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Paper short abstract

The presentation frames Zainichi Koreans as a postcolonial internal borderland shaped by Japanese empire and postwar law, showing how provisional citizenship reproduces colonial boundaries while everyday resistance exposes the instability of Japan’s nation-state today persistently.

Paper long abstract

This presentation examines Zainichi Koreans in Japan as a postcolonial boundary space produced through Japanese imperial expansion and sustained within the postwar nation-state. Rather than treating Zainichi Koreans solely as an ethnic minority or immigrant community, the study reframes their presence as an internal borderland where colonial histories of labor mobilization, citizenship, and racial differentiation continue to structure everyday life. Originating from Japan’s colonial rule over Korea, Zainichi Koreans were incorporated into the imperial system as subjects without full political agency, a condition that was reconfigured—but not resolved—after Japan’s defeat in 1945.

The author argues that postwar legal regimes, particularly nationality laws and residency classifications, reproduced colonial boundary-making by positioning Zainichi Koreans as permanently provisional subjects: neither fully foreign nor fully national. This liminal status was reinforced through practices of surveillance, discrimination, and the depoliticization of colonial responsibility. At the same time, Zainichi Koreans actively negotiated this boundary space through legal challenges, cultural production, and transnational forms of belonging, exposing the instability of the nation-state’s borders from within.

By framing Zainichi Koreans as a boundary space rather than a marginal population, the article challenges narratives of postwar Japan as a homogeneous nation and highlights the persistence of colonial logics in citizenship, memory, and minority governance. In dialogue with borderlands and postcolonial studies, it demonstrates how internal borders remain central to Japan’s contemporary social and political order.