As the number of foreign residents in Japan continues to grow, scholars of Japanese society are devoting increasing attention to the ways in which foreign communities interact with state and society in Japan. David Chapman's recent book Zainichi Korean Identity and Ethnicity focuses on the oldest and, until recently, the largest foreign community in Japan: the Korean community. Koreans in Japan are often called “zainichi Koreans,” which literally means “Koreans in Japan.” However, as Chapman notes, zainichi thinkers, beginning with Kim Tong-myung, have made the term zainichi into a new identity category, treating zainichi identity as an alternative to “being totally Korean or totally Japanese” (p. 44).

Chapman articulates three goals that he hopes to accomplish by writing this book. First, he aims to make the ideas of a variety of zainichi thinkers accessible to non-Japanese readers. Second, he aims to “demonstrate how, since the early 1970s, the zainichi have resisted discourses and conditions that have attempted to shape their lives, and how new and different discourse has played a considerable role in bringing about social change” (p. 2). Third, Chapman aims to examine “the dynamic relationship between discourse and identity” in order to demonstrate “the influence of discourse on zainichi life” (p. 5). Chapman draws on several different kinds of evidence in order to develop his argument. He synthesizes secondary scholarship on the history of the zainichi community in Japan, tracing the changing nature of that community from the 1910 Japanese annexation of Korea until the present. He also looks at primary sources—newspaper articles as well as government documents—in order to examine the social changes that have impacted the zainichi community. Finally, he examines the writings of and published interviews with a variety of zainichi activists, academics, and public intellectuals in order to paint a complicated and compelling portrait of zainichi discourses in postwar Japan.

Chapman is at his best as he traces the history of the zainichi community in Japan. His discussion of the relationship between zainichi organizations, the Japanese state, and the American occupation force in the immediate postwar period (pp. 24–30) is particularly strong, as is his discussion of the lead-up to and the fallout from the Hitachi incident of 1974, in which a zainichi college graduate had his offer of employment at Hitachi withdrawn when Hitachi found out that he was not a Japanese citizen (pp. 33–36). Chapman also does a nice job summarizing and analyzing the thoughts of a variety of zainichi intellectuals and activists. Here, his decision to focus on several debates among zainichi thinkers is useful because it reveals the extent to which issues of identity and ethnicity are contested within the zainichi community.

However, Chapman's decision to (mostly) exclude discourse from the North Korean community in Japan is puzzling, especially in light of that community's social and political importance—the North Korea-affiliated Chōsen Sōren runs the vast majority of Korean primary and secondary schools in Japan and not a small number of zainichi have North Korean citizenship. Chapman defends this decision by arguing “Sonia Ryang's (1997) work on this community is comprehensive” (p. 148, note 2). While Chapman is right to note the quality of Ryang's book on the North Korean community in Japan, Ryang's book is an ethnography, and her main source of evidence is “what ChongryunFootnote ¹ Koreans say about themselves in their everyday lives.”Footnote ² This contrasts starkly with Chapman's account, which focuses on published interviews with and articles by leading zainichi thinkers. Chapman's book would have been strengthened by an examination of the writings of North Korea-affiliated zainichi thinkers.

Moreover, Chapman's work would have also been strengthened had he followed Ryang in devoting a bit more attention to what zainichi “say about themselves in their everyday lives.” Before his compelling summary of Iinuma Jirō's 1979 interview of Kim Tong-myung in which Kim first formally articulated the idea of zainichi identity as an alternative to being completely Korean or Japanese, Chapman argues “the thoughts of the majority of the younger-generation zainichi community were concisely articulated through this interview” (p. 44). However, the reader is not in a position to evaluate this claim, because Chapman does not present interview data, public opinion data, or ethnographic data to evaluate how zainichi who do not publish articles or give media interviews see the world.

I do not want to overstate these issues, as Chapman took on a very challenging scholarly endeavor with this book. Zainichi make up a diverse community with a complex and compelling history, and Chapman does a nice job of capturing much of this diversity and complexity. I recommend this book to those interested in Japanese society, minority politics in Japan, political thought in Japan, and issues relating to diaspora communities worldwide.