Third Generation Zainichi Korean Hip Hop Music: Investigation of the Diverse Focus on Representation of Heritage Embodied by Young Zainichi Rappers

: This research project centers on the discussion about the question of how the Third generation Zainichi Korean rappers internalize, reproduce and represent their Korean ethnic heritage through the form of Hip Hop. Three Zainichi rappers, including Chanmina, Kohh, and Moment Joon, are carefully selected for the case study with the expectation that they each embody a distinctive focus on their self-identity construction. The central proposition of this paper is to highlight the cruciality of approaching the ontological construction of young Zainichi Koreans concerning individual choices and then to regard the formation and representation of individual identities as an ongoing process rather than a fixed, monolithic entity.


Introduction
The term Zainichi Korean refers to the ethnic Koreans residing in Japan.While recent migration is part of the process, the constitutive unit of Zainichi Koreans predominantly comes from the sizable diaspora population.Its descendants emerged during the 35 years of annexation of Korea by Japan between 1910 and 1945.Established scholarship pinpoints salient changes in Zainichi Korean communities.As Hawon Jang claims, "collective identity is neither fixed nor innate, but rather emerges through the interactions among various members of that identity" [1].According to Fukuoka, pronounced turning points of Japanese public wisdom have divided the Zainichi Korean population into the following lines: first generation, anti-Japanese nationalism and nostalgia for the Korean peninsula; the second generation, despondent by systematic discrimination with poverty and determined to gain a foothold in Japan; third generation and beyond, adjusted to Japanese society to get by without too many problems [2].
The third generation born from the 1970s onwards, specifically, is ascribed to be the third way of Zainichi Koreans by researchers, which involves "a movement away from affiliation with a political group" [3].In other words, deviating from the first or second generation of Zainichi Koreans who had experienced the darkest past of social exclusion before the 60s, the third generation hardly regards naturalization-to become Japanese through adopting Japanese names and registering in Koseki-as a taboo or intolerable ethnic betrayal to their Korean heritage.Instead, they see naturalization as an individual choice.Rennie Moon reports that "by the early twenty-first century, over 10,000 Zainichi Koreans choose to naturalize every year by the early twenty-first century."[4] The quantitative data showcases the broad practice of naturalization among young Zainichi.
Such a remarkable generational transformation highlights the significance of the scholarship to focus on the young generations.Besides Chapman's observation on the shift of power dynamics from the elder to the younger Zainichi generation, the cruciality of emphasizing the nowness also reflects the debate over ethnographic presence and Hobsbawm's argument about the invention of tradition.Hobsbawm claims, "Traditions which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented."[5] That is to say, identity construction travels a similar path of development as other collective consciousness because they are not fixed entities and vary in time.Similar to the process involved in the socialization of Neo-Confucianism in Japan, the construction of individual identities also requires generational participation in establishing the epistemological foundation to distinguish between Self and Other and reinforcing or revising this knowledge through both hard power and soft power, such as political intervention or cultural inculcation.In the case of Zainichi Koreans, different constructions of self-identity might be produced over time as factors vary.Hence, the question of how Zainichi Koreans' belief system about their identities is reproduced in contemporary context deserves further investigation.Given this urgency, the preliminary interest for this project is drawn on discussing how young Zainichis internalize past construction of Zainichi and then represent redefined identity.
To unpack the younger generation of Zainichi's distinct construction of ontology and epistemology, it appears at stake to draw expositions based on primary sources of literature, art, and music, which are the approaches of representation.However, previous scholarship studies the representation of the third way leaves an informational gap by undermining the analysis of the music sector.Therefore, this research is designed to be a case study investigating young Zainichi Koreans' representation of their heritage in their music with a focus on the division of Hip Hop.
