They Were Promised a Socialist Paradise and Ended Up in 'Hell'
SEOUL, South Korea — On a bright August morning in 1960, after two days of sailing from Japan, hundreds of passengers rushed on deck as someone shouted, “I see the fatherland!”
The ship pulled into Chongjin, a port city in North Korea, where a crowd of people waved paper flowers and sang welcome songs. But Lee Tae-kyung felt something dreadfully amiss in the “paradise” he had been promised.
“The people gathered were expressionless,” Lee recalled. “I was only a child of 8, but I knew we were in the wrong place.”
Lee and his family were among 93,000 people who migrated from Japan to North Korea from 1959 to 1984 under a repatriation program sponsored by both governments and their Red Cross societies. When they arrived, they saw destitute villages and people living in poverty but were forced to stay. Some ended up in prison camps.
“We were told we were going to a ‘paradise on earth,’” said Lee, 68. “Instead, we were taken to a hell and denied a most basic human right: the freedom to leave.”
Lee eventually fled North Korea after 46 years, reaching South Korea in 2009. He has since campaigned tirelessly to share the story of those 93,000 migrants, giving lectures, speaking at news conferences and writing a memoir about a painful, mostly forgotten chapter of history between Japan and Korea.
His work comes at a time of renewed interest in North Korean human rights violations, and when leaders in Japan and South Korea remain particularly sensitive about opening old wounds between the two countries.
“It was my mother who urged my father to take our family to the North,” Lee said. “And it was her endless source of regret until she died at age 74.”
The Lees were among 2 million Koreans who moved to Japan during Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945. Some went there looking for work, others were taken for forced labor in Japan’s World War II effort. Lacking citizenship and financial opportunities, most returned to Korea after the Japanese surrender.
But hundreds of thousands, among them Lee’s family, remained as the Korean Peninsula was plunged into war.
Lee was born in Japan in 1952. The family ran a charcoal-grill restaurant in Shimonoseki, the port closest to Korea — a reminder that they would return home.
As the Korean War came to an end, the Japanese government was eager to get rid of the throngs of Koreans living in slums. For its part, hoping to use them to help rebuild its war-torn economy, North Korea launched a propaganda blitz, touting itself as a “paradise” with jobs for everyone, free education and medical services.
Lee's primary school in Japan, he said, screened propaganda newsreels from North Korea showing bumper crops and workers building “a house every 10 minutes.” Marches were organized calling for repatriation. A pro-North Korea group in Japan even encouraged students to be recruited as “birthday gifts” for Kim Il Sung, the country’s founder, according to a recent report from the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights.
Japan approved of the migration despite the fact that most Koreans in the country were from the South, which was mired in political unrest. While Japanese authorities said ethnic Koreans chose to relocate to North Korea, human rights groups have accused the country of aiding and abetting the deception by ignoring the circumstances the migrants would face in the communist country.
“By leaving for North Korea, ethnic Koreans were forced to sign an exit-only document that prohibited them from returning to Japan,” the Citizens’ Alliance report said. The authors likened the migration to a “slave trade” and “forced displacement.”
Most of the migrants were ethnic Koreans, but they also included 1,800 Japanese women married to Korean men and thousands of biracial children. Among them was a young woman named Ko Yong Hee, who would later become a dancer and give birth to Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea and grandson of its founder.
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