Migrants, Diaspora, and the Korean Impeachment Protests in Japan

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Note: All individual names are pseudonyms.

Minjoon’s Night

Minjoon is a South Korean student who moved to Tokyo, Japan, for his college education. On Tuesday, December 3, 2024, as he prepared to go to bed, he noticed posts about martial law beginning to appear on an online forum. Initially, he thought it was the forum manager figuratively declaring “martial law” to stop the online trolls, but he quickly realized it was South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol who had made the declaration. Watching the declaration speech, he was struck by Yoon’s choice of words: martial law was necessary for “eradicating at one sweep the anti-state forces who follow North Korea.” What does he mean by eradication (척결), Minjoon wondered. Will people get shot to death? Was his family in Seoul safe? 

That night, he couldn’t sleep. He kept refreshing the online forum and his X/Twitter feed for updates. He also watched live-streamed YouTube videos from the National Assembly Building, where police blocked the National Assembly legislators from entering the building while armed military members attempted to break in. At the same time, civilians gathered to stop the armed forces and make way for the legislators. Around 1:00 am, the lawmakers managed to reverse the martial law. However, Minjoon felt uncertain whether the chaotic night—and martial law—were truly over. 

A couple of days later, he heard from a friend that a protest would be held in Ueno, a major transportation hub in a working-class neighborhood in Eastern Tokyo. Ueno also serves many diasporic and immigrant communities, including the Zainichi Koreans. Although he was tired, he said he found it “obvious” (당연) that he should attend the protest given the “unprecedented state of affairs” (초유의 시국). He joined the Ueno protest on December 7, which drew a crowd of 150–200 people; he also went to subsequent protests in Shinjuku, one of which had as many as 500 attendees. 

The anxiety Minjoon expressed during the interview was echoed by all the others I talked to in the weeks following the protests calling for Yoon’s impeachment. These protests brought together diverse Koreans in Tokyo, whose legal statuses and migration histories greatly vary. 

An estimated 800,000 ethnic Koreans live in Japan, although the exact number is difficult to pin down. This is partly due to histories of social and legal discrimination against them. The figure includes both Zainichi Koreans (在日コリアン) and the “Newcomer” (ニューカマー) Koreans. The Zainichi Koreans are the descendants of Korean colonial subjects who moved to Japan during the colonial era (1910–1945). Even though most originated from the Southern part of the Korean peninsula, their political affiliation is split into South Korea-backed Mindan and North Korea-backed Chongryon. While many Zainichi Koreans have naturalized as Japanese citizens in the past decades, many are still legally classified as special permanent residents and travel with a South Korean or a North Korean passport. 

“Newcomers,” by contrast, are colloquially understood as Koreans who are not Zainichi Koreans. They are South Korean citizens who moved to Japan after the diplomatic relationship was established between South Korea and Japan in 1965. Among them are business immigrants, long-term migrant workers, and students. Amid this complexity, Zainichi Koreans and Newcomers rarely cross paths with each other in their everyday lives. The diversity of the protest participants was thus a novel experiment that challenges the conventional understandings of migration, belonging, and citizenship among Koreans in Japan.

The Tokyo Impeachment Protests and the Problem of “Anti-State Organization”

Within a month of the declaration of martial law in South Korea, I counted at least five impeachment protests in Tokyo, most of them not reported by the local or international press. The earliest protest occurred on December 6 in Shin-Okubo, a neighborhood known to be Tokyo’s “New Koreatown,” just three days after what many protestors now call the “12.3 Insurrection.” Subsequent protests alternated between Ueno (Dec. 7, 2024, and Jan. 4, 2025) and Shinjuku Station (Dec. 14 and Dec. 28, 2024), the latter a site that a protest participant called “the center of Japan.”

Shortly after the Dec. 7 protest, I began working with my colleague Ilju Kim to talk to Koreans participating in Tokyo’s impeachment movement. We recruited many of our interlocutors from an anonymous chat group on KakaoTalk—the most popular messenger in South Korea—where about 350 Koreans living in Japan exchange protest information. Most of our interlocutors were South Korean citizens in their 20s and early 30s studying or working in Japan. At the protests, we encountered a more diverse array of protestors, not only Koreans living in Japan but also members of more transient groups like temporary workers on working holiday visas, tourists from South Korea, and Japanese citizens joining the protests in solidarity. 

For all our interlocutors, this was their first time attending a protest in Japan. Yet, like Minjoon, many characterized their participation as an obvious decision. For example, Yujin, who took a three-hour-long bus ride from a neighboring prefecture to participate in the protests, said that seeing reports about rallies in South Korea had “naturally” (자연스럽게) led her to search for information about protests in Japan. Others shared feelings of frustration and distress for not making it to the earlier protests.

However, while they took protest as an obvious and “natural” response, they were still cautious. This was because of the suspicion about the Zainichi Korean activists and their politics. The December 7th protest was organized by Hantongryon (Korean Democratic Unification Alliance in Japan), which has been designated an “anti-state organization” (반국가 단체) by the South Korean government. This designation is a legacy of South Korea’s authoritarian past: Hantongryon was first established in Japan in 1973 largely by Mindan-affiliated Zainichi Koreans under the name of Hanmintong (The National Council for the Promotion of Recovery of Democracy and Unification in Korea). It played a key role in the democratization movement, especially in the 1970s and 80s, including working with the former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Kim Dae-jung during his exile in Japan and leading the movement to save Kim after his kidnapping by the South Korean intelligence authority. 

