ABSTRACT
No nation is pure or homogeneous in terms of race, ethnicity and culture. Any nation contains cultural difference within its boundary. This difference is, however, often forgotten in the discursive representation of the nation as a racially and culturally homogeneous entity. As Stuart Hall argues, “a nation is not only a political entity but something which produces meanings – a system of cultural representation” (1992: 292). Likewise, Japan’s national identity is produced and reproduced by discursive strategies, rather than by a reality itself (Iwabuchi 1994). No one would deny, for example, that since the colonization of Korea in 1910, if not before, resident Koreans have been found in Japan, and about 700,000 of them continue to live in Japan today. 1 Their existence, however, has not been acknowledged as constitutive of Japan, its society and culture, in either Japanese official discourse or the media. The Japanese media have tended to represent resident Koreans as irrelevant to Japanese national life, by neglecting them altogether, or representing them in such a manner that they are confined to a space of eternal victimhood: victims of Japan’s past colonialism. Resident Koreans had to be forgotten or somehow completely separated from the ongoing process of constructing modern Japan in order to imagine Japan as a monoracial nation, an imagining which necessitated a clear break from the colonialist past: resident Koreans are neither in nor of Japan.
