Korean Diaspora

The formation of ethnic and diasporic identities was studied by both domestic and Western scholars. In particular, the issue of the formation of diasporas has always been considered through the prism of the notion of classical diasporas, however, modern globalization processes force the emergence of “new” diasporas, qualities of which are possessed today by a predominant part of the Korean Americans. Contrary to popular belief, the community of the Korean Americans is not homogeneous but bimodal - in terms of language, kinship, generation, identity and class, time of immigration. The perception of ethnic belonging is an important factor for Korean Americans and Korean Christian missions are the main social institutions that play a significant role in the formation of the diasporic identity in the Korean American community. This article covers socio-psychological factors that influence the formation of ethnic and diasporic identities.

Keywords: Korean diaspora in the USA, Korean Americans, diaspora, ethnic identity, diaspora/diasporic identity.

Ефремов Е.А.
(Алматы, Казахстан, Казахстан, Казахский национальный университет имени Аль-Фараби)

Этнокультурная идентичность корейцев Казахстана
(по результатам социологического опроса)
Доклад на X Международной корееведческой конференции ДВФУ

Аннотация
Настоящая статья основана на проведенном опросе и нацелена на выявление степени этнокультурной идентичности корейцев Казахстана. В рамках которого были изучены факторы, влияющие на этническую и диаспорную идентичность, межэтническую толерантность корё сарам и степень их интегрированности в общество Казахстана.
Ключевые слова: диаспора, корё сарам, корейцы Казахстана, этническая идентичность, диаспорная идентичность.



Ethnocultural identity of Koreans in Kazakhstan
(basing on the results of the sociological survey)
Yefrem Yefremov
Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty, Kazakhstan
Paper for the X-th FEFU International Conference on Korean Studies

Summary
In this paper, an analysis of the results of a sociological survey aimed at identifying the degree of the ethnic, diasporic, and cultural identity of Koreans in Kazakhstan was carried out. As part of the survey, the factors influencing ethnic and diaspora identity, interethnic tolerance of Koryo Saram, and the degree of integration of Koryo Saram into the society of Kazakhstan were studied.
As part of this work, an analysis of the results of a sociological survey aimed at identifying the degree of the ethnic, diasporic, and cultural identity of Koreans in Kazakhstan was carried out. As part of the survey, the factors influencing ethnic and diaspora identity, interethnic tolerance of Koryo Saram, and the degree of integration of Koryo Saram into the society of Kazakhstan were studied. It is concluded that the preservation of “Koreanness” in the multiethnic society in Kazakhstan occurs on the basis of genetic factors, as well as due to the preservation of ritual and everyday culture.
Keywords: diaspora, Koryo Saram, Koreans of Kazakhstan, ethnic identity, diasporic identity.

The author of this article examines the phenomenon of diaspora and diasporic identity, conditions, and factors influencing the transformation and development of identity in a multiethnic society in Kazakhstan. Diasporic identity is a multifaceted phenomenon characterized by its dynamism. Kazakhstani Koreans (ethnonym-"Koryo Saram") are integrated into the multiethnic society of modern Kazakhstan and it can be argued that the overwhelming majority of them are urbanized. This factor determines the high rate of acculturation, which leads to the transformation of the traditional Korean community. The author also analyzes the relationship between ethnic and diaspora identities. The characteristic forms of manifestation of ethnic identity, as well as methods for preserving and manifestation of the ethnic identity of the Korean diaspora in Kazakhstan, are analyzed. A diaspora is not a diaspora by defaultinitially, it is a group that is in an amorphous state, which can develop into a diaspora, provided that its construction is based on ethnic consciousness. The community of Koreans in Kazakhstan is not ethnically closed. As a result, the nature of the phenomenon of diasporic identity was determined and the forms of manifestation of the diasporic identity of Koreans in Kazakhstan were identified. The diasporic identity of Koryo Saram-a construct of various identities, which are based on a common cultural basis and are superimposed on the identity of representatives of the multiethnic society of Kazakhstan-is a "borderline" phenomenon: on the one hand, representatives of the diaspora are focused on the preservation of their ethnic and cultural identity, or "otherness" in relation to the ethnic majority; on the other hand, the situation of long-term residence and adaptation to new socio-cultural conditions determines the process of socialization and the formation of the Republic of Kazakhstan's civic identity.

