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.
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.
> 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).
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Besides more recent events several hundred years ago Japan also tried to invade Korea under Tokotomo Hideyoshi. Japanese Imperialism has a bit of history to it that makes Koreans uncomfortable given the peninsula has been under constant conquest by its neighbors for at least a thousand years now.
According to some sources (Bloomberg) South Korea is currently the most innovative country in the world, and having spent significant time there, I wholeheartedly agree.
Despite the mythos surrounding Japan espoused by some ill-informed westerners, while it is a beautiful country, there is no benefit in moving from Korea to Japan. Japan, while it's my current home, is well past its heyday.
This isn't to say it won't return, but the current climate speaks otherwise.
“They have experienced military service and are disciplined,” said an official at a manufacturer in Aichi Prefecture. “They are good to work with, because they respect their superiors and are diligent.”
I find israelis pleasant to work with, mostly because i think they are smart, and they have a good idea what they are doing. They also want to improve constantly.
Also they speak their mind, no bs. We need more people with this mindset.
Readit News
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_...
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...
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.
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).
This surprises me a bit (I believe you; I am just surprised.)
Why do Koreans think learning Japanese is easier than learning English?
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.
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)
Deleted Comment
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.
Good question. My understanding is that (from the article)
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.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...
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.
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.
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.
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".
And Japan is infamous for its incredibly negative attitude towards Koreans...
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...
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_under_Japanese_rule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan%E2%80%93Korea...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimizuka
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Japanese_sentiment_in_Kor...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_under_Japanese_rule#Lega...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Korean_sentiment#In_Japan
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Despite the mythos surrounding Japan espoused by some ill-informed westerners, while it is a beautiful country, there is no benefit in moving from Korea to Japan. Japan, while it's my current home, is well past its heyday.
This isn't to say it won't return, but the current climate speaks otherwise.
This is a pure fluff piece.
Also they speak their mind, no bs. We need more people with this mindset.