanted
them because it needed foreign exchange. Once a Japan-resident Korean had arrived in the North,
he began writing a stream of letters to his family in Japan pleading with them to send him funds.
He wrote the letters under duress -- he was starving, after all, and escape was hard. Eventually,
about 200 did manage to escape and return to Japan (Zai Nihon 2018, 83; Sankei 2017, 115), but
the rest remained as hostages for the rest of their lives.
The first ship bound for North Korea with Japan-resident Koreans (and sometimes their
Japanese spouses and children) left in December 1959. That year, 2,942 people travelled fromJapan to Korea. The number soared to 49,036 in 1960, and 22,801 in 1961. Thereafter, thenumbers fell to under 4,000 per year. Still, in 1972 Soren leaders sent 200 of its university students
to the North on one-way tickets. North Korea had ordered them to send the students in honor of
Kim Il-sung's 60th birthday, and school leaders had complied (Sankei 2017, 36, 43). The final
boat for North Korea -- the 186th ship -- did not leave until 1984. By then 93,339 Japan-resident
Koreans and family members had moved to North Korea.
Soren leaders sent their members despite knowing that North Koreans viewed theimmigrants suspiciously, and consigned them to very lowest rungs of their brutally fixed social
ladder (Sankei 2017, 116). By the terms of the agreement between Japan and the North, eachmigrant could take only 45,000 yen in English pounds. When they left Japan, the emigrants
44

42

Yomei (2016, 108-09); see Bando (xx); Higuchi (2002, 185-86).

43

Sakurai (2017, 128-29); see Kaneda (2018, 31-35); Bando (xx).

44

Zai Nihon (2018); Kim, Shin & Sonoda (xx, 22); Ko (2014, 169-70); Sankei (2017, 114).

Ramseyer: Page 28
entrusted the rest of their assets to the Soren. Soren, in turn, treated the assets as a donation (Ko2014, 171; Sankei 2017, 115).
G. Koreans in Japan:
The Koreans in pre-war Japan had constituted a vulnerable group. They were poor, badly
educated, and often unable to speak Japanese. As the post-war South Korean government
increased its pressure on the communist opposition, many of the Korean communists left for Japan.
There, they commandeered the Korean groups that preyed on the most destitute of their Japanresident compatriots. Using those Koreans as their military force, they opened a second front to
the Korean War within Japan itself. For much of the remainder of the 20th century, they
maintained a school system designed expressly to prevent the children of the Korean communityfrom acquiring the social, intellectual, and linguistic skills they would need to move into the worldof modern Japan.
The self-appointed burakumin leaders had manipulated the group for their private
economic gain. The self-appointed Korean leaders manipulated the group toward their private
political goals. In both cases, the leaders generated statistical discrimination toward the groups asa whole. They were able to take control because the groups so lacked social capital that members
were not able to constrain those who would purport to act on their behalf. In both cases, statistical
discrimination then drove the out-migration of the members best adapted to the majority Japaneseenvironment. The group-specific preferences may have slowed the out-migration of theburakumin; given the absence of any preferences, Koreans left their community at a faster pace.
V. Okinawa
A. Introduction
A string of 360-some islands off the southern coast of Kyushu, Okinawa (also known as
the Ryukyu islands) is home to 1.43 million citizens. It is also home to 47,000 American military
personnel and families, and a tourist industry that brings 8 million visitors a year. From the northeastern most island to the southwestern end, the prefecture stretches 600 miles.
The prefectural capital of Naha is now an easy flight from any number of mainland airports.
Prior to the 19th century, it was obviously more secluded. From the 15th to 19th centuries, thelocal Sho dynasty ruled the islands, while the Satsuma fief on Kyushu claimed nominal sovereignty.
During the same period, the dynasty also paid tribute to the Ching dynasty in Beijing. The
Japanese government made the islands one of the prefectures in the late 19th century.
As a whole, Okinawans do not constitute an underclass. On a wide variety of dimensions,however, they score very low on social capital (Ramseyer 2015). The poorest Okinawans are
extremely poor, unemployment is high, divorces and non-marital births are common, education isbad, and inequality is high.
The U.S. has maintained the Futenma marine airbase in the middle of the city of Ginowan
since the end of the war. In 1952, Ginowan was a small town. It no longer is, and the airbase
remains in the center. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called it "the most dangerous basein the world" (Lummis, 2018), and Okinawan residents generally agree. Under local pressure, theU.S. and Japanese governments agreed to move the base to the much more secluded Henoko.
Twenty-three years later, the airport remains in the middle of Ginowan. Like theburakumin and resident Koreans, Okinawans lack control over their own elites. For reasons of
economic returns, those local elites fight base relocation militantly. For reasons of visceral antiAmericanism, fringe-left mainland activists fly to Okinawa to help.

Ramseyer: Page 29

B. Identity Politics:
1. The invention of an Okinawan identity. -- Japan "should expressly recognize ...
Ryukyu/Okinawa as indigenous peoples in domestic legislation," declared the U.N. Human Rights
Committee. It should "adopt special measures to preserve and promote their cultural heritage andtraditional way of life, and recognize their land rights." Over and over again, the committee has
pushed Japan to "recognize" Okinawans as an "indigenous people" (Nakamura 2018a, 226-27).
It is pressure that activists on the Japanese mainland celebrate. And celebrate it they should,
as they engineered the pressure themselves. Already in 1945, Kyuichi Tokuda emerged fromprison to take control of the Japan Communist Party. Okinawans, he promptly announced, "werea minority people who were historically exploited." They should fight for independence (Megumi
2011, 137-38). Half a century later, modern activists on the mainland import "woke" American
rhetoric to describe the country as mired in "structural discrimination." That institutional racism
targets the burakumin, they declare, the resident-Koreans, the Okinawans.
For example, Daisuke Minami (N.D.) writes that Japan must confront "the colonial historyof the Ryukyu islands and the violation of the Okinawans rights as an indigenous people." Afterall, he continues, "[i]ndigenous rights matter a great deal to Okinawans because they are
indigenous peoples and the concentration of U.S. bases is one instance of violation of their rights."
To economist Koji Taira (1997, 142) the "indigenous people of the Ryukyu Islands are ethnicallydistinct." They are "the largest minority group" among the "several groups of people ethnicallydistinct from the majority Japanese." Mainland Japanese, he writes, treat them "somewhere
between the former outcastes, the Eta," and "full-fledged membership in the nation-family."
The BLL-affiliated "International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination andRacism (IMADR) continues to lobby the U.N. committee hard. The U.N. must condemn Japanese"racism" against the burakumin, it announces. To buttress it's claim, it describes that "racism" asrelentless and pervasive: it does not just target the burakumin; it targets Japan-resident Koreans
and the indigenous Okinawans to boot.
In turn, activist Yasukatsu Matsushima (2018) adopts strategies related to the American
Indians, and invokes indigenous religious sanctity. The University of Kyoto museum contained askeleton of a pre-modern Okinawan. To honor that indigenous religion, he pressured thegovernment and university to "return" the skeleton to Okinawa. Befitting a modern activist, hethen wrote a book about it all.
Western scholars champion the BLL claims about the buraku, and they champion theclaims of the Okinawan activists. "Okinawans were pressed to follow a path of self-negation,
casting aside their distinctive language and culture," write Gavan McCormack & Satoko
Norimatsu (2012, 7). When the U.S. returned sovereignty over Okinawa to Japan in 1972, it was
45

