After his three-year campaign to abolish mandatory fingerprinting of foreign residents bore fruit in 1992, Lee Young Hwa decided more needed to be done to address the larger, more fundamental human rights issues they face.
So once the Diet decided to revise the Alien Registration Law to lift the fingerprinting mandate for permanent foreign residents, many of whom are Korean, the 45-year-old assistant professor of economics at Kansai University in Osaka immediately began campaigning to win them the right to vote.
"Mandatory fingerprinting was so obviously wrong that the campaign against it did not develop into a larger and more lasting civil rights movement (against more generally accepted human rights violations)," said Lee, a third-generation Korean holding a North Korean passport who was born and raised in Osaka Prefecture.