Вопрос формирования этнической и диаспорной идентичности рассматривался как отечественным так и западными учеными. В частности вопрос формирования диаспор всегда рассматривался через призму классических диаспор, однако современные глобальные процессы стимулируют возникновение «новых» диаспор, качествами которой обладает преобладающая часть американцев корейского происхождения сегодня. Вопреки распространенному мнению, сообщество американцев корейского происхождения не однородно, а бимодально – по языку, родству, поколению, идентичности и классовой принадлежности, времени иммиграции. Ощущение этнической принадлежности является важным фактором для американцев корейского происхождения, при этом основным социальным институтом, играющим значимую роль в формировании диаспорной идентичности в сообществе американцев корейского происхождения, играют корейские христианские миссии. Данная статья ставит перед собой целью рассмотреть социально-психологические факторы, влияющие на формирование этнической и диаспорной идентичности.

Ключевые слова: корейская диаспора в США, американцы корейского происхождения, диаспора, этническая идентичность, диаспорная идентичность.

The Department of Asian Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is pleased to announce its hosting of an international conference, " Korean Diaspora and the Arts. " There has been great interest in the study of the Korean diaspora in the last two decades, during which we have witnessed scholars' active engagement with the Korean diaspora especially in the fields of anthropology, sociology, ethnography, and art. Drawing on this scholarship, this conference aims to bring together innovative approaches that will deepen our understanding of the historical, cultural, and political experiences of Korean diasporic individuals and communities as reflected in creative works—literature, films, multimedia works, performance art, music, popular culture, etc.—as well as scholarly works that deal with diasporic artists. By closely examining both well-known and lesser-known artworks and artists, the conference is hoping to explore how the living experiences of the Korean diaspora can be articulated through creative means; and what purposes the arts serve for diasporic individuals and communities. We welcome individual papers and panel proposals that examine representations of the Korean diaspora in creative works; and that investigate lives and philosophies of diasporic artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will also consider papers that contain innovative theoretical, historical, and sociological approaches to the Korean diaspora.

Individual abstracts and panel proposals (with abstracts for each of the panelists) should be sent to koreadisapora@gmail.com by January 30, 2017. Successful applicants will be notified by February 28, 2017, and asked to send their working papers (3,000–4,000 words) at least two weeks prior to the conference. Questions regarding the conference and the proposal submission process can be sent to: Dr. Jooyeon Rhee (jooyeon.rhee@gmail.com) or Ira Lyan (irlyan@gmail.com).

Accommodation
The conference provides two nights at the university lounge (May 21-23) and accommodation during the conference. A free guided tour to The Old City (or Dead Sea/Masada) will be provided for all participants on May 24.

Sponsors:
The Academy of Korean Studies, The Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies, and The Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace

Organizing Committee
Dr. Jooyeon Rhee, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Ira Lyan, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is the oldest in Israel and is one of the biggest departments in the Faculty of Humanities, home to over 300 students specializing in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian Studies. The department is characterized by its excellence in research and teaching, and it maintains an environment of cooperation between students and faculty in a wide array of extracurricular activities. To read more about the department, visit: http://asia.huji.ac.il/en

Previous Conferences on Korean Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem:
2013 The “Miracle” Narratives of the Korean Cultural Industries: Perspectives from the Middle East
2014 Cultural Geography of the Hallyu: Mapping the World through Korean Popular Culture
2015 Transnational Cultural Interactions between Korea and Japan
2016 Mobility, Creativity, and Collectivity: Making Sites in Contemporary Korean Visual Culture

The article is a case study of the Koryo saram, the ethnic Koreans living in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, to reflect on how notions of diasporas, community, and identity have changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It contends that the Koryo saram are best understood through the lenses of diasporic conditions rather than as bounded communities as such an approach allows for greater recognition of heterogeneity within such communities. While many Koryo saram continue to claim some form of Korean-ness, how they related to issues of homeland-orientation and boundary maintenance evidences internal variation and growing in-betweenness. The community’s hybridity (“hyphenization”) and liminality (“identity through difference”) stand out when examining generational differences and are especially evident among the local Korean youth.

