Abstract
Post-war Japanese society has been characterized by the "myth" that only one ethnic group (Japanese) constitutes this society. But of course, as the result of Japanese colonialization of Korea, many Korean residents live in Japan. The myth produces, on the side of Koreans, the "Japanese-vs-Korean shema" which legitimizes the exclusion and discrimination.
This paper focused on the contribution of the formation of so-called (Korean-in-Japan Identity) to the social resistance and social change. As the resources of the insight, the author used two oral life-histories and analyzed both of two intensively. The framework of analysis was borrowed by E. H. Erikson's identity theory which relates youth crisis with social change. The author focused on how each Korean faced the youth crisis and by what kind of commitment to the ideological forces they tried to solve the crisis.
The analysis suggested the limits and potentials of solution mechanisms (ideological forces) which were developed in Korean community. On the one hand, as was seen in "CHO-SOREN", typical ideological force produces coherent ethnic identity but provides only "total" (Erikson) solution. Thus, it cannot help the integration of experiences and also cannot provide historical perspective. More importantly, it often internalizes the "myth" and is confined by and fixes the "Japanese-vs-Korean shema". So it cannot resist to the dominant Japanese ideology. On the other hand, new and more flexible resistance was seen in a woman's life-histories which shows the possibility to transcend the dominant "Japanese-vs-Korean shema". She impressively talked about her refusion of the endogamy ideology of Korean community, her commitments to some enclave-based activities, and her resistance to the foreigner management policies of Japanese government.
