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

by Masaji Ishikawa

The Japanese defeat in World War II left 2.4 million Koreans stranded in Japan. They belonged to neither the winning nor the losing side, and they had no place to go. Once freed, they were simply thrown onto the streets. Desperate and impoverished, with no way to make a living, they attacked the trucks containing food intended for members of the imperial Japanese armed forces and sold the booty on the black market. Even those who’d never been violent before had little choice but to turn into outlaws.

From my perspective, there wasn’t much difference between a socialist movement, a nationalist movement, and a brutal brawl in the black market.

We walked through the maze of a Korean neighborhood near a confectionary factory, and the sweet smell of candy permeated the air. When we arrived at his house, his mother immediately asked me if I was hungry. A moment later, she rushed into the kitchen and reemerged with rice, Korean pickles, and several other dishes. The table was soon filled with food. She kept saying, “Eat more!” even though my mouth was full and I was practically choking on the rice I was wolfing down. Lion and his mother watched me, and I couldn’t help noticing their smiles. I’d experienced maternal love, and of course I loved my sisters dearly, but this was the first time I’d felt real affection from people not related to me.

There were others like me who couldn’t speak Korean at all. And you know what? Some teachers bent the rules and explained things to us in Japanese. Dissidents!

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.

After Kim Il-sung’s statement, the General Association of Korean Residents started a mass repatriation campaign in the guise of humanitarianism. The following year, 1959, the Japanese Red Cross Society and the Korean Red Cross Society secretly negotiated a “Return Agreement” in Calcutta. Four months later, the first shipload of returnees left the Japanese port of Niigata.

Did the International Committee of the Red Cross know anything about this? Did the United States? The UN? Yes, yes, and yes. And what did they do about it? Nothing.

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.

The Japanese government actively promoted the repatriation, supposedly on humanitarian grounds.

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.

From the North Korean government’s point of view, their country desperately needed rebuilding after the Korean War. What could be more convenient than an influx of workers? Kim Il-sung was desperate to prove to the world that the Democratic Republic was superior to South Korea.

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

I wonder if any of the people spouting these messages ever really grasped, in later years, the depths of misery for which they were responsible.

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.

The bald hills in the background made everything look even more desolate and bleak.

I looked around at the ramshackle cottages with their thatched roofs sprinkled with snow. It sounds picturesque. But it wasn’t. It was desolate.

When I lived in Japan, I never really pondered my life. But after I moved to North Korea, the thing that preoccupied me most was the sheer magnitude of the difference between my old life and my new one. I became obsessed with all the things I had taken for granted before, and all the hardships that marked my life now.

The most important thing was how faithful you were to the Great Leader. Teachers and every other adult I knew tried to brainwash us into becoming slavish members of their pseudo-religious cult. I played along. I learned quickly that in that sort of situation, if you want to survive, you have to stifle your critical faculties and just get on with things. I had to pick my battles carefully and not let myself get riled up by every little thing. But the trouble is that some people really do end up brainwashed. They come to believe all the bullshit. But, thankfully, there are also many who don’t. And one day, they’ll

After that, I noticed that the permanent farmworkers did hardly any work at all. They spent all their time telling the members of the Youth League and the soldiers what to do. But at the end of the day, the farmers claimed they’d put in a full day’s work, and the officials logged their hours without question. We didn’t protest.

Harvest was known as the “autumn battle.” I don’t know who came up with that expression, but it has the stamp of Kim Il-sung all over it. Everything was a “battle” or a “march” or a “war.” Stirring words to encourage the people to fight hard. And always uttered with that overblown intonation that sounded simultaneously preposterous and deranged.

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.”

It was difficult for me to understand why no one ever seemed to question the point of the training, but I had to remember that they’d been brainwashed since they were babes by one or another barking, hysterical voice. When they were kids, it came from their teachers; later, it came from party officials, who drilled the same messages into them day after day after day.

As you question whether they could really have been so completely brainwashed, keep in mind that North Koreans had never experienced a liberal democracy. They had no concept of what it was or what it meant. My comrades had only ever known or heard of colonial rule at the hands of Japan and dictatorship at the hands of Kim Il-sung. And before that was the miserable feudal period of the Korean dynasties. They’d only ever known bondage. North Koreans didn’t have anything to compare their country with because they’d never experienced anything else.

In Japan, he faced endless bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination. The only way he could express his feelings and fight back was through violence. But back then, as he saw it, he was fighting to defend his Korean brothers.

Suddenly, I felt completely overwhelmed. By rage. Frustration. Despair. And all I could do was walk off in the direction of the mountain and weep. Someone once said, “If a crying baby could tear down the universe, it would.” That’s how I felt that day. I wanted to demolish the whole universe, but the sad truth was, it had already come crashing down around my head.

