Episode 4: Statelessness — The Chameleon Identity of Zainichi Koreans
What does it mean to belong to a country where you were born, but never legally claimed?
In this episode of the Zainichi Music Project Podcast, Yukimi explores statelessness as lived reality: not as a single legal definition, but as a shifting condition that shaped generations of Zainichi Koreans in Japan.
From the collapse of the Japanese empire after 1945 to the long decades of legal ambiguity that followed, this episode traces how Zainichi legal status changed repeatedly—stateless, foreign national, South Korean citizen on paper, Special Permanent Resident—without ever fully resolving questions of belonging.
Along the way, Yukimi examines:
Why statelessness extended beyond the first generation
How postwar Japan’s emphasis on homogeneity intensified exclusion
Why North Korea–affiliated organizations attracted many Zainichi in the 1950s by offering dignity and recognition amid severe discrimination
How South Korean nationality became a pragmatic—but limited—path in the 1970s and 1980s
What Special Permanent Residency in the 1990s actually meant, and what it did not
Woven into this legal and historical narrative are moments from everyday life that reveal how policy became practice—and how children, families, and identities were shaped by systems that operated quietly and systematically.
This episode is not about assigning blame or promoting ideology. It is about understanding how statelessness functioned, how dignity was deprived and sought, and why Zainichi identity often feels adaptive, conditional, and unresolved.
Episode 4 lays the groundwork for what comes next: silence—not as absence, but as something learned, inherited, and normalized.
