Exile Dreams of Japan’s First Koreatown in Kawasaki : Pacific Rim: Lim Yoon Taek plans a mall, restaurants and shopping center that would provide Koreans with jobs and sell Korean goods.

In exile from his homeland for more than 50 years, Korean Lim Yoon Taek dreams of building Japan’s first Koreatown in the city he calls his second home.

Inspired by a successful Chinatown in Yokohama, only 19 miles down the coast, Lim wants to build his Koreatown in Kawasaki, a major industrial port of 1.2 million people.

Chinatown attracts 15 million visitors a year to its lively combination of restaurants, dispensaries and department stores.

“There are 50,000 Chinese in Japan and three Chinatowns. There are 700,000 Koreans and no Koreatowns,” Lim said.

“We should do something,” the vigorous 61-year-old said in an interview in his cramped office above a noodle shop in the area where most of Kawasaki’s 10,000 Koreans live.

The 700,000 Koreans in Japan are descendants of those who came willingly or by force during the Japanese colonial occupation of their country from 1910 to 1945.

In xenophobic Japan, Koreans were always outsiders.

After the Great Kanto earthquake of Sept. 1, 1923, leveled much of Tokyo, rumors spread that the Koreans had poisoned the water supply or were rioting.

Angry Japanese formed “self-protection groups” and murdered an estimated 6,000 Koreans in the greater Tokyo region.

Lim came to Kawasaki, southwest of the capital, with his family at the age of 9 in 1940. By 1945 the city had 20,000 Koreans, most of whom worked in its large steel and cement plants.

With the end of World War II and the liberation of their motherland, half of Kawasaki’s Koreans returned home, including all of Lim’s family except Lim himself. He chose to remain in Japan to continue his studies.

After doing a variety of jobs, he is now president of a firm importing Korean food. Most Koreans in Kawasaki run restaurants, pinball parlors or scrap metal firms, or work in construction or in factories.

It is almost impossible for a Korean to work for the government or to get a career job in a major Japanese firm.

Lim plans a mall, restaurants and shopping center that would provide Koreans with jobs and sell Korean goods, thereby helping Seoul cut its enormous trade deficit with Japan.

The proposed Koreatown would also be a psychological and social asset, helping to give Koreans a sense of home and belonging and to provide places where Koreans and Japanese, especially the elderly, could hold activities together.

Lim’s proposal includes a Korean garden and assembly halls for elderly people and public meetings. The town would aim to attract tourists of all nationalities to sample Korean delicacies such as ginseng, fried beef, the fiery pickled vegetables known as kimchi, and red peppers.

“The nationality of second- and third-generation Koreans is Korean but their way of thinking and habits are Japanese,” Lim said. “They live and work among Japanese.

“We first generation know that we will live and die in this country. But the second and third generation think they might return (to Korea) and so do not develop the sense of responsibility and belonging we have.

“In fact, they cannot go back, to North or South (Korea),” he said. “They are not equipped to do so, in terms of spoken or written language, lifestyle or economically.”

Koreans who have returned to South Korea say that they are looked down on because their Korean language is poor, they are accused of having stayed away during the Korean War of 1950-53 and they are said to be descendants of low-class people.

“Working together with Japanese, we must make a second homeplace for ourselves,” said Lim. “We must make a new history of relations and way of dealing between our two countries, end the distortions of the past and stop blaming each other.”

Koreatown would be built in the clean, quiet area of one- and two-story homes and roast meat restaurants where most of Kawasaki’s Koreans live.

Just over a main road are the giant mills of NKK, one of the world’s largest steelmakers, which owns much of the area’s land.

The cooperation of NKK, local Japanese and the city government is essential if the project is to be realized, especially as Lim is looking for public financing.

In principle, city officials support the idea, as does a group of Japanese citizens set up in November with the aim of revitalizing that part of the city.

Lim’s group of a dozen Koreans in the food business held its inaugural meeting to set up Koreatown in November. NKK has yet to express any view on the idea.