{"id":3843,"date":"2018-08-30T18:40:58","date_gmt":"2018-08-30T09:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.01.asiapress.org\/rimjin-gang\/?p=3843"},"modified":"2018-09-10T11:36:43","modified_gmt":"2018-09-10T02:36:43","slug":"zainichi-korean-returnees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.02.asiapress.org\/rimjin-gang\/2018\/08\/recommendations\/zainichi-korean-returnees\/","title":{"rendered":"What happened to the 93,000 Zainichi Koreans who returned to North Korea?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Park Young-sook lost two brothers and two sons who were charged with political crimes. She is originally from Hiroshima. (Taken by Koda Hajime)<\/p><\/div>\n

\"I saw a dark and strange-looking cloud rising up in the distance and said, 'What is that?'\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the morning of August 6, when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Park Young-sook watched the mushroom cloud rise from Yamagata District, Hiroshima Prefecture- where she had been recently evacuated to. Nine days later, Japan surrendered. When Park returned to Hiroshima, her house had disappeared without a trace. Her sister-in-law had died in the explosion.<\/p>\n

There were an estimated 50,000 Koreans living in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. Seventeen years after watching the mushroom cloud rise as a 5 years-old child, Park joined thousands of other Koreans in returning to North Korea as part of the \u201cHomecoming Project\u201d. Now, however, Park is a North Korean defector.<\/p>\n

\u25c6The Homecoming Project<\/h2>\n

The Homecoming Project, which started in 1959 and lasted for 25 years, allowed around 93,000 people, including 7,000 with Japanese citizenship, to relocate to North Korea. Among them, there were an estimated 2,000 people who survived the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (The current number of survivors is said to be about 50.)<\/p>\n

Remarkably, about 2 out of every 13 Zainichi Koreans living in Japan at the time decided to return to North Korea aboard the ships departing from Nigata. Although the event is widely referred to as the first mass migration from a capitalist country to a socialist state, little is known about the actual lives of those who returned North Korea.<\/p>\n

Next page: \u201cThey kept me from seeing my son\u2019s body.\u201d...<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Zainichi Koreans boarding the ship for returnees in Nigata. Young children, middle school, and high school students make up the crowd. What kind of life was in store for those passengers in North Korea? Picture taken in 1961 and provided by the late Yang Young-hoo.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u25c6\u201cThey kept me from seeing my son\u2019s body.\u201d<\/h2>\n

ASIAPRESS hosted an event on July 8th where Park, who now lives in South Korea after defecting from the North, was invited to share her experiences. This is her story.<\/p>\n

\"My father, who came to Hiroshima from Gyeongsang Province, ran a lumbermill. Business was bad after the war and we didn\u2019t have enough money to send my younger sibling to high school. One day, an executive of the pro-North Korean General Association of Korean Residents in Japan came to our home and persuaded my parents to return to North Korea, saying that they would be able to send their children to school in Korea. When we got to North Korea, I was disappointed and thought, \u201cAm I really going to live here?\u201d It was cold, food rations weren\u2019t enough to feed the family, and we didn\u2019t have sufficient daily goods such as clothes and soap.<\/p>\n

Eight out of Park\u2019s ten siblings returned to North Korea. Park\u2019s older brothers, who remained in Japan, worked hard to send money to North Korea every year so the rest of the siblings could make ends meet. Unfortunately, in the mid-1970s her two brothers were arrested in Japan for political crimes.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of my brothers was arrested on his way to work and we have lost contact since. I still don\u2019t know why he was arrested, where he may be detained, or even whether he is alive or dead. I think the whole case may have been fabricated from the start to cut the supply of money being sent from Japan. There were also many other returnees who were targeted.\"<\/p>\n

The tragic story did not end there. In the 1980s and 90s, Park\u2019s two sons in North Korea were also arrested on charges of political crimes. The younger son died during interrogation but Park was not allowed to see or claim his body. Soon after, her family was banished to a rural area and kept under surveillance. During the late 90s, North Korea was experiencing unprecedented social turmoil and countless people faced starvation.<\/p>\n

\"This society is no longer a place where people can live,\" Park thought.<\/p>\n

She decided to escape North Korea with the help of her relatives in Japan.<\/p>\n

There are many other returnees from Japan who, like Park, defected from North Korea. Today there are around 150 in Tokyo, 50 in Osaka, and 300 in South Korea \u2014and they are an aging group. In order to document what kind of life the returnees had in North Korea, we founded the \u2018Group for the Documentation of the Memories of North Korean Returnees\u2019. The purpose of this group is to meet with returnees in Japan and South Korea and document their stories in detail.<\/p>\n

In the 1950s and 60s, many Zainichi Koreans suffered from discrimination and lived in poverty. The pro-North Korean General Association of Korean Residents in Japan appealed specifically to these people to return to the socialist homeland. Additionally, political parties, including the Liberal Democratic Party and Japanese Communist Party, considered their struggle as a humanitarian issue and, as a solution, supported the exodus of Zainichi Koreans to North Korea. In other words, through neglect and discrimination, Japanese society pressured the 93,000 Zainichi Koreans onto the ships. However, we still know almost nothing about how they fared in North Korea.<\/p>\n

History is the aggregation of human memories and records. The Zainichi Koreans and Japanese will work together to ensure that the memories of the returnees are etched in history.<\/p>\n

(Contact: 1959kikoku@gmail.com)<\/p>\n

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