46

47

48

U.N. Human Rights Committee, 94th Session, Geneva, 30 October 2008, CCPR/C/JPN/CO/5, Concluding
Observations of the Human Rights Committee; for a more recent committee statement to the same effect, see U.N.
Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Concluding Observations on the Combined Tenth andEleventh Periodic Reports of Japan, CERD/C/JPN/Co/10-11, Sept. 26, 2018; see generally Matsushima (2018, 219).
45

46

E.g., Sato (2016a, 2016b); Okubo & Shinohara (2015, 200).

47

Taira (1997, 143), quoting Kerr (1958, 448).

E.g., IMADR, Joint Written Statement submitted to the Human Rights Council, 31st Session, UN General
Assembly, A/HRC/31/NGO/97,. 19 Feb. 2016; see also Tomoki (no date).
48

Ramseyer: Page 30
for Okinawans "a day of humiliation." Never mind that Okinawans seemed to celebrate the return.
McCormack & Norimatsu (2012, 2) continue:[Their] ancestors a century ago spoke languages distinct from Japanese, that is, separate
languages rather than dialects, and five of which, still spoken today, especially on the
outlying islands, are recognized by UNESCO as either 'endangered' or 'severely
endangered.'
Explains McCormack (2014), the dispute over the American bases in Okinawa (discussed below)
is nothing less than "the struggle for colonial liberation, democracy, human rights and the rule oflaw ...."
2. The science of the identity. -- For their claim that Okinawan residents constitute a
distinct "indigenous people," activists will not find much support in science. Dialect, separate
language -- McCormack and Norimatsu stress the distinction. But then again, "a language is adialect with an army and navy," as linguist Max Weinreich famously put it.
Stripped of technical detail, the scientific consensus -- based on genetic, linguistic, carbondating, and a wide variety of other evidence -- goes something like the following. The first groupto settle Japan in large numbers arrived 12,000 to 20,000 years ago (Omoto 1996, 133; Saito 2017,
8-9, 70-72). At the time, the Japanese islands were part of a landmass that extended northward
into eastern Siberia, and the settlers simply walked. They were hunter-gatherers, and eventually
settled the entire archipelago (Omoto 1996, 156). Archeologists describe their pottery as "Jomon."Sometime around 300 B.C.E. or perhaps a bit later, a second wave of settlers arrived. This
group too may have come from eastern Siberia, though some scholars point to the Korean
peninsula instead (Omoto 1996, 156). They brought with them wet rice agriculture, and a
distinctive "Yayoi" style pottery. They settled the bulk of the Japanese islands, and intermarried
with the Jomon population (Omoto 1996, 133, 139, 159; Saito 2017, 8-9).
Traces of the earlier Jomon culture, however, remained in the least accessible regions. The
Ainu in the northeast, the residents of the distant Okinawan islands to the southwest, and the fishingcommunities on other small inaccessible islands all retain traces of the distinctively Jomon genetic
formula and linguistic patterns. Given the enormous distance from the Japanese mainland to
Okinawa, one would expect there to have been less contact between two groups of residents thanamong people living in neighboring mainland regions, and so there was. The Okinawan capital of
Naha is almost equi-distant from Kagoshima on the southern tip of Kyushu to Taibei on thenorthern coast of Taiwan. Because of this distance, one would expect there to have been lessintermarriage with the Yayoi farmers. One would expect there to have been less linguistic
similarity.
And so the studies indicate. Okinawans do show genetic and linguistic patterns that differ
from those of the mainland. And yet, the Okinawan patterns remain closer to those of the Japanese
mainland than to people anywhere else (Matsumoto 1992). More specifically, they are closer toother Japanese than to the Koreans. They are closer to other Japanese than to the Chinese.
Linguist Thomas Pellard (2015, 31; see also Hudson 2007) explains the origins of what is
now the language on Okinawa: "we can say that the Ryukyuan languages form a sister branch ofJapanese and that their ancestor separated from Japanese probably during the first centuries CE."He continues (id.):49