In 1977, the South Korean government fabricated an espionage case against Zainichi Korean students, falsely accusing them and their organization of being North Korean spies. Despite a series of court rulings and official reports in the last decade admitting the convictions’ invalidity, the government never lifted the designation. Hantongryon members, who are legal citizens of South Korea, are thus still deprived of their voting rights and are denied passports by the South Korean embassy.

The “anti-state organization” label gave many interlocutors (and me) pause. The organization fit the description of the very enemy that Yoon called to “eradicate” (척결) and “execute” (처단) in his martial law declaration. Participants’ hesitation also derived from the fractured political affiliation—and the potential fluidity—among Zainichi Koreans. In this context, many South Korean migrants were openly vigilant about distancing themselves from anti-American rhetoric or any discourses related to North Korea. This reveals that Cold War anti-communist politics extends to many young South Korean migrants in Japan, not just Yoon or his supporters in South Korea waving American flags.

The Minority Anxiety

In response to the discomfort underpinning the first Ueno protest hosted by Hantongryon, some young South Koreans mobilized on social media to organize a follow-up protest in Shinjuku. The volunteers characterized themselves as a group of ordinary citizens, emphasizing the dispersed nature of their mobilization and distancing themselves from any affiliations that could open them up to attacks from far-right activists in South Korea and Japan. When we spoke, several volunteers speculated that this distancing likely contributed to the Shinjuku protest’s larger, more diverse crowd.

In addition to the fear of connection to an “anti-state organization,” many interlocutors were also concerned by their status as a legal and ethnic minority in Japan. Organizers and participants face a very real risk of harassment or doxing by Japanese far-right nationalists (uyoku dantai), whose nativist claims resonate with anticommunism and colonial racism. Some of them are infamous for their anti-Korean activities, from hate speech, public protests, and soliciting political support to committing hate crimes.

Other interlocutors expressed concerns about the wider stigma against political expression in Japan, especially protest. Hayoon shared the sadness and anger that she felt after reading far-right Japanese comments online, which included xenophobic attacks toward a protest she attended:

“Is speaking up in Japan [as Koreans] considered a nuisance (민폐)? […] What we are doing… is it making South Korea lose face? […] I was also worried about having my face appear in news reports. What happens if my colleagues see?” 

Anxieties like these shaped how the Shinjuku protest was organized. The volunteer organizers visited the local police and the train station to ensure the legality of their protest even after earlier confirming by phone that the “appeal protest” did not require prior permission. To prevent local businesses from filing complaints against them, they contacted every store near the protest site to establish a communication channel. They even arranged for volunteers to regularly monitor the noise level inside the shopping mall to ensure protesters remained below the legal limit of 55dB. This turned out to be pointless given how busy the area can get on a weekend evening, with traffic and pedestrian noise drowning out protesters.

When the Korean Migrant Meets the Korean Diaspora

It is important to note that the diasporic activist communities were still present at the Shinjuku protest. During the protest, speakers from various organizations gave speeches in Korean and Japanese, including Hantongryon, Tokyo Coalition of Overseas Voters (동경유권자연대) made up largely of older Newcomer Koreans, and a local chapter of a Japanese labor union. The mood was light and joyous, and many interlocutors later expressed their gratitude toward individuals and organizations who showed solidarity. Some interlocutors even went so far as to express shame for their previous ignorance about Hantongryon’s contribution to the democratization of South Korea and describe their newfound respect for the Zainichi Koreans who endured political repercussions for their activism. 

Following these encounters, some of our interlocutors told us about what drew them to the protests and their sense of in-betweenness as Koreans in Japan. For example, Jiwoo pointedly remarked that she does not strongly identify herself with South Korea as a nation-state, partly because of the growing unfamiliarity she felt toward its pop culture trends and urban landscape. Instead, her protest participation was driven by a sense of “justice” (정의). Minjoon similarly stated that he felt a sense of belonging in Japan at the scale of the neighborhood and expressed that his participation was shaped by a desire to live simultaneously as a Korean citizen (국민) and a “citizen of the world” (세계시민).

The difficulty with which these young Korean migrants spoke of their emergent sense of belonging reflects the limitation of existing vocabularies for discussing belonging and citizenship. However, their shared experiences during the protests as a still-unfolding series of events also reveal a possibility of bridging the conceptual distance between the diverse migrants and diaspora Koreans in Japan. Many young Koreans studying or working in Japan are too transient to be characterized as diasporic. Likewise, it would be misleading to equate Zainichi Koreans with other groups of immigrants in Japan—including the Newcomers—given that our contemporary understanding of migration is built on the idea of liberal individuals making free choices. While making claims based on their shared ethnicity or nationality may appear to be the obvious way to close the gap, this is not the path taken by the young Koreans. In this respect, the protests indicate a need to reimagine the conceptual constellation among migration, diaspora, and citizenship, one that transcends dominant culturalist or legalistic approaches to citizenship.  

Joshua Babcock is the section contributing editor for the General Anthropology Division.