South Korean students flock to Japan | Hacker News Reader

South Korean students flock to Japan

japantimes.co.jp

69 pointsUltramanoid76 comments

This article is laughably wrong (probably a puff piece to entice Korean students to work in Japan). The truth is exactly the opposite: there are fewer Koreans in Japan every year (as measured by foreign residents in Japan -- this includes work and student visas). The fastest rising immigrants to Japan from 2015-2018 are in descending order[1]:

Vietnam Cambodia Uzbekistan Myanmar Sri Lanka

South Korea comes in dead last, having DECLINED by 10% during the same period.

The truth is that as soon as Korea became a developed country, having joined the OECD in the 90s, immigration to Japan slowed to a trickle, precisely for the historical reasons that you might suspect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Foreign_...

It did sound like a puff piece, since the only company that was even mentioned by name was a recruiting/staffing agency.

South Korean here. My anecdata: some of my friends went to Japan for advanced degrees. Most of them came back within a couple of years after their study.

10x or more people around me went to US. The majority of them are still in the country after a few years.

Such tendency was remarkable to me, given the difficulty of learning English and relative ease of learning Japanese by Koreans.

There is one thing I can't understand from the article: it says a low birth rate as a reason of an increase in migration. Why would a low birth rate lead to more migration? I can understand the unemployment rate as a reason, and SK surely has a serious problem of low birth rate.. but that's for new babies...

But Koreans are still required to learn Kanjis right? Even with many shared/loan words through history, learning several thousands characters still doesn't feel easy enough to me.

While in many countries, people start learning English when they are in elementary schools. Upon until getting out of college, that is some decent years spent on English alone.

While the language itself is significantly different, more reading and extension of vocabulary should the few pending items to master English from that point on.

Koreans learn the hanja, which are basically identical to traditional Chinese characters (hanzi) in secondary school. Kanji are more divergent from hanzi than kanji and if you want to be able to read a newspaper or textbook you’d probably need to add about 700 characters to the 1800 generally taught in Korea but that is a massive leg up. Japanese and Korean have very similar morphemes and grammar. And English education in Korea is historically dire though improving. They are not going to be mastering English after secondary school, on average.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja

> South Korean primary schools abandoned the teaching of Hanja in 1971, although they are still taught as part of the mandatory curriculum in grade 6. They are taught in separate courses in South Korean high schools, separately from the normal Korean-language curriculum. Formal Hanja education begins in grade 7 (junior high school) and continues until graduation from senior high school in grade 12. A total of 1,800 Hanja are taught: 900 for junior high, and 900 for senior high (starting in grade 10).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Japanese_and_Kor...

> Japanese and Korean both have an agglutinative morphology in which verbs may function as prefixes[13] and a subject–object–verb (SOV) typology.[14][15][16] They are both topic-prominent, null-subject languages. Both languages rely heavily on turning nouns into verbs utilizing "to do" (する and 하다).

> Modern Korean and Japanese share a similar system of demonstrative pronouns: i- (이), ku- (그) and ce- (저) for Korean corresponding to the Japanese ko- (こ), so- (そ) and a- (あ)(“this”, “that” and “that over there”). They both lack a compulsory distinction of plurality (for example "an apple" vs "apples" is usually not specifically distinguished).

From my interaction with Korean people here in US, since the modern Korean language has moved on to its indigenous Hangul system, their ability to understand Hanja is limited, nor do they need such ability in daily life.

It is correct that Hanja is no longer used in daily life, but most people do know enough Hanja to start with. It is still mandatory to learn Hanja in middle schools (AFAIK), and since Hangul is pervasive now the use of Hanja ironically adds a good visual cue---many newspapers frequently use 美 or 英 in place of USA or UK and people is fine with that.

You still have to learn a lot of irregular spellings in English or any other natural languages anyway. Even if the spelling is perfectly regular, you still have to learn a lot of words. At that sense, it's no harder than any other languages.

> given the difficulty of learning English and relative ease of learning Japanese by Koreans

This surprises me a bit (I believe you; I am just surprised.)

Why do Koreans think learning Japanese is easier than learning English?

Syntax-wise, Koreans and Japanese are very close. The sound systems are also close (e.g. no p/f v/b distinction). Kanji and Hanja are just Japanese/Korean versions of Chinese. Some words are shared and some nursery rhymes have the same melody. They even memorize the multiplication table with the same melody. In many ways, their languages and cultures have evolved with proximity for a long time, like thousands of years.

English and Korean are just two languages that would have almost no way of influencing each other directly for a long long time. They evolved independently, and once one is familiar with one language system, learning the other is just... painfully difficult in my experience.

If you see grammar errors in my comment, a Japanese person would very likely show similar mistakes in their English writings.

