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

by Masaji Ishikawa

Across the river, about thirty yards away, I can make out China, shrouded in mist. Thirty yards—the distance between life and death.

The last words I spoke to my family still ring in my ears. If I succeed in escaping, somehow or other, no matter what it takes, I’ll get you there too.

Kim Il-sung proclaimed he was building a socialist utopia. It was called the Chollima Movement. Like the rest of us, our teachers were living in poverty. So they grasped at straws. There was this land, this “promised land,” a “paradise on earth,” a “land of milk and honey.” In their desperation, they fell for these claims—and passed these lies on to us.

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.

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.

All at once the adults on the train started crying. I wondered why. After all, they were going back to their homeland, so why were they sad? It seemed to portend bad things to come.

The village farms were administered by local “instruction committees.” These committees were in charge of everything—machinery, irrigation, materials. Farmers had no choice but to follow the committee’s instructions. 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.”

They completely ignored any local environmental conditions and issued the same order to everyone.

No matter how bizarre the directive, farmers had to keep to the schedule. And so sometimes we worked all night.

no one dared to complain.

Soon after we moved into our rickety shack, a young police officer came by. According to this fellow, our family register was defective. My mother’s nationality had been recorded as Japanese, and her name had been recorded as Miyoko Ishikawa. “You must change your name!” he shouted, glaring at my mother.

I knew of course that the party was hostile toward us, but I hadn’t realized until that moment that it was a deliberate policy to send Japanese people to the very bottom of society.

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.

Some were sent to concentration camps. Others were purged or executed. So many lives wasted.

July 8, 1994, began like any other day.

solemn music suddenly started booming from the speaker above my head. “There is very important news. There is very important news. Today, the Great Leader, Comrade Kim Il-sung, passed away!”

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.

And suddenly, it came to me. People didn’t keep dogs in North Korea. They ate them. This dog was a pet. This wasn’t North Korea. It was China. I’d made it. I couldn’t believe it. It was nothing short of a miracle.

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.

I was elated to be returning at last, to be putting the hell of North Korea behind me, to have a chance at creating a future of my own design.

But my dreams were to be shattered once again.

It was a rehabilitation center under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, full of alcoholics and people too sick to make a living. It was called Hamakawa, located in the Shinagawa ward in Tokyo. What a place. I was frustrated, to put it mildly. Why was I being treated like I was ill? We were wedged in, four people to a tiny room with only curtains as partitions.

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,

People talk about God. Although I can’t see him myself, I still pray for a happy ending.