On studies based on genotypes, see Yamaguchi-Kabata, et al. (2008); Hugo (2009); on virus carrier
patterns, see Hinuma (1998); see also Pellard (2015, 29); Hudson (2007).
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Ramseyer: Page 31
After that, (pre-)Proto-Ryukyuan was still spoken on the mainland, most likely in
Kyushu, for several centuries. ... Then, around the 10-11th century, ... a group of merchantsfrom Kyushu, accompanied by craftsmen and farmers who settled there, entered the
Ryukyus, ... probably motivated by the rising market value of the Ryukyuan seashells. The
settlers gave birth to and diffused the Gusuku culture, a package comprising agriculture,ceramics, and the Proto-Ryukyuan language."
3. The politics of the identity. -- Okinawa residents themselves seldom claim to be an"indigenous people." In 2016, Masahisa Miyazaki, elected to the lower house from Okinawa,
criticized the cabinet for not doing more to stop the U.N. Human Rights Committee. Hisconstituents did not think of themselves as indigenous peoples, he explained, and did not wantanyone to designate them as such. The United Nations had no business making the unilateralpronouncements that it did (Matsushima 2018, 219). Okinawa journalist Satoru Nakamura(2018b) complained about the U.N. declarations too. We Okinawan residents are Japanese, hewrote, and always have been.
In truth, the claim that Okinawans are distinctively distinct has always been a pretext. The
dispute has never been about indigeneity. It is about U.S. military bases. Nakamura (2018b) madeclear why "indigenous" mattered. By the U.N. Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of 1989
(ILO 169), ratifying countries agree to protect the traditional lands of the indigenous peoples. As
the U.N. Human Rights Committee (2008) declared, Japan should "adopt special measures to ...
recognize [the] land rights" of the Okinawan residents. Neither Japan nor the U.S. have signed
the treaty, but the designation still ramps the popular pressure on the Japanese government to returnthe lands to the original residents.
The lands at stake: U.S. military bases. Through the designation, mainland activists havesought to recast their long-time anti-American program as a crusade against "racial discrimination"
toward "indigenous peoples" (Nakamura 2018c, 5). Explains Minami (N.D.), the activists
manipulating the U.N. "claim that the continuing presence of American military bases violates the
Okinawans' rights to land and self-determination, because these bases are occupying their native
land despite their political demand to remove them."
C. Base Politics:
1. Reversion. -- In 1972, the U.S. returned sovereignty over Okinawa to Japan. Although
the Allied (primarily American) occupation ended in 1952, the U.S. had retained control over
Okinawa. There, it had maintained a large complex of military bases. In 1972, the U.S. returned
the islands to Japan. Once again, Okinawa became a Japanese prefecture.
By treaty, the U.S. has agreed to protect Japan. To do that, it needs bases in Japan. During
the occupation itself, the U.S. government had forced Japan to accept a constitution that banned
all military force. Under the mutual security treaty ratified at the end of the occupation andamended in 1960, it then agreed (Art. 5):[T]hat an armed attack against ... the territories under the administration of Japan would be
dangerous to its own peace and safety and declare[d] that it would act to meet the common
danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes.
50

Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between Japan and the Uniuted States of America, Jan. 19,
1960. Available at: https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/q&a/ref/1.html
50Ramseyer: Page 32
Realistically, the U.S. cannot meet that danger from California, or even Hawaii. It needs
troups and equipment in East Asia. Accordingly, Japan promised to provide U.S. (Art. 6) "land,
air and naval forces [access to] facilities and areas in Japan." In response, the U.S. maintains bases
across all of Japan, but with a disproportionate number in Okinawa. Under this arrangement, theJapanese government pays the domestic costs (such as land rents) associated with the bases. The
U.S. pays the rest.
In one of the many freakish perversions of ideological alignment, the Japanese fringe-left
opposed the 1972 reversion. Under the reversion agreement, the Japanese and U.S. governments
agreed that the U.S. would retain its bases in Okinawa. The activists wanted the U.S. militarygone. Apparently, whether Okinawa residents wanted to rejoin Japan and participate in post-war
Japanese democracy was neither here nor there. The two governments had agreed that the U.S.
would keep its bases in Okinawa, and those bases did not fit the activists' vision for Japan. Until
the U.S. agreed to leave Okinawa entirely, the activists were determined to fight reversion itself.
2. The Futenma airbase. -- Much the same dynamic that governed the responses to the1972 reversion has governed the current base relocation dispute. Most Okinawans unambiguously
want the Futenma airbase out of central Ginowan. The U.S. has agreed to move it out of Ginowan,
but it needs a substitute. The Japanese government understands, and has agreed to build a
substitute base in Henoko. Yet the mainland activists do not want the U.S. to move the base to
Henoko. They want the U.S. to leave Okinawa entirely. If moving out of Ginowan entails a newbase in Henoko, then the mainland activists will oppose the move out of Ginowan.
The U.S. has operated the airbase since World War II. The Japanese military had bought(n.b.: not rented, bought) the land for the base and started work on it in 1942 (Megumi 2011, 38).
The war ended before it could finish, so the U.S. completed construction shortly thereafter.
The Japanese military had begun the base in the village of Ginowan. In late 1944, 13,600
people lived in Ginowan; during the battle of Okinawa in the spring of 1945, 3,600 of thoseresidents would die. Yet by 2006, Ginowan had grown into city of 90,800. The newly populous
city encircled the U.S. base.
This was not a stable arrangement. Air force jets generate enormous noise. The airport
also houses helicopters and vertical-take-off ospreys. An elementary school and a university sit
next to the airport, and in 2004 a helicopter crashed onto the university grounds. Helicopter parts
have fallen onto the elementary school and a nearby daycare center (Lummis 2018).
The uneasy stability collapsed in 1995. That year, three U.S. servicemen kidnapped andraped a 12-year old girl (Packard 2010, 100). In the ensuing tension, the Japanese and U.S.
governments reached an agreement. The U.S. would relocate its airport from Ginowan to an
expanded base facility at Henoko, 30 miles away (Megumi 2011, 39; Lummis 2018). To makeroom for the relocated airbase, the Japanese government would expand the new base into the bay.
The two governments anticipated that the move would take place by 2003 (Lummis 2018).
The move promised dramatically to reduce base externalities. The Funtenma base covered
480 hectares; the new airport at Henoko would cover 210. Of the 210, 50 acres were within theexisting Camp Schwab base, and 160 would come from new landfill. Given that this landfill fellwithin Schwab as well, it would affect neither the fishing nor the tourist industries. Although
51

52

51

http://www.city.ginowan.okinawa.jp/pageRedirect.php?url=/2556/2562/2563/2602/27094.html

