COMMENTS ON PROF. J MARK RAMSEYER’S ARTICLE ‘SOCIAL CAPITAL AND THE PROBLEM
OF OPPORTUNISTIC LEADERSHIP: THE EXAMPLE OF KOREANS IN JAPAN’ (PUBLISHED ONLINE
BY THE EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF LAW AND ECONOMICS ON 18 FEBRUARY 2021, CURRENTLY
BEING RE-EXAMINED BY THE JOURNAL)
Tessa Morris-Suzuki
GENERAL COMMENTS –In the comments below, I argue that this article’s ‘case study’ dealing with Koreans in Japanis both factually wrong and falls woefully below standards of research integrity expected ofa peer reviewed article in the following ways:a.
Instead of seriously addressing existing research, and explaining why the author
rejects the views of the vast majority of experts in the field, it simply ignores thecontent and findings of this research, and cherry-picks it for snippets of
convenient information which are used in a misleading way (for example –Section 4.4, comment 5).
b.
It uncritically uses unscholarly and notoriously unreliable sources suchanonymous blogs, Wikipedia, popular books by far-right agitators etc. In somecases, unchecked use of facts from these sources results in fundamental factual
errors (for example – 5.1.1, comment 2; 5.2.2, comment 3).
c.
It misquotes sources in a way that indicates, at least, a degree of carelessness
unacceptable in a peer-reviewed article (for example – 4.4, comment 2)d.
It makes important assertions of fact without providing any verifiable evidenceor references (for example, 5.2.2, comment 1; 5.2.2, comment 3).
e.
It uses demeaning and offensive language about the subjects of the research (forexample, 4.4, comment 1; 5.2.2, comment 3).

The article ignores the analysis and findings of almost all existing scholarship on the topic ofKoreans in Japan for all periods discussed. It makes no reference to key works on the subject
in English and Japanese, such as Kim (1997), Ōnuma (2005); Chapman (2007); Lie (2008);
Oguma and Kang (2008); Ryang and Lie (2009); Kim-Wachuka (2018) etc.
It is inadequate in terms of contextualisation – it provides no proper backgroundinformation about Japanese colonial policy in Korea, the division of the Korean Peninsula,
the Korean War etc., all of which are essential to understanding the topics it discusses.
One of the most glaring flaws is its failure to provide any definition of ‘Koreans in Japan’.
This results in multiple examples of misleading statements and misleading data.
‘Koreans in Japan’ can refer to any or all of the following groups –(i)
Koreans who arrived in Japan before Korean regained its independence, andwere legally Japanese when they arrived, but whose Japanese nationality was
unilaterally abrogated by the Japanese state in 1952 (and those descendants ofthe group who are still Korean nationals). In government reports, members of
this group are often referred to by the term which indicates their current legal
status in Japan: ‘special permanent residents’;

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(ii)

Koreans from group (i) who have become Japanese nationals by naturalisation orbirth (with one Japanese parent or grandparent), but retain a sense of Korean
identity;(iii)
More recent migrants from Korea to Japan (‘newcomers’).
In my comments below, I refer to the people in groups (i) and (ii) as ‘Zainichi Koreans’, aterm widely used in Japan and internationally. Ramseyer’s article slides from one category
to another in a confusing and misleading way. I shall return to this issue later in mycomments.
SECTION 4.2 PREWAR IMMIGRATION
4.2.1-4.2.2
1. Ramseyer gives figures showing the growing population of Koreans in Japan as risingfrom about 130,000 in 1925 to 1.2 million in 1940 and over 2.2 million by 1945. He
writes ‘Koreans moved to Japan for the money’. In a footnote and with no details, hebriefly mentions both a ‘restrictive recruiting effort’ by Japan to encourage Koreans
to work in Japan – adding (with absolutely no supporting reference or evidence) thata ‘substantial minority of Koreans who applied for the jobs were not hired’ – and asubsequent draft of Korean workers that started in the fall of 1944. What he isdiscreetly alluding to here is the fact that around one-third of the Koreans in Japan
at the end of the Asia-Pacific War – at least 700,000 people – were there because
they had been recruited as wartime labourers by the Japanese state, by means
which included threats, deception or violence (See, for example, Nishinarita 2000, p.
398; Naitou 2005).
