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Abstract
From 1959 to 1984, some 90,000 Koreans migrated from Japan to North Korea as part of the “repatriation movement.” Enduring severe deprivation in North Korea, in the last decade some 300 of these individuals have returned to Japan. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, this paper asks how gift giving and the attendant obligation to reciprocate impacts on relations between non-profit organizations (NPOs) and the people they seek to help. I answer this question by examining the resettlement of returnees from North Korea, and their relationship to members of Japanese civil society. The organizations working with returnees primarily consist of elderly Japanese men who aid returnees out of guilt for their support in the 1960s and 1970s of the socialist left, North Korea, and the repatriation movement. Their assistance engenders a feeling of debt in the people they help. Returnees try to mitigate this debt by performing acts of “flexible filial piety” toward NPO members. But returnees’ attempts to renegotiate the burden of the gift consequently endanger themselves and their families who remain in North Korea.
Acknowledgments
Although I cannot use the real names of the North Korean and Japanese people I worked with during my fieldwork, I owe a great debt to all those who helped me in this research. Thanks go to Fabrizio Bensi, his assistance in the archives of the ICRC proved invaluable. I offer a further thanks to Dr. Jamie Coates for his helpful suggestions, and to the anonymous reviewers, whose insightful comments helped me greatly improve this paper.
Notes
1. In Japanese “Zainichi” means “foreigner residing in Japan.” However, the expression “Zainichi Korean” has been appropriated by long-term ethnically Korean citizens of Japan to distinguish them from the Japanese population and from later waves of “newcomer” migrations from South Korea.
2. 帰国事業’ in Japanese, and ‘북성사업’ in Korean. For more on the Repatriation movement see Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s (Citation2007) Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War.
3. I use the term “Zainichi returnee” to refer to Koreans who moved to North Korea during the Repatriation movement (1959–1984) and later escaped the DPRK, returning to Japan. I acknowledge that this term is contentious, however, as some Zainichi returnees would prefer to be known as North Korean, some as North Korean refugees, and some simply as Zainichi Korean. Some of these individuals are ethnically Japanese. Official discourse on the subject of North Korean refugees often lump North Koreans in South Korea and North Koreans in Japan into the same category. However, this oversimplifies the situation, as the Japanese government does not consider individuals who were part of the repatriation movement as refugees. Yet, contradictorily, these individuals become stateless once they arrive in Japan.
4. $998 USD per month, as of April 2015.
5. If a person works part time and earns 50,000 yen a month, half of that will be deducted from their social security income.
6. For more on the resettlement of North Korean refugees in South Korea see Markus Bell’s (Citation2013) “Manufacturing Kinship in a Nation Divided.”
7. The names of the participants in this paper and the organizations under discussion have been changed to protect the identity of those who kindly gave their time and expertise.
8. Akio Kawashima continues to finance various initiatives for Zainichi returnees, including paying for the travel expenses of those attending Japanese languages class and financing the development of an agricultural project designed to create employment for unskilled and elderly returnees.
9. ‘拉致問題’, in Japanese.
10. In November 1987, Korean Air flight 858 exploded mid-air. Two North Korean agents were subsequently arrested for the bombing. One committed suicide; the other, Kim Hyon-hui, admitted acting on orders from the North Korean government. For more on this subject see Kim Hyon-hui’s (Citation1993) The Tears of My Soul.
11. “I Believed North Korea’s Propaganda,” in Amnesty International AI Journal (Original in German).
12. For more on the abduction issue see Robert S. Boynton’s (Citation2016) The Invitation Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea’s Abduction Project.
13. The Stockholm Agreement was signed between the DPRK and Japan in May 2014. In this agreement Japan sought a resolution to the “Abduction issue” in exchange for the normalization of diplomatic relations.
14. Thousands of Japanese civilians were left behind in Manchuria following the Japanese defeat and withdrawal from Northeast China. Some of these individuals have since returned to Japan. For more on Japanese war orphans in China see Yeeshan Chan (Citation2011), Abandoned Japanese in Postwar Manchuria, New York, Routledge.
15. Kelly Greenhill (Citation2011) argues that South Korean and Japanese civic groups pursued these methods as a means of drawing international attention to North Korean human rights violations and attempting to provoke regime change via the mass outward migration of North Korean refugees (see Greenhill, chapter five).
16. Sorensen and Kim (Citation2004) write, “Filial piety has long been fundamental to Korean ethics. During the Buddhist Koryo dynasty (918-1392), the Sutra of Parental Grace was popular, but it was Confucianizing reforms, introduced at the beginning of the chosen dynasty (1392-1910), that made Confucian family ethics central to Korean elite culture” (Sorensen and Kim: 155). Hashimoto explains, with reference to Japan, “The values of obedience and deference toward parents central to koko (filial piety) [in Japan] have been subjected effectively to this method of transmission, especially as long-standing virtues deeply rooted in the Confucian and moral education of Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868) and the nationalist education of late Meiji (1868–1912) through early Showa Japan (1926–89)” (Citation2004, 182–197).
17. “부담이 너무 많아요”.
18. ‘The General Association of Korean Residents in Japan,’ Chongryon (총련) in Korean and Sōren (総連) in Japanese, is one of two main organizations for Koreans in Japan. Chongryon functions as North Korea's de facto embassy in Japan.
19. The book is titled “Nightmare 575 Days.” Akio came across this book as a university student.
20. This is a ‘guilt by association’ law, whereby three generations of a family are punished for the political crimes of a single family member.