52

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Ramseyer: Page 33
Henoko lay within the boundaries of the smaller Nago city, its location on the city's outskirts would
dramatically reduce the noise and flight risk to urban residents (Okubo & Shinohara 2015, 36).
Almost immediately, however, mainland activists declared themselves against any moveto relocate the Futenma base to Henoko. They had opposed the 1972 reversion to Japanesesovereignty unless the U.S. abandoned all bases. They now opposed any move to dismantle the
Futenma base unless the U.S. built nothing to replace it.
3. The Okinawan burden. The burden on Okinawa from maintaining the bases was grossly
unfair, activists argued. The overwhelming concentration of bases in the prefecture embodied"structural bias" and reflected longstanding anti-Okinawan racism. In 1945, write Davinder
Bhomik and Steve Rapson (2016, 3), the "[r]ampant discrimination" by the Japanese mainstream"culminated in the decimation of the populace of Okinawa ..." Since then, little has changed.
"Throughout the prewar period," Okinawans have been caught in a "vicious cycle wherein theyencountered discriminatory policies from the government in Tokyo and fierce discrimination in
housing and the workplace on the mainland."Exactly what the burden might be is unclear. Despite the 1995 rape, the burden is not U.S.
crime. The bases do not raise crime rates at all. Women's studies scholar Mire Koikari (2015, 4)
captures the tenor of most activist writing when she decries "the staggering scale of sexual violenceagainst Okinawan women by US military personnel." So staggering is that violence that it leads
to "the centrality of rape as a metaphor and a reality in Okinawa's encounter with the US" (Koikari
2015, 4).
Yet the actual world is far more mundane. The occasional high-profile crimes
notwithstanding, the bases actually lower the crime rate. Consider arrests in 2018 per 100,000
population:
53

Murder, robbery, arson, rape:
Battery, threat, extortion:
Other theft:
All Criminal Code:U.S.
military
0
11.5
34.6
61.4

Other All
foreigner
5.5
66.6
210.8
349.5

Okinawa
2.7
47.4
121.7
210.4

American soldiers presumably do commit crimes. Apparently, however, they commit most ofthem on base. Off base, they commit crimes at lower levels than the local population, and at much
lower levels than other foreigners in Okinawa (see also Table 8).
[Insert Table 8 about here.]
No principle in democratic theory requires a country to distribute its disruptive installations
broadly across its jurisdiction. Military bases are "public goods." Arguably, they increase publicwelfare by keeping violent intruders at bay. Most Japanese believe that they face aggressive andpotentially hostile regimes in North Korea and China. They understand that they lack the military

Figures are for all military-related personnel. Base population figures are for 2013. First category
includes violent robbery only; battery figures include attempts. See
http://www.police.pref.okinawa.jp/docs/2019021200021/files/201804.pdf;
https://www.pref.okinawa.jp/site/chijiko/kichitai/sofa/documents/us-mil-number01.pdf; https://www.estat.go.jp/dbview?sid=0000010101; https://www.mod.go.jp/j/press/news/2013/12/20d.pdf.
53

Ramseyer: Page 34
power to counter the latter. The bases they provide to the U.S. constitute part of the price they pay
for the protection most Japanese believe that they badly need.
Yet military bases are also "local bads." Inevitably, they impose costs on their neighbors:noise, traffic, and the occasionally violent drunken soldier. Often, a government can mitigate theaggregate level of these negative externalities by concentrating the disruptive installations in a few
areas. And because of these economies to concentrated siting, neither the U.S. nor the Japaneseconstitution gives local residents a veto over disruptive installations. In neither country does
constitutional theory require the government -- as political scientist Mike Mochizuki (2018)claimed -- "to listen to the voice of Okinawans," and reduce "the unfair burden that Okinawans
have had to bear." Instead, subject to paying compensation, the constitutions in both countries(5th Amendment in the U.S.; Article 29 in Japan) give the government the power to force aninstallation on a community -- subject to paying compensation.
In truth, however, the U.S. and Japan have not concentrated military bases on Okinawa
nearly as heavily as the activists claim. Those activists have long asserted that Okinawa houses
74 percent of the American bases. In fact, it houses 74 percent of those bases used exclusively by
the U.S. military, but most bases are not used exclusively by the U.S. military. The major baseson the Japanese mainland -- e.g., Sasebo, Yokosuka, Atsugi -- are jointly operated by both the U.S.
military and the Japanese Self Defense Forces (SDF). Of all bases used by the U.S. military, only
23 percent are in Okinawa. Of the SDF bases, only 1 percent are in Okinawa.
54

4. Outside support. -- At many Okinawan demonstrations, a large number of protestors are
not Okinawan at all. In the years prior to the 1972 reversion, mainland activists flew to Okinawa
to protest reversion. Now they fly to Okinawa to protest the planned move to Henoko. Never mind
that Okinawan residents want the airport in central Ginowan closed, and do not care about a new
runway in Henoko's secluded Camp Schwab.
Mainland activists fight the move to Henoko because they want all U.S. bases in Japan
closed. Mainland labor unions recruit members to fly to Okinawa and join the protests. So too
do independent far-left associations. Some groups apparently (the point is contested) pay a perdiem to members who travel to Okinawa to demonstrate. Others subsidize travel. Okinawan
journalist Satoru Nakamura (2018b, 25) estimates that the prominent anti-American groups obtain70 percent of their funding from outside Okinawa. Public sector unions like the national teachers
union, the municipal and prefectural employees union, and the JR railroad union have been among
the anti-base movement's most prominent supporters (Nakamura 2018b, 26-27). Of the 44 people
arrested for violence at one recent Okinawa protest, 11 were from outside Okinawa. Four of the
11 were South Korean nationals (Kabekika 2017).
Plausibly but not conclusively, some observers find Chinese support behind the anti-baseprotests. Americans know well both the difficulty of proving the role of foreign countries indomestic politics, and the difficulty of proving the absence of that role. Yet several Japanese
55

56

57

54

Okubo & Shinohara (2015, 71); Megumi (2011, 50); Yamashiro (2018, 4-5).

