A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea(6)
It didn’t end there. They also took my father to task about his lack of work. They’d come in and scold him relentlessly about it. “Look! You don’t have a job. And what do you do? You get drunk all the time and make your wife’s life a misery. But if you went there . . . there are jobs galore! Think of it! You’ll get to send your kids to university.” I didn’t know where “there” was, but they repeatedly urged him to go “back” there. They talked and talked, sometimes till midnight and beyond. I could hear every word they said through the thin sliding door that separated my room from theirs. They were clearly discussing something that would change my life completely. Irrevocably. I was scared out of my wits at the thought of what it might be. Then, lo and behold, the same thing came up at school. “North Korea is your country. It’s a paradise on earth. This is your chance. Go home!” But North Korea wasn’t my country. It had nothing to do with me. Why was my father being urged to “return” there?
Kim Il-sung barked on about it in a speech we listened to at school on September 8, 1958, if my memory serves me correctly. Something along the lines of “Our fellow countrymen living in Japan have no rights and are discriminated against. Because of that, they are suffering from the hardships of poverty, and they want to return to their mother country. We would like to welcome them back. The government of the People’s Republic will ensure that they can start a new life when they come home. We will guarantee their living conditions.” The expression “return to North Korea” still didn’t make sense to me. My father was from the southern part of Korea, not from North Korea. North Korea didn’t exist when my father was born. Why would he “return” to a place he’d never known?
After Kim Il-sung’s statement, the General Association of Korean Residents started a mass repatriation campaign in the guise of humanitarianism. The following year, 1959, the Japanese Red Cross Society and the Korean Red Cross Society secretly negotiated a “Return Agreement” in Calcutta. Four months later, the first shipload of returnees left the Japanese port of Niigata. Shortly after that, people affiliated with the League of Koreans in Japan started showing up on our doorstep, eager to persuade us to make the journey. They were all in favor of the mass repatriation.
Did the International Committee of the Red Cross know anything about this? Did the United States? The UN? Yes, yes, and yes. And what did they do about it? Nothing.
In the early days of the so-called repatriation, some seventy thousand people left Japan and crossed the sea to North Korea. With the exception of a brief three-and-a-half-year hiatus, the process continued until 1984. During this period, some one hundred thousand Koreans and two thousand Japanese wives crossed over to North Korea. That’s one hell of a mass migration. In fact, it was the first (and only) time in history that so many people from a capitalist country had moved to a socialist country.
The Japanese government actively promoted the repatriation, supposedly on humanitarian grounds. But in my opinion, what they were actually pursuing was opportunism of the most vile and cynical kind. Look at the facts. During the period of the Japanese Empire, thousands upon thousands of Koreans had been brought to Japan against their will to serve as slave laborers and, later, cannon fodder. Now, the government was afraid that these Koreans and their families, discriminated against and poverty-stricken in the postwar years, might become a source of social unrest. Sending them back to Korea was a solution to a problem. Nothing more.
From the North Korean government’s point of view, their country desperately needed rebuilding after the Korean War. What could be more convenient than an influx of workers? Kim Il-sung was desperate to prove to the world that the Democratic Republic was superior to South Korea. The prospect of thousands of Koreans returning home to serve as foot soldiers in the Great March Forward (as I call it) fueled his maniacal dreams.
So yes, the mass repatriation was great news for both governments—the perfect win-win situation for everyone except the real human beings involved.
We were bombarded with a constant stream of infantile, almost hysterical pronouncements. “Enjoy working and studying in North Korea!” and “North Korea is a paradise on earth!” The League and the mass media were equally to blame. The bigwigs in the League were simply delusional, the journalists spectacularly naive. Oh sure, they felt guilty about Japan’s colonial past, but this guilt, far from sharpening their judgment, clouded their thinking and befuddled their critical faculties. I mean, this was the second half of the twentieth century, for pity’s sake, and they still saw communism as the road to utopia. I wonder if any of the people spouting these messages ever really grasped, in later years, the depths of misery for which they were responsible.
Having said that, I’m not convinced that naive utopianism was the actual driving force behind people’s decision to migrate. For most displaced Koreans living in Japan at the time, the key point was a much simpler promise: “If you come back to your homeland, the government will guarantee you a stable life and a first-class education for your children.” For the countless Koreans who were unemployed, underpaid, and laboring away at whatever odd jobs they could get, the abstract promises of socialism held far less sway than the hope for a stable life and a bright future for their children.
Early one evening in 1959, when I walked in the door from school, my father announced, “We’re going back to my country.” I shook with anger and shock. “No way!” I said. “I don’t want to go!” My heart was racing, and I turned to my sisters and my mother for help. My sisters weren’t old enough to grasp what the conversation was about, so they just listened to us timidly as my father went on. “What do we have here to eat? Practically nothing. But if we go there, we’ll have a steady life—something we’ve never had here!” My mother broke in, her voice trembling. “But I can’t speak Korean. How on earth am I going to live?” She sounded terrified, and I held out some hope that she’d stand up to him. But I also noticed she didn’t say outright that she wouldn’t go.