Los Angeles Times, January 22, 2010
[floatr][/floatr]Ko Jong-mi can still see her mother lying on her deathbed in a shabby North Korean village.
"I'm sorry," the old woman said, her voice weak. "I'm the one who brought you to this life. Please, please forgive me."
Now 49, Ko long ago forgave her mother for becoming an unwitting victim of North Korea's covert Homecoming Project. Under the slogan "Let's go back to the fatherland!" the campaign persuaded more than 93,000 ethnic Koreans and their families living in Japan to emigrate to North Korea from 1959 to 1984.
[...]
She was often bullied at school, labeled a panjoppari, a slur meaning half-Japanese. Classmates ripped her Japanese-made clothes, considered too colorful compared with the drab military-style garb worn by most children.
The teacher lashed out at Ko, telling the class that her mind had been polluted in Japan.
"Homecoming members were the lowest rung of the ladder. We were like untouchables," Ko said, a reference to the lowest members of the caste system.
[...]
Kim Il Sung's communist government came to view many of the newcomers as potential spies, banishing them to concentration camps. They extorted money and goods from the prisoners' families in Japan and elsewhere to keep the immigrants alive and support the dictatorship.
(Full Story)
I had heard of Koreans leaving Japan and going to North Korea but I had no idea that there were so many or that it continued even into the 80s. I can imagine people getting suckered into it in the 60s when the situation in NK probably wasn't as well known as it is now, but it is hard to understand why someone would willingly move there in 1984. Lots of propaganda and brainwashing I guess.
