North Koreans in Japan

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:

Book title: Ryang, Sonia. North Koreans in Japan. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997

Main points:

- ch. 6 – (Diaspora and beyond) – Mr. Yun, a Chongryun Korean, drew a clear distinction between the South Korean regime and its people, including his relatives. This distinction functions brilliantly as a device to rationalize Mr. Yun’s north Koran identity despite his southern origin and his relatives were in south Korea. In order to do this, Mr. Yun distinguished between the word kohyan, ‘native place’, and choguk, ‘the fatherland’. The kohyan-choguk separation allowed him to maintain his dual attachment to the peninsula. (168)

- second-generation Chongryun Koreans could do the same type of switching as their third-generation counterparts. They used to speak Korean at school and Japanese at home. But their symbolic boundaries of the organization were drawn in different ways for each generation. (174)

- now the antagonism between Chongryun and Japanese society had eased. Previously Chongryun regarded the Japanese state as one of its ‘enemies’. For this reason, the second generation did not undertake the frequent and speedy border crossing between intra-organizational and extra-organizational line until much later – possibly after quitting high school, and even later for those who were related to Chongryun. For those who continue to be working with Chongryun full time, this experience had yet to come. (174)

- all the forty third-generation youth that I met were clear that they would continue to live in Japan even after Korean reunification. North Korea was politically their fatherland, but Japan was where they lived. (176) In this vision, the third generation gave south Korea little room. Now that the new curriculums more or less ignored South Korea, this tendency would continue to grow. (176)

- in the 1960s and 1970s, Chongryun schools placed considerable stress on remembering Japanese colonialism. The story of the massacre of thousands of Koreans by the Japanese in the wake of the Kanto earthquake in 1923 had a prominent place in the lessons. Such films had an immense impact on children’s everyday conduct. Second-generation children equated their being overseas nationals of North Korea with being rescued by Kim II Sung. (178)

-terror-based drills thus help young pupils appreciate the existence of their fatherland. Such a mechanism augmented the second generation’s feeling of indebtedness toward North Korea. The combination of fear and gratitude generated by its emotional campaigns once had been used to maintain Chongryun’s organizational boundaries. (178)

- the transition from the second-generation model to that of the third generation might be called a post-diaspora. This was also a transition form collective identity to individual identity. Second-generation experience had been placed well within the state’s boundaries. Second generation‘s identity as Chongryun Koreans stood on the premise that Chongryun was a north Korean organization. Third generation experience was more individual-oriented. Their identity as North Korean living in Japan did not necessarily relied on the relations between North Korea and Japan. (198)

- the third generation distinguish between the north Korean state and Chongryun, and they could view north Korea critically. The third generation’s North Korea identity was gradually leaving the image of North Korea as a solid entity. Their identity did not have to rely on the state form.(198)

- conclusion: in this section the author tries to retrace the process as a historical flow. (201) If the colonial past was a collective past, the utopia of reunification was a collective future. The second generation thus grew up in the dual construction of terror (of repeating the miserable colonial history) and hope (the reunification under the guidance of Kim). (203)

- the reproduction of Chongryun’s organizational identity in individual utterance had a social effect crucial to Chongryun’s ongoing existence. As Paul Willis has shown us, it was true that within the limits of the given language, individuals were able to make life more meaningful; they strategically appropriated their underprivileged situations and turned them into positive factor to create meaning. In this process working-class youth were articulate and capable of expressively reflecting on their life-world. (203)

- however, Paul Willis’s work was important in the insightful analysis that despite their affirmation attitude towards life, working-class youth were structurally positioned in such a way as to maintain the exiting class structure. Far from causing an ‘educational crisis’ in British, the counter-school culture contributes to perpetuating the process that working-class youth would ‘voluntarily’ direct themselves to skilled, semiskilled and unskilled manual work. (203) The same was observed in the world of Chongryun Koreans. When they referred to their North Korean identity, they were articulate, expressive and positive. (203)

- in this historical course, we could see how the same term, overseas national of north Korean, had had different function. In the 1960s and 1970s, the term represented a utopia and was part of a discourse of heroism; it implied that Chongryun Koreans would eventually become North Korean nationals. Now oversees nationals comes closer to reflecting reality: it implies that Chongryun Korean would remain overseas. There was a shift from heroism to realism. (204)