This project examines young Korean adults raised in Japan who chose to pursue higher education in Korea, focusing on their motivations for this cross-border educational transition, their cultural and linguistic adjustment to life in Korea, and how the experience reshapes their sense of Korean-Japanese identity. Against the backdrop of increasing global student mobility, this population remains largely overlooked in the literature — as members of a ethnic minority community in Japan, they occupy a unique position that differs from both typical international students and local Korean students, and their experiences of belonging and displacement deserve closer scholarly attention. Fourteen participants (6 female; 8 male), most of whom grew up in Tokyo and were enrolled at a Seoul university at the time of the study, completed a short demographic questionnaire covering educational background, language use, and self-rated proficiency in Korean and Japanese, before taking part in semi-structured group interviews in March 2025. Sessions were conducted face-to-face in Korean, Japanese, or a combination of both depending on participant preference, lasted between one and one-and-a-half hours, and were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Their accounts reveal layered and often contradictory experiences — navigating minority status and the pressures of ethnic identity in Japan on one hand, and encountering a different kind of displacement in Korea on the other, where Korean heritage does not automatically translate into cultural belonging. During AY2025, transcription of the full interview corpus was completed and preliminary engagement with the data has begun. Findings are being prepared for presentation at the International Conference on Migration Linguistics, with a peer-reviewed journal article submission planned within AY2026.

This research project has focused on young Korean newcomers who grew up in Japan and chose to move to Korea for their university education. The aim of this project was to investigate the motivation and realization of their student life in Korea and how their Korean-Japanese identity back in life in Japan has been changed or improved since they moved (back) to Korea for their tertiary education. With the research funds given in AY2024, 14 (6 female; 8 male) Korean newcomers participated in this project through responding to a questionnaire and a group interview in March 2025. Most of them were born and raised in Tokyo (except four who also moved to Japan soon after their birth before they turned one) and were current university students in a university in Seoul at the time of participation. Prior to the group interview, all participants were asked to respond to a brief questionnaire about their profile including their education, language use, self-assessed proficiency of Korean and Japanese, and motivation to go to a Korean university. The group interview was conducted all face-to-face and took between 1 and 1.5 hour. Both Korean and Japanese were used (or mixed) depending on the preference of the interviewees. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. This interview aimed to explore their life before and after moving to Korea. Some questions about their family, language use, culture and identity were asked to analyze their experience in both countries. The participants have shared numerous thoughts and rich episodes related to their life as a Korean in Japan as well as their life as a Korean-but-not-so-Korean in Korea. The interviews are now being analyzed for the next phase. The remaining tasks of the current project in the upcoming fiscal year would be to analyze the interview data and present at an international conference and be ready to publish this project as an article.