A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea(9)

I couldn’t help but notice that our future neighbors paid little attention to her words and were busy staring at us—ogling our watches and bicycles and the few other things we’d managed to bring with us. The lady turned to me. “I’ll take you to school tomorrow, so be ready!” she said. And with that, she and the neighbors all left the house.

The lights appeared to be on, but the bulbs emitted only a thin and feeble glow. I didn’t know about low voltage at the time. I looked around for gas points, but there weren’t any. I couldn’t even find a cold-water tap. I looked out the window. And there it was, about thirty yards away. A well.

My mother was distraught. Like me, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

“How are we ever going to live here?”

The bleak walls echoed her words. I felt numb, overwhelmed, unable to think or feel anything. After the long journey, I lay down on a mat and tried to sleep. I tossed and turned and woke up exhausted and disoriented.

True to her word, the chairperson of the Democratic Women’s Union came to collect me the following morning for my first day at school in North Korea. She turned up with her daughter, who proudly announced that she was the “scout leader.” Although I couldn’t speak much Korean at the time, I vaguely understood what she was talking about. I just said, “Good morning” and followed them. There were no first-day-of-school photographs for the family archive.

When I walked in, I saw about a hundred pupils and teachers gathered in a single room. I greeted them in my clumsy Korean.

“Thank you for welcoming me.”

“Japanese bastard!” someone muttered.

And then everyone seemed to be whispering the words. “Japanese bastard!”

I was mortified. I felt the heat rising to my face. I wished I could disappear.

The pupils started pointing at my plastic shoes and other things they didn’t approve of.

“Look at his bag!”

“He’s wearing a watch!”

“Japanese bastard!”

I noticed that they didn’t have bags themselves but simply wrapped their stuff in a cloth. I resolved to do the same from then on.

After this welcome, I watched as twenty pupils put on a play. It was a crude piece of propaganda that portrayed my life up to that point. According to the play, I’d led a hard life in Japan, but thanks to the kind efforts of the Workers’ Party of Korea and the good old League of Koreans, I’d been able to “return” to my “mother country.” When it was over, everyone clapped rapturously. I clapped too, just to be polite.

School was difficult, not because of my studies but because I could understand very little Korean. All I could do was vaguely deduce what people were saying from the context. I often got called “Japanese bastard” because I couldn’t speak Korean. In hindsight, it was probably just as well that I couldn’t answer back.

On my way home from school one day, I witnessed a fight among my schoolmates. I couldn’t stand the sight of one guy getting beaten so badly, so I jumped on the bully. Although I was small, I was fearless and tough thanks to my father’s genes and the tough Korean school I’d attended in Yokohama. To my surprise, I knocked him out. Then some man in uniform grabbed my collar. He came out with the obligatory “Japanese bastard!” and proceeded to beat me up. He didn’t stop until my mouth was cut and my clothes were spattered with blood. When I got home, my mother asked me what had happened, but I didn’t want her to worry, so I just said it was a scuffle with some of the other kids at school. The last thing I wanted was to have her fretting on my account. She was already living in a constant state of fear thanks to the warning from the chairperson of the Democratic Women’s Union not to speak any Japanese.

My father, however, seemed quite content with our new life. He never hit my mother. He started working as an agricultural laborer on a cooperative. There weren’t any private farms, only cooperatives with teams. He had no choice but to also join the Agricultural Workers’ Union and attend compulsory study-meetings twice a week to explore the thoughts of Kim Il-sung and the policies of the Workers’ Party.

Everyone in North Korea had to join a group affiliated with the Workers’ Party. These groups and unions didn’t produce anything. Their sole purpose was to indoctrinate members. Everyone had to understand the words of Kim Il-sung and have a thorough knowledge of party policy.

The big difference between regular workers and farm laborers was that the farm laborers couldn’t earn a proper salary. They received a little cash, but their primary form of payment was a share of the harvest every autumn. Distribution was based on man-hours. Every day, your work was assessed. If the amount of work you put in was deemed “standard,” you were awarded a count of one man-hour. If the amount of work you put in was deemed “heavy,” you were awarded a count of two man-hours.

But when we first arrived? Oh, the party was generosity itself. My father received what was supposed to be a year’s supply of rice. Ha! When we opened the sack, it turned out to contain mostly sweet corn and low-grade cereals.

When I lived in Japan, I never really pondered my life. But after I moved to North Korea, the thing that preoccupied me most was the sheer magnitude of the difference between my old life and my new one. I became obsessed with all the things I had taken for granted before, and all the hardships that marked my life now. But that didn’t last long. I soon learned that thought was not free in North Korea. A free thought could get you killed if it slipped out. If you were lucky, you might get sent to some remote mountainous region to do hard labor. Or you might get sent to a concentration camp for political prisoners because you were deemed a “liberal” or a “capitalist” with “bad habits.” And bad habits needed to be stamped out. By means of a jackboot to the genitals. Or then again, you might simply be executed.