Today’s word of the day, thanks to The Dictionary Project’s daily newsletter, is tenacious. It is an adjective with several meanings that depend, partly, on whether it is modifying a noun that refers to an animate or an inanimate object. It can mean “holding fast; inclined to keep in possession; keep a firm hold of,” or “persistent; unyielding; resolute; stubborn; obstinate,” or “able to retain or remember; retentive,” but it can also mean “able to or having a tendency to adhere or stick together; sticky” (like a tenacious glue).

Tenacious appears in the English language around 1600. It is derived from the noun tenacity and the word-forming element –ous (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=tenacious). The noun tenacity entered the language “early 15c., tenacite, ‘quality of holding firmly,’ from Old French ténacité (14c.) and directly from Latin tenacitas ‘an act of holding fast,’ from tenax (genitive tenacis) ‘holding fast, gripping, clingy; firm, steadfast,’ from tenere ‘to hold’ (from PIE root *ten– ‘to stretch’). The PIE root produced two Latin verbs, tenere ‘to hold, grasp,’ and tendere ‘to stretch’ (as in tend (v.1)), which perhaps is from an inflected form in the PIE verb. Both Latin verbs have past participle tentus” (https://www.etymonline.com/word/tenacious#etymonline_v_30603). I quoted the whole entry because I wanted to get to that last sentence. Lots of people mock English because we have words that spelled and maybe even pronounced the same but mean different things. But here is Latin, the classical language, the language of order and rationality, having past participles of two different verbs that are exactly the same. If one were to use tentus in a sentence, how would one know if the speaker was saying “held fast” or “stretched”? The obvious answer is that one would know by the context, but when you give that answer to complaints about English, people tend to scoff.

The second part is the suffix, or word-forming element, –ous, which makes adjective out of nouns, “meaning ‘having, full of, having to do with, doing, inclined to,’ from Old French –ous, –eux, from Latin –osus (compare –ose)” (https://www.etymonline.com/word/tenacious#etymonline_v_30603). So someone or something that is tenacious is full of tenacity.

On this date in 1991, Japan ended the practice of requiring South Koreans to be fingerprinted. Wait, what? Feel free to read it again.

The relationship between Japan and Koreans who live in Japan has been complicated for a long time. The relationship between Japan and Korea has been complicated for a long time, but we’ll start in the 20^th century.

In 1910, Japan and Korea signed the Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty, which ceded the Korean Empire to the Japanese Empire. In other words, Japan took control of Korea. As a result, all Koreans became citizens of the Empire of Japan. In the 1920s, during a period of economic expansion, there was a labor shortage in Japan, and many Koreans immigrated to the island to fill that void. Despite their citizenship, these Koreans faced discrimination in Japan, in part because of the lack of educational opportunities they had had in Korea. During World War II, which started earlier in Japan than in the USA, many Koreans were drafted into the military since they were considered Japanese citizens.

After the war, because of the turmoil that was taking place in Korea, many Koreans illegally entered Japan. It was difficult for the Japanese coast guard to deal with these immigrants because the Japanese were not allowed to carry weapons, by virtue of the treaty that ended the war, but the Koreans did carry guns.

The US occupation of Japan ended with the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco, April 28, 1952. One of the things this treaty did was formally end Japan’s control of Korea, which by that point was divided into North and South Korea, both of which had already declared their independence. But one result of the formal separation of Japan and Korea was that Koreans living in Japan were no longer considered citizens, even if they had been born in Japan. These Koreans came to be Zainichi Koreans, or just Zainichi, a Japanese word which means “resident in Japan.” This term seems to make clear that the Japanese expected these Koreans to eventually return to Korea, no matter how long they had lived in Japan.

After World War II, as the Japanese government modernized, it began to provide various services to its people, such as health insurance. But the Zainichi, no longer considered citizens, were not able to take advantage of the social welfare system, and the cost of medical care was quite high, so they were effectively barred from such care.

Another thing that happened as a result of this change was that the Japanese government required all Zainichi to be fingerprinted. The government’s reason for this was a tricky little part of the long-term discrimination against Koreans: Koreans in Japan went by two names, a Korean name and a Japanese name. The Korean name was a way to maintain their Korean identity. But the Japanese government used that as a reason for forcing all Koreans to get fingerprinted. This practice was particularly galling to the Koreans who had lived in Japan all their lives.

So in 1991, the Japanese government ended the practice. According to the New York Times, in an article about the agreement between the Japanese and South Korean governments,

South Korean officials said that under today’s agreement, starting in 1992 Japan would provide Korean residents of Japan with identity cards bearing their photographs but no fingerprints.
Japan does not plan to grant the Koreans automatic and full citizenship rights, however. Koreans in Japan who wish to become Japanese citizens must submit to an official investigation of their backgrounds and must adopt Japanese names. Those who retain their Korean identity may not vote and are barred from becoming public servants. They can be deported if they break the law.

One human characteristic that is particularly tenacious is the tendency to prefer our own, people who look and act like us. We call it discrimination, and it probably has its roots in the earliest days of human existence, when a person could be certain only of the others in their own tribe or people group. We can just hope that, as humans mature, we will eventually learn to accept those who are different from us, whether they are very different or just a little different.

Today’s image: “Participants in a rally hold up banners calling on the Japanese government to end its discriminatory policy, in Kyoto’s Shimogyo Ward on Nov. 15, 2022. (Mainichi/Kanae Soejima)” (https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20221216/p2a/00m/0na/026000c).