Artigo Revisado por pares

Ethnic Nationalism and Political Community: The Overseas Suffrage Debates in Japan and South Korea

2009; Routledge; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10357820902923241

ISSN

1467-8403

Autores

Konrad Kalicki,

Tópico(s)

Asian Culture and Media Studies

Resumo

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Tsuyoshi Kawasaki and three anonymous reviewers of this journal for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions, as well as the journal editors for their generous assistance in the preparation of this paper. Notes 1. Although there is generally little conceptual disagreement as to whether citizens temporarily staying abroad – tourists, students, government and military personnel, corporate representatives, correspondents, etc – should retain the right to vote in their home country (López-Guerra, 2005), this can hardly be said about those who have lived in a foreign country for an extended period, often with no intention of returning to their country of origin. And as we will see later, Japan and South Korea's debates over non-resident citizens' suffrage rights have largely focused on long-term and permanent expatriates. 2. Explicit examples of such ideologically constructed sentiments can be easily observed in statements such as that by Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone: “The Japanese race is excellent because since the time of the goddess Amaterasu, the Japanese have remained as pure as unadulterated rice wine … We have accomplished much because for more than 2,000 years no foreign race has mixed itself with the Japanese” (quoted in Chung, 2003, pp. 87–88n). 3. Recent polls show that an overwhelming majority of South Koreans agree that “Koreans are all brothers and sisters regardless of residence or ideology” and feel a stronger attachment to ethnic Koreans who live overseas, even if they have attained foreign citizenship, and Korean descendants in foreign countries than to ethnic non-Koreans resident in Korea (quoted in Shin, 2006, p. 2). 4. The distinction between such arguments can be relatively easily established even when relying on English-language news reports and public records. 5. This is to say that in practice conceptual arguments advanced by state authorities for or against the enfranchisement of overseas nationals ought to reflect the values – ethnic, liberal, or civic – that are central to the self-understanding of a given national community and that, among other things, underscore its citizenship policy. Hence, for example, an ethnically defined citizenship gives a rationale for a particular kind of conceptual argument that should find its way into the overseas franchise debates by state officials (as well as other debaters if the community has an overpowering sense of ethnic self-consciousness). 6. Interestingly, as imperial subjects, those Koreans and Taiwanese who resided in Japan proper were formally entitled to participate in local and national elections until December 1945 (for details, see, e.g. Kashiwazaki, 1998; Takenaka, 1997; Weiner, 1994). 7. The first recorded large wave of emigration from Japan dates back to the Meiji period, when the new government, aiming both at easing domestic population problems and expanding economic opportunities and territories abroad, began to sponsor emigration to Hawaii as a form of contract labour migration. By 1910, an estimated 130,000 Japanese had moved to the United States, whereas between 1908 and 1941, around 190,000 Japanese migrated to Brazil alone. The 1950s saw another flow of emigrants from Japan, prompted by the country's postwar economic conditions (for details, see Goodman et al., 2003; Lesser, 1999; Maeyama, 1972; Roth, 2003). 8. By then, close to half a million Japanese nationals – both non-immigrant long-term residents and permanent overseas residents – were living abroad, according to the official statistics of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (in Nakafuji, 1995). 9. The June 1993 fall of the government of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa brought an end to the 38-year period of uncontested dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). 10. At this gathering, the four virtually independent groups formed the Japanese Overseas Voters Network, which was then quickly joined by three other groups from São Paulo, Manila and Paris, in order to share information and work more closely together to achieve their common goal. 11. Although the right to vote was restricted to specific types of elections, it was neither time-limited nor confined to a particular category of electors. 12. Article 15 of the Constitution of Japan stipulates that “The people have the inalienable right to choose their public officials and to dismiss them”, which the plaintiffs argued to mean an inalienable right for all Japanese citizens, regardless of their place of residence. The ruling, in line with this argument, has been described as “epochal”, as in the past the Supreme Court was inclined to refrain from passing verdicts on the constitutionality of an action or inaction of the Diet and/or the central or local government. This case in fact marked only the seventh time since World War II that the nation's highest court had found a law unconstitutional (Daily Yomiuri, 15 September 2005; Japan Times Online, 20 September 2005). 