A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea

by Masaji Ishikawa

You don’t choose to be born. You just are. And your birth is your destiny, some say. I say the hell with that. And I should know. I was born not just once but five times. And five times I learned the same lesson. Sometimes in life, you have to grab your so-called destiny by the throat and wring its neck.

more. On the outskirts of Mizonokuchi there

out later that most of them had

Behind their backs, people called them “Beauty and the Beast” and wondered why she’d married such a terrible man.

We were taught that Kim Il-sung was “the king who liberated Korea from colonialism.” He’d waged a war against US imperialists and their South Korean lackeys—and had won. It was thoroughly drummed into us that Kim Il-sung was an invincible general made of steel. I could tell the teachers were proud of his role as the Great Leader of an emerging nation.

Kim Il-sung barked on about it in a speech we listened to at school on September 8, 1958, if my memory serves me correctly. Something along the lines of “Our fellow countrymen living in Japan have no rights and are discriminated against. Because of that, they are suffering from the hardships of poverty, and they want to return to their mother country. We would like to welcome them back. The government of the People’s Republic will ensure that they can start a new life when they come home. We will guarantee their living conditions.”

In the early days of the so-called repatriation, some seventy thousand people left Japan and crossed the sea to North Korea. With the exception of a brief three-and-a-half-year hiatus, the process continued until 1984. During this period, some one hundred thousand Koreans and two thousand Japanese wives crossed over to North Korea. That’s one hell of a mass migration. In fact, it was the first (and only) time in history that so many people from a capitalist country had moved to a socialist country.

During the period of the Japanese Empire, thousands upon thousands of Koreans had been brought to Japan against their will to serve as slave laborers and, later, cannon fodder. Now, the government was afraid that these Koreans and their families, discriminated against and poverty-stricken in the postwar years, might become a source of social unrest. Sending them back to Korea was a solution to a problem. Nothing more.

So yes, the mass repatriation was great news for both governments—the perfect win-win situation for everyone except the real human beings involved.

For most displaced Koreans living in Japan at the time, the key point was a much simpler promise: “If you come back to your homeland, the government will guarantee you a stable life and a first-class education for your children.” For the countless Koreans who were unemployed, underpaid, and laboring away at whatever odd jobs they could get, the abstract promises of socialism held far less sway than the hope for a stable life and a bright future for their children.

There was a sentence, buried somewhere in the paperwork, that stated, “Once you have settled in North Korea, you will not be allowed to return to Japan without official Japanese authorization.” I tried to convince myself that since I was Japanese by birth, it wouldn’t be a problem for me to come back someday.

I remembered the ridiculous public notice issued by the League of Koreans in Japan: “If you go to North Korea, you will be able to obtain everything you need.” That was blind faith for you.

I was anxious about the future, but for me—a fast-growing thirteen-year-old—the most alarming thing was when we sat down to our first meal. I couldn’t believe the dish that appeared in front of me. They served us dog meat. Yes, dog meat. The stench was overpowering. We were ravenous, so we held our noses, but even then we gagged. I really tried to overcome my nausea, but none of us could get so much as a bite down. Except my father.

We’d brought some dangerous items with us from Japan when we moved—things like bicycles and electrical appliances and half-decent clothes. What if the local villagers came to realize that their standard of living was pitiful? Worse still, what would happen if they got wind of the concept of free thought from us? They might question the wisdom of Kim Il-sung. And that was verboten.

When you find yourself caught in a crazy system dreamed up by dangerous lunatics, you just do what you’re told.

The system was known as the “feasibility concept.” Feasibility concept! That’s what happens to language in countries like North Korea. A totalitarian dictatorship is a “democratic republic.” Bondage is known as “emancipation.”

But our house didn’t have a bathtub. Nobody’s house did. In 1960. In paradise on earth.

“They told us to keep ourselves clean, right? If they mean it, then they should be encouraging us to bathe every day.” “What are you talking about? A bath every day? Only a Japanese bastard could advocate something like that,” he replied, as though I’d proposed something insane.

But one skin cost four or five won, a staggering amount when you considered that an average worker’s annual salary was only seventy or eighty won.

At the end of a particularly grueling training period, I said to my closest friend, “Jesus! I can’t do this anymore. It’s just too hard!” If a member of the secret police had overheard even this petty gripe, I’d have been sent to a concentration camp at once. I wasn’t the only one who complained, but it was dangerous to do so.

suggested we could reorganize the world, hew out a career for ourselves, and be the masters of our destiny. This was laughable, of course, but that’s always the way with totalitarian regimes. Language gets turned on its head. Serfdom is freedom. Repression is liberation. A police state is a democratic republic. And we were “the masters of our destiny.” And if we begged to differ, we were dead.

The penalty for thinking was death. I can never forgive Kim Il-sung for taking away our right to think.

Bizarrely, that was the truth. At the time, all railroads, roads, and rivers were military secrets. You revealed their locations at peril of death.

In theory, if you were able-bodied, you got seven hundred grams of food a day. The elderly and sick got three hundred grams a day. That’s right. If you were sick or old, you were penalized. But the reality was even worse. The reality was “no work, no dinner.” So old people had to work until they died. They truly did.

Because we were always changing positions throughout the night, my father and I often bumped heads. Sometimes we burst out laughing like raving lunatics. If you suffer long enough, it almost becomes funny, and you can find yourself laughing at the most miserable situations. I guess it’s a kind of hysteria.

One day she finally broke the silence and asked me if I was going to participate in an upcoming soccer competition. I told her I couldn’t because I didn’t own any shorts. The next time I saw her, she gave me a pair of shorts that she had made out of white nylon. I turned to her and blurted out, “I love you—so will you marry me?” Quite the pickup line.

“You see, the thing is . . . well, I’m sure you’re a perfectly upstanding young man . . . I mean, I know you are. But the thing is . . . if my daughter married a returnee, well, we’d be in a dangerous situation too, you see.”

And I came to recognize that, no matter how difficult the reality, you mustn’t let yourself be beaten. You must have a strong will. You have to summon what you know is right from your innermost depths and follow it.

I can remember those commandments to this day. Well, of course I can. I’d have been dead long ago if I couldn’t.

Much later, I checked out the Ten Commandments of the Abrahamic religions. You know how many of them contain a reference to God? About five. So it seems that God could learn a thing or two from the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung, peace be upon him.

We were taught that the United States brutally slaughters our brothers and sisters in the south. That we must free the people of South Korea. That their country is occupied by the enemy, the United States.

A few days later, he came to my room and gave me a document. “Read this and then sign it, please,” he said. The document was a personal letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Do not tell anyone for a while that the Japanese government helped rescue you, it said. Of course, I signed the thing on the spot, and the First Secretary went back to Beijing.

According to the Japanese government, people like me who’d moved to North Korea but not changed their nationality were still Japanese citizens. But the North Korean government had other ideas. According to them, all Japanese people who’d immigrated to North Korea were now, ipso facto, North Korean. From their point of view, I’d effectively been kidnapped by the Japanese government.

It was the evening of October 15, 1996. The plane touched down in Tokyo a short while later. I was back in Japan. It took me thirty-six years to get home, but I finally did it.

When I’m eating something considered a basic food in Japan—far simpler than anything most Japanese people eat, plain rice, let’s say—I look at it and wonder how many meals it would provide in North Korea. And not just how many meals, but how many days of meals.

I still hope to rescue my remaining children.