2. Ramseyer depicts Koreans in Japan en masse as poor and unskilled young men
seeking ‘money’. While a high proportion of prewar Korean migrants to Japan werefrom relatively poor rural backgrounds, this sweeping generalization neglects thefact that there were also others, including Koreans coming to Japan for college
education (as indicated by Ramseyer’s own later reference to the 1000 to 3000
Korean students in Tokyo at the time of the 1923 earthquake).
3. Ramseyer states that the Korean migrants to Japan brought only negative
characteristics with them: lack of education, illiteracy, high crime rates, lack of‘steady effort’ and work efficiency, and habits that Japanese landlords considered‘unsanitary’. These ‘lacks’ are used to justify the fact that Japanese employers andlandlords shunned Koreans in favour of Japanese workers and tenants. Employers,
Ramseyer argues, would of course have preferred Japanese workers who came froma more skilled, educated and industrially disciplined background. Aside from the factthat this echoes historical and contemporary prejudice and stereotypes, it ishistorically and logically flawed. Male Korean migrants seeking low-skilled work inJapanese cities were not competing against high-skilled and experienced Japaneseindustrial workers. They were competing against a mass of young Japanese men andwomen from poor farm families like their own, with a similar lack of experience inthe disciplines of industrial labour, who were flowing into Japanese cities at thesame time. And the Koreans were systematically being paid lower wages.
Ramseyer’s ‘efficiency’ rationale for the fact that ‘Japanese employers avoided
Koreans when they could’ makes no sense.

24.2.3 What Koreans Did
1. According to Ramseyer’s account, the only thing that ‘Koreans did’ was commit
crimes and cause social disruption. His only sources for this section are official
materials produced by the Japanese authorities of the day (including colonial
Japanese authorities in Korea), and ‘Miki 1933’ (on which, see below).
2. Using these sources, Ramseyer states that arrest rates of Koreans for all crimes andfor serious crimes were many times higher than those for Japanese. Setting aside thefact that Koreans were more likely to be arrested because they were targets ofsuspicion by the Japanese police, this ignores the obvious point highlighted by
Japanese scholarship on the subject, and indeed by Ramseyer’s own descriptions of
the social make-up of the Korean population: the prewar comparisons between
Japanese and Korean crime rates, cited by Ramseyer, fail to factor in age, class andgender. If the crime rates of young, male Japanese of lower socio-economic status in
the prewar period are compared with those recorded for the same cohort of
Koreans in Japan in the same period, the difference in crime rates is negligible (Ueda
2005, 9).
4.2.4 Terrorism
1. In this section, Ramseyer does not refer to any postwar scholarship in any language
about the 1919 independence demonstrations in Korea and their aftermath – anaftermath which included mass killings, mass arrests and widespread torture by theJapanese colonial authorities – nor does he refer to any contemporary eyewitness
testimony about the Japanese suppression of the independence movement by
Koreans or by foreigners. (There is substantial English and other foreign language
eyewitness testimony on this, particularly from European missionaries in Korea at
the time).
2. Ramseyer conflates the complex Korean independence movements post 1 March
1919 with ‘terrorism’, failing even to mention that large sections of the movement
were driven by liberal, Christian or other ideologies (see, for example, Park 2014).
3. His only sources on ‘terrorism’ are contemporary Japanese official documents and‘Miki 1933’, which is also his major source for information Koreans’ ‘high crime rates’
and on the 1923 massacres of Koreans. ‘Miki 1933’ is a report written By Miki Imaji,a Japanese state prosecutor of ‘thought crimes’, whose main task was to prosecute
Koreans seen as dangerous by the state – a task which he performed with great zeal
(see, for example, Kawashima 2009, 249, note 58). Because of his prewar activities,
Miki was purged from public office during the Allied occupation.
SECTION 4.4 – THE EARTHQUAKE
1. The main purpose of this section seems to be to repeat rumours about violent deeds
or conspiracies by Koreans which circulated in Japan at the time of the massacres.
The sources that Ramseyer draws on here are contemporary Japanese newspapers
and documents produced by the Japanese police, colonial government etc., andagain ‘Miki 1933’ (see above).

