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Motorcycle Book Store > Motorcycle books beginning with E
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Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War (Asian Voices) |
Author: Tessa Morris-Suzuki
Published: 2007-03-28 |
List price: $30.95
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Departure to Oblivion
Tessa Morris-Suzuki has written a remarkable account of the various forces behind the emigration of as many as 90,000 Koreans from Japan to North Korea in the late 1950's into the 1960's. By dint of thorough research, she has shone a light on the unexpected origins of that exodus. Perhaps most Westerners who are aware of that migration know that the vast majority of the Korean "returnees" were not of northern Korean origin but from southeastern Korea or from Cheju Island. However, far fewer probably realize the tangled origins of their departure from Japan. I have worked on Korean affairs fairly steadily for much of the past thirty years and was generally familiar with the emigration story. However, I thought the movement started as a result of North Korean propagandizing among the sad and badly treated Koreans in Japan, who numbered perhaps 600,000 in 1952 when Japan regained its sovereignty through the San Francisco Treaty.
"Exodus to North Korea" shows that the impetus for emigration came not from Kim Il-Sung or from the Chosen Soren, the North Korean front organization in Japan, but from Japanese officials. Only several years later and for his own purposes did Kim Il-Sung buy into the migration idea. The author points out that one of Kim's motives was a need for laborers, including in North Korea's mines, after the 1958 withdrawal of the last Chinese People's Volunteer units. For five years after the armistice those soldiers did a lot of reconstruction work in the North. Professor Morris-Suzuki points out the irony that many of the Koreans who went to the North had been taken to Japan in the first place as conscripted miners; they would wind up being used by the North Koreans for the same kind of dangerous labor.
Professor Morris-Suzuki identifies Japanese foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu as one of the protagonists behind the exodus. There was no reason to expect sympathy toward Koreans of any political stripe from him. The reason he had to limp aboard the USS Missouri to sign the surrender as foreign minister in 1945 was that a Korean nationalist had blown his leg off with a bomb at a Shanghai railway station in the 1930's. (For some reason, despite all her detailed research, Professor Morris-Suzuki does not mention that factoid.) It would undoubtedly be incorrect to describe the entire Japanese motivation for the exodus as "Shigemitsu's Revenge," but the project must have given him a great deal of satisfaction. The Japanese wanted to get rid of a troublesome minority that was no longer needed or useful, people whom the Japan stripped of their colonial-era Japanese nationality as quickly as legally possible. Their existence in Japan was not only politically troublesome and a drain on the welfare budget, but also a reminder that Japan's population was not as homogeneous as the national mythology maintained.
The International Committee of the Red Cross does not come off well in this account. The Japanese Government and Red Cross and the North Koreans drew the ICRC into their ostensibly humanitarian plans. The Geneva officials, despite misgivings about Japanese motives and largely in ignorance of what awaited the Koreans who left for the North, failed in a basic duty: to satisfy themselves that each person was making an informed and willing decision to leave Japan for North Korea, a place almost none of them had ever seen.
Professor Morris-Suzuki honestly identifies gaps in her excellent work, pointing out that she had no chance to talk with returnees still in North Korea and also that she barely addresses the South Korean dimension of the story. On the first point, she is too hard on herself; it would be impossible for anyone to do. Exploring the second point may be worth another book. She did interview several returnees who managed to escape from North Korea in recent years. This book is a major contribution to understanding many of the tensions and animosities that still color relations between Japan and the two halves of the Korean Peninsula. It is a wrenching and troubling story.
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