Hip Hop is spotlighted in this project because it contains inherent advantages for investigating socially marginalized groups.Since Hip Hop culture heavily emphasizes the notion of keeping it real, its believers are strongly committed to behaving and sharing messages consistent with their own experiences.All subjects in this study said similar words: I can't accept my music to talk about anything but my thoughts.This unique feature of realness in Hip Hop provides the grounds for the authenticity of my research on analyzing these young Zainichis' ideas.On top of that, as Perry argues: Hip Hop embraces the outlaw.Outlaw status is conferred only metaphorically through lawbreaking, but on a deeper, more symbolic level, it is achieved through a position of resistance to the confines of status quo existence [6].
Such an outlaw characteristic of Hip Hop is consistent with the third generation's rejection of the existing dichotomy between Self and Other with the prospects to have the agency to find alternative definitions or representations of their collective identities.Lastly, Hip Hop has already formed a sophisticated subculture ranging from graffiti, distinctive dressing code, break dance, and rap, becoming a distinctive way of living for Hip Hop believers.Thus, such a subculture offers a kaleidoscopic range of sources for my research, including music lyrics, interviews, music videos, and rappers' autobiographies.In response, the techniques adopted for analysis consist of music/video analysis and textual analysis.

Chanmina: Embrace Cultural Diversity, Rejection to Distinguish between Self and Other
Born and raised in South Korea until she was three years old, Chanmina ちゃんみな, one of the most outstanding female rappers in Japanese Hip Hop, is inspired by her mixed heritage-with a Japanese father and Korean mother.
Besides embracing cultural diversity, another overarching theme throughout her expressions is the ambition to reject to distinguish between Self and Other.Hall states: Identities are constructed through, not outside, differences.This entails the radically disturbing recognition that it is only through the relation to the Other, the relation to what it is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what has been called its constitutive outside that the 'positive' meaning of any termand thus its 'identity'-can be constructed [7].
The Self and Other dichotomy argued by Hall has infiltrated the process of sociocultural construction of identities: Japanese society has associated Koreans as unethical, irrational, and even parasites to Japan while regarding the Japanese themselves as their superior moral counterparts for decades.The digestion of the Othering notion is indispensable for unearthing the origin of the Japanese collective unconsciousness of discriminating against Zainichi Koreans and for further discussing potential solutions.As Ryang argues: This pseudo-or fictive-blood myth as a national origin is essential, as it works to eternally and completely exclude anyone who cannot claim their descendants from the Sun Goddess from membership to the people called Japanese, that is, the eternal banishment of the non-Japanese [8].
In other words, the association between Japan's modern national sovereignty based on nation-asfamily logic and the exclusion of non-Japanese pinpoints the essential social barriers for young Zainichi to fully incorporate themselves into the homogenous Japanese society or redefine themselves; therefore, the following case analysis centers on discussing how Chanmina asserts agency in challenging othering in the process of constructing her Zainichi identity.
In the music video of I'm a Pop, Chanmina intentionally starts by zooming in a close shot on the tattoo on her arm, which combines both Japan's and Korea's national flags.Throughout early Japanese history, tattoos prevailed among Ainu and burakumin communities to distinguish themselves from the rest of the Japanese, which later developed into the social stigmatization of tattoos by othering marginalized untouchable groups from the mainstream.Even though the stereotype of tattoos has waned in contemporary Japanese society, Chanmina's intrepidity to exhibit such a symbolic while controversial tattoo under the public spotlight still vividly portrays her determination to embrace her mixed identity and the rejection of normalizing Japanese existing social stigmatizations of tattoos and ethnic identities.The last message is more explicitly unveiled in the lyrics [9]: Where The excerpt above perceptibly manifests Chanmina's employment of three different languages, including English, Japanese and Korean, to create her own language of rapping, which perfectly resonates with her life experiences.During the beginning years after Chanmina moved to Japan with her parents, she was bullied by classmates due to her Korean heritage.Young Chanmina released her mental frustrations in writing journals by mixing the three languages, which documents later served as the primary inspiration for her music lyrics.Chanmina's strategy of remixing three different languages demonstrates her embracement and pride in her mixed heritage and past mental burdens, and instantiates a form of cultural and linguistic creolization.The theory of creolization has been discussed in minority literature, which refers to the production of new cultures when cultures are already interwoven with each other.Chanmina's use of multiple languages in her music vividly reflects how individuals' multicultural experiences lead to linguistic fusion in Zainichi discourses.Heneghan interprets the emergence and practice of creolization among young Zainichi as: The attempts to redefine Zainichi Koreans as transnational both in terms of their resistance to colonial and neocolonial discourses of the nation-state and their ability to bear multiple associations that refute a uniform national or ethnic identity [10].