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2. Anyone reading this very peculiar account of the 1923 massacre of Koreans would beforgiven for assuming, from the framing of the discussion, that many non-Japanesescholars vastly exaggerate the number of Koreans killed in the massacre, and that
Ramseyer is setting the record straight. Perhaps he has confused the 1923 massacrewith the 1937-38 Nanjing Massacre. In the latter case, there is a lot of controversy
about the numbers killed. In the former, there isn’t. Ramseyer adds nothing to ourknowledge of the number of victims of the massacre. There is wide consensus thatthe number is unknown and unknowable, but may have been around 5000 to 6000
people. Since Ramseyer concedes that the number could have been up to 5200, thisis hardly a ground-breaking revision. Ramseyer creates a straw scholar to demolishby citing Professor Sonia Ryang as claiming that ‘the Japanese patrols may havekilled 10,000… Elsewhere, she suggests 20,000.’ (footnote 8). The 10,000 figure issourced to an article where Ryang quotes this as a figure suggested by ‘Japanese
conscientious attorneys’, without specifically endorsing it (Ryang 2003, p. 746). The
20,000 figure is sourced to a later article (readily accessible online https://apjjf.org/-Sonia-Ryang/2513/article.html) where Ryang gives the following
estimate of massacre deaths: ‘While the number can never be specified precisely’
many sources agree that ‘approximately six thousand of the 20,000 Koreans residingin the Kanto area were killed’ (sic, my italics).
3. Ramseyer himself gives an estimate of a minimum of 400 killed (a number admitted
by the prewar Japanese state) and a maximum of 5200, yet titles this section of his
article ‘Japanese Massacres?’ with a question mark, implying that there is somedoubt as to whether a massacre actually happened. This subtitle is never explained –does the question-mark mean that the killing of ‘just’ 400 people would not reallyqualify as a massacre?
4. Ramseyer selectively extracts convenient and uncontextualized snippets of
information from one postwar collection of documents on the massacre, but makes
no reference to any research findings contained any of the numerous scholarly
works on the issue except for an article by Yamada Shōji (see below). He merely
includes a footnote which lists a number of English works only to dismiss them on
the grounds that they ‘generally discount the reports of Korean violence, but takethe newspaper accounts of retaliatory Japanese violence nearly at face value’. Of theworks cited there, two are the works by Sonia Ryang (see above), and one (Bates
2006) has no reference at all to the 1923 massacre in the location cited.
5. Ramseyer’s only postwar academic source for his discussion of the earthquake is
Yamada Shōji’s 2012/2013 article ‘What Happened in the Area of Greater Tokyo
Right after the Great Kantō Earthquake’ (available online here - http://www.cgs.c.utokyo.ac.jp/publication.html). Ramseyer describes Yamada as having ‘done some of
the most careful work on the topic’, but the only thing he cites from Yamada are a
few statistics about the numbers of Koreans living in the Kanto district. He makes nomention of the fact that the key points of Yamada careful (and meticulously sourced)
essay are as follows: various Japanese state agencies including the police were
alarmed by the growing presence of Koreans in and around the capital, anddeliberately provoked the massacre by disseminating fabricated rumours about
Korean crimes or conspiracies (e.g. Yamada pp. 8-9); police then turned a blind eye
to, or assisted, massacres by mobs or vigilante groups (Yamada pp. 13-14); Japanesemilitary units not only helped to spread the rumours but also participated in the4massacres – Yamada lists fourteen such incidents, including one where soldiers usedmachine guns to ‘massacre Koreans in large numbers’ (Yamada pp. 10-11); themassacres were accompanied by widespread sexual abuse of Korean women(Yamada p. 15); the military and others concealed the extent of the killings byburying or burning bodies (Yamada pp. 11 and 15); the Japanese state covered up its
own involvement in the massacres by prosecuting some private vigilantes whileallowing soldiers and police involved in the massacre to avoid punishment (Yamada,
pp. 17-18); the Japanese state should apologize for the massacres (Yamada, p. 1).
Ramseyer’s use of this source is thus extremely misleading.
6. Ramseyer seeks to argue that the higher ‘possible’ figure of massacre deaths – over
5000 – is very unlikely given the number of Koreans living in and around Tokyo, andgiven the fact that some 7000 Koreans were placed in ‘protective custody’ by thepolice. This ignores the fact that some of those massacred had been placed in‘protective custody’ only to be handed over by their ‘protectors’ to the mob to be
killed (Yamada, p. 14)
5 WAR AND POSTWAR
This section demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the dynamics of the
Korean community in postwar Japan, which is perhaps not surprising, as it cites none of themain scholarly works on the subject.