Interestingly enough, I feel that your grammar is pretty much spot on perfect, at least from this excerpt. It's the cadence and rhythm of the way you write and format your sentences that subtly suggest you're not a native English speaker.

Maybe the thing that most sticks out to me is saying "English writings." I don't think a native speaker would say writings, just "in their English", or perhaps "In their written English."

Your English is fantastic, this is me simply musing on what you're suggesting.

Thank you, you made my day. I spent way too much time reading commets in HN, and that effort paid off. :)

Of course! Coming from someone who's tried (and failed) to learn a bit of Mandarin, even the spoken language was quite tough. Chinese/Japanese/Korean -> English/Romance languages is quite a tough lingual gap to bridge, and you should be proud of yourself for achieving fluency!

Their syntax and grammar is very similar. Korean and Japanese are both among the most difficult languages for an English speaker to learn, so I would imagine the reverse is true for Japanese and Korean speakers as well.

Consider the difference between English and Spanish vs. English and Japanese. If you look at a Spanish sentence, you can more or less translate it word for word to and from English so long as you know the vocabulary and verb conjugations. Japanese on the other hand has an entirely different grammar, uses the case (particle) system, has honorifics and levels of politeness, has entirely different parts of speech from english, is far less ego-oriented (I don't mean this in a judgemental way, just that objects are much more often the subjects of sentences)

The grammar is very similar (use of particles, word order) and a large amount of vocabulary, especially technical vocabulary, is derived from shared Chinese words.

Some of the characters are similar as well as grammar. English follows a completely new set of rules.

You're not considering the Korean perspective. If Korean is your native language, Japanese is significantly easier to pick up than English due to similarities in the grammatical structure and syntax of both languages. Your surprise is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding and stereotype about English because English is, I'm guessing, your native language.

It is mine as well, but I considered the questions you're asking when I was teaching myself Japanese around age 9. I'm 33 now. The barrier of difficulty is all in your mind. You're the only limiting factor. You decide for yourself how difficult something is to do.

> There is one thing I can't understand from the article: it says a low birth rate as a reason of an increase in migration. Why would a low birth rate lead to more migration?

Good question. My understanding is that (from the article)

    The low birthrate is leading to severe labor shortages ... prompting the
    country to welcome more foreign workers.

So foreign workers (e.g. from South-East Asia?) make it harder for Koreans to find a job in SK? But it's all the same (severe labor shortages) in Japan, if not worse.

"Labor shortage" in the context of high unemployment (edit: as in South Korea, not Japan) usually just means, from the point of view of employers, a shortage of suckers who are willing to accept low wages.

Besides, the birth rate in SK hovered between 1.4 and 1.5 during much of the 80s and 90s, and only dropped to current levels (around 1.1) since the early 2000s. Most people who are looking for jobs right now were born in the 90s; the ultra-low-birth-rate generation is still in K-12. It's a lame excuse.

Foreign workers are willing to accept the kind of crappy treatment that most young Koreans would not hesitate to report to the authorities. That's why they're hired and Koreans are not. Then the Koreans become foreign workers in Japan...

Japan has low unemployment, not high.

https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/unemployment-rate

> The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in Japan increased unexpectedly to 2.5 percent in March 2019 from a five-month low of 2.3 percent in the previous month

Sorry for the confusion. I was responding to the parent's last line where he asked about foreign workers and labor shortage in SK. Edited to clarify which country I'm talking about.

> some of my friends went to Japan for advanced degrees. Most of them came back within a couple of years after their study. 10x or more people around me went to US. The majority of them are still in the country after a few years.

My thinking is that Japanese and Korean work culture is quite similar. So if you want to live in that culture, why not do it closer to your family?

However, if you get smitten by a more western lifestyle in the US or Europe, it will be very hard to return home.

>However, if you get smitten by a more western lifestyle in the US or Europe, it will be very hard to return home.

Anecdotal, but I can confirm. I work for a Japanese bank in NYC that has a lot of Japanese expats. A few weeks prior a new expat came over and he was in awe of being able to start work around 8:50 and leave at 6:00, and how easy it is to approach the managers. Meanwhile, the expats that have been in NYC for a while are dreading returning to Tokyo.

The answer is, they need slaves. The foreign workers are suitable for slaves because they don't know the labor law well.

As the birth rate is decreasing, there is a shortage of young slaves. It's a simple supply and demand situation. If you want to hire a worker, you have to pay more because there is not enough supply that satisfy the demand.

I have no idea what the future Japan will look like, but for workers, it will be a good market until Japanese economy corrupt.

Younger people can think about their future too. Anyone should be free to seek better future for him/herself.

Aging society is a big issue.

When i was studing, alot of thought went into "my county has a lot of internal issues that doesnt seem to be solved anytime soon - mby its better to jump the ship before it sinks".

Those are my daily thoughts about my country. The problem is that if I move away, all my friends will still be there and be miserable, which makes a tough decision to make.