The case of Chanmina confirms Heneghan's statement.By avoiding choosing between Koreanizationa and Japanization, Chanmina's practice of language use embodies the young Zainichi's attempts to build a transnational identity by rejecting the existing bifurcated categorization of identity that centers on the distinction of Self and Other.
After entering high school and being attracted by Hip Hop music, Chanmina first came to distinction after participating in the 2016 Bazooka!!! -a high school rap battle broadcast on BS Sky Perfect!Following her successful debut single, Miseinen (未成年, 2017), Chanmina announced her debut by purposefully adopting the stage name Chanmina rather than her real name Otomonai Mina.Her rejection of using the actual name and intentionally creating the stage name by flipping the order of Mina-Chan [11] revealed her ambition in denial of the existing social norms to construct identities and even Japanese obsession with the cutismo culture-Ian Condry indicates a preference in the Japanese music industry on images of vulnerability and weakness [12].Chanmina's manipulation of the order of her name Mina and Chan could arguably be seen as an attempt to overturn the patriarchal Japanese music industry and even to challenge other existing powers that restrain individuals' agency, such as using othering to exclude Zainichi Koreans.Besides the name, Chanmina also suggests in the lyrics of I am a Pop about her denial of categorizing her music into any single genre of Pop, Hip Hop, or western.Growing up with her Korean mom, an expert ballet dancer, Chanmina spent her youth studying violin, which provided the entryway for her to integrate elements from Asian and Western music into her melodies.This example suggests Chanmina's engagement with the trend of globalization is buttressed by her attitude toward celebrating cultural diversity, as mentioned in the interview: We can not choose to be born in which country, and we should appreciate whichever country we are born.I never judged people based on their nationalities because no matter how each language and culture is different, every culture tries its best to thrive.The beauty resides in the differences among cultures [13].
Chanmina's expressions echo the concept of cultural particularism, which stresses all cultures' uniqueness and inner values.
In a nutshell, Chanmina's active rejection of the othering between Zainichi Korea and Japanese by employing multiple rather than a single language, creating a unique stage name rather than her real Japanese name, and her calls for respecting cultural diversity through the particular tattoo and statements all demonstrate her core message: to advocates for the third way, which underlines the essentiality of human agency in constructing their own identities and refusal of the either-or decision of young Zainichi Koreans' identity, which decision was a general acquiescence among both elder Zainichi and Japanese.

3.
Kohh Compared to Chanmina, Kohh endured a more turmoil upbringing with his Korean heritage.Stormed with an iconic thick but resonant timbre created by plucking the Sanshin at a gradually uplifted tempo, the song Family (Kazoku, 2022) bursts through the silence and delicately sets a tone of nostalgia.The interface between Sanshin, one of the most famed Japanese traditional instruments, and Hip Hop, a novel counterpart internalized from African American culture, does not happen by coincidence.In his investigation of Okinawan popular music, Roberson also found the hybrid product of Okinawan traditional folk music and western music styles.Roberson argues: Music is a symbolic resource, and that musical production and consumption are important practices in the ongoing, creative use of music to construct identities [14].
Since then, the emerging practice of hybridity in music production suggests a potential cultural product of political-economic histories of colonialism and imperialism.This prediction from the music perspective foreshadows later analysis of how Kohh internalizes and represents his Korean heritage.