5.1.1 Politically Selected Immigration
1. The discussion here presents a extremely confused and confusing picture of theformation of the postwar Korean community in Japan. Ramseyer does not provide
any estimates of the total number of Koreans who remained in Japan after the war,
but seems to want to convey the sense that those who remained (or arrived as
immigrants) were mostly communist. He tells us that there were about 1.9 million
Koreans in Japan at the end of the war, and in a later (section 5.2.1) explains that‘after 1945 (sic), the fiercely anti-communist Syngman Rhee gave the cross-cutting
repatriation patterns a distinctly ideological cast. Disproportionately, conservative or
apolitical Koreans returned to (or stayed in) South Korea’, suggesting that those who
repatriated to Korea after the war were mostly people relatively sympathetic to theconservative Syngman Rhee regime, while those who remained were mostly leftwing. It is only possible for Ramseyer to make this muddled and misleading assertion
because he fails to provide any figures of, or timeline for, the postwar repatriation
Koreans. About 1.3 million Koreans were repatriated to Korea between August 1945and early 1946, leaving around 500,000-600,000 Koreans in Japan (Kim 2015, 273) –a number which (as Ramseyer’s own figures show) remained roughly constant until
the end of the twentieth century. In the period when the repatriation was taking
place, politics in the southern half of Korea were in a state of flux and confusion.
Syngman Rhee did not come to power until over two years later, in July 1948, so his
policies obviously did not influence the decisions of those who repatriated orremained in Japan in 1945-1946. A large proportion the Koreans who were
repatriated between August 1945 and early 1946 took part in the official repatriation
program organized by the allied authorities, but this program required returnees to5leave most of their assets in Japan (see Augustine 2017), so more prosperous
members of the Korean community had less incentive than others to return (asystem which, it would be reasonable to hypothesize, selected returnees politicallyin the opposite sense to the sense suggested by Ramseyer).
2. Ramseyer then goes on to discuss the 1948 uprising and subsequent massacres on
the Korean island of Jeju (commonly known as the Jeju 4.3 massacres), which, heclaims, resulted in a flood of communist refugees entering Japan. Here,astonishingly, he writes: ‘estimates of the number it killed range from 15,000 to
60,000—this on an island with a population of only 290,000. Almost immediately,
however, surviving Jeju leftists began to leave surreptitiously for Japan. Given thatthey migrated illegality, the number is hard to know. But by 1957, barely 30,000
people still lived on the island’ (my italics). In other words, he is suggesting thatperhaps some 200,000 ‘leftist’ Jeju Islanders may have fled to Japan, leaving theisland virtually depopulated. His source for these remarkable statistics is ananonymous online blog, much of whose contents (including Ramseyer’s figure of aremaining population of 30,000) come from Wikipedia. Wikipedia in turn attributes
this to a dead link. In fact, the figure of 30,000 is clearly a misreading or distortion ofa genuine estimate of the number of victims of the massacre. The official Korean
report on the massacre, compiled in the early 21st century, suggests this as a possible
figure for number of those killed in the massacres, noting that Jeju’s population fell
from 282,942 in 1946 to 250,400 in 1949 (Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation/National
Committee for Investigation of the Truth of the April 3 Incident 2003, 452). There areno accurate figures showing how many of these people were massacred, how many
died from other causes and how many fled to Japan. However, if we accept that theroughly 32,500 decline in Jeju’s population between 1946 and 1949 represents both
victims of the massacres and refugees fleeing to Japan, and that some further
outflow of refugees continued into the early 1950s, a realistic estimate for thenumber heading for Japan would be in the thousands or low tens of thousands at
the most. So, having spent much of the prewar section of the article trying tominimize the death figures for the 1923 massacre, which he (inaccurately) castigatesother scholars for exaggerating, Ramseyer now casually gets the crucial evidence forhis thesis about the postwar Korean community wrong by a factor of over 10x
because he has relied on a single anonymous blog containing misinformation
circulated via Wikipedia, without bothering to check it.
