Wow, thank you for this very thoughtful and engaging response.
My first sympathy is with Koreans and others who are marginalised, but once you win your basic survival, the question is where do you go from there? I myself am hopefully about to become the father of a Japanese/Irish boy in the next few days, and I am very aware that all the daily annoyances of being treated like a perpetual semi-outsider—which as a European are more or less easy to shrug off if you’re not an immature freak like Arudō Debito—are going to sting a lot more for my son growing up here.
But at some level you have to have that basic good-will desire to get on with everyone and have a society together, otherwise what are you about? Japanese citizenship is actually relatively easy to get: for third-generation Korean Japanese it's literally filling out a form or two, and you can keep being as culturally Korean as you want. The best and most successful people here are very multicultural and open-minded, and the rest are so used to it after a hundred years of having Koreans around, they certainly don’t bat an eye, and they can’t do anything about it anyway so fuck them if they have a problem; they’re dying off faster than ever.
South Korea has rightfully been getting its due on the international stage, and Korean-Japanese are doing fine, too, on the whole: the ones who make noise are generally sending money to the North. All the naturalised South Koreans I know stand up and contradict Korean-Americans who come over here with a nationalist saviour complex.
Reminds me of Irish-Americans donating to the IRA, inciting mayhem, and keeping Ireland in a repressive Catholic/nationalist time warp. The Troubles only ended eighteen years ago, and the North is still whatever it is, but at the end of the day England is a trading partner, a military ally, and a neighbour, and there’s much more to be gained by getting along. These situations are complicated, but surely the answer lies in the direction of civility and cooperation.
Bonus Irish sketch comedy satirising identity politics: https://youtu.be/_7b8P4d9tNw https://youtu.be/WuTj97MAt-w