By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, Oct 24 2003 (IPS)

While Tokyo marks the first anniversary this month of the return of five kidnapped Japanese nationals from Pyongyang, Chong Hyon Suk, an ethnic Korean in Japan, says she is still trying to come to terms with those horrifying revelations.

"I felt terrible when North Korea confirmed its abduction of Japanese nationals. I now apologise to my Japanese friends for my pro-Pyongyang stance," says 40-year-old Chong, a third-generation Korean here in the country.

Chong, a part-time English teacher, is married to a fellow Korean resident and has two children who attend a pro-Pyongyang school in Tokyo.

Her grandmother came to Japan with her parents, who were forcibly brought from the Korean peninsula that was then under Japanese colonial rule.

”The decision to send our children to an ethnic school was aimed at giving them a firm Korean identity by having them study their culture. It had nothing to do with supporting the totalitarian North Korean regime," she says.

Following an icebreaking visit to North Korea in September last year by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Pyongyang released five Japanese nationals the following month. However, it continues to reject demands to permit their children still in North Korea to follow them home.

Today, decades later, friction over North Korea’s nuclear weapons development and Japanese compensation for its colonisation of the Korean peninsula remain thorny issues. Japan and North Korea have not signed a peace treaty.

As Chong’s story attests, the past year has been a tough time for Japan’s largest ethnic minority of Korean background, most of them descendants of people brought to work in Japan as cheap labour for the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.

The revelation last year that there was indeed a network of North Korean spies responsible for the systematic kidnapping of Japanese nationals, mostly in the sixties and seventies at the height of the Cold War, has resulted in daily harassment, insults, and even bomb attacks against ethnic North Koreans.

Says So Chung So, an official at the Chongryon, the pro-Pyongyang residents Organisation: ”The past year has been a setback for us in gaining equal rights in Japan."

A survey by the organisation that shows 39.9 percent of female fifth and six graders and 48.3 percent of older female students have suffered abuse, such as being told " go back to Korea" or " you will be kidnapped”.

Most attacks were by right-wing groups, but investigations also showed that young Japanese students and even homemakers had participated in some of them.

"Emotions are running high among the public," acknowledges professor Haruhisa Ogawa, who has long campaigned for the return of the kidnapped Japanese from North Korea.

Ogawa warns of growing enmity among Japanese against ethnic Koreans here unless Pyongyang settles the abduction issue quickly.

So meantime blames the media for the escalation of violations against the North Korean community, explaining that their insensitive reportage propagates a chilling picture of North Korea and its people.

"While I sympathise with Japan’s anger about the sad plight of its kidnapped nationals, I cannot forgive the media for portraying every North Korean as a potential threat," he says, referring to more reports of North Korean military activities and espionage and critical coverage of its reclusive leader, Kim Il Sung.

Chong, for example, says that while discrimination against ethnic Koreans is common, the past year has been particularly trying. Her children, for instance, have lived in a perpetual state of fear and anxiety in the rising suspicions against Koreans.

"The school even decided last year to stop asking students to wear the Korean national dress, the uniform, for self-protection. By being able to blend more easily with the Japanese, we can avoid attacks," she explains.

Japan’s ethnic Korean community now number around 620,000, comprising mostly of third and fourth generation residents.

They are either affiliated with North Korea – Chongryun explains that these would be around 200,000 – or the South, even though the majority of settlers arrived here when Korea was a united peninsula under Japanese rule that ended in 1945.

With Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II, Koreans living in Japan suddenly had to face a national policy where they could, in effect, no longer be Japanese.

Then came the Korean War, when the peninsula was split in two. Many Koreans decided to take on South Korean nationality at this stage. But a large number also decided not to take any sides and instead live without passports in order to retain the Korean – not South, not North – nationality.

This sector is usually seen as affiliated with North Korea. In a bid to keep the link with their motherland, they have always attended schools supported by Pyongyang, and travel to North Korea to keep up links with relatives there.

While this has helped sow suspicion in Japan, this was the only way they could study their culture and keep their Korean identity, ethnic Koreans here explain.

"This complex historical background lies at the heart of ethnic Koreans linked to North Korea,” says So. ”They cling to their identity but at the same time think Japan is their home."

But changes have also been forthcoming. Seeing the urgent need to combat anti-North Korean sentiment in Japan, the Chongryon organisation has developed new curricula that teach Japanese culture and studies and move steadily away from the school’s former strictly pro-Pyongyang stance.

Lee Hyon Suk, 30, a fourth-generation ethnic Korean who was educated at Tokyo Korean High School, says she welcomes the changes.

"The reality is such that while we dream of a united Korea, we are brought up and bred in Japan. Our role is acting as bridge between North Korea and Japan to build better relations," she says.

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