55

rengo (Kanagawa); jreu56; Megumi 2011, 42)See, e.g., the dispute discussed at Nyusu joshi bangumi kenkai ni tsuite [On the Opinion Shown in the
Women's News Program], DHC Shiataa, Jan. 20, 2017. Available at:https://web.archive.org/web/20170202005825/https://www.dhctheater.com/information/2017-01-20-283265/
56

Watanabe (2017, 23-24); Megumi (2011, 41-42); Okinawa hondo (2019); Okubo & Shinohara (2015,155); Yamashiro (2018, 53); Megumi (2011, 42); Nakamura (2018, 27).
57

Ramseyer: Page 35
writers claim a Chinese part in the protests. A 2016 U.S. government study found the same.
According to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (Bergerson 2016, 9):China likely maintains a presence of intelligence officers and agitators to bothcollect intelligence against the U.S. military presence on the island and complicate aspectsof the U.S.-Japan alliance by participating in anti-base activities. Fumio Ota, a retired
Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force vice admiral ... notes "China has ... supported
Okinawa's independence activities, which were developed by pro-Chinese Okinawans andprobably Chinese ... agents as well."As one might expect, North Korea plays a role in Okinawan politics too. Former presidentof Okinawa University, Seiichi Sakugawa, has been a prominent leader in the fight against the
Henoko move. He personally maintains connections to North Korea, and leads a group dedicatedto promoting "Juche thought" -- the adulation of the Kim Il-sung family.
58

59

D. Okinawa Dysfunction:
Okinawa is a world badly out of balance. Consider the indices on Table 9. Where mean
Japanese per capita income (2016) was 3.06 million yen, at 2.1 million Okinawa was the poorestof the prefectures. Where mean Japanese per capita savings was 12 million yen (2015), at 4.65
million Okinawa was again the poorest. Where the Japanese poverty rate (2007) was 14.4 percent,at 29.3 percent, Okinawa had the highest rate in the country. Where the poverty rate for householdswith children (2013) was 8.99 percent, at 13.9 percent Okinawa was again the highest. Where
unemployment across Japan was 3.1 percent, at 4.4 percent the Okinawan rate was the highest in
the country.
[Insert Table 9 about here.]
Although Okinawa has many of the very poor, it also has an unusually high fraction of thevery rich (Table 13). Calculated by household consumption, the Gini coefficient of inequality was
the highest in the country. Calculated by household savings, the coefficient was again the highest(Okubo & Shinohara 2015, 90-94, 122-25).
Consistent with a high fraction of poor residents, Okinawans invest in human capital atvery low levels (Table 13). The rate at which middle school students proceeded to high school
was the lowest in the country. The rate at which those high school students proceeded to university
was also the lowest. On standardized middle-school math and verbal tests, Okinawa students
scored lowest in the country.
Consistent with low levels of investment in human capital, Okinawa family structure lies
close to collapse. Okinawans marry often and divorce often. The marriage rate per capita was
1.78 percent, highest in the country. But the divorce rate per married couples was 1.28 percent,also the highest in the country. In some Okinawa high schools, half the students come fromhouseholds with only a mother. At 42.4 percent of all marriages, the rate of shotgun weddings
60

61

62

63

58

Watanabe (2017, 4); Megumi (2014, 41-42), Ganaha (2016).

59

Megumi (2011, 58); http://japanlabor.party/news/970205a1.html)

See generally Yamashiro (2018, 2-3); Miwa (2018); Okubo & Shinohara (2015, 119-20, 123); Watanabe(2017, 6); Uchikoshi (2017).
60

61

See generally Higuchi (2018); Okubo & Shinohadra (2015, 119); Yamashiro (2018, 2); Okinawa (2018).

62

https://todo-ran.com/t/kiji/14276 (2016)63https://todo-ran.com/t/kiji/14268 (2016)

Ramseyer: Page 36
was highest in the country. At 11.67 per 1000, the rate at which teenagers gave birth was thehighest in the country. And the birth rate among single mothers was the highest in the country -indeed, double the national average (Higuchi 2018).
This family collapse coincides with a wide range of other dysfunctional behavior (Table
13). Mahjong gambling parlors are more common than anywhere else. The alcohol consumption
rate is fourth in the country. The arrest rate for drunken driving is the highest in the country. And
at 3.2 protective orders over domestic violence per 100,000 population (2018), Okinawan courts
issue the orders at the one of the highest rates in the country (the national average was 1.8).
Typical of underclass groups in wealthy democracies, Okinawans are badly overweight. In
Okinawa, 49.1 percent of men aged 40-44 were overweight and 7.2 percent obese; on the Japanese
mainland, the percentages were 29.4 percent and 2.1 percent. Consistent with being widely
overweight, 41.5 percent of Okinawan men exhibit metabolic syndrome and 26.8 percent exhibit
pre-metabolic syndrome. On the Japanese mainland, the percentages were 29.7 percent and 23.9
percent. Among women, 32.8 percent in Okinawa have metabolic syndrome, and 23.0 percent
have pre-metabolic syndrome. On the mainland, the percentages are 19.8 percent and 11.8
percent.
64

65

66

67

E. The Roots of the Okinawan Malaise:
1. The origins of the dependency. -- Okinawa as a whole does not constitute an underclass,but many of its residents do comprise such a group. As the many figures on Table 9 show, manyof those residents exhibit correlates of a population with low levels of investment in social capital.
The poorest are very poor; families are fragile; unemployment is high; educational levels are low.
These behavioral patterns reflect dependency. For two decades, the U.S. ran Okinawa. It
ran it generously, but in a way that cultivated that dependency. While much of the mainland barely
avoided starvation in the immediate post-war, the U.S. distributed generous amounts of beef andother foodstuffs to Okinawans. It supplied clothing, shoes, buckets, basins. It built hospitals andclinics, and staffed them with military medical personnel. It installed electricity, water, and sewage.
It supplied the food in kind, and manipulated the exchange rate to provide a customer base for
Okinawan production. In the process, it necessarily reduced incentives for Okinawans to invest ininternationally (or even domestically) competitive production.
After the 1972 reversion, the dynamic shifted, but the dependency remained. Many
Okinawan communities depend on base-related revenue directly. Take the town of Kadena.
Residents collect annual rent from the base of 12.5 billion yen. They earn total income from all
sources of 38.7 billion -- making the base rent a third of all local income. What is more, 12.5
percent of all Kadena employees work in construction, and earn salary on base-related projects inthat industry as well (Okubo & Shinohara 2015, 88).
6864

https://todo-ran.com/t/kiji/14304 (2009)65

See generally Watanabe (2017, 5, 125); Okubo & Shinohara (2015, 98, 119); Okinawa (2018).

These rates are still substantially lower than in the U.S.. In 2015-16, 71.6 percent of adults were
overweight and 39. percent obese. Center for Disease Control, available at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesityoverweight.htm.
66

67

See also Wilcox, et al. (2012: 54); Tanaka, et al. (20xx); Matsushita (2008); Watanabe (2017, 6).

68

Watanabe (2017, 8, 58); Yamashiro (2018, 153); Megumi (2011, 40-41, 130-33; 2014, 94-97).

