’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) following the signing of a repatriation agreement between the Japanese and North Korean Red Cross Societies in 1959. The Ko family left at the height of the exodus: though repatriation continued until 1984, over 70,000 of those who left did so before the end of 1961. Most, like Ko Young Hee’s family, originated in the southern half of the Korean peninsula, and a particularly large number came from Jeju: an island with a history of large-scale emigration to Japan, and the site of a 1948-49 uprising against the South Korean government which was suppressed with great force.
Boarding a ship for North Korea
What is unusual about the Ko family’s story is their destiny once they arrived in North Korea. As is now known, the background to the “repatriation” is a dark story of pressures and intrigues on both sides. Japanese bureaucrats and some politicians played a very active role behind the scenes in creating the scheme for a mass repatriation, and in encouraging Koreans in Japan to leave for a “new life” in a North Korea which most had never seen before. An important factor on the Japanese side was majority prejudices against a minority seen as lawless and potentially subversive. (The widespread perception that Koreans had tried to “lord it” over the Japanese majority in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat in war was an important element in these prejudices). Meanwhile, the DPRK government, via the pro-North Korean organization Chongryun [Sōren in Japanese] spread glowing propaganda about the rosy life that awaited “returnees” in the socialist fatherland. In some cases, Chongryun was instructed specifically to encourage the repatriation members of the community with specialist skills which would help North Korean development, and this seems to be the case with Ko’s father.
Most Koreans from Japan, however, quickly found that their lives in North Korea were far from the propaganda image. Many were sent to work in remote mining or rural areas, and came to be assigned to the lowest 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