It's graduation day at a children's school in Tokyo.
From the metro station it's just ten blocks to their school,
but these children aren't totally safe. Old men from their community have to stand at
every corner to make sure that these kids aren't harassed or bullied.
It's happened before. In fact, there's been a lot of rallies in Tokyo lately:
protesting these kids and their school.
This is because, even though these kids
and their parents were born in Japan, they're not Japanese.
This is North Korea's bubble in Japan.
It's a community of about 150,000 Koreans,
holdovers from the 1940's when Japan's military forcibly brought over
their relatives.
They run a network of schools, where they teach their kids
about Korean history, teach them Korean language. They teach them the ideology of
the great leader Kim Il-Sung.
The guards are here this morning because three days ago,
North Korea tested a bunch of missiles that landed right off Japan's shores.
Before the students can leave, they have to change out of the traditional Korean clothing.
But this community isn't giving in to the pressure.
Their schools are the place where they can protect their identity
and quietly revere their great leader and the homeland that he founded.
A place none of them have ever lived.
This North Korean bubble is a nation within a nation,
whose borders are made out of culture, language, history, and ideology.
And it shows how borders exist as much in our minds as they do on maps.
In 1910 the Korean Peninsula was annexed by Japan's expanding empire. During its rule
the empire brought tens of thousands of Koreans to Japan, mainly to work and to
serve in their army. Or in the case of Korean women, to serve as sex slaves in
brothels for Japanese soldiers.
Japan's empire grew until 1945 when World War II,
brought its sudden defeat and the loss of much of its empire, including Korea.
The Koreans who were in Japan were free, but they found themselves in a country that
didn't recognize them as citizens. The United States and the Soviet Union
quickly filled the power vacuum of this newly liberated Korean Peninsula and two
new countries were formed: the U.S. backing the new South Korea, and the
Soviet Union backing the North, installing a rising leader, Kim Il-Sung
who a few years later invaded the U.S.-backed South, starting the Korean War.
Most of the Koreans in Japan went back to Korea, but about 600,000 decided to
stay in Japan.
The Korean War changed everything,
creating a bitter division between these two new Koreas. So the Koreans in Japan
could no longer just be Korean. They suddenly had to choose which Korea they
affiliated with. Almost all of them had originally been from what was now South Korea,
but this new North Korea began paying special attention to the Koreans
in Japan, sending the money and helping them build schools and businesses.
Effectively, helping them build a cultural border, to help protect their identity and language
against the Japanese society that sought to change or destroy it.
This school where the graduation is taking place, was built with funding from
Kim Il-Sung in those early days, after the war.
For these stateless Koreans in
Japan, this support from a faraway government built trust and loyalty to a
regime that they had never actually lived under.
The North Korean backed organization in Japan called themselves the Chongryon and
over the following decades they built a network of schools, banks, and gambling parlors.
They became rich, and started sending millions of dollars back to
North Korea to support the regime. In their heyday the Chongryon was worth
around $25 billion dollars.
But something happened that would mark the
beginning of the end for this North Korean business empire in Japan.
In the late 70's North Korea started sending spies disguised as fishermen to Japanese
beaches, to start kidnapping Japanese citizens. They brought them back to North Korea
so that they could use them for their language and cultural
understanding of Japan, so they could help train their spies. The victims, including
a 13 year old girl who allegedly died in captivity, gripped the nation's attention for years,
their stories making their way into pop culture,
their faces known to every citizen. Around the same time, North Korea
began developing its long-range missile program, a program that would eventually
lead North Korea to having nuclear weapon delivery capabilities. Both the
nuclear and abduction issues came to a head in the early 2000's, when North Korea
withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, a treaty that
prevents countries from building more nuclear weapons. The regime also
officially admitted that they were behind some of the kidnappings of
Japanese citizens. This set off a wave of violent attacks and hate speech
against North Koreans living in Japan.
The Japanese government demanded that the Chongryon repay its outstanding debts.
When the organization couldn't do this, they were forced to declare bankruptcy.
Many of their buildings, including their headquarters, were seized.
The organization was left in financial ruin, with only its network of a few dozen
schools standing. These schools became the next target for Japanese animosity
towards North Korea.
