Yuko Toyoda thought she was Japanese. After all, she spoke Japanese and looked like her other elementary school friends. But shortly before she entered the third grade, her parents told her that her real name was Kang Woo Ja and she was actually Korean. Woo Ja, surprised but not dismayed, announced her true identity to her classmates, and some of them promptly taunted her. It was her first encounter with Japan's lingering prejudice against Koreans, but it was not likely to be her last.
Roughly 677,000 Koreans live in Japan, the country's largest foreign contingent but still less than 1% of...
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