Articles : Japan Unlimited

FLOATING above pools of lotus blossom, with its enormous gold-plated Buddha smiling benignly across the water, the Byodo-in temple in the city of Uji is everything the well-heeled tourist imagines old Japan to be.

Built at the exquisite height of the Heian court in the 11th century, when the Fujiwara clan ruled Japan from the ancient imperial capital of Kyoto, the temple is arguably the most important, and certainly the most beautiful, to have survived.

Its name means "hall of equality". But drive 20 minutes from the immaculately raked gravel lawns of the Byodo-in - where visitors sip ceremonial thimbles of the famous local whisked green tea - and you come across another Japan, one the tourists never get to see.

It is a hamlet called Utoro, a collection of huts and houses sandwiched between the grey hangars of an old Nissan car factory and the barbed wire of a military base. Cats and dogs explore piles of rusting junk, old women squat gossiping in the alleyways.

There is no equality here, nor any roads, just lanes. Until five years ago, there was no running water, just a pump. There are still no sewers, and reeking open drains carry away the waste-water. Some of the tiny tumbledown houses do not even have a bath and the nearest public facilities are three stops away by train.

Utoro is Japan's Third World; one of the hidden ghettos in the world's wealthiest country where about a million people of Korean background choose, or are forced by institutionalised bigotry and discrimination, to live. And now, even this is under threat.

For the 300-odd "Koreans" who live here - many of them third-generation, Japanesespeaking, sushi-eating youngsters indistinguishable from their"Japanese" neighbours - there was never any hope that they would get a fair share of the spoils of the economic miracle they helped build.

The community was built, technically illegally, on land owned by a Nissan company when the Korean settlers were abandoned here after the war. It was secretly sold a few years ago to a development company, and now the residents- some of them in their 70s and 80s who have lived here for half a century -have been served with eviction notices.

It has happened before in other parts of Japan. The bulldozers move in, the Koreans bundle up their lifetime possessions and look on in helpless rage as their homes are destroyed to make a profit for some multinational corporation.

However, this time when the wrecking crews arrived in their trucks, they were in for a surprise. The residents rallied, the police were called in, the developers beat a startled retreat. It was the beginning of a confrontation which has grabbed the headlines, and galvanised Japan's Korean minority into a battle for its rights.

"I can't imagine what would have happened if they hadn't handed us over ... perhaps the Japanese would have massacred the whole town," says Che Chun Kyu as he squats on the porch of his cottage, casting his rheumy old eyes back more than 50 years.

He was 26 at the time, the war was three years old, and the Japanese occupation army - which had ruled Korea since 1910 - had come to Taikyo city in South Korea with an order for the civic fathers: deliver up 150 fit young men for the Japanese war machine.

Bidding farewell to his wife and two young children, Mr Che and 149 of his fellow citizens of Taikyo reported to the recruitment office in the port city of Pusan, and a few weeks later they were working in brutal conditions down the coal mines of Kyushu, Japan's southernmost island. He moved to Utoro 25 years ago.

Mr Che is part of the great Korean diaspora in which more than 6 million people, mainly from the southern provinces of the peninsula, were taken from their homeland to work for the Japanese overlords in occupied Manchuria, Siberia and Japan.

Millions went "voluntarily", if you can call it that - their land expropriated for Japanese settlers, they became Asia's original boat people. Many more were press-ganged into service in the Japanese military, or sent to work as slaves in the munitions factories, building roads and railways, or down the mines.

Utoro came into being in the later years of the war. Many of the original residents worked for a corporate ancestor of Nissan, which had an aircraft factory nearby; another 1,300 laboured building a military airstrip.

"Times were terribly tough," says Hang Soon Ye, who fled to Utoro with her mother and two sisters in the last months of the war from her home town of Kyoto, because "rumour had it that Kyoto was going to be the next city to be atom-bombed". They lived in a "four-mat shack" - a mat is about the size of a desk top - with straw on the floor, while Mrs Hang's mother worked as a day labourer to put rice balls on the table.

After the war, "the work ended, and the Japanese just abandoned us here to starve", says Mrs Hang. Many Koreans - perhaps half the 2 million who had been in the country - returned to Korea, but the rest stayed, afraid of the civil war that was about to break out in their homeland, or too poor to afford the passage.

Over the years, the Koreans stranded in Utoro began some cottage industries- bicyclemaking, scrap-iron recycling, construction - and built homes for themselves. Mrs Hang says: "This place was nothing. We collected rocks in sacks and levelled the land with our bare hands. Our blood, sweat and tears are here, and we are not going to move."

The miracle is that this community, and the hundreds like it across Japan, survived at all in the face of the institutionalised racism that people of Korean ethnic ancestry are subject to, even if their parents and grandparents have been born in Japan.