13. The term literally means the “new first-generation [Japanese immigrants]”, and refers to those who came to the United States voluntarily, for whatever purpose and regardless of their background, after the new Japanese immigration law was enacted in 1952. 14. The bill would have in effect enfranchised some 900,000 Koreans of the nearly 2 million-strong population of South Korean citizenship holders that was resident abroad as of that date (Korea Times, 3 February and 22 March 2005). 15. Close scrutiny reveals that this technical issue, raised only very sporadically and not by the lawmakers themselves, has only been of oblique importance in these public debates. 16. Consider also a simultaneous and somewhat related debate that followed the 1998 Justice Ministry's announcement of a legislative plan to give extensive legal rights – almost equal to those of local Korean nationals – to the then-estimated 5.2 million ethnic Koreans residing overseas, regardless of their citizenship status. Once they were issued with registration cards, ethnic Koreans would be allowed to come and stay in the country almost indefinitely and engage freely in most types of economic activity. They would also enjoy various social and legal benefits, as well as the right to vote. The bill was initially addressed to all people of Korean ancestry, but after China and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries expressed concern about its possible impact on their assimilation policies for minorities, the revised plan was limited to “those who were once Korean nationals or are the lineal descendants of those who obtained foreign nationality” (quoted in Shin, 18 December 1998, p. 2), which would in effect exclude ethnic Koreans from China and the CIS countries, most of whom had left Korea before the inauguration of the Korean government in 1948. As for the franchise, the revised bill provided for the right to vote for qualified ethnic Koreans in various Korean elections on the condition that they stayed in the country for a minimum of 90 days. The proposed bill was approved by the National Assembly in 1999, but several controversial plans, including the right to serve in public posts and the right to vote, were dropped. Further, in 2001, following a constitutional appeal filed by the family of a Korean Chinese, the Constitutional Court ruled that the limited definition of ethnic overseas Koreans in the existing law was unconstitutional, and ordered that the law be revised. This was carried out by the National Assembly at the beginning of 2004. And although there is little doubt that the basic idea expressed in the bill was, as the Korea Herald affirms, that “blood precedes nationality” and that therefore people of Korean descent ought to have some privileges in their ethnic homeland (1 October 1998, p. 6), it is important to stress that the right to vote was not in the end extended to them – that is, that they have not been incorporated in the political life of the national community. 17. In its analysis, this paper does not aim to single out any particular group of Korean expatriates but treats the entire overseas Korean community as a whole. It is interesting to note at this point, however, that because of the size of its population and the historical context, Korean citizens residing permanently in Japan [zainichi kankokujin] have at times been at the centre of Korean overseas suffrage debates. Contrary to intuitive expectations, though in general in line with this paper's argument, the South Korean government has not only been reluctant to incorporate these people into its democratic polity, but has in fact actively pushed for their voting rights in Japan – that is, for their inclusion in the Japanese political community (e.g. Fouser, 27 September 2000; Korea Times, 8 October 1998). This stands in direct contrast, for example, to the Japanese state's attitude to its emigrant population in Brazil. See Kalicki (2008) for a detailed discussion of long-term Korean residents' quest for the right to vote in Japan. 18. Making a contribution to the common good should by no means be seen as limited to these two types of obligation towards a political collectivity, although they are often among those most commonly identified with this ideological stance. 19. In the case of the Japanese debates, such arguments were highly sporadic and did not originate from the government authorities. 20. The revised (in 2005) Korean Nationality Act, which prevents people with dual nationality from avoiding military duty by giving up their Korean citizenship, can be seen as further underscoring the importance of military responsibilities in South Korea. Under this law, a male with two or more nationalities is not allowed to renounce his Korean citizenship after turning 18 unless he first completes compulsory military service. Moreover, a controversial follow-up measure to punish draft dodgers who have already done so by depriving them of their special legal status as overseas ethnic Koreans, in cases where it has been proven that they renounced their South Korean citizenship to avoid their military obligations, has re-ignited the nationwide debate over military service, highlighting the magnitude of this issue.

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