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Dancing Lessons from God
track with the specified research agenda. She was not going to pro-
vide me with any more facts about being a Japanese department store
employee. However, as the good bad ethnographer, I noticed how im-
portant the new development was for her, and I allowed the narra-
tive to come forth. Instead of ethnographic facts about department
stores, she was about to show me the experiential reality of a member
of a minority group in Japan. She was to tell me how she had spent
her, still as yet young, lifetime trying to pass as mainstream Japanese.
I did not coerce her story and had not even anticipated it. I had been
ready to go home, filled to the brim with facts; it had already been a
late evening. I had a choice: to continue to be the good ethnographer
by interrupting the flow of what was happening and getting the in-
formant back on track and on topic as soon as possible, or to be the
good bad ethnographer and allow her to tell the story that was im-
portant to her.
She did tell her story, and as that story came forth, as a flood, it was
the story of a young woman who was what is called in Japan, Zainichi
Kankokujin, or “resident Korean.” There are many “resident Kore-
ans” in Japan, many third- or fourth-generation descendants of Kore-
ans brought to Japan when Korea was a colonial attachment to Japan
( 1910 – 1945 ). Even if born and raised in Japan, these Korean descen-
dants are not granted Japanese citizenship at birth. Conversely, they
are legally defined as resident foreigners. In this case, the woman had
Japanese citizenship through her mother.^2 Her father was Korean, from
Korea (not a “resident Korean” from Japan), and her mother was Jap-
anese, originally from Japan. There were two girls in the family, sis-
ters. The older one was born in Korea, where the parents had moved
and were living until she was about eight or nine. She, the speaker,
who was seven or eight years younger than her older sister, was also
born in Korea but had little memory of this part of her life because she
left as a very young child. She was not quite two when her father died
and her mother took her two young daughters back to Japan to live.
They then took the mother’s Japanese family name and got listed on
the Japanese registry system. Unlike the younger sister, the older sister
had strong and clear memories of the land of their birth. The older sis-
ter later married and took on the Japanese name of her husband, thus
having a different Japanese surname from the younger sister.