"It is subtle apartheid," says Om Myong Bu, snacking on a pancake of spicy pickled cabbage in the office of his construction company in Utoro. Mr Om is a second-generation Korean-made-good in Japan, but the discrimination still rankles.

He was born in 1953 in Kyushu. His father came to Japan as a labourer before the war, moved to Utoro and started a business building roads and other public works projects. He has kept his North Korean nationality.

"No matter how many generations we may live here, we are still Korean,"says Mr Om. "But we pay our taxes like anyone else - and we believe we should have the same rights as other citizens."

Prejudice against the 600,000 or so non-naturalised Korean Japanese like Mr Om begins with the koseki, the family household register, which records the name, address, relationship and nationality of everyone in the country.

Talking to him, you would never know he is a "ninniku bara" - a "garlic belly", one of the many pejorative words for Korean Japanese. Mr Om looks and dresses like a Japanese, he had a Japanese education, his only accent is a slight Kyoto twang - but the Government says he is different.

Korean Japanese, for a start, cannot vote, cannot work for most levels of government - even the local council in Uji - cannot draw old-age pensions or most other welfare benefits, apart from a basic subsistence allowance. Everywhere they go, they have to carry the hated "kae p'yo" (dog tag), the alien registration card, and until last January, they had to be fingerprinted every year.

Examples of petit, and petty, apartheid are too numerous to chronicle. Korean Japanese babies are not entitled to free vaccinations like everyone else. Schoolchildren do not get discount train passes and are not allowed to compete against Japanese in interschool athletic meets. If they go to a Korean school, they will find it almost impossible to get into the elite government-run universities that are a prerequisite for entry to the civil service and the large corporations.

In later life, Korean Japanese may find housing, jobs, marriage, even golf-club membership closed to them as soon as they produce their incriminating koseki, or register. There is even a thriving business in private detectives who specialise in sniffing out "bad blood" in prospective spouses.

Perhaps most outrageous of all, thousands of Japanese Koreans and Chinese who were working as slave labourers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time of the atom bombings are not only unremembered at the annual services, but are denied the free medical care other Japanese victims receive.

Technically, Japanese officials assure the world, most Koreans are eligible for Japanese citizenship. But in practice there are formidable obstacles, which have ensured that fewer than 200,000 of the million or so Korean Japanese have become naturalised.

Stories abound of bureaucratic abuse, not least an arbitrarily enforced rule that applicants for naturalisation must produce family records that may have been lost, be judged to be of "good behaviour" and capable of"independent living".

"Even if I wanted to become a citizen, they don't want poor old people like me," sighs Mr Che, who at the age of 77 is still forced to go out to work for a few dollars a day as a labourer cutting grass.

WHAT makes all this even stranger is that there is no anthropological difference between modern-day Koreans and Japanese, much as some Japanese profess to believe in the creation myth of a unique Yamato people - both sprang from the same north-east Asian stock, both have "Mongolian blue spots"at the base of their spines when they are born. Even the Emperor Akihito has Korean forebears, though no Japanese would dare mention this in public.

Hardly surprisingly, many Korean Japanese continue to live in ethnic ghettos. More than 200,000, for example, live in Osaka's bustling "little Seoul", where they have their own FM radio station and the streets are redolent of kimchi (pickled cabbage), loud with the drums and flutes of Korean folk music, and lined with Korean-owned pachinko parlours, video shops and yakiniku barbecue restaurants.

It also comes as no surprise that, like other minorities around the world, Japan's Koreans are over-represented at the bottom end of the social league ladder.

Masaki Saito, a social worker in Utoro, says the village has higher than average levels of alcoholism, unemployment and disability. A fifth of the families have no-one in regular work, compared with an unemployment rate of less than 1 per cent for the rest of Uji.

The immediate threat to Utoro comes from a mysterious "paper company", which six years ago bought the two hectares on which the residents' homes are built from Nissan for a mere $A6 million. Its bid to have them evicted and redevelop the land is grinding its way through the Kyoto Local Court.

The people of Utoro, however, are not content to depend on the vagaries of Japanese justice. They have taken the unusual step of buying a $30,000 advertisement in The New York Times in a slick public relations operation aimed at embarrassing Nissan and hurting the car giant's international sales.

Although Nissan says (correctly) that it no longer has any legal responsibility for the land, the Utoro residents have hit it with a claim for wartime reparations, based on its exploitation of low-wage and no-wage Korean labour during the war. In their advertisement, they make a pointed comparison with the Mercedes Benz company, which paid several million dollars'compensation to its labourers after the war.

The highly politicised struggle for land rights in Utoro has profound implications for the way Japan treats all its other unacknowledged ethnic minorities, during this the United Nations' Year of Indigenous People - the shunned burakumin communities, Ainu (the original Japanese), Okinawans and Chinese - who make up about 5 per cent of the population.

"This is a test case," says Mr Om. "It is a first step - if we win this, then we will fight for our other rights."