Resonating with the fact that Sanshin is designed to transcend a lifetime, as it is often passed down from generations of a household, the two rappers Hannya and Kohh vehemently unbosom their mixed feelings about their Korean blood inherited from their Zainichi fathers.At the tender ages of Hannya and Kohh, their childhood was chaotic, involving financial hardship and the absence of parental care after their fathers' deaths.In this collaborated song Family (Kazoku, 2022), Kohh narrates [15] The poignant narrative Kohh depicted in Family (Kazoku, 2022) reveals the brutality of his childhood-Kohh's mother became addicted to meth after his Zainichi father died, and his grandmother then raised Kohh in a housing project in the Oji district of Kita in northern Tokyo.In addition, the excerpt of the lyrics above raises a critical question of how the third and successive generation of Zainichi construct their identities with confined access to their Korean heritage.In other words, for young Zainichi like Hannya or Kohh with Japanese citizenship through naturalization, while their Zainichi family members leave before leaving unforgettable influences to highlight the Korean cultural legacy, how do they internalize their identities?In the song Family (Kazoku, 2022), Kohh answers this question by shouting out to his father and later adopting his father's name as his stage name.This evidence strongly implies Kohh's reconciliation with the turmoil his father left behind and even shows reverence for his Zainichi legacies.Featuring in an interview, Kohh states that: I just happened to grow up in Oji in the projects next to the Sumida river.Simply put, it's my home, so I like it here.I think everyone takes pride wherever they're from.I never met my father's family nor remembered my father, but I revere them [16].
Kohh's expression above reverberates with what Rumi Sakamoto indicates as "diasporic communities' long-distance nationalism" [17]: although young Zainichi Koreans might have very confined cultural contacts to their Korean ethnicity, a group of them still construct a transnational national/cultural identity by paying homage to their distanced Korean heritage.
Another message conveyed by Kohh's interview is how Kohh and his childhood friends found their identity by forming a Hip Hop crew called Riverside Mobb.Most members resided in the same housing project with Kohh since their young ages, which explains the trivial behind the naming: these members are proud of where they grew up, the Sumida River.The main reason these families of about 3-5 people squeeze themselves into the ghetto-like houses is that they are all labor immigrants or descendants from Korea or the Philippines, who can only work on below-minimum-wage jobs.Shared a similar brutal living experience in an environment blighted with drugs, violence, and discrimination, Kohh and his friends chose to displace their disheartenment and outrage towards economic inequalities and discrimination against foreigners into their Hip Hop music.A shared goal is constructed in the crew as searching for ways to disentangle their life struggles for a brighter future.The union of Kohh and his friends entered the stage of communitas [18] as they shared each other's both financial and mental burdens from their early ages.Kohh recalled in the interview that he sometimes depended on his friends' families to share dinners when his grandmother was busy at his young age, while till now, his friends would still help him in his music production.When asked whether you are afraid of losing everything, Kohh replied with determination: I think it doesn't matter.Such things always happen, don't they?As long as I'm not dead, no matter what happens, my friends will give me a hand.What should I be afraid of?[19] On the other hand, the documentary also reveals Kohh's assistance to his friends' fashion boutiques by providing the startup fund, giving hands-on setting up the store and helping to promote the merchandise.From here, it becomes conceivable that members of the Riverside Mobb, including Kohh, helped each other in the past years to overcome life's sufferings as a group and eventually realize their dreams of becoming Hip Hop stars.This instance not only metaphorically resonates with the cipher culture of Hip Hop, in which multiple rappers collaborate to produce a song to talk about their marginalized experiences in the hope of overthrowing the cultural hegemony as a group, but also suggests a possibility for young Zainichi to respect and rise from their legacies as a group.