Комментарий от автора:
Редактор в ряде мест заменил термин «диаспора» на термин «община», не согласовав замену с автором. В данном случае речь идет не просто об обычном термине, а концептуальном аппарате, имеющим прнципиальное значение. Отношения между данными понятиями подпадают под категорию «родо-видовых отношений», т. е. понятие «община» шире, чем понятие «диаспора». Общины бывают разные — профессиональные, половозрастные и т. д. Диаспора — этнический тип общины. Но в отличие от общин, которые могли веками проживать на данной территории и являются коренными, не входя при этом в состав «титульной нации» (например, народы Средней Азии), диаспоры — это отколовшаяся община, проживающая за пределами исторической родины. Вся уникальность ситуация с русскоязычными корейцами в том, что это не просто община, а именно диаспора, если принять, что их родиной является СССР, Россия или другие страны СНГ. Это субэтническая группа с особыми признаками. Это сравнительно новое явление, и вопрос корректного обозначения данного феномена может быть предметом обсуждения, но ни в коем случае автоматической замены одного термина другим, поскольку речь идет о принципиальных понятиях и авторской позиции. По крайней мере, на недавней международной конференции в Южной Корее, моя позиция была воспринята как новый и перспективный взгляд на русскоязычных корейцев в Корее, включая возможность пересмотра понятия «историческая родина». Что касается термина «диаспорология», то в науке понятия могут переходить из одной науке в другую с изменением смысла. Это происходит повсеместно. Тот же термин «диаспора» применяется в ботанике, а в этнологии одно время применялся исключительно к евреям. Но сегодня это термин, прочно вошел в этнологию, и в этнологии диаспорология означает учение о диаспорах.

Опубликовано в журнале в колонке "Комментарии" 28 октября 2018 г.

The author of this article examines the phenomenon of diaspora and diasporic identity, conditions, and factors influencing the transformation and development of identity in a multiethnic society in Kazakhstan. Diasporic identity is a multifaceted phenomenon characterized by its dynamism. Kazakhstani Koreans (ethnonym — “Koryo Saram”) are integrated into the multiethnic society of modern Kazakhstan and it can be argued that the overwhelming majority of them are urbanized. This factor determines the high rate of acculturation, which leads to the transformation of the traditional Korean community. The author also analyzes the relationship between ethnic and diaspora identities. The characteristic forms of manifestation of ethnic identity, as well as methods for preserving and manifestation of the ethnic identity of the Korean diaspora in Kazakhstan, are analyzed. A diaspora is not a diaspora by default — initially, it is a group that is in an amorphous state, which can develop into a d...

The Pinocchio-like story of a life-sized sex toy gaining consciousness and learning to live and love in contemporary Tokyo, Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Air Doll (“Kuki Ningyo,” 2009) has been largely overlooked within the director’s filmography as he graduated from independent auteur to one of Japan’s internationally recognized commercial directors. During this transition in the late 2000s, he incorporated his projects’ longstanding thematic focus on absence and loss into the generic model of the family melodrama, the sole focus of many Japanese directors in their maturity. A seemingly aberrant departure into child-like fantasy mixed with faux and unabashed eroticism, the critically maligned Air Doll offers a surprising key to understanding Kore-eda’s development, but more crucially reveals a coy engagement with the politics of Japanese social relations freighting the domestic genre not found in his later works. Highlighting the casting of South Korean actress Bae Doona as the protagonist “Nozomi,” the air doll of the film’s title, I analyze the film’s posthuman narrative of encounters in a consumer culture by a subject literally structured by capitalism as one drawing intimate relations between social precarity in Japan, the Korean diaspora, and cinematic obsolescence with great ontological depth.

Public diplomacy, which is widely used in modern countries' foreign policy in addition to traditional diplomacy, has only recently been actively developed in South Korea. Its legal foundation was the Public Diplomacy Act, which was adopted in 2016. The Republic of Korea's public diplomacy, along with political and economic diplomacy, nowadays constitutes the so-called «three pillars of Korean diplomacy», which is the basis of «smart power» in the country's foreign policy. This article examines the implementation of South Korea's public diplomacy. The focus is on the role and place of the overseas Korean diaspora. The main attention is paid to the role and place of the Korean diaspora. An analysis of the official documents, the First Master Plan for Korean Public Diplomacy 2017-2021 and the Comprehensive Plans for 2018, 2019, 2020, shows that public diplomacy in the Republic of Korea is primary focused on three areas: culture, knowledge, and politics, and aims to enhance the country's image, spread the information about Korea, and draw attention to the unification of the Korean Peninsula. The main actor is the state, and it uses official diplomacy along with public diplomacy in cooperation with local executive bodies and the private sector. The overseas Koreans, who are officially classified as South Koreans living abroad and foreign Korean nationals, play two roles: actors in the first case and target audience in the other.

