A socialist utopia awaits, they were told in the early 1960s, and your every need – work, home, clothes, health care – will be guaranteed by the state
Hiroko Sakakibara was only a young girl when the North Korean agents came to her father’s house trying to sell him on a dream of earthly paradise in the family’s ancestral land.
A socialist utopia awaits, they were told in the early 1960s. Your every need – work, home, clothes, health care – will be guaranteed by the state.
“I was small so I couldn’t join the conversation, but I could hear them talking,” she said. “I told my father, ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’ ”
In all, more than 93,000 people – mostly ethnic Koreans whose Japanese citizenship was stripped after World War II – left Japan between 1959 and 1984, lured by the promise of a new life in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea during the heart of the cold war. The ethnic Koreans, known in Japan as Zainichi, were joined by a few thousand Japanese spouses and children.
Instead, they say they encountered discrimination, desperate poverty and a complete denial of basic freedoms.
Now, five Zainichi who spent decades in North Korea before finally escaping to Japan, are pursuing legal action against the North Korea government in a Japanese court, seeking damages for the lies they were told and mistreatment they suffered.
They are also demanding that their relatives be given the right to return to Japan.
The fate of the Zainichi is not a priority for the Japanese government. It is fixated on the “abductees,” a much smaller number of Japanese citizens who were kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s. Their stories have become something of a national obsession and a major obstacle to any rapprochement between Tokyo and Pyongyang.
But the Zainichi are a powerful reminder of other humanitarian catastrophes that have unfolded in North Korea in the past six decades, and how the regime of Kim Jong-un faces reckonings and recriminations on many fronts as it seeks dialogue with the West and its allies.
The lawsuit by the Zainichi also cuts another way: highlighting the cultural politics in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia that can relegate ethnic minorities to underclass status.
Sakakibara’s parents, both ethnic Koreans, found life a challenge in Japan, she said. Her father struggled to find regular work, and her mother had suffered a stroke.