5.1.2 The Rise of the Communist Left
1. Ramseyer now tells us that ‘the communist refugees from Syngman Rhee’s South
Korea soon took control over the most destitute and vulnerable of the Japaneseresident Koreans’. The next paragraph states that ‘almost immediately after the endof the war, communists commandeered the formal Korean organizations’, citing thename of Kim Chon-hae as his sole example. After some name changes, Ramseyersays, this group ‘eventually took the name Soren’ and ‘the violence began almost
immediately’. He goes on to illustrate this with some lurid examples of ‘Koreanviolence’ between 1945 and 1950. These paragraphs demonstrate a lack ofunderstanding of Korean political organizations in later 1940s-1950s Japan and a
confused chronology of events. The dominant Korean organization in Japan between

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1945 and 1949 (when it was forcible dissolved by the Occupation authorities) was
the League of Koreans (Chōsenjin Renmei or Chōren) – the body in which Kim Chonhae was one of a number of prominent figures. It initially embraced a broad
spectrum of political opinions, but became increasingly left-wing as time went on.
Following its dissolution, from 1951 to 1955, the leading left-wing Korean
organization was the Democratic Front for the Unification of Koreans in Japan(Zainichi Chōsen Tōitsu Minshu Sensen or Minsen for short), which was the only oneof the groups discussed here to be very closely aligned with the Japanese Communist
Party. Neither Chōren nor Minsen was dominated by postwar refugees from Jeju –the key figures had been in Japan since before the war. ‘Soren’, the only group
Ramseyer actually names (properly Zai-Nihon Chōsenjin Sōrengōkai in Japanese,
abbreviated to Sōren) was not founded until 1955, so obviously did not instigate any
violence in the late 1940s or early 1950s (See Lie 2008, 39‒41). Its founding mission
was to separate the Korean community in Japan from the influence of the JapaneseCommunist Party, and to redirect Koreans’ loyalty to North Korea. It encouraged its
members not to engage in revolutionary activity in Japan, but rather to focus oncontributing to the rebuilding and strengthening of North Korea.
5.1.3 Out-Migration
1. Here we are told that ‘those Koreans who had learned to make their way within
Japan (those already integrated into Japanese social capital networks) created arival organization that in time would become the Mindan (Zai Nihon Daikan
minkoku mindan)’, which ‘constituted a way-station along the path to full
assimilation’. Apart from failing to make clear that Mindan was founded in 1948,
seven years before Sōren, Ramseyer fails to note a few roadblocks to being‘already integrated into Japanese social capital networks’ and on the path to ‘full
assimilation’. Koreans in Japan had been Japanese nationals in the colonial
period, and theoretically remained so until the end of the Allied Occupation ofJapan in 1952. As its first act on achieving independence from occupation, theJapanese government unilaterally rescinded the Japanese nationality of Koreansin Japan, turning them into aliens with no guaranteed residence rights. As aliens,
Koreans had no vote, were ineligible for any form of government employment –such as teaching in state schools or even sweeping the streets for their local
council – and had no access to most forms of welfare (such as state pensions).
Acquiring Japanese nationality by naturalization was legally possible, but inpractice extremely difficult. Most large Japanese companies also refused to hire
Koreans in white collar positions
2. The following paragraph, on assimilation, highlights the other fundamental andobvious flaw, referred to at the start of my comments. In this article: Ramseyer
never defines what he means by a ‘Korean in Japan’. Is he talking about people
with Korean citizenship, people with Korean ancestry, or people who identify in
one way or another (and there are many possible ways) as Korean? He seems not
to have grasped the fact that the Japanese government does not collect statistics
on ethnic background or identity. There are no census questions on the ethnicity,and there are therefore no statistics on the number of people in Japan who have
Korean heritage and/or identify as Zainichi Korean. Thus, while it is true that the7number of Korean nationals resident in Japan has declined because ofintermarriage and naturalization (which has become easier over time), there is
no way of telling how many of those with Japanese nationality but Korean
heritage see themselves as Korean.
3. The statement that ‘violently hard-left political opportunists’ have become theface of those who continue to identify as Korean is completely wrong, and iseasily disproved by the statistics on those Korean community that are available.