Lots of people move abroad for a couple years, save a lot of money there, build strong CVs and then come back to their home country. With the saved money, they can easily start a life (buy house/flat without debt etc.) and strong CV presumably allows them to get a decent job. Of course, it is only suitable in countries that are at least somewhat developed, don't have wars etc.

How come it's so easy for koreans to go to the US ?

Read the story but they're very short on the data. cited a job fair in Nagoya which had 40 Koreans. Then a Korean job search firm that placed the most people to work in Japan out of any country. Is it just me or is the article short on enough evidence to make this a piece?

I don't get the "as birthrate sinks and unemployment climbs". It's not like Japan is doing well there.

And Japan is infamous for its incredibly negative attitude towards Koreans...

Both countries have low birthrates, but Japan is far enough along the labor shortage curve that unemployment has been essentially eradicated in Japan. From the friendly article:

According to Statistics Korea, the national statistics office, the unemployment rate last year for people aged between 15 and 29 was 9.5 percent, compared with 3.8 percent overall and 3.6 percent for Japanese 15 to 24.

Also, Japan has a vocal far-right fringe, but the average Japanese person has no qualm with Koreans and Korean TV, music, food etc is widely popular. There are over 500,000 Koreans living in Japan, many 2nd or 3rd generation, and plenty more naturalized Japanese of Korean descent. If anything, I'd suspect there's a lot more antipathy in Korea towards Japan than the other way around...

> unemployment has been essentially eradicated in Japan

Much of that is the surprising amount of minor busywork the country uses instead of welfare support e.g. multiple people doing circulation around a minor bit of roadwork when other countries would use traffic signs or temporary traffic lights. This is mostly unreliable contract and part-time work.

Japan has fairly high rates of relative and working poverty, with north of 15% living under the poverty line.

For comparison, in 2010 the U.S. had 15.1% of its population living under the poverty line. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold

To draw some analogies, Japan has some very conservative people in power, but that's more to do with the election systems that give more power to monolithic parties that attract rural voters. When you look at the proportional vote (Japan has FPTP + a non-reproportioning proportional segment), Japanese people are on average much less conservative than their elected government would make it seem.

> Also, Japan has a vocal far-right fringe, but the average Japanese person has no qualm with Koreans and Korean TV, music, food etc is widely popular.

And Israelis love Palestinian/Arab hummus. That feeling is not transitive to the Palestinian people.

> There are over 500,000 Koreans living in Japan, many 2nd or 3rd generation, and plenty more naturalized Japanese of Korean descent. If anything, I'd suspect there's a lot more antipathy in Korea towards Japan than the other way around...

Zainichi Koreans of any generation are not citizens and have limited rights in Japan, and can face widespread discrimination if they do not hide their identities/ancestry.

> Zainichi Koreans of any generation are not citizens

That's a bit of a tautology: if they nationalize, which they can if they wish to, they become citizens and stop being counted as Zainichi. They're also granted a number of privileges (welfare, state pensions etc) as "Special Permanent Residents" not afforded to any other non-citizen residents, although they're still not to vote.

I think comparison with Israel/Palestine is wrong because Koreans do not explode bombs in Japan.

Also, I don't understand why anyone could dislike Korean people. They didn't invade Japan, and probably they never invaded any country.

They can naturalize anytime they want but choose not to...

Have to admit I am clueless about the history between these two. Why don't they like each other?

Japan invaded the Korean peninsula as well as a sizeable portion of China and enacted horribly cruel war crimes against the citizens of those places. I won't get into details, but this comment would be akin to asking "What's the history between the Germans and Jews? Why don't they like each other?". The primary difference being that Germany had a reckoning with the history of what happened during that time, while the Japanese Government has mostly denied that any of its war crimes even happened which never allowed tensions to drop as much as they may have in Europe.

Actually, Japan has apologized repeatedly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements...

However, Japan has more than its fair share of far-right fruitcakes who deny everything, and in both Korea and China politicians have found Japan to be a convenient whipping boy whenever they need a distraction from domestic problems.

However, Japan has more than its fair share of far-right fruitcakes who deny everything

They elected a far right "fruitcake" to the post of prime minister.

To be fair, they only elected the conservative party, the LDP; the party elected the prime minister. Granted, they've elected the LDP almost continuously since 1955. Of course, they tried electing the other party in 2009, but their leadership kept resigning. Of course, given the LDP's stranglehold on politics, one has to wonder why they feel a need to pander to the nettouyo.

I stopped paying to attention to politics about 5 years ago and am very surprised to learn that the major opposition party (DPJ?) has essentially fractured into multiple, smaller parties, all using a variation of the same name.

At this point, I'm not even sure who to vote for anymore.

