The Invitation-Only Zone (12 page)

“What
are you doing? Don’t you know that entering the water is
prohibited
!” shouted a hard-faced middle-aged man with an armband that identified him as the manager of the area. The sound shook Kaoru out of his state of calm. With a moment’s hesitation, he put on his best penitent face. “I’m sorry, but the streams of my fatherland are so beautiful that I entered the water. I didn’t know that doing so
was forbidden,” he said, modulating his Korean slightly to give it a foreign sound. “I live in the U.S. and this is the first time I’ve been able to visit the northern part of the Republic,” he added, choosing his words carefully. The phrase “northern part of the Republic” was the locution international supporters of the regime used to describe North Korea, and the reference to the United States
made Kaoru seem like an “important” visitor.

Hearing these words, the manager’s face softened. “Oh, I see. You have made a long journey. The mountains and streams of our fatherland are splendid, aren’t they? Please bathe yourself unobtrusively,” he said with a big smile, and walked away.

*   *   *

When Kaoru and Yukiko had been reunited in 1980, they were told to come up with a plausible cover
story that would hide their Japanese identities and help them blend into North Korean society. Concocting a suitable cover would be easy in a pluralistic society where immigration and cultural differences were common, but the narratives Kaoru and Yukiko had to choose from to explain away their accents and their ignorance of all things North Korean were limited.
²

There was one story, however,
that seemed to fit the bill; it was about a group of Japanese-born immigrants who’d previously had trouble fitting into the North. These were the ninety-three thousand ethnic-Korean “repatriates” who had come to the North in the sixties and seventies to escape the discrimination and economic hardship of postwar Japan. Having relatives in Japan who could send them gifts, they were both envied and despised.
Those whose Japanese relatives were too poor to support them were relocated to the cold, mountainous north of the country, far from Pyongyang. A disproportionate number ended up in the gulag, never to be heard from again. The fact that Kaoru and Yukiko had in reality grown up in Niigata prefecture, where the repatriation movement was based, bolstered their account. So Kaoru and Yukiko assumed
the names Park Soon-chul and Kim Kum-sil, and manufactured elaborate stories of trading their lives in Japan for the adventure of moving to their sacred “homeland.”

9

THE REPATRIATION PROJECT: FROM JAPAN TO NORTH KOREA

At the conclusion of the Second World War, Japan was home to an estimated two million Koreans. One million had immigrated to Japan for economic reasons since the late nineteenth century, with roughly 80,000, many brought by force, coming every year from 1932 to 1940. During the war, 350,000 Koreans fought with the Japanese armed forces
and 500,000 more worked in Japan’s mines and factories.

The United States knew little about Korea when, on August 10, 1945, two young officers, future secretary of state Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, drew a line across a
National Geographic
map dividing the Soviet and the American occupation zones at the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. The U.S. strategy was to refashion Japan into a bulwark against
the Communist threat in China and the USSR, and the Koreans were perceived as an unstable and potentially disruptive leftist element. “As long as there is a sizeable Korean minority in Japan it will be a menace to law and order,” concluded a British Commonwealth Occupation Force intelligence report. The United States was dimly aware of Japan’s Korean minority and hoped they would simply return to
Korea. And during the first three months of the occupation, from August through November 1945, eight hundred thousand of them did. The remaining six hundred thousand Koreans, many whose families had lived there for generations, became Japan’s largest minority.

One reason they remained in Japan was the instability awaiting them on the divided Korean Peninsula. In the North, Soviet-style people’s
committees nationalized industry and redistributed land. On the brink of economic collapse, the South was ravaged by political infighting. Considering their options, many Koreans judged it safer to remain in Japan, where, as colonial subjects, they had been granted Japanese nationality. However, unlike other Japanese citizens, Koreans considered themselves victims of Japan, who, having been liberated
by the Allies, deserved reparations. Against these sentiments, the United States weighed the fact that three hundred fifty thousand Koreans had fought
for
the Japanese.
¹
So how should Koreans be treated under the occupation? As a liberated people who were victims
of
the Japanese, or as potential subversives who had fought
with
the Japanese? The compromise pleased no one: Koreans would be considered
“liberated” nationals in ordinary circumstances and “enemy” nationals when military security was involved.

The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty formally ended the Allied occupation of Japan. The treaty stipulated that Japan relinquish the colonies it had acquired, which had the consequence of stripping Koreans and other ethnic minorities of Japanese citizenship, leaving them in legal limbo. Their
fate was not resolved until 1965, when those Koreans who had been living in Japan before August 15, 1945, were allowed to apply for “permanent resident” status. They could remain in Japan indefinitely, but under the Alien Registration Law they were barred from becoming lawyers, teachers, nurses, bank officers, or public servants (postal workers, firemen); in addition, they were ineligible for
bank loans, scholarships, and welfare benefits. With Japanese unemployment soaring, most private-sector jobs were denied to them. As a result of these restrictions, a disproportionate number of Koreans in postwar Japan, much like blacks in Jim Crow America, pursued careers outside the mainstream, whether in sports, the arts, or organized crime. Others assimilated, using the Japanese names forced upon
them in colonial times, and blended in so thoroughly that they unwittingly confirmed Japan’s new self-image as an ethnically homogeneous nation.