The word could be translated in a number of ways. It could mean self-reliance, autonomy, independence, or responsibility—all the things we weren’t allowed to have. According to the Juche “philosophy,” “human beings are the masters of the world, so they get to decide everything.”

It 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.

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.

In the seventies, a new slogan appeared: “Speed strategy!” This became yet another meaningless mouthful repeated ad nauseam at our study meetings. We also had to memorize Kim Il-sung’s Ten Commandments and then repeat them endlessly until they were chiseled into our brains for all time. In the end, I felt as though my very mind had been occupied.

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.

He said I was an “outstanding worker.” I don’t think I was outstanding at all—just average—but that was enough. But that’s the thing. People in North Korea spend so much time in study meetings and calculating the number of hours they’ve worked that there’s no time to do the actual work. The result? Raw materials don’t arrive in factories, the electricity doesn’t work, and farms are overrun with weeds. But as long as people can get their food rations, they don’t care. Since my job was off the record, I had no study meetings and was not forced to put in countless hours for pointless bureaucracy. So I could work properly. Or normally, as an ordinary, average worker, as I saw it. But in the manager’s eyes, I was outstanding.

Kim Il-sung died on the eve of what was supposed to have been the first ever North-South Summit. The party leadership had been delirious with optimism about the summit, claiming that the unification of North and South would soon become a reality and that our present difficulties would be over. But that’s the trouble with propaganda. It constantly contradicts itself. We had been told that the collapse of farming and the demise of the economy were entirely the fault of US imperialists dividing the Korean Peninsula into two countries. If only the North and South could be unified, the threat of starvation would be over. But that didn’t make any sense. If our troubles were purely the result of US imperialism, why weren’t South Koreans starving too? And besides, only the other day, hadn’t we been told that they were starving too? In that case, how would the unification save us?

The party started churning out more slogans, more propaganda. I couldn’t help but wonder where they even got all the paper for the posters—and whether I could eat it. And what did all these wretched posters tell us? They gave advice on alternatives to the standard food ration. “Make the root of rice plants into a powder and eat it! It’s rich in protein! . . . Arrowroot contains a lot of starch! . . . If you eat and survive, we can definitely prevail!” Useless information, all delivered with the usual histrionic exclamation marks. By that time, we’d been scouring the ground for ages for anything edible—acorns, mugwort, pine-tree bark. It was hellish stuff. You

Children gave up going to school. I’d see them wandering the streets with the adults, desperately searching for food. Myong-hwa and Ho-son got thinner and thinner, their faces so sunken that their eyes looked huge, entirely out of proportion to their other features. I wanted to cry whenever I looked at their small bony bodies, but I lacked even the energy for that.

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.

The Yalu River separates China and North Korea. A lot of people cross over it, and even more try to. Bizarrely, some thirty years earlier, many Chinese Koreans and Chinese had tried to escape to North Korea during China’s “Great Leap Forward” and Cultural Revolution, that country’s own attempt at mass starvation.

After the Korean War, China and North Korea had a “friendship signed in blood” in which they agreed to a “Border Security Cooperation Protocol.” Fancy words for a simple process: if you escaped from North Korea but your luck ran out and you got caught, you were sent back. Cue the firing squad. As for South Korea, trade with China was all that mattered. That was evidently far more important than helping your own brother.

The First Secretary was a scholarly type. I asked him a few questions in order to better understand my situation, but he just replied, “Don’t worry. Be strong!” Nothing more. 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.

A few days later, I was talking to the consul when a call came in from the First Secretary in Beijing. As the consul picked up the phone, he turned the radio up and then explained to me, “If I do this, they won’t be able to eavesdrop.”

If you look at a map, you’ll see that Dalian is to the west of North Korea. Whereas Japan, of course, is to the east. So strictly speaking, the hellhole that had ruined my life was still sitting there defiantly between the place where I found myself and the place where I wanted to be.

After so many years of helplessness and despair, I would finally be able to do something for my family. Those sparkling lights gave me a surge of hope. I would do whatever it took to get my family out of North Korea. It was difficult for me to think of what they must be enduring, but I let myself imagine the moment when we would all be together in Japan. But my dreams were to be shattered once again. And now? Now I have just one thing left. My only true possession. I’m sorry to say that it’s bitterness. Bitterness at the cruelty of life.

The truth is I never succeeded in finding a decent job. I tried everything, but it wasn’t easy. I hated that I’d been reduced to living on welfare and that I couldn’t send anything to my wife and children, but I wasn’t exactly an ideal candidate. Just imagine what my résumé looked like. Educational background? Tricky one, that. Work experience? You really want to know?