We offer a n ew perspective on the recent controversies surrounding the memorialization of comfort women in sever al American cities b y shifting the focus from bilateral historical grievances and tensions between the national governments of Japan and South Korea, to the grassroots and transnational politics involved in the siting of these monuments. We find that the construction of a transnational Korean identity among the Korean diaspora in the USA, and their creation of a collective public memory of the comfort women are evidence of their growing political consciousness and engagement in American civic life, and it i s notable that most of the leadership and membership of the main organizations involved are women. These women are part of the global feminist and human rights movements which advocate for the inclusion and recognition of the experiences of women during wartime and colonization.Therefore, the memorials are not only symbols of historic reconciliation and remembrance, but of the skillful and strategic organizing, activism, and leadership of AsianAmericans. This article also shows how the movement is evolving through the development of educational and curricular initiatives in honor of the comfort women in the USA.

This  article  attempts  to  construct  a  narrative  of  ethnic  Koreans  in  postwar  Taiwan  through careful  reading  of  governmental  archives  as  well  as  oral  history  collected  through  personal interviews. Its scope is from 1945 to 1970, a period which underwent political transition from
a Japanese regime to a Chinese one, requiring local residents challenging adjustments to the new political environment. 

Voices of Korean diaspora in Taiwan remain relatively unheard despite the celebration of ethnic diversity  and  multiculturalism  in  the  recent  decades  orchestrated  by  the  liberal-minded Democratic  Progressive  Party. This  may  be  due  to  the  small  number: There  remained  about
only  four  hundred  Koreans  in  Taiwan  after  the  end  of  WWII.  Most  Korean  men  found employment  with  the  Taiwanese  Fishery  Company  in  Keelung,  filling  a  vacuum  left  by Japanese employees who were forced to repatriate after the war. Seasoned Korean fishermen
took  on  well-paid  positions  such  as  captain  and  chief  engineer  with  the  company,  but  soon faced  economic  hardship  after  gradually  being  replaced  by  local  Taiwanese.  A  number  of women who stayed were previously involved in the sex industry during the prewar and wartime eras. 

One of the highlights of this article depicts a power struggle between Yim Du-uk  任斗旭  and Lee Sang-man  李象萬  over the leadership of the Korean Association. In the end, Yim, who had a record of collaborating with Japanese military during wartime, ousts Lee, a long-time Korean independence activist sent by the Korean provisional government in China. Through the narratives of ethnic Koreans in Taiwan, this article also attempts to rethink decolonization, i.e. “de-Japanization,” and national imagination by focusing on how the Korean residents on
the island became “Korean,” through everyday negotiations with cultures, including a Korean one that is presupposed as their own. This article pays special attention to the ethno-spaces of the Korean School and the Church in Keelung as case studies.

Public diplomacy, which is widely used in modern countries' foreign policy in addition to traditional diplomacy, has only recently been actively developed in South Korea. Its legal foundation was the Public Diplomacy Act, which was adopted in 2016. The Republic of Korea's public diplomacy, along with political and economic diplomacy, nowadays constitutes the so-called «three pillars of Korean diplomacy», which is the basis of «smart power» in the country's foreign policy. This article examines the implementation of South Korea's public diplomacy. The focus is on the role and place of the overseas Korean diaspora. The main attention is paid to the role and place of the Korean diaspora. An analysis of the official documents, the First Master Plan for Korean Public Diplomacy 2017-2021 and the Comprehensive Plans for 2018, 2019, 2020, shows that public diplomacy in the Republic of Korea is primary focused on three areas: culture, knowledge, and politics, and aims to enhance the country's image, spread the information about Korea, and draw attention to the unification of the Korean Peninsula. The main actor is the state, and it uses official diplomacy along with public diplomacy in cooperation with local executive bodies and the private sector. The overseas Koreans, who are officially classified as South Koreans living abroad and foreign Korean nationals, play two roles: actors in the first case and target audience in the other.