Ramseyer: Page 37
Okinawan farmers depend on national subsidies directly. More than anything else, theyraise sugar cane, but their cane is not internationally competitive. As a result, they stay in businessonly through a combination of subsidies to cane sugar producers and higher prices on imported
sugar (Yamashiro 2018: p. 160-61).
Many of the highest paid Okinawans work for the government -- and rely on nationallargesse through that avenue. In Okinawa, those who work for the public sector constitute a large
fraction of the elite. Where Okinawans earn a mean 3.49 million yen per year (2004), prefectural
workers earn a mean 7.22 million. The national government subsidies Okinawan schools morethan it subsidizes schools elsewhere (Yamashiro 2018). And as pressure from protesters over thebases mount, the Japanese government responds by buying silence from government employees
by raising the salaries it pays.
Some Okinawan residents collect from the government through nuisance claims. Nevermind that the Futenma airbase went into operation in 1945 and that most of its neighbors arrived
after it had begun operation. Never mind that the adjacent elementary school arrived in 1969, theuniversity in 1972 (Okubo & Shinohara 2015, 75). Never mind even that some critics accuseneighbors of moving to the area precisely in order to participate in a suit (Watanabe 2017: p. 50).
The planes make noise. The neighbors sued. And the Fukuoka High Court recently ordered thenational government to pay 3,400 of the neighbors 2.1 billion yen (Okada 2019).
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70

2. The relocation dependency. -- a. The shakedown. The national subsidies to Okinawa
are massive. As of 2011, one writer put the total post-reversion subsidies at 13 trillion yen(Megumi 2011, 1; at the late 2019 exchange rate, about $119 billion). In 2017 alone, the special"Okinawa promotion budget" came to 315 billion yen (Watanabe 2017, 40; see Kobuna 2016).
Given that the entire prefectural budget for the year was 754 billion, these subsidies constituted 40
percent of the total (Kobuna 2016). Only Fukushima, recovering still from the reactor meltdown,
receives higher subsidy levels than Okinawa (Table 10).
[Insert Table 10 about here.]As the poorest prefecture in the country, a social democratic government would obviously
pay it net positive subsidies. Yet commentators routinely explain the subsidies as more than simple
redistribution. The government pays them, they argue, to buy tolerance for the bases. As Masato
Kobuna put it in 2016, "the Okinawa promotion fund was increased in particular to obtain theacquiescence of local residents to the move of the Futenma base." The subsidies are the price otherJapanese pay, in other words, for locating the "local bads" disproportionately in Okinawa.
Given this dynamic, Okinawan elites protest the bases in part to raise the price they receive
for taking them. The majority of Okinawans gain little if anything from the subsidies, to be sure.
But Masahide Ota, elected governor in the 1990s, pursued this shakedown strategy aggressively.
He realized that public "opposition to the bases," writes economist Akira Shinohara (2017, 224),"could become a tactic to acquire increases in the Promotion Budget." And so it did. Ota
71

72

69

Okubo & Shinohara (2015, 97, 127); see Yamashiro (2018, 156)

The litigation has been extensive, and has prominently involved the administrative procedures involved.
See Kamino & Honda (20xx).
70

Others place the total at 11 trillion. See, e.g., Okubo & Shinohara (2015, 17); Watanabe (2017, 120);
Yamashiro (2018, 152).
71

72

Kobuna (2016); see also Megumi (2014, 1); Akamine (2015).

Ramseyer: Page 38
successfully raised the subsidies to unprecedented levels (Shinohara 2017, 223-25). Yet it is adelicate strategy, and Ota's successors may have overplayed the tactic. After Takeshi Onaga ran
on a platform of vehement opposition to the Henoko move, the national government flatly refused
any further increases (Okinawa shinko 2018).
73

b. Construction firms. -- As with the buraku subsidies, construction firms take the largest
portion of the promotion subsidies. The government earmarks much of the money for bridges,
highways, tunnels, harbors, and big boxes (halls, athletic facilities). Separately from the subsidies,it pays for the U.S. bases -- amounts that here too heavily involve construction. It will pay 500
billion yen just to expand the airbase on Camp Schwab to take the Futenma traffic (Okubo &Shinohara 2015, 52).
Activists routinely cite environmental concerns in their fight against the Henoko move. In
fact, the subsidy-funded non-military construction alters the natural environment as radically as
any military base. A Henoko base would require 160 hectare of landfill into the bay. The national
government's new civilian airport at Naha changes the environmental even more. So too do thecontinuing flow of bridges, highways and tunnels.
74

75

c. Landlords. A curious second group of prosperous Okinawans also opposes the Henoko
move -- and opposes it even as it pursues long-term goals diametrically opposed to those of themainland activists. These are the "putative" landlords to the bases. As of 2015, the Japanese
government paid 90 billion yen in rent to the 42,000 citizens who claimed to own the land used
for military (U.S. and Japanese) bases on Okinawa. Among these men and women, 8,000
claimants (i.e., purported landlords) collect at least 3 million yen per year; 4,200 collect at least 5
million per year (Yamashiro 2018, 43). For the Futenma airbase itself, the government pays 3,354
claimants (2008) a total of 6.6 billion yen.
These are "putative" landlords. When the Japanese military started work on the Futenma
base late in the war, it bought the land outright (Megumi 2011, 38-39). Nonetheless, the war
destroyed Okinawa land registries (Megumi 2011, 39, 162; Yamashiro 2018, 43), and to placate
the local elites the U.S. government adopted the honor system. It agreed to pay rent to anyone
who claimed to own a share of the bases. For the Futenma airbase, it apparently pays rent on total
land area greater than the base itself (Yamashiro 2018, 43).
Base rent invites the same shakedown dynamic as the promotion subsidies. Upon reversion
in 1972, the Japanese government promptly raised the rent it paid on the bases more than six-fold(Yamashiro 2018, 43). Should the landlords cooperate with the Japanese government too eagerly,
the government will have little reason to agree to higher rents. Fight it, however, and thegovernment raises the amount it pays. Obviously, the local claimants can overplay their hand;charge too much and the government has that much stronger an incentive to leave. Until it does,
though, the U.S. and Japanese governments want as quiet an environment as possible. Towardthat peace, the Japanese government pays the landlords handsomely.
76

73

E.g., Megumi (2014, 1, 177); Okubo & Shinohara (2015, 46); Kobuna (2016).