Lacking citizenship and civil rights, Koreans in Japan saw their lives change little in the postwar era, and in many cases actually get worse. In 1952, 79 percent were unemployed. Excluded from the mainstream, Koreans committed crimes at six times the
rate of the Japanese, and drug and alcohol abuse were problems. To improve their lot, Koreans sought help from two groups: Mindan, which served those who identified with capitalist South Korea, and Chosen Soren, which supported the Communist North. The Japanese Communist Party had cultivated a large Korean following after the war, and the number of Chosen Soren members vastly outnumbered Mindan’s.
Chosen Soren—its full name is the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan—became North Korea’s de facto representative in Japan, issuing passports and performing basic diplomatic functions. It was also a social service provider, helping Koreans with jobs, housing, and education; facilitating travel to the peninsula; and maintaining the connection between Japan and North Korea.

In June
1956, Kim Il-sung issued Cabinet Order 53, in which he invited Japan’s Korean population to return “home.”
²
It was an enticing prospect, offering cash stipends in addition to free housing, education, and health care. The Japanese government had been considering plans to get rid of the poorest, most left-leaning Koreans for several years, so it didn’t take long for Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke
to give his consent.
³
Repatriation offered something for everyone. “In an era when Japanese politics were deeply polarized between right and left, repatriation brought both sides together. This issue was a vote winner, popular with media and the public alike,” writes historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki in her study of the repatriation,
Exodus to North Korea
.
⁴
Japanese newspapers echoed Chosen Soren’s
promise of “Paradise on Earth,” with headlines proclaiming, “Return of Compatriots from Japan Welcomed: Livelihood to Be Completely Guaranteed,” and “No Unemployment for Returnees: Housing Ready to Receive 50,000 People.” Under the auspices of the International Red Cross, the first of 187 ships, carrying 93,000 people, departed from Niigata on December 14, 1959.

Repatriation ship in Niigata
(Kyodo)

The event was big news throughout Japan; the local
Niigata Nippo
assigned twenty reporters to cover it. Reporter Kimiya Nakajima recalls the sense of euphoria in the air.
⁵
“The repatriates looked radiant. They were emitting a kind of aura. They believed in North Korea and were excited to be contributing to its success,” he tells me. “One man told me the North
Koreans had developed a device fueled by atomic power that emitted a ray that could heal any disease. Japan didn’t have one, but he swore that it was available to all North Koreans for free.” Nakajima paid special attention to the eighteen hundred Japanese wives who accompanied the Korean repatriates. “It was never an issue of whether the wives believed in the stories about North Korea. Their
husbands were going, and their nobility was believing in their husbands.”

*   *   *

Born in Sabae City, in central Japan, in 1941, Hiroko Saito was barely eighteen when she met her husband.
⁶
Sabae is famous for the quality of its eyeglasses, and he worked in one of the factories. Born in Korea in 1936, he was three years old when his parents moved to Japan in search of employment. He understood
a bit of Korean, but didn’t speak it, and had assimilated so thoroughly that Hiroko wasn’t aware he was Korean when they met. Once she learned of his origins, she panicked because she knew her parents would object. But in a gesture equal parts romance and rebellion, she defied them. “I told my mother I didn’t care if he was Korean. I wanted to marry him,” she says. She was tough, and confident
that she could hold her own against any discrimination her decision brought her way. “As long as we were in Japan it didn’t make any difference whether I married a Japanese or Korean,” she says. They wed in 1959, and she gave birth to a girl the next year. Chosen Soren members began making the rounds of Sabae’s Korean households in 1959, proselytizing about the wonders of North Korea. Hiroko’s extended
family—ten people in all—were extremely poor, and decided to make the journey.

Her sister-in-law was also Japanese, and the two women spent days agonizing over what to do. They wanted to remain in Japan, and suspected that the promises of a good life in North Korea were too good to be true. Also they felt it would be difficult to be separated from their families now that they had children. Yet,
having defied their families and married men of Korean extraction, they couldn’t move back in with those families. Still, the two women made the decision to stay in Japan, although they couldn’t tell their families. Hiroko recalls the chaotic scene in Niigata. “There was a process in which they would ask us whether we were going to North Korea willingly. We thought the interview would be private,
and that we’d each go into the room separately and say that we didn’t want to go,” she says.

Moving so many people from Japan to North Korea was a complex logistical affair. The two countries didn’t have diplomatic relations and were still reeling from the destruction left behind by two wars. While the move was officially sponsored by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the governments
of Japan, the United States, the Soviet Union, and North Korea were involved at every stage. The most contentious dispute was more philosophical than logistical. With ninety-three thousand émigrés—half of them women and children, many destitute—how could the Red Cross be certain they were moving to North Korea of their own free will? The organization insisted that it interview returnees one by
one in private, to ensure that no one was being coerced and that each understood the step he or she was taking. But in such uncertain circumstances, what constituted a “properly informed choice”?

North Korea was enraged by the stipulation, and brought the whole process to a halt in protest. For the next few weeks, the hundreds of Koreans who arrived in Niigata by train were forced to live in
tents. With their numbers growing and their living conditions worsening, a deal was struck. The Red Cross would be allowed to conduct its interviews, but the repatriates would be questioned as family units. And, as if to ensure a lack of privacy, it was specified that the interview rooms have no doors.

“Contrary to our expectations, we were interviewed all together, as a family,” Hiroko recalls.
She and her sister-in-law watched in pained silence as a Red Cross official asked her father-in-law, the patriarch of the family, if they were moving to North Korea of their own free will. “Yes,” he replied.