Abstract
This article analyses a case involving the dismissal of a tenured faculty member at Hiroshima City University of Japan. The university dismissed a Korean woman associate professor after filing a criminal complaint against her, leading to a house raid, her arrest and media coverage. After 11 days of detention, the Hiroshima Prosecutor’s Office decided not to indict her because they could not find criminal intent on her part. With the suspicion of the university’s fabrication of her criminality looming large, she was dismissed within a few hours of her release. The university’s attempt to purge a critical foreign faculty member from the university campus, faculty housing and the country of Japan was an almost complete success until the case became an international controversy with counter-media exposure and the formation of a transnational support network. This case reveals a volatile mixture of race- and gender-based discrimination, administrative incompetence and politicised financial subsidy as a backdrop to violations of human rights and academic freedom. The present article shows that the rights’ violations in this case are closely connected to rising nationalism, the politicisation of educational subsidy and ideological human agencies with a set of professional agendas.
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Notes
Visit http://www.city.hiroshima.lg.jp/english/ (accessed 8 January 2018) for the city’s self-identifying slogan.
For detailed chronological accounts of the bullying and criminalisation of Kim by HCU for 12 years, go to https://justice-for-mikyoungkim.org/chronology-of-bullying-and-criminalization/ (accessed 8 January 2018).
Visit HCU’s website for its public announcement: https://www.hiroshima-cu.ac.jp/news/contents2249/ (accessed 12 December 2017).
For her prison notes from the Hiroshima Jailhouse, visit https://justice-for-mikyoungkim.org/professor-kims-prison-notes/ (accessed 12 December 2017).
For Kim's CV, visit https://justice-for-mikyoungkim.org/professor-mikyoung-kims-cv/ (accessed 12 December 2017).
To verify the identicalness of project contents between HCU and City of Hiroshima, visit http://www.cocplus-hiroshima-cu.com (accessed 12 December 2017).
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Kim, M. At the intersection of nationalism, incompetence and money: Mikyoung Kim versus Hiroshima City University of Japan. Eur Polit Sci 19, 68–76 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-018-0169-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-018-0169-4