On January 13, 1903, the first Korean immigrants arrived in Hawai'i. Numbering a little more than a hundred individuals, this group represented the initial wave of organized Korean immigration to Hawai'i. Over the next two and a half years, nearly 7,500 Koreans would make the long journey eastward across the Pacific. Most were single men contracted to augment (and, in many cases, to offset) the large numbers of existing Chinese and Japanese plantation workers. Although much has been written about early Chinese and Japanese laborers in Hawai'i, until now no comprehensive work had been published on first-generation Korean immigrants, the ilse. Making extensive use of primary source material from Korea, Japan, the continental U.S., and Hawai'i, Wayne Patterson weaves a compelling social history of the Korean experience in Hawai'i from 1903 to 1973 as seen primarily through the eyes of the ilse. Japanese surveillance records, student journals, and U.S. intelligence reports--many of which were uncovered by the author--provide an "inner history" of the Korean community. Chapter topics include plantation labor, Christian mission work, the move from the plantation to the city, picture prides, relations with the Japanese government, interaction with other ethnic groups, intergenerational conflict, the World War II experience, and the postwar years. The Ilse is an impressive and much-needed contribution to Korean American and Hawai'i history and significantly advances our knowledge of the East Asian immigrant experience in the United States.

"The photographs, in illuminating and complementing writings and oral histories found elsewhere, provide insight into Hawai'i's Korean immigrant community, politics, and everyday life. They reveal the struggles and successes of the first and subsequent generations, allowing the viewers to connect with the past.

The Koreans in Hawaii: A Pictorial History, 1903-2003, brings together hundreds of photographs to tell the powerful story of the people who have shaped the Korean immigrant experience in America over the past one hundred years. Although Koreans faced the same hardships and barriers as other East Asian immigrants in the New World, the story of their migration, settlement, and assimilation into American society has received relatively little attention. This volume not only commemorates the centennial of Koreans in Hawaii, but also offers readers an unprecedented look at the rich history of a community that continues to develop and change to this day. The photographs, which illuminate and complement writings and oral histories found elsewhere, provide insight into Hawaii's Korean immigrant community, politics, and everyday life. They reveal the struggles and successes of the first and subsequent generations, allowing viewers to connect with the past. Together with chapter introductions, the wide range of photographs (many only recently discovered in archives and family albums) represents an engaging record that uncovers the deep roots of Korean Americans in Hawaii.

Korean immigration to Hawaii provides a striking glimpse of the inner workings of Yi-dynasty Korea in its final decade. It is a picture of confusion, functionalism, corruption, oppression, and failure of leadership at all levels of government. Patterson suggests that the weakness of the Korean government on the issue of emigration made it easier for Japanese imperialism to succeed in Korea. He also revises the standard interpretation of Japanese foreign policy by suggestion that prestige—the need to prevent the United States from passing a Japanese exclusion act—as well as security was a motivating factor in the establishment of a protectorate over Korea in 1905. In the process he uncovers a heretofore hidden link between Japanese imperialism in Korea and Japanese-American relations at the turn of the century. The author has made extensive use of archival materials in Korea, Japan, Hawaii, and Washington, D.C. in researching a subject that has been neglected both in the United States and Korea. The study presents new information on the subject along with a keen analysis and innovative interpretation in a readable and accessible style. The work will be of significant value to specialists in Korean history, Korean-American relations, Japanese history, Japanese-Korean relations, U.S.-Japanese relations, Hawaiian history, and U.S. diplomatic history.