74; Yamashiro (2018, 29, 155-56); Okubo & Shinohara (2015, 92); Kubona (2016).

75

Yamashiro (2018, 173); Okubo & Shinohara (2015, 146); Megumi (2011, 50-51).

76

Okubo & Shinohara (2015, 58); Okinawa jin 2015; Yamashiro (2018, 39-41).

Ramseyer: Page 39
F. Okinawa and the Underclass:
Okinawa is a mix. A few of the residents are extraordinarily rich; most are uncommonlypoor. And with the poverty come low levels of social capital and the standard mix of dysfunctionalcorrelates: crime, domestic violence, alcohol abuse, low education performance, nonmarital births.
And as with the burakumin and the Japan-resident Koreans, the Okinawan underclass havefallen victim to their own elites. Without a dense network of social and economic bonds, theycannot monitor or control their own self-appointed leaders. Ordinary Okinawans would like theU.S. base moved out of the center of Ginowan city. The U.S. government has agreed to move it,
and the Japanese government agreed to fund a replacement.
But over 20 years after the agreements, the move has not happened. By fighting the move,
Okinawan elites obtain higher subsidies from the national government and mainland activists
pursue their extra-Okinawan agenda. Bureaucrats collect higher salaries. Landlords collect higher
rents. Construction firms earn higher profits. And fringe-left mainland activists carry on theiranti-American crusade.
VI. Conclusions
Criminal opportunists caused the underclass burakumin to extort preferential subsidies
from firms, local governments, and eventually the national government. In the process, they
increased hostility toward the group. Political opportunists caused the resident Korean underclass
to pursue their private political ends. They caused it first to sabotage allied efforts in the Korean
War, and then to support the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Economic and political opportunists
both took advantage of the Okinawan underclass. Ordinary citizens wanted the Futenma base outof the city center. Local elites created and fueled opposition to their private economic ends;
mainland activists created and fueled opposition to their private political ends.
These dynamics are more general. Given the hyper-polarization in American universities,
I skirt any discussion of ethnic politics in the U.S. Note, however, that where members of aminority can monitor and constrain each other, they can leverage that high level of internal social
capital to financial gain. Living within dense networks of personal contacts, they more often havethe information necessary to learn whether potential trade partners have kept their word. They
more readily have access to the sanctions necessary punish those who renege.
Where members of a minority group lack that social capital, they become vulnerable totheir own self-appointed elites. Lacking a network of social and economic ties, they cannot
monitor others in the group. They cannot constrain them. In turn, this social vacuum creates an
opening for the opportunists. Within this social vacuum, other members can purport to act onbehalf of group as a whole, in such a way that they increase hostility toward the group while
diverting economic or political rents to themselves.
Arrovian statistical discrimination follows. The opportunists will raise the real (andperceived) level of dysfunction within the group (e.g., lower productivity, higher criminal
propensity). Faced with an outside majority that treats members of the group by the perceived
group mean, those with characteristics more attractive than that mean will abandon the group to
the opportunists. They will leave the underclass, pursue legitimate careers, and join the social
mainstream.
Sometimes, these self-appointed elites will extract ethnic subsidies (or other grouppreferences) from private firms or the government. When they do, whether a minority member
exits the group will turn on the cost of the discrimination, net of the ethnic subsidies. The higher
the subsidies, the fewer the number of group members who will choose to leave the dysfunctional

Ramseyer: Page 40
group. The higher the subsidies, the slower the pace at which the underclass dissolves, and its
members merge into the general public.

Ramseyer: Page 41

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Ramseyer: Page 51

Figure 1:

Note:
Source:1942 Census omitted because an outlier.
Ramseyer (2019).

Ramseyer: Page 52

Table 1:

Korean Residents in Japan

1910
1915
1920
1925
1930

2,246
3,992
30,149129,870
298,091

1935
1940
1945
1950
1955

625,678
1,190,444
2,206,541
535,236
567,053

1960
1965
1970
1975
1980

581,257
583,537
614,202647,156
664,536

1985
1990
1995
2000
2006

683,313687,940
666,376
635,269
486,653

2010
2015
2017

453,316
411,547
395,912

Notes: Post-war figures total special and generalpermanent residents; pre-war figures are based on the Ministryof Interior.
Sources:(2004, 42).

Higuchi (2002, 23, 206); Homusho (2018); Tonomura

Ramseyer: Page 53

Table 2:

Korean and Burakumin Population Within Osaka, 1935
Koreans

Districts
Higashi
Nishi
Minami
Kita
Higashi-nari
Asahi
MinatoTaishoKonohana
NaniwaTen'oji
Sumiyoshi
Nishinari
Higashi-yodogawa
Nishi-yodogawa
Sources:

3,642
838
2,928
886
38,53812,003
9,418
10,304
10,746
8,886
2,627
5,777
12,67915,872
11,389Burakumin Total
population
0
165,5450122,571
0
112,615940
23,316
0291,955
8,528
166,7080294,3130
122,667
0
202,755
24,443
145,672
1,900
114,2173,077
275,095
22,950
195,0610
214,486705
183,694

Sugihara (1998, 61 tab. I-2); Chuo yuwa (1936).

Ramseyer: Page 54

Table 3: Movement of Koreans to Japan,
and Back to Korea, 1921-1930

1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930

(I)
Korea toJapan
38,11870,462
97,395
122,215
131,273
91,092138,016
166,286
153,570
95,491

Sources:46).

(II)
Japan toKorea
25,55649,32689,74575,427
112,471
83,70993,991
117,522
98,275
107,706(III)
Total inJapan
38,65155,85180,617120,238
133,710
148,503
175,911
243,328
276,031
298,091(II)/(I)
%
67.0%
70.0
92.1
61.7
85.7
91.9
68.1
70.7
64.0
112.8

(II)/(III)
%
.
66.1%
88.3
111.3
62.7
84.1
56.4
53.4
48.3
35.6
36.1

Miki (1933, 11); Chosen (1933, 190-92); Tonomura (2004,

Ramseyer: Page 55
Table 4: Arrests (All Crimes)of Japan-Resident Koreans, 1932-38

1932
1933
1934
1935
1936 `
1937
1938

Total
Koreans
390542456217537695625678690501735674799878Sources:

KoreanArrests
35411
49471
49881
45022
48970
45342
45782

Arrests
Per cap
9.06%
10.84
9.27
7.19
7.09
6.16
5.48

Male/
100 Fem
212
204
184
166
162
155
154

Naimu sho (1938, 1037-40).