The problem is that Japan has a history of doing things like this:

> In October 2006, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe's apology was followed on the same day by a group of 80 Japanese lawmakers' visit to the Yasukuni Shrine which enshrines more than 1,000 convicted war criminals.[57] Two years after the apology, Shinzo Abe also denied that the Imperial Japanese military had forced comfort women into sexual slavery during World War II .

This is from your link.

Japan demands the issue to be "settled" or "forgotten" after mulling quick apologies. Imagine Germany demanding that the Holocaust be forgotten.

Germany's the exception, not the rule. Most countries's governments like nothing more than to behave as if their past transgressions never happened. And even then Germany has had no shortage of politicians who say "Germany has apologized enough".

Japan and South Korea signed an agreement in 1965 that was supposed to settle all financial claims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Basic_Relations_betw...

This agreement is about property claims, not about war crimes against civilians.

The agreement is about "property and claims" between the two states. Of course, individuals can and have sued various Japanese entities, some successfully.

It's worth pointing out, I think, that nowadays most Germans and Jews get along perfectly fine, despite their history a few generations ago.

So just citing that case isn't a full explanation of the enmity between Japanese and Koreans.

They do like each other. Koreans love Japanese food and many Japanese also like Korean food. They watch TV shows from each other. Many TV shows are often just translated versions from the other country.

It's actually the politicians who want the people to have enmity to each other and some people are vulnerable to the propaganda. The existence of the North Korea regime and their history of kidnapping Japanese people also don't help. Much of their economic strength also overlaps, so there's competition as well.

If you still don't understand, think about close European countries. They probably get along just fine, but Brexit happened..

Oh yeah, I understand. That's why I brought up the last part. Germany did a relatively good job after the war of apologizing for its warcrimes and rooting out the toxic culture that led to them. I was trying to describe the gravity of the crimes that happened during the war with that comparison, less so the modern day feelings.

Historically, Korea was repeatedly invaded by Japan. More recently, Korea was a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945, during which the Japanese ruled with an iron fist and did their best to destroy Korean identity by forcing people to take Japanese names etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_under_Japanese_rule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan%E2%80%93Korea...

The identity-destroying part only came after 1938. They were trying to do 내선일체 [內鮮一體] (not sure how to translate this in English).

Before that, they actually helped Koreans learn Hangul. I was also very anti-Japan as a I grew up under typical Korean parents.

But after reading the actual history, there were some good parts during the colonization. Although, I'm not denying the horrific parts caused by war. But that's just war. It's horrible to begin with. Not to mention what Koreans did in the Vietnam War to the locals.

I think part of the hostility from either of the countries is caused by only seeing part of the reality.

I guess the word you are looking for is "cultural assimilation". 内鮮一体 is the specific case of Japan and Korea.

The Japanese were fresh out of their own industrial revolution so had plenty of experience to do the same thing in Korea. The legacy of that is that Korean and Japanese societies have a lot in common eg Chaebol and Keiretsu. Following the war Japan sheltered people persecuted by the ROK dictatorship (eg Kim Dae-jung, Lee Byung-chul)

> I think part of the hostility from either of the countries is caused by only seeing part of the reality.

It's tribal. East Asian People are racist against each other and each other's countries, but East Asian Persons get on just fine.

> The identity-destroying part only came after 1938. They were trying to do 내선일체 [內鮮一體] (not sure how to translate this in English). Before that, they actually helped Koreans learn Hangul.

Banning Hangul and erasing Korea's independent cultural identity intentionally traced the pattern of Japan's nearly identical actions a few decades earlier in conquering Ryukyu, including classifying each suppressed language as a "dialect" of Japanese.

As a contrast to Korea, the former Ryukyu Kingdom is now fully subsumed as the Okinawan islands and its original languages, religions, and culture are, in practice, nearly extinct.

Which certainly explains why Korea doesn't like Japan, but why does Japan seem to dislike Korea so much?

Xenophobia and belief in Japanese racial superiority:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron#Specific_theses

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_Japan#Pre-war...

Much of it can be blamed on propaganda driven by economic decline and political scapegoating. While Korean music, drama, and movies are popular in Japan, consumers are mostly women. Among small but growing and very vocal population of Japanese men, Korea-bashing books and manga are popular. Later trend is not unrelated to continuing economic decline of Japan. And Japanese politicians are leveraging and fueling that trend to divert the blame.

Maybe because they're not Japanese enough.

See https://www.upi.com/TOP_NEWS/WORLD-NEWS/2019/04/17/ANTI-KORE...

One small chapter of the history "The Mimizuka ... is a monument in Kyoto, Japan, dedicated to the sliced noses of killed Korean soldiers and civilians as well as Ming Chinese troops taken as war trophies during the Japanese invasions of Korea from 1592 to 1598."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimizuka

Wikipedia has a short page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan–Korea_relatio...