Another crucial part of this story which Ramseyer fails to mention is thatmembers of the long-term Korean resident community in Japan are required (forcomplex historical reasons) to register themselves with the Japanese authorities
either as ‘Zainichi Kankokujin’ (using the name for ‘Korea’ adopted by the South
Korean government) or as ‘Zainichi Chōsenjin’ (using the name for Korea which isincorporated into the official title of North Korea). Although these names are notprecise indicators of political affiliation (Zainichi Kankokujin do not neceaarily
support the policies of the Korean government, and not all Zainichi Chōsenjin are
pro-North Korean), they are a rough indicator of the political spectrum. As of
2018 (according to the Ministry of Justice source quoted by Ramseyer elsewherein his article) amongst members of the long term Zainichi Korean community
who retain their Korean nationality and are registered with the Japanese
authorities, 292,878 (91%) choose to register as Zainichi Kankokujin (i.e. using
the South Korea affiliated identifier) as opposed to 29,569 (9%) who are
registered as Zainichi Chōsenjin (i.e. using the identifier often seen as being
associated with North Korea). Those who belong to or are affiliated with Sōren
are an even smaller proportion of the population.
5.1.4 The Soren Schools
1. This section bases its discussion of the complex history of the Sōren school systemon a single mass market book published by the right-wing Sankei Newspaper
company, and wrongly referenced in the bibliography (see below).
5.2 Residual Dysfunction
5.2.2 Dysfunction
1. Here Ramseyer returns to his theme of labelling Koreans in Japan ‘dysfunctional’,criminal, uneducated and lacking social capital. He provides a table to show thateven in 2015, their crime rate was much higher than that of Japanese. This table isfootnoted to Ministry of Justice statistics on ‘foreigners in Japan’ for 2018 and Police
Agency crime statistics for 2015. Neither of these documents contains the data
reproduced in this table. The Ministry of Justice reports provide population figures
but no crime statistics, while the Police Agency statistics give figures for crimes
committed by all Koreans in Japan (both ‘special permanent residents’ and‘newcomers’), but do not distinguish between these two groups. Ramseyer’s table
does distinguish between them, but the referencing gives no indication of the sourceof the additional information which is the basis for this distinction, so there is no way
of confirming its accuracy.

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2. Ramseyer tells us that Koreans in Japan are not only criminal but also welfare
dependent, and produces a table to demonstrate this (Table 5). The first half of thistable (up to 1957) is based on material from a publication by Higuchi Yūichi, a serious
historian. The table then leaps to 2010 figures which are taken from a book entitled
The Special Privileges and Crimes of Koreans in Japan, written Bandō Tadanobu, a
far-right former police interpreter best known for his work in disseminating
demeaning stereotypes of various minorities at home and abroad. Bandō’s recent
contributions to public discourse include an online video explaining to Japaneseviewers that the US Black Lives Matter is a Black Supremacist movement whose
members go around urging people to kill whites(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf5xTeDr0jg) On the basis of this expertise,
Professor Ramseyer tells us that ‘the fraction of Korean households on welfare could
be twenty times the fraction for Japanese households’ (sic).
3. The result (says Ramseyer) is a community of Koreans in Japan who are
dysfunctional, devoid of social capital and talent, are manipulated by communist
leaders and ‘generate significant discrimination against themselves’. He offers noevidence for any of these gratuitous statements. On the contrary, serious studies
done on this subject show that Zainichi Koreans with Korean nationality, despite
decades of social challenges and discrimination, and despite ethnic prejudice evident
even today, had, by the mid-1990s, reached a point where their average educationlevels were only very marginally lower than those of the Japanese majority, andwhere their average SSM occupational prestige score and average income were
marginally higher than those of the majority (Kim 2011, 240).
5.2.3 Repatriation
1. Like the rest of this article, this section demonstrates that the author has either
failed to read the relevant literature or has deliberately chosen to ignore most of
the facts and cherry pick a convenient few from works like a book by the rightwing Sankei Shinbun (astonishingly listed in the bibliography as being authoredby ‘Shimbun, S’ – the equivalent of listing a book produced by the Washington
Post as being authored by ‘Post, W’). Ramseyer omits any account of thecomplex social factors that pushed Zainichi Koreans to seek repatriation, or of
the complex history of political maneuvers by the Japanese, North Korean, South
Korean Soviet and other states which created the tragedy of the repatriation (seeTakasaki and Pak 2005; Morris-Suzuki 2007).
Bibliography
At my count, the bibliography contains at least ten misspellings, mis-transliterations etc.
