Reframing Korean Mass Emigration: History, Political-Economy and Sentiments

Talk by Shimpei Cole Ota, associate professor at the National Museum of Ethnology and the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan.

Over the course of the twentieth century, roughly ten percent of the population of the Korean Peninsula left for other countries, and since the beginning of the twenty-first century this outflow has accelerated even further. Why are people leaving South Korea?

In the first half of this lecture, I will trace the history of large-scale Korean emigration alongside the social conditions of each period. In particular, I will examine both the usefulness and the risks of the existing periodizations and labels: the “old-timers” up to 1945; the “survival migrants” up to the 1980s; the “QOL migrants” of the 1990s; the “emigrants with no hope” of the 2000s; and, since the 2010s, the so-called “escapees from Hell-Chosun.”

In the second half, I will move beyond the political and economic explanations that researchers and commentators in South Korea and elsewhere have repeatedly emphasized, and instead present the collective sentiments that have driven South Koreans to migrate, as revealed through qualitative research in sociocultural anthropology. By examining in particular the complex motivations and imaginaries of the growing number of young South Koreans in Denmark since the 2010s, we can reconsider the strengths and limitations of viewing migration solely as a political and economic phenomenon. This process will also open up a comparison with Japan, which has not generated large-scale emigration since the 1970s and has continued this pattern even amid prolonged economic stagnation since the 1990s.

Bio 

Shimpei Cole Ota is an Associate Professor at the National Museum of Ethnology and the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan, and a Research Associate in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in the United States.

He has conducted fieldwork in South Korea since 1995. After completing the doctoral coursework at Seoul National University in 2003, he wrote the first doctoral dissertation in the century-long history of Japanese anthropological studies of Korea to designate the Seoul metropolitan area as its primary field site. He received his Ph.D. in Human Sciences from Osaka University in 2007.

Since 2012, he has shifted his main field site to New York and has carried out urban anthropological fieldwork in North America, China, and Europe as well.