Discrimination in Japan? Say It Ain’t So
I’m sure no one is to shocked that Koreans are discriminated against in Japan. One Korean citizen Chong Hyang-gyun in particular has led a legal challenge to allow foreigners to take a civil service examination to allow foreigners to hold higher government positions. Here are the details from the Japan Times.
Chong Hyang Gyun has just written herself into the history books, but not for the reason she wanted.
Chong Hyang Gyun addresses the media in Tokyo on Jan. 26 following the Supreme Court decision to support a bar on her promotion.
The 54-year-old public health nurse spent a decade fighting the Tokyo Government for the right to take a promotion exam, from which she was barred because of her South Korean nationality.
Had she won, nationality would have ceased to be a factor in determining senior civil service jobs in Japan.
But last week, the Supreme Court supported Tokyo’s 1994 decision to bar her from promotion, saying: “Japanese nationality is necessary for positions which are linked to the exercise of public power.” The landmark decision, which effectively ruled that senior civil service jobs here should be filled only by Japanese, has been greeted with dismay by antidiscrimination campaigners.
Makoto Teranaka, secretary general of Amnesty International, Japan, says that Japan, as a signatory to the U.N. International Convention on Eliminating Racial Discrimination, has a duty to protect all residents from discrimination.
However, strangely enough Chong was not even born in Korea. Here are some details on Chong from the Japundit.
Some aspects of Chong’s story raise a few questions. She was born in Iwate Prefecture to a Korean father and Japanese mother. I have not seen detailed information on her background, but it is probably safe to assume that she has spent most, if not all, of her life in Japan. She is obviously a native speaker of Japanese. Most important, she is not being denied Japanese citizenship; her South Korean citizenship is an option she chose. Indeed, her brother took Japanese citizenship and works as a university lecturer. She could have followed her brother’s example and taken the promotion exam a decade ago.
Why did she choose Korean citizenship? Chong says, “It is because of (the) history between the two countries. I’d like Japan to acknowledge this history and apologize for it. The fact that a person like me with Korean nationality exists in Japan at all is the result of the colonial era and that’s what I would like everyone to know. That’s why I pledged to stay Korean.”
In other words, she chose to become a citizen of a country she wasn’t born in and doesn’t live in because of something that happened to other people before she was born. So for Chong, it’s not about getting a promotion. It’s about being a crusader and drawing attention to her cause.
Apparently there is more to this story also. It appears possibly that the main reason the Japanese are denying her the ability to take the civil service examination may be due to national security reasons. Also from the Japundit.
Not all zainichi kankokujin are harmless women who just want to advance their career and boost their income. The largest and most powerful organization of Korean residents in Japan is Chongryun, or Chosen Soren in Japanese. There are an estimated 670,000 zainichi kankokujin in Japan, and of these about 150,000 are thought to be affiliated with the group, its schools, or its businesses.
Chongryun is very clear where its sympathies on the peninsula lie–with North Korea. The accompanying photo was taken at the Chongryun conference in Japan last September.
While there is no potential danger in a public health nurse rising to a supervisory rank, it would be a different story if the Foreign Ministry or Self-Defense Forces were obligated by the Supreme Court to hire and promote someone loyal to North Korea.
If national security concerns are the real reasons than I can kind of understand the ruling but it seems they should just be choosy about what positions can or cannot take a the civil service examination. A nurse getting promoted is not a national security issue. However, getting promoted to a high level SDF position is a security issue. For example in the US, a foreigner cannot be the President but foreigners can hold other government positions. It seems like an arrangement like this would be a suitable compromise unless it is just simple racism at work.
Does anyone know if foreigners can hold government positions in Korea?
I guess the Japanese private eye detectives who were hired by Chong's grandparents didn't do their jobs. The private detectives, like so many others in Japan, were hired to ferret out any Koreans hiding out and masquerading as Japanese, trying to marry into Japanese families.
Of course I don't know anything about this specific case but, in general, I would side with the Japanese on this issue. This woman isn't a foreigner who later in life decided to move to Japan, she's been there all her life and made a conscious decision to be a Korean citizen for political purposes. I think her political goal, getting Japanese acknowledgement of their past, bad behavior is worthy but it would naturally affect her employment with the Japanese government.
I'm not sure if this example relates or not; but something in my mind connects them:
While traveling in Turkey and Greece with a Canadian tour group, two member were asked to pay higher visa fees to enter a country. They were shocked that their British passports caused them to pay more than the Canadians did. However, they had lived in Canada for 20 years or more and so had put some effort into keeping their British passports rather than supporting the country they lived in.
Okay, the connection comes to me now: they made a decision to be apart from the country they lived in and then had to accept the consequences (my example is admittedly trivial compared to yours).
Re your question about foreigners' eligibility for government jobs in Korea, the answer is that they are, although the govt jobs for which they are eligible generally fall outside the scope of the civil service and also generally do not include policy making positions,.
For example, Alan Timblick, a British national who has lived in Korea for 20 years is the Predident of Invest Korea which is a branch of the Korean Trade and Investment Promotion Agency,. KOTRA is titularly an independent govt agency, but I beleive that it may in fact be under the effective control of the Ministry of Foriegn Affairs and Trade.
The city of Seoul also has a foreign employee who is a black woman, but I don't recall her job function.
Of course, there's also the American nobel laureate who recently became president of KAIST, Korea's version of MIT, which is a public institution directly responsible to the Ministry of Education.
And there's been a lot of talk about recruiting foreign ceos and senior executives for vatious government controlled corporations, but I don;lt beleive anything has come of it yet.
Re Ms Chong, I don't think her case is legally compelling or sympathetic. on the latter, she made a decision not to become a Japanese citizen and knew or should have known the consequences. Legally, I don't think there's much ground for denying any state the right to restrict all or any part of state employment to its own citizens. For that matter, no state is legally obligated to permit any non-citizen to live , let alone work in even the private sector, in its jurisdiction.
Korea is pretty restrictive on both scores, especially if you're not interested in becoming the cigar store expat and wage slave at a Korean company but want to be in business for yourself.
I do not see any problem about the judgement; that was her dicision to keep the Korean natinal right. Once foreginers get approved to get a job position to provide civil service, even if it's just a promotion for the nurse, it wiil make a flaw in the Japanse law system; we would need to change bunch of law statements and the change will certainly provoke political attacks by lefty supporters backed by China and North.