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Citizenship and North Korea in the Zainichi Korean Imagination: The Art of Insook Kim

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Young Min Moon
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An article in the Hankyoreh a few months back caught my attention. The story is about Ko Kang-ho and Ri Mi-oh, a married couple of Zainichi Koreans living in Kyoto. Recently Mr. Ko had filed a lawsuit in Seoul City Court requesting that his South Korean nationality be annulled. Ko had become a South Korean national upon his parents' acquiring that nationality after the 1965 normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and the ROK. Now he has chosen to become stateless, the option which in theory is available to Zainichi, who were completely stateless between the years 1945 and 1965. Thereafter, only those who acquired South Korean nationality (including Mr. Ko's family) obtained permanent residence in Japan, leaving a large number of Zainichi continuing to be stateless, the situation only to be addressed in the 1990s. In 2012 this unprecedented request was denied in the Supreme Court of South Korea. Mr. Ko's action was inspired by his wife, Ms. Ri, who has lived all her life stateless: she has no nationality, retaining only the Chōsen identification in her Japanese alien registration.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 13 , Issue 5 , February 2015 , e3
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2015

References

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