In Kohh's song, I'm dreaming, he detailedly delineates his prospects for the future [20]: Rather than a slightly dark past This song parallels Kohh's dream about material possession and fame while complicating itself by highlighting the humbleness of Kohh's characteristics.Furthermore, like the lyrics in the music, I'm dreaming, Kohh's wordings are relatively less metaphoric than Chanmina or Moment Joon, another Zainichi rapper.Thus, audiences from all levels of living conditions could form spiritual resonance with him.For instance, Kohh has a penchant for asserting his lucid self-awareness reflecting on his brutal life to his audience through freestyle, demonstrating his attractive personal charisma to further expand the influence of his uplifting force to wider communities other than Riverside Mobb.
Like Chanmina, Kohh also strives to break the constructs of othering by dreaming of eliminating discrimination against tattoos and cheering the young Zainichi living in poor economic conditions to ease their pains while seeking a brighter future.Another similarity between Chanmina and Kohh is their mixed use of a western orchestra to play the chorus while gradually joining the flow by rapping.A mark of influence from globalization could be traced in both of their music, which identifies another potential obstacle for the young Zainichi to sustain or reconcile their own identities when bombarded by a magnitude of external sources.

Moment Joon: Reverberation with the Past with Internalization
As Korean popular culture, known as Hallyu, raised Japanese interest in South Korea, Rennie Moon observed: Both pressures from the international community as well as from domestic social groups increased awareness and changed Japanese attitudes about discrimination towards ethnic minorities [21] Arguably, this change in attitudes might provide a sociocultural incentive for the third generation of Zainichi publicly announce their Korean heritage with pride.Such an observation, however, has hardly reached the masses of Zainichi Koreans.The horrendous number of "nationalistic and xenophobic commentaries towards Zainichi Koreans" [22] and the repeated anti-Zainichi Korean demonstrations held by ultra-nationalistic social organizations such as Zaitokukai question the credibility of the undeniable incentives for Zainichi Koreans to announce their heritage openly.Confronting these lingering negative social attitudes, young Zainichi, like Moment Joon, takes part in active protesting against cultural hegemony, or specifically Japan's modern national sovereignty with its exclusion of non-Japanese.
Born in 1991, Moment Joon neither adopted family names like Kohh nor left any marks like Chanmina on his real identity.Instead, he used a pseudonym, which might protect him from possible threats due to his involvement in protests.
In 2020, engaged in a fierce online argument with Japanese nationalists, Moment Joon expressively dissed back the negative comments towards immigrants by releasing the track Iguchidou 井口堂, the eponymous neighborhood of his residence in suburban Osaka.Joon begins the song by aggressively shouting his home address so clearly that he even includes the apartment number [23] The lyrics above are sung by Moment with a sense of dauntlessness, manifesting his indignation fueled by the nationalists' comments.He converts his audacity into directly inviting these people to meet in person, a statement declaring his determination to find a unique and intimate place in a foreign land with an active confrontation with social exclusions.Such a declaration highly reverberates with the attributes of the second generation of Zainichi-determined to gain a firm foothold in xenophobic Japan.Moment Joon wrote down his reflections on the discrimination against foreigners he observed in his autobiography [24]: These prejudices are based on recognizing that the other person is Japanese and judging the other person based on additional information, such as where this person comes from.What is conveyed from the categories of Koreans and Foreigners is nothing more than additional information, and it is only information that does not reach the average value.
Moment's words provide the primary evidence to showcase how he has witnessed and experienced Japanese society othering Zainichi Koreans and foreigners from Japan, a phenomenon Moment perceives as the exacerbation of ethnic and racial discrimination that society holds towards people from diverse backgrounds.In response, he challenges Japanese exclusive collective unconsciousness by explicitly divulging the stories he collected in his book and music to raise social awareness about cultural inclusion.
