Those Who Left Japan for North Korea

Posted on 14. Feb, 2009 @ 11:03 am by in Culture Views: 411


I’m taking a course on North Korean state and society this semester, and unable to suppress my tendency to link everything to Japan, I managed to stumble upon this fascinating video.

A North Korean Mystery

The lady in the video is Tessa Morris-Suzuki, a Japan scholar and the author of Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War. This book just came out in 2007 so it’s very recent. I want it.

I knew of the mass migration of some 90,000+ Koreans from Japan “back” to North Korea (most of the Koreans in Japan actually came from, or were taken from, the south) in the 1950s and 1960s, but I always thought that they returned to Korea for reasons of national pride, and because they were lured by North Korean propaganda. This book suggests that Japanese bureaucrats also encouraged the Koreans to leave Japan and return to Korea for reasons that were largely discriminatory. They felt that the Koreans in Japan would cause trouble as communist sympathizers, or would be a burden on the welfare system among other things. Japan and North Korea were then both able to make this mass “repatriation” seem like a humanitarian act on the surface. They were both cooperating to bring these individuals back to their home country. The Red Cross was even mixed up in this act and takes some of the blame in this book. Most of the Koreans who returned to North Korea in this way were made to perform hard labor, or worse, and were never heard from again. It is a very interesting yet tragic story.

I also came across an article in AsiaOne about a North Korean defector that shows how relevant this story remains today. A lady who was among those who went to North Korea from Japan during the migration period managed to escape North Korea (no easy task) and is now back in Japan attempting to sue the North Korean “embassy” in Tokyo for using false propaganda to trick her into going to North Korea and thus ruining her life.

I knew more than a couple Japanese friends of Korean heritage while I was in Japan and their parents were able to explain bits and pieces of this story from their perspective. If you’ve got some close Korean-Japanese friends you might want to ask them if the know anything about this incident. It could be a sensitive subject, but you never know what you might learn.

- Harvey

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  • http://theghostletters.blogspot.com/ freedomwv

    This explains so much to me. Thank you for posting this.

  • http://sevententotokyo.com billywest

    Good post! Sometimes people need to see it’s not all Hello Kitty and Genki, Genki, Joy, Joy.

  • http://www.gaijinbash.com Brian

    Really interesting. I had no idea this happened. Thanks Harvey-

  • silentangelfish

    that is fascinating

  • Edward

    Harvey,

    This is very dark side of Japan, indeed.

    There are so many Koreans living in Japan. Many still afraid to admit they are Koreans. Otherwise, they would be discriminated.

    Few years ago, I heard about different social class in Japan during a after-movie discussion.
    They are known as the buraku.
    Here is an interseting story in New York Times.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/world/asia/16outcasts.html?_r=1&scp=35&sq=Aso&st=cse

  • http://www.virgame.com/cabal-online-c-137.html cabal online alz

    Really interesting. I had no idea this happened. Thanks Harvey-

  • Don Chadle

    Of course this is all nonsense. The reason that the majority of Koreans in Japan chose North Korean citizenship after War World II is that the North was an independent state while the South was a puppet state propped up by the hated U.S. military, and that the North surpassed the South in economic and social standards from the split up until 1980 (when the North’s trading partners in the Socialist Bloc started to fall apart and the pumping of huge sums of American capital into the South began to show results). The military dictatorship of the “Democratic” South killed 100,000 men women and children BEFORE the Korean war, and smashed the attempts by Korean people to form their own national government to bits. Read about it, and the Jeju uprising, and all the rest. Don’t buy into the propaganda. South Korea is a repressive place where lists of books and music are banned and its illegal not only to “oppose the government” but to refuse to report anyone else who “opposes the government”(look up the National Security Act, People’s Revolutionary Party Incident and the recent case of the Socialist Workers League of Korea).

    The U.S. is the only country that has used nuclear weapons and it has more than any country on earth. Japan invaded half of Asia. The U.S. has soldiers in more than 100 countries. North Korea has never used nuclear weapons, developed defensive weapons, and has never invaded another country.

    North Korea is no paradise, but neither is South Korea or Japan. The latter two just have more friends because they kowtow to U.S. imperialism and world capitalism.

  • Don Chadle

    Also remember that the U.S. military protected Japanese leaders and their Korean collaborators in the South while the North punished those and took their huge property holdings and either nationalized them or broke them up and distributed them to peasants.

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