John Lie's Zainichi is a welcome addition to the expanding literature in English on Korean minority populations in Japan. He not only presents the complex, arbitrary, and transient identities and conditions of this diasporic population, but also illuminates more broadly the limits of positivist social scientific approaches and essentialism. As descendents of prewar migrants from colonial Korea to Japan, Zainichi Koreans inherently challenge the prevalent nationalistic assumption of isomorphism between a territory and a people who believe they have a common ancestry. Beyond that, Lie's examination of the trajectory of dominant modes of ideology and expressions of identities from the post–World War II period up to the 2000s reveals a constellation of nationalistic and exclusive “Zainichi ideologies” among intellectuals whose diasporic nationalism simultaneously induces a variety of discontents.

This volume is the fruit of decades of primary and secondary data collection with keen sociological imagination. Readers, regardless of their prior knowledge about Zainichi Koreans, will benefit from this longitudinal intellectual journey, which originated in Lie's formative childhood in Tokyo during the 1960s, his two separate yearlong stays during the 1980s and the 1990s, and additional revisits during the 2000s (pp. 185–88). He reconstructs the postcolonial Zainichi life with illustrative and poignant details through an exhaustive use of a range of discourses published and circulating in the Japanese print market and other media, including autobiographies, novels, movies, televised dramas, and documentaries. He captures several critical but interrelated turns of Zainichi narratives, while resisting any taxonomic oversimplification.

Each chapter deals with the conditions and turning points of dominant paradigms and ways of life in a loosely overlapping chronological order. The first three chapters, “Silence” (1950s), “Exile” (1950s and 1960s), and “Cunning” (1960s and 1970s), discuss the backdrop that gave rise to Zainichi ideologies, coinciding with the eras of the Cold War, the dominance of the conservative establishment, and the monoethnic identity of Japan's high-growth period. The first chapter, “Silence,” foremost denies the received Zainichi historiography of involuntary colonial migration, oppression, and resistance (pp. 4–6), which misrepresents other sides of colonial migration, such as the lure of modernity and upward mobility as well as the irreversible trend of assimilation (pp. 6–7). Lie identifies several factors that kept Zainichi presence unrecognized and monoethnic Japan intact: Zainichi Koreans' ability to “pass” as a mixture of constraint and choice (pp. 18–19) and residence and occupational segregation (p. 17); the nationalist understanding of Zainichi as an extension of the Korean peninsula and Cold War (pp. 30–31); and the absence of organization and movement (pp. 28–29). Chapter 2, “Exile,” focuses on the golden days of the pro–North Korean organization Sōren, culminating in the repatriation movement to North Korea. Sōren and its affiliated intellectuals laid the foundation of the ideology of return (p. 39), which later transformed itself into a longing for and identification with the hypothetical unified Korean homeland (p. 60), and justified the Zainichi in permanent exile (p. 47). Chapter 3, “Cunning,” sheds light on the incipient challenges to Zainichi “disrecognition”—the lack of recognition as “a complex of attributes—love, right, and esteem—that endow people with a sense of acceptance and acknowledgment” (p. 80) within Japanese society. Zainichi passing as Japanese is an endorsed and internalized form of disrecognition (pp. 83–84), the departure from which marked the emergent Zainichi civil rights movements, which were grounded in the concrete and mundane desires of well-educated Zainichi inspired by the ideal of multiculturalism (which actually requires a strategic essentialization of Koreanness).

The critical arguments pertaining to Zainichi ideology and its discontents are included in the fourth and fifth chapters, “Recognition” and “Reconciliation” (both concerned with the 1980s and beyond). The then-emergent Zainichi ideology was a reaction to and counterchallenge against disrecognition, the political division of the Korean homeland, and a Korea–Japan binary. Zainichi ideology was an expression of ethnic fundamentalism and diasporic nationalism; it solidified essentialized Zainichi-ness, emphasizing oppression—forced labor migration in the past and discrimination at present (pp. 98–99)—yet retaining elements of a homeland orientation. Based on Yoon Keun Cha's treatise, Lie summarizes Zainichi ideology as follows: “To be Zainichi means to reflect on Zainichi-ness and to seek unification: to retain historical memory and critique of Japanese imperialism, to sustain oppositional consciousness that is tantamount to anti-Japanese sentiments, and to resist assimilation and naturalization” (p. 115). Then, Lie elaborates contradictions inherent in Zainichi ideology, pointing out its inappropriateness to represent diverse Zainichi populations, the influences of Japanese high and popular culture on Zainichi discourses, and the interests of ethnic entrepreneurs. Building on the fact that ancestry or ethnicity alone does not determine one's identity and that ethnicity is only one of many factors in an individual life course (pp. 131–32), the following chapter, “Reconciliation,” introduces the emergent post-Zainichi generation, in terms of how it embraces its internal Japaneseness and awareness of being part of Japanese society. The final chapter, “Reflection,” broadens the book's scope with theoretical and comparative frames; Lie defies Korean nationalism in the Korean peninsula and nationalism in general by pointing out its diasporic and eclectic origins (p. 173) and the false contrast between Korean Americans and Zainichi that tends to assume better-adapted Korean Americans in a multicultural society versus tragic and pitiful Zainichi as perpetual outsiders in a homogeneous society (pp. 185–92).

Although Lie does not intend to provide a comprehensive overview of post–World War II Zainichi Korean history (p. ix), the volume gives readers an illustrative map to navigate this population in further detail. It reaches beyond the boundaries of disciplines and regional studies (although this review is in the Korea section). The volume is also about Japanese society. Korean studies scholars will be intrigued by Lie's critique of modern Korean peoplehood, that is, collective identity based on reified ethnic, racial, or national boundaries.