owest levels of the DPRK’s complex (and secret) social ranking system – regarded as unreliable citizens, and therefore barred from prestigious jobs. There were exceptions however – and Ko Young Hee was the most remarkable of all, becoming the wife of Kim Jong-Il and mother of his designated successor Kim Jong-un. Many members of the Korean community in Osaka remember the Ko family, and, with Ko Young Hee’s relatives still living in Japan, there should be the basis for a link between the North Korean heir apparent and his mother’s birthplace. It is symbolic of the tragedy of Northeast Asia today manifest in the continuing Japan-North Korea clash, that this link may never be celebrated, but rather (as in the interviews reported here) spoken of uneasily, almost in whispers.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor of Japanese History at the Australian National University and an Asia-Pacific Journal Associate. She is the author of Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War. Her two most recent books are To the Diamond Mountains: A Hundred Year Journey Through China and Korea, from which this article is excerpted, and Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era.
The Asahi portrayal of Zainichi Korean life in Osaka and the Family Origins of Kim Jong Un
From the article’s headline through the treatment of Zainichi history in Osaka, the migration of Korean families to North Korea, and the family history of Ko Tae Mun and Ko Chung Hee, the present article is indicative of the fraught relations between Japan and North Korea and the continued legacy of prejudice against Korean residents of Japan.
Take the headline: Osaka Black Mark in Kim’s Life? The article paints a portrait of Korean residents of Osaka that emphasizes their black market activities in the desperate years of the immediate postwar, a time when the Japanese government stripped Koreans of their Japanese citizenship, sought to deport many, and generally marginalized Korean residents who were among the groups hardest hit by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo, Osaka and other cities. No mention here, for example, of the fact that many Japanese survived the early postwar years via black market activities or any other contextualization of the Zainichi Korean experience.
Not only does the article quote an elderly Japanese resident who describes Korean control of the Tsuruhashi black market, but the interviewee bridles at the fact that Koreans, particularly those who dominated the black market, “walked around as if they owned the place,” and Ko in particular (by association) “walked around with a proud bearing,” though the article does not directly charge him with black market activity.
The brief mentions of the US-Korean War are equally interesting. I am particularly interested in the use of sentences with no subject: “The division in the Korean Peninsula led to the creation of South Korea and North Korea in 1948.” No agents at work here. If my recollection is correct, the division did not simply “happen”. Rather, then army officer, later Secretary of State, Dean Rusk drew a line across a map at the 38th parallel and the US then persuaded the Soviet Union to accept the demarcation as a means of preventing armed conflict between the two former wartime allies. And placing Seoul and the majority of the Korean population under US rule. Indeed, the United States nowhere appears in the article’s several references to the Korean War.
That includes the discussion of Jeju, the island off South Korea that produced the largest number of Korean migrants to Japan including Ko. The author states that “In 1948, islanders clashed with the right-wing South Korean authorities. The conflict resulted in numerous fatalities, and some islanders fled to Japan.” Numerous fatalities? Indeed numerous, and the figures remain contested to this day. As Ko Sun Hui Kate Barclay and conclude, “Local records show 14,028 people [out of an estimated population of 300,000] were registered as killed or missing that day, and since many more deat