Korean students suddenly found themselves in the middle of this heated
international conflict.
This graph shows the amount of state funding for
Korean schools by Japanese prefectures over time.
2006 was the year that North Korea tested a nuclear weapon. And you can see the
immediate drop-off of funding every year thereafter. Prefectures providing
tuition subsidies for Korean schools went from 28 in 2006, down to 12 today.
Education officials specifically cite the abduction issue as well as the
general "situation" in North Korea, as their motive for defunding the schools.
Japan's Ministry of Education declined my request for an interview
on this, but I did talk to an anti-Korean activist who defended these
actions by putting the issue into terms that I, as an American, could understand.
As I visited these schools and talked with these people who live in a country
that is openly hostile towards them, I found myself torn. This organization
pledges allegiance to a regime that has committed some of the most horrific
atrocities that our modern world knows.
Each and every conceivable human right is violated.
There are 80,000 to 100,000 people who are languishing in political prison camps.
Yet at the same time, they are also victims of severe structural discrimination.
The U.N. and other international bodies have repeatedly condemned the Japanese
structural discrimination against Koreans. The North Korean community often
cites this as validation for their plight, but the U.N. has also called North Korea's
human rights violations so grave that they have "no parallel in the contemporary world".
When you ask them how they reconcile this contradiction, the
response is always some version of:
"any country has human rights issues."
At first I found this astounding, that
there could be such a willful ignorance to the atrocities of the North Korean
regime, but the more embedded I got into this North Korean community in Japan, the
more I realized that, to this marginalized community, North Korea
represents more of a refuge of safety for their identity - something they crave
while they're living in a country that is actively working to diminish their
heritage and culture.
While younger generations are more likely to assimilate into Japanese society,
the Chongryon have done an exceptional job
at cultivating the strong Korean identity despite all the pressure and
hardship. In their last year of high school the students have an opportunity
to go visit North Korea.
Seeing and hearing the accounts of this highly
choreographed visit to Pyongyang, is all you need to understand the
relationship that this disenfranchised community has towards its adopted homeland.
I visited the North Korean university where they've curated a museum dedicated to
everything Korean. Every rock, tree, species of fish, plant, animal, root, that
has ever existed on the Korean Peninsula is found in this museum, which was built
with support from the North Korean government. I had never seen such a
meticulously comprehensive collection to enshrine a place in a history.
This place does not exist for visitors. It's much more of a statement that, in spite of
intense pressure and hostility, Korean culture endures in Japan.
North Korea isn't their home country in the way that you would think. They weren't born there,
they've never lived there, but they see it as their home country because the
country that they were born in actively works to make their lives harder.
Like in many parts of the world, right-wing nationalism is surging in Japan.
Anti-Korean rallies are on the rise, according to an investigation by
Japanese law enforcement. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is a fierce nationalist and
he's caught up in a scandal right now for having given secret donations to an
ultra-nationalist kindergarten with anti-Korean views. Japanese nationalism leads
to discrimination against Koreans. This causes the Koreans to resist Japan
as their home country, looking to a country they've never lived in for
support and protection of their identity.
Affiliating with this universally
reviled regime, that routinely vows to destroy Japan creates more resentment
from the Japanese population and politicians, leading to more
discrimination which leads to again deeper commitment to North Korea as a protector.
And in my mind there's no doubt that the cycle will continue.
While I was in Japan making this video, I also spent a lot of time with these
ultra right-wing groups who are anti-Korean and I didn't go into that much in
this video, but I made an entire separate video about the rise of right-wing
politics in Japan and kind of the anti-Korean sentiment and where that comes
from, from like a historical perspective.
And of course: big THANK YOU to lululemon
who is a sponsor of Borders, they sent me these ABC pants a while back that I've
been wearing. They are sturdy, and flexible and you can wear them when
you're hiking or when you're at home. So thank you lululemon, but more importantly
thank you for supporting Borders and making this project possible. I'm gonna
leave a link here for the lululemon shop for men online, and you can check out
your own pair of ABC pants.
Alright, we're three episodes into
Borders, we have three to go. Get ready for next Tuesday when I publish the fourth.
And wish me luck in the meantime I've got a lot of editing to do.
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