GENERAL COMMENTS
The fact that this article could have been published in a peer reviewed journal, despite its
glaring scholarly flaws and use of offensive and demeaning language, is an indictment of thepeer review system as it exists in scholarly publishing today. This seems to reflect two
problems:

9(i)Academia / academic publishing has become divided into disciplinary silos which
do not have enough communication with one another, apparently resulting (inthis case) in an article not having been reviewed by scholars with expertise in
crucial parts of its content.
(ii)
Academics (including those who serve of editorial boards) are under hugepressure from their home institutions to publish in peer reviewed journals and to
perform a multitude of tasks. This means that more and more articles are being
submitted for review, while academics have less and less time and incentive toreview these articles thoroughly.
The deeply regrettable publication of this article has one positive side to it: this is a wake-up
call, confronting scholars and academic publishers with the urgent need to get together todiscuss how we can improve and rethink methods of maintain and strengthening scholarly
integrity in the dissemination of knowledge, and ensure that something like this never
happens again.

Sources:
Augustine, Matthew. 2017. ‘The Limits of Decolonization: American Occupiers and the“Korean Problem” in Japan, 1945-1948’. International Journal of Korean Studies. Vol. 22,
no. 1, https://ijkh.khistory.org/journal/view.php?number=473 .
Chapman, David. 2008. Zainichi Korean Identity and Ethnicity. London and New York:
Routledge.
Jeju 4.3. Peace Commission/National Committee for Investigation of the Truth of the April 3
Incident. 2003. The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report.
Kawashima, Ken. 2009. The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan. Durhamand London. Duke University Press.
Kim, Bunso. 2011. ‘Changes in the Social Position of “Zainichi” Koreans: A Historical
Overview’. Social Science Japan Journal. Vol. 2. No 2. pp. 233-245.
Kim, Mungja. 2015. ‘How Does Diaspora Mobilization Become a Causal Feature of Structural
Change?’ Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 266-290.
Kim, Tae-Gi. 1997. Sengo Nihon Seiji to Zainichi Chōsenjin Mondai. Tokyo: Keisō Shobō
Kim-Wachutka, Jackie J. 2019. Zainichi Korean Women in Japan: Voices. London and New
York: Routledge.
Lie, John. 2008. Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Morris-Suzuki. 2007. Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War. Lanham and
New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Naitou, Hisako. 2005. ‘Korean Forced Labor in Japan’s Wartime Empire’. In Paul H. Kratoska
ed. Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown Histories. London: Taylor andFrancis, pp. 90‒98.
Nishinarita, Yutaka. 2000. ‘Chōsenjin, Chūgokujin no Kyōsei Renkō to Gendai’. HitotubashiRonsō. No. 2, pp. 397‒406.
Oguma, Eiji and Kang, Sangjung. 2008. Zainichi Issei no Kioku. Tokyo: Shūeisha.
Ōnuma, Yasuaki. 2005. Zainichi Kankokujin, Chōsenjin to Jinken. Tokyo: Yūhikaku.
Park, Albert. 2014. Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism and Protest in JapaneseOccupied Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

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Ryang, Sonia. 2003. ‘The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Massacre of Koreans in 1923:
Notes on Japan’s Modern Sovereignty’. Anthropological Quarterly. Vol. 76, no. 4, pp. 731748.
Ryang, Sonia. 2007. ‘The Tongue That Divided Life and Death. The 1923 Tokyo Earthquake
and the Massacre of Koreans’. The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. Vol. 5, issue 9.
https://apjjf.org/-Sonia-Ryang/2513/article.html
Ryang, Sonia and Lie, John eds. 2009. Diaspora Without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Takasaki, Shōji and Pak, Chongjin.2005. Kikoku Jigyō wa nan datta no ka: Fūin Sareta Nicchō
Kankeishi. Tokyo: Heibonsha.
Ueda, Hiroshi. 2005. ‘Waga Kuni ni Okeru “Gaikokujin Hanzai” no Mondai’. Ritsumei Hōgaku.
No. 304.
Yamada, Shōji. 2012/2013. ‘What Happened in the Area of Greater Tokyo Right after theGreat Kantō Earthquake? The State, the Media and the People’, Comparative Genocide
Studies, vol. 3, available for download from http://www.cgs.c.utokyo.ac.jp/publication.html

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