The transformers. Dealing with citizenship as undocumented migrants

This paper aims at recapturing citizenship through biographies of Korean “illegal” migrants in Japan in early postwar period.

Just after the Second World War, enormous number of people migrated to Japan from Korea, Taiwan and China, because of conflicts and civil wars due to the Cold War. At the same time, in many regions where had been the parts of Japan Empire had to refine their borders and migration systems, dealing with mass traffic of people on one hand and wars and conflicts on the other. Citizenship as system in East Asian countries was largely re-established during this period, from late 1940s to early 1950s.

One of the citizenship systems which were introduced in this period was finger printing registration. This system was introduced to Japan and South Korea almost at the same time, in order to control this traffic and to capture “illegal migrants” who were thought as “communists”. The system originates in Japan’s colonial management in Manchukuo, and encouraged by Occupational Forces. Through the registration, “illegal migrants” in Japan were made to be outsiders from their homelands, immigrated societies, and even from their own ethnic group members who had lived “legally” in Japan.

However, such “illegal migrants” neither were just subjects of systems nor remained suppressed; they negotiate their citizenship and tried to live where they wanted, even sometimes with different legal identities.

In my presentation, citing written documents from and about “illegal migrants”, I first figure out hidden historical ties in Japan, South Korea and United States, which tried to capture nationals through fingerprinting registration. Then, using biographical interviews from “illegal migrants”, I turn to the migrants’ experiences. Their experiences of exclusion and obtaining quasi-citizenship will cast light to another aspect of citizenship, which performed and negotiated in our daily lives.