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Paper short abstract

This presentation examines the 1968 Kin Kiro Incident through Zainichi Korean activist writings, showing how the case exposed unresolved colonial legacies amid 1960s normalisation, labour migration, and emerging rights discourses, and highlighted competing visions of postwar justice and citizenship.

Paper long abstract

This presentation situates the 1968 Kin Kiro Incident within the broader landscape of postcolonial tension and political transformation shaping Japanese–Korean relations in the 1960s. The decade marked a critical juncture: the 1965 Normalisation Treaty redefined Japan’s diplomatic engagement with South Korea, labour migration patterns intensified, and new rights-based discourses began to emerge amid rapid economic growth. Yet these shifts coexisted with persistent racial hierarchies and social marginalisation experienced by Zainichi Koreans.

Drawing on the Kin Kiro Trial Countermeasure Committee News (1968–1975), a grassroots newsletter produced by Zainichi lawyers, activists, and intellectuals, this paper examines how contemporaries interpreted the Kin Kiro case as a symbolic confrontation with the unresolved legacies of empire. While mainstream media framed the incident largely as a sensational criminal event, the Committee News reframed it as evidence of structural discrimination, documenting the everyday injustices faced by Korean residents and positioning Kin as a victim of systemic exclusion. Through its reportage, appeals, and editorials, the newsletter served both as political communication and as a vernacular archive that captured minority perspectives largely absent from official narratives.

By reading the Committee News against the shifting political landscape of the 1960s, the presentation argues that the Kin Kiro incident illuminates competing visions of postwar justice and citizenship. It reveals how Zainichi Korean activists challenged the state’s self-presentation as having moved beyond its colonial past, insisting instead on a reckoning with ongoing inequalities. This analysis positions the Kin Kiro case not as an isolated episode but as a window into a decade defined by contested diplomatic, legal, and social transitions, through which the terms of Japanese–Korean relations were actively being renegotiated.