Word: japanized
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When he was younger, Lee Chek says, he wanted to be a soldier for Kim Jong Il, and "fight Japan." He'd have been fighting from behind enemy lines, of course, because the ethnic-Korean Lee was born and raised in Japan, where has always lived. The 35-year-old is a third-generation zainichi, one of 600,000 ethnic Koreans who dwell in Japan. And, like many zainichi, he grew up identifying with the North Korean regime. Lee attended Korean-language schools run by Chongyron, the fiercely pro-Pyongyang Korean residents association in Japan, where he was taught that...
...fatally beholden to Kim Jong Il, and in 2001 he broke with the organization, becoming a freelance journalist. (Lee Chek is a pen name he uses to protect relatives still living in North Korea from retribution.) Chongyron - which functions as North Korea's de-facto diplomatic voice in Japan - took away his North Korean passport, and he hasn't been back to Pyongyang. Permitted to take Korean or Japanese nationality, last year Lee took South Korean citizenship in order to travel abroad...
...decades after World War II and the division of the Korean peninsula, Pyongyang commanded the affection of a large proportion of the Koreans living in Japan, with an obedient and well-funded Chongyron as its organizer. That meant vital cash for the regime's leaders - some Japanese experts believe that Chongyron has channeled hundreds of millions of dollars to Pyongyang from semi-mandatory contributions by the zainichi community. But in recent years, the "Dear Leader" has lost the love of Koreans in Japan, thanks to a stream of ugly revelations about the Pyongyang regime, plus the inevitable influence of assimilation...
...Despite their longtime support for the North, most zainichi hail from the southern half of Korea, before they moved (or were forcibly relocated) to work in Japan between 1910 and 1945, when Korea had been a Japanese colony. In their new home, the Koreans were an oppressed minority; Kim Kyoo Il, a 69-year-old zainichi activist, remembers that during the war years, "Japanese were first-class citizens, and the [Koreans] were considered second-rate people...
...have lived in Japan some 25 years, and though Pico Iyer's Japanese friends may suggest eating at Colonel Sanders', I have never met any food-loving Japanese older than 14 who would opt for KFC or McDonald's. Junk food is junk food, and to suggest that it is somehow different in different regions is to let delusions substitute for the real world. Luther Link, SHIMODA, JAPAN...