Post-Colonial Border Crossing: Transnational Families between Korean and Japanese Living in Japan

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Marriage migration is one of the drivers of global migration and has drawn the attention of scholars and practitioners. The majority of marriage migration studies have focused on the “global hypergamy,” or “global marriage-scapes,” which are often brokered marriages between women from poorer countries and men from wealthier countries and observe more women than men crossing national boundaries for marriage. However, the concepts of global hypergamy and feminized migration could be only partially applied to transnational marriages between Koreans and Japanese. Due to the geographical proximity and historical ties between Korea and Japan, transnational marriages between Koreans and Japanese are significant in numbers in Japan but few have paid attention to marriage migration as a contingent phenomenon that depends on not only economic forces and social networks, but also the accumulated history between two countries. By applying the notion of ‘post-colonial border crossing,’ this paper aims to illuminate nuanced ways in which the linkages, experiences, and understandings inherited from the colonial past are revoked, reconfigured, and reimagined by these transnational families, and the issues around identity negotiation, citizenship, and coping with marginalization.

METHODS: 18 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted, 12 marriages of Japanese man and Korean woman, and 6 unions of Korean man and Japanese woman. Snowball sampling was used for participant recruitment. Interviews took place in Kyushu, Japan during the period between April 11 and July 18, 2017 and were conducted in Korean, English or through a Japanese translator. The interviews elicited participants’ life history narratives which provided empirical material for exploring how colonial and post-colonial experiences between two nations are encountered and negotiated in their daily life. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and coded thematically.

FINDINGS:  First of all, this study testifies to the highly contested nature of border crossing and place-making of Korean-Japanese transnational families as their present experiences are embedded in historical experiences and are shaped by the past. Lingering colonial memories, lived and reimagined, influence both sides of the divide (colonizer and colonized) in power relations as indicated by familial (in)acceptance of the union. Second, Korean immigrant spouses cope with situations of “othering” by choosing strategic (in)visibility in terms of choice of family names for their children, language to be spoken at different situations, and holding dual citizenships. Third, this study found that fluid identities such as ‘citizen of heaven’, ‘global citizen’ and acquiring passports from both countries for children were ways to withhold or defer loyalties to either country at the potential risk of discrimination and marginalization.

 

CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS:

Findings highlight the influence of accumulated colonial and post-colonial experiences that still shape the daily life of the Japanese-Korean transnational families in Japan. It shows the importance of understanding multiple factors that shape life experiences of transnational families and the historical experiences are one of those easy to overlook but to be explored in order to provide culturally sensitive interventions for them.