The “Zainichi” problem has reached the point where Japan can no longer afford to look the other way. To be clear, this is not about the Korean community as a whole — that would be both unfair and sloppy. It concerns a specific and particularly troublesome subset: those who operate under Korean names as information brokers and opportunistic middlemen, peddling rumors, political access, and quick-turnaround scams in the hidden currents of Japanese society.
These men were forged in the brutal postwar underbelly — the raw world of yakuza networks, backroom fixers, con artists, and filthy slum districts. That was their only school. There they mastered their one genuine tradecraft: the buying and selling of whispers. They exploited whoever they could, and were exploited in turn. Their work on North Korea, and what are euphemistically called “Xi Jinping missions,” is nothing more than a natural extension of that same grubby, parasitic, transactional economy.
They remain chained to a Showa-era playbook that should have been discarded decades ago, still convinced that Japanese society can be played with the same tired tricks of ethnic signaling and insider manipulation. That delusion no longer works.
Japan has arrived at a decisive strategic inflection point. The question is now unavoidable: Will Tokyo continue to tolerate these layered dependencies and external manipulations, or will it finally summon the clarity and institutional courage to see its own reality clearly, set its own course, and cut away these parasitic arrangements once and for all?
Mature nations do not live by comforting fictions. They face reality without flinching and act. Japan has the strength, the cohesion, and the latent will to do precisely that. The only question left is whether it will finally choose to use it.