After years of protesting, however, Moment Joon has planned to leave the state.In the song TENO HIRA with Japan [25] The first scene of the music video starts off exposing Moment Joon himself to be overlapped with a driving clip, visualizing the one-way road Moment chose to counter with Japanese overarching ethnic discrimination continuously.The next scene followed is a real-life clip of Moment Joon taking a nap while leaning against the elevator after protesting in outdoor demonstrations.This scene echoes the sense of fatigue, loneliness, and scaredness expressed in the lyrics.After years of setting himself forefront, Moment met the stalemate as he realized that the process of eliminating social discrimination is inevitably exhausting and slow.While he starts questioning the meaning of his efforts, he employs a metaphor by juxtaposing "you" to the beautiful Japanese society he sees, encouraging him to fight until ideological change emerges.What is consistent from the title and the repeated chorus of the song is Moment Joon's calling towards the audience.The phrase "show me the palm" sung under a tone of helplessness touchingly reflects Moment's aspiration to be understood and even supported by more people.In contrast to Kohh, who has a group of friends to form communitas, Moment Joon is like a sole contemporary samurai, fearless with the purity of mind on devoting himself to active protesting.With Moment's persistent commitment to protest against Japanese social prejudice, he not only embodies how young Zainichi inherited the resolute endeavors of past generations to assert their agency under the unbalanced power dynamics of society but also internalizes a new focus on expanding the discourse for all immigrants in Japan and represents these spirits through more contemporary forms such as Hip Hop music.

Conclusion
Chanmina, Kohh, and Moment Joon, who were all born in the 1990s and fell into the third generation of Zainichi Koreans, endured exclusive sentiments resulting from the social construction of Zainichi as Japan's other.Even though they share a common goal of achieving a brighter future by embracing the coexistence of mixed heritage, the disparity in their focus on representing their identities outweighs the similarities.For Chanmina, the very essence of embracing collective identity is to reject the distinction between Self and Other, which Japan's modern national sovereignty supports a distinction as Sonia Ryang argued.Kohh sees his mission as revealing real-life experiences, tugging the audience's heartstrings, and even leading the community to reach communitas.The ultimate goal for achieving communitas for Kohh is to bolster mutual support among marginalized individuals.Moment Joon, however, internalizes the active resistance carried by the first and second generations of Zainichi and contemporizes the representation of endeavor in the form of Hip Hop music and autobiography.These three young Zainichi rappers each embody a unique focus to represent their construction of identities.Therefore, it is convincing to regard the formation and representation of identities as an ongoing process with variances to factors such as time and individuals rather than a fixed, monolithic entity.Meanwhile, this unfixed nature underscores the consideration of intersectionality in future studies on cultural identity.
On top of that, I consider this research as the first step to approaching the mentality of young Zainichi Koreans in constructing cultural identity because of the remaining drawbacks interwoven with the analysis.First, due to the esoteric nature of Hip Hop lyrics and my poor mastering of the Japanese language, the analysis relied on unreliable online translations, which might jeopardize the analysis' authenticity and credence.Besides, the decision to conduct a case study constrains the potency for future application.For instance, young Zainichi Korean rappers such as Verbal from Teriyaki Boyz hardly ever represent their ethnic heritage in their music, which is the alternative that has been overlooked in the current study.The potential reason for Verbal's muted representation might be that he does not see the need to incorporate such a discussion in his narratives.Alternatively, it is also possible that Verbal aims to protest in utter denial of the ethnic categorization silently.Diving deeper into cases like Verbal would help generate a more comprehensive analysis of young Zainichi Koreans.In addition, emerging related questions of how globalization might shape the selfconstruction of Zianichi Koreans, which is observed in the case of Chanmina and Kohh, also deserve a detailed future study.

: Post-Zainichi and Rise from Legacies Unlike
Chanmina, who manipulates her real name to create a different stage name, Yuki Chiba 千葉 雄喜 chose to adopt his Zainichi Korean father's name Kohh as his stage name.Before receiving global recognition after participating in Korean rapper, Keith Ape's It G Ma in 2015, Kohh had already risen from underground Hip Hop circles.