North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology, and Identity (review)

BOOK REVIEWS135 grant communities. I am also unsure whether we can interpret conflicts between Korean immigrant entrepreneurs and wholesalers, landlords, and government agencies as Jewish-Korean conflict. Furthermore, it is doubtful whether the middleman minority thesis, and a focus on Black-Korean relations, could adequately explain the predominantly Latino involvement in looting of Koreatown during the 1992 riot. Finally, any examination of intergroup conflict should qualify the classic conflict aphorism that "intergroup conflicts increase internal solidarity," instead of blindly following it. The author also invokes Black nationalism as an additional factor transforming Black dissatisfaction into concerted antiKorean action. However, the role of Black nationalism in this "anti-Korean" process has yet to be spelled out, to say nothing of the fact that it is treated in an overly simplistic and unrealistically reifying manner. As a further, minor point of contention, I would like to point out that the author's critique of the media is skewed toward mainstream and African American media, not Korean American media. For instance, Min took as evidence for some claims a report by the Korean media, which maintained that an investigation by the FBI indicated that Black gangs were responsible for planning the L.A. riots and deliberately chose to loot and burn Korean-owned stores (91). The data on the Los Angeles Korean immigrant community and Black-Korean conflicts in L.A. were also added to the book at the last minute, and do not square with New York data. Despite significant numbers of Korean immigrants working for others (52% in the author's 1986 Los Angeles survey ), the author's bias toward self-employed small business owners is palpable . Are the only Korean immigrants without their own small businesses single women and illegal residents, as the author claims? Despite this criticism, Caught in the Middle is a much needed and timely publication on Korean American communities. This book will be of both theoretical and empirical interest to scholars of Korean and American studies as well as to social scientists. I admire its utility as a potential textbook that skillfully examines important topics of immigrant entrepreneurship and minority-minority conflict, and that tests the sociologically significant middleman minority thesis. Kyeyoung Park University of California, Los Angeles North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology, and Identity, by Sonia Ryang. Boulder: Westview, 1997. 256 pp., $64.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology, and Identity examines a community that defies easy characterization: the Affiliates of the General Associa- 136KOREAN STUDIES, VOL. 22 tion of North Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryun) or "overseas nationals of North Korea," who numbered some 260,000 in 1990. The collapse of the Japanese empire in 1945 found some 2 million Koreans in Japan, largely Japanese colonial and wartime labor recruits. Created in 1955, Chongryun followed in the footsteps of the leftist pro-North League of Koreans, which suffered violent suppression by the Japanese state and Allied powers in the late 1940s. Today, Chongryun Koreans inhabit a highly ambiguous cultural and political space in Japan. Ironies and seeming incompatibilities abound. In spite of their North Korean affiliation, some 97% of Chongryun Koreans hail from homelands that now comprise South Korea. Although the association was founded on an ideal of repatriation to the North, the vast majority of Chongryun Koreans today have no real desire to ever reside in North Korea. Despite being "overseas nationals of North Korea," Chongryun Koreans have no voting rights and little legal standing in North Korea, a situation exacerbated by lack of normalized relations between Japan and North Korea. Finally, the primary language of most Chongryun Koreans is Japanese and their cultural affiliation is with Japan. Amid these ironies, the daily lives of Chongryun Koreans traverse seemingly incompatible milieus as they touch upon both the Japanese and Korean languages, capitalist Japan and Communist North Korea, and heterogeneous understandings of late 20th-century Asian Pacific geopolitics . Sonia Ryang takes these ironies and seeming incompatibilities as her points of departure, offering an extended argument about the day-to-day workings and reproduction of Chongryun identity. She portrays the heterogeneity and complexity of Chongryun Koreans, who have often been vilified for their ideological unity and faith in North...