Arrests percap (Japanese)
1.75%
1.72
2.07
2.37
2.23
1.73
1.73

Ramseyer: Page 56
Table 5:. Naturalization and Marriages
of Japan-Resident KoreansA.

Acquisition of Japanese citizenship by by Japan-Resident Koreans
1955
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
2010
2015

2434
3763
3438
4646
6323
5987
5040
5216
10327
9842
9689
6668
5247

B. Marriages of Japan-Resident Koreans
Marriages of Z
1955
1965
1975
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
2010
2013

Sources:

1102
5693
7249
8588
13934
8953
9483
9238
6454
5043

% of weddings to Jese
30.5
34.6
48.9
71.6
83.7
82.2
87.4
88.3
87.5
87.7

From Mindan website, https://www.mindan.org/syakai.php.

Ramseyer: Page 57

Table 6:

Crime Numbers and Rates by Nationality, 2015

All
Japan
Tot Criminal
Code
Murders

Number arrested.
Resid Other Chinese Mob
Kor
Kor

239355 2321

444

2951

12690

All
Japan

Rate per 100,000.
Resid
Other Chinese Mob
Korean Korean

188.33 615.06

290.79 459.23 32455.24

913

10

5

6

115

0.72

2.65

3.27

0.93

294.12

Rapes

933

6

1

9

48

0.73

1.59

0.65

1.40

122.76

Intimidation

2720

29

10

19

592

2.14

7.68

6.55

2.96 1514.07

Extortion

2187

35

6

7

865

1.72

9.27

3.93

1.09 2212.28

Prostitution

538

7

7

44

104

0.42

1.85

4.58

6.85

Meth related
crimes

10785

165

17

33

5618

8.49

43.72

11.13

5.14 14368.29

Sources:. Resident Koreans are those designated as "special
long-term residents." Mob includes those counted as quasimembers.. Numbers give arrests. Arrests are for 2015;
population numbers are from 2012.

Sources:. Homu sho (2018); Keisatsu cho (2015).

265.98

Ramseyer: Page 58

Table 7:A.

Kanagawa residents on welfare:

1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
B.

Japan-Resident Koreans on Public Assistance

Koreans
33.6
41.0
47.1
49.1
20.6
18.9

Total
Population
2.2
2.2
2.3
2.5
2.0
1.6

Households on welfare in Japan, 2010:

Household
Total
Japanese 50,857,365
Korean190,246
Philipino
38,540Other
foreign
1,093,139

Households
on Welfare
1,321,120
27,035
4,234% on
Welfare
2.6
12.2
10.9

40,029

3.6

Notes: Welfare is "seikatsu hogo."
Sources: Bando (2016, 79); Higuchi (2002).

Ramseyer: Page 59

Table 8:Arrests for Serious Crimes in Okinawa, 2018
Number arrests

100,000All

All Criminal Codecrimes3,006
Murder, robbery,arson & rape
39
Battery, threats,& extortion
677
Other theft
1,739

Rate perMilitary Other
personnel foreigner All

Military Other
personnel foreigner

32

63

210.4

61.4

349.5

0

1

2.7

0

5.5

6
18

12
38

47.4
121.7

11.5
34.6

66.6
210.8

Sources:
http://www.police.pref.okinawa.jp/docs/2019021200021/files/201804.pdf;
https://www.pref.okinawa.lg.jp/site/chijiko/kohokoryu/honka/documents/section
2.pdf;
https://www.pref.okinawa.jp/site/chijiko/kichitai/tyosa/documents/p32.pdf
https://www.e-stat.go.jp/dbview?sid=0000010101
https://www.pref.okinawa.jp/site/chijiko/kichitai/sofa/documents/us-milnumber01.pdf
https://www.mod.go.jp/j/press/news/2013/12/20d.pdf

Ramseyer: Page 60
Table 9: Okinawa Characteristics,
Relative to Other Prefectures

Okinawa mean
National mean Okinawa rank
Income per capita, 10,000 yen (2016)
210.17306.07
47
Savings per capita, 10,000 yen (2015)
465
1217
47
Poverty rate (2007)
29.3%
14.4
1
Poverty rate for households with children (2013)13.85%
8.99
1
Unemployment rate (2016)
4.4%
3.1
1
Gini coefficient based on consumption, households of 2 or more (2009)
.339
.311
1
Gini coefficient based on savings, households of 2 or more (2009)
.699
.571
1
Percent middle school advancing to high school (2010)
95.00
98.44
47
Percent high school students advancing to university (2017)
39.5
54.7
47
Standardized tests, verbal, middle school performance (2014)
74.4
79.4
47
Standardized tests, math, middle school performance (2014)
56.2
67.4
47
Divorces per, 1000 population (2012)
2.59
1.87
1
Shotgun marriages (2009)
42.43
25.28
1
Birth rate for mothers aged 15-19 per 1000 women (2009)
11.67
4.95
1
Mahjong parlors per 100,000 adult population (2016)
17.09
8.53
1
Alcohol consumption per adult capita
8.75 liter
6.77
4Adult males overweight or obese (2010)
45.2%
31.1
1
Domestic violence protective orders (per 100,000) (2011)
3.2
1.8
4
Sources: https://todo-ran.com/t/kiji/14268; Okubo & Shinohara(2015); Yamashiro (2017); Okinawa (2018)

Ramseyer: Page 61
Table 10: National Subsidies per Capita, 2013
Lowest2
3
4
5

Kanagawa
Saitama
Aichi
Osaka
Chiba

20.2
24.5
30.5
30.6
30.6

MedianHokkaido

75.9

43
44
45
46
HighestShimane127.4
Miyagi
149.9
Iwate
169.3
Okinawa
170.3
Fukushima 293.0

Notes: Subsidies are in 1000 yen.
Sources: Kokko shishutsu kin [National Trasury
Distributions], as found in
http://grading.jpn.org/SRD310108.html.