Lee Kyung-jae
Japanese politician
Lee Kyung-jae, also known as I Kyonje, Yi Gyeong-jae, or Yi Kyŏngjae (born 1954 in Takatsuki, Osaka Prefecture) is an ethnic Korean community organiser in Japan.
Early life
Born to Zainichi Korean parents holding South Korean nationality, Kyung-jae grew up in Nariai in Takatsuki, a small village of around 35 Korean families. His father was a day labourer, while his mother worked in a quarry. Both were illiterate in Japanese and Korean. Further more, his mother, who had immigrated to Japan at the age of three, had forgotten how to speak Korean, and as a result, their home language was exclusively Japanese.
Lee was given the name legal alias Ri Keisai and grew up being ashamed of his Korean background and due to his poverty. He revealed his Korean name to his classmates at his middle school graduation but retained a strong desire to assimilate to the point of "hatred" towards Koreans and blaming his family's poverty on his parents' laziness. This was a state of mind which was overcome by the intervention of a teacher, who raised the issue of anti-Korean discrimination, and the support and acceptance of Japanese friends. However, upon later entering a private high school he resumed the use of the Japanese name, Takayasu Keisai, and again hid his ethnicity.
Political career
After Lee graduated from high school in 1972, his former teachers provided him with no assistance in finding a job.
“Lee Kyung-jae” enters the record as japanese politician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kyung-jae, Japanese and politician can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 5, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q11522467. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1954 and 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lee Kyung-jae” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.