Korean Restaurateurs in Japan as Strategic Actors

This essay examines how Korean restaurateurs in Japan have expanded their market from the postwar period to the present, viewing them as strategic actors. It analyzes how their strategies have changed and how they have been constrained and enabled by the situation of the Korean community, mainstream market trends, and transnational cultural consumption. The analysis draws on previous studies, semi-structured interviews, media analysis, and fieldwork in the Tokyo neighborhood of Shin-Okubo. Restaurateurs have employed five strategies: de-ethnicization, re-ethnicization, authentication as ethnic food, transnational localization, and the transnational transplantation of youth-centered popular food culture. These strategies coexist today and mutually reference one another. In the postwar period, oldcomer Koreans developed yakiniku (a tabletop grilled meat dish) through de-ethnicization under discriminatory labor conditions and a limited co-ethnic market. From the 1980s to the 2000s, the influx of newcomer Koreans, heightened interest in Korean culture, and the established yakiniku industry enabled restaurateurs to foreground Koreanness and authenticity. Since the 2010s, strategies have increasingly involved transnationally drawing on and transplanting contemporary Korean foods and youth cultures. Overall, Korean restaurateurs in Japan operate beyond a simple authenticity/localization binary, actively combining multiple, often transnational, strategies and serving as cultural intermediaries who shape urban culinary culture.