Burnt by the Sun examines the history of the first Korean diaspora in a Western society during the highly tense geopolitical atmosphere of the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. Author Jon K. Chang demonstrates that the Koreans of the Russian Far East were continually viewed as a problematic and maligned nationality (ethnic community) during the Tsarist and Soviet periods. He argues that Tsarist influences and the various forms of Russian nationalism(s) and worldviews blinded the Stalinist regime from seeing the Koreans as loyal Soviet citizens. Instead, these influences portrayed them as a colonizing element (labor force) with unknown and unknowable political loyalties. One of the major findings of Chang’s research was the depth that the Soviet state was able to influence, penetrate, and control the Koreans through not only state propaganda and media, but also their selection and placement of Soviet Korean leaders, informants, and secret police within the populace. From his interviews with relatives of former Korean OGPU/NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) officers, he learned of Korean NKVD who helped deport their own community. Given these facts, one would think the Koreans should have been considered a loyal Soviet people. But this was not the case, mainly due to how the Russian empire and, later, the Soviet state linked political loyalty with race or ethnic community. During his six years of fieldwork in Central Asia and Russia, Chang interviewed approximately sixty elderly Koreans who lived in the Russian Far East prior to their deportation in 1937. This oral history along with digital technology allowed him to piece together Soviet Korean life as well as their experiences working with and living beside Siberian natives, Chinese, Russians, and the Central Asian peoples. Chang also discovered that some two thousand Soviet Koreans remained on North Sakhalin island after the Korean deportation was carried out, working on Japanese-Soviet joint ventures extracting coal, gas, petroleum, timber, and other resources. This showed that Soviet socialism was not ideologically pure and was certainly swayed by Japanese capitalism and the monetary benefits of projects that paid the Stalinist regime hard currency for its resources.

Millions of ethnic Koreans have been driven from the Korean Peninsula over the course of the region’s modern history. Emigration was often the personal choice of migrants hoping to escape economic and political hardship, but it was also enforced or encouraged by governmental relocation and migration projects in both colonial and postcolonial times. The turning point in South Korea’s overall migration trajectory occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the nation’s increased economic prosperity and global visibility, along with shifting geopolitical relationships between the First World and Second World, precipitated a migration flow to South Korea. Since the early 1990s, South Korea’s foreign-resident population has soared more than 3,000 percent. Homing investigates the experiences of legacy migrants—later-generation diaspora Koreans who “return” to South Korea—from China, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the United States. Unlike their parents or grandparents, they have no firsthand experience of their ancestral homeland. They inherited an imagined homeland through memories, stories, pictures, and traditions passed down by family and community, or through images disseminated by the media. When diaspora Koreans migrate to South Korea, they confront far more than a new living situation: they must navigate their own shifting emotions as their expectations for their new homeland—and its expectations of them—confront reality. Everyday experiences and social encounters—whether welcoming or humiliating—all contribute to their sense of belonging in the South. Homing addresses some of the most vexing and pressing issues of contemporary transnational migration—citizenship, cultural belonging, language, and family relationships—and highlights their affective dimensions. Using accounts gleaned through interviews, author Ji-Yeon Jo situates migrant experiences within the historical context of each diaspora. Her book is the first to analyze comparatively the migration experiences of ethnic Koreans from three diverse diaspora, whose presence in South Korea and ongoing relationships with diaspora homelands have challenged and destabilized existing understandings of Korean peoplehood.

The Korean Kingdom and the United States signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce in 1882. This treaty opened Korea to American missionaries who proselytized Christianity to the Koreans. When Hawaii sugar planters recruited Koreans to come to Hawaii to work in the Hawaii sugar plantations, they picked most of the Korean Hawaii emigrants from the Korean Christian converts. Between 1902 and 1905, some 7,000 of them immigrated to Hawaii. Of those 7,000, about 2,000 transmigrated to the mainland. Most of these Hawaii Korean trans-migrants settled on the West Coast, primarily in California. This book tells the Korean immigrants' life stories in California's eight San Joaquin Valley farm communities: Fresno, Hanford, Visalia, Dinuba, Reedley, Delano, Willows, and Maxwell. It describes how they survived through discrimination and injustices in early twentieth-century America, and also details the Korean immigrants' efforts to regain their lost motherland from Japanese colonialism (1910-1945).