Why nearly 100,000 people left Japan to move to North Korea

I remember the story about a group of people that left Japan to go to North Korea, only 1 manage to get back to Japan and regret ever going there in the first place, she left flowers at the dock that she left Japan from to mourn her friends who had died and still stuck in North Korea.

After the Korean War and in 1950s, North Korea received very much aid from the Soviet Union and China to rebuild their war destroyed country. At the same time Japan in 1950s was very difficult to live, it was like a third world country in rebuilding program. That's why many Japanese or Korean ethnic Japanese fled to North Korea for a better living. North Korea had a higher living standard than People's Republic of China until 1970s. North Korea was like East Germany that a communist country needs to be stability because they are the frontlier and bulwark against the West infiltration or invasion. But things changed dramatically in 1980s when China open the door to the West and the deterioration of Soviet Union. After losing Soviet aid in 1990 and the development of nuclear weapons in North Korea, their economy turned to worse and became a total poverty. But the Japanese xenophobic culture and racism in Japan was also the reasons why many Koreans chose to go back to North Korea, their ancestry root were in Korea's northern province so they couldn't goto South Korea.

i mean they were not wrong,in the 1960s in the aftermath of the war north korea was paradise compared to south korea.

6:00 the grandmother was a smart cookie, she was rather spot on.

I can’t imagine going to live in another country I know very little about. It would be like if white Americans went back to a Europe country or black Americans to an African country. Our cultural and familial ties to those places would have been broken generations ago. Even though we have ancestry in those places, it would still be a foreign country to us.

Wow this was so interesting! Thank you for this great documentary!

this is incredible! without this video theres no way i would ever have thought this could have happened! what a story! thx for sharing

Great documentary, i didn't know this part of history existed. Thank you SCMP.

Informative video. I lived in Japan for about a decade and always found this subject confusing. A co-worker of mine was a Korean medical doctor, born in Japan and who had only a Korean passport. He would joke to me that he had to live a clean life; if he committed any crime he could be deported to Korea, a country he barely knew. Near some Korean schools I would see signs reminding people not to discriminate. So clearly there were problems around the schools. Coming from the US it was hard to understand how families could live for multiple generations in a country and not have citizenship rights. I would think dual citizenship would help in this situation, but neither Korea nor Japan allows this (technically, you can have both Japanese and a North Korean passports, but this is only because Japan does not recognize North Korea as a sovereign state, and so considers its passports invalid.). How odd to live in this kind of nether world where you don't belong to a country you grew up in.

crazy how many things like this we never hear about, very well made thanks

My heart breaks for Ms. Park. I cannot imagine what her life has been like and how she feels.

Well made, compelling and thought provoking short documentary. Congrats to SCMP, exceptionlly produced indeed.

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the fact that they even loved her smell, this really hit me, you can feel how hopeless and desperate they were

It is horrible to hear about that, Thanks for sharing the story, Otherwise, it would be totally forgotten

Thanks SCMP ,U explain lots of knowledge ❤!

I bet most of those people, alive or gone, thought once that that was the biggest mistake of their life.

I learned about Chongryon from Vox, and from other sources when i looked it up, some I could not trust and only read its headlines, but this one adds a bit more detail for me to learn more about ethnic Koreans in Japan.

My grandmother's aunt's family moved to California from Japan before World War II, Even their parents and other family members stopped them, They didn't listen, and all of them survived WW2 at there. However, all of my grandmother's family who remained in Japan died during WW2, except my grandmother who was 6 years old and my grandmother's sister who was 4 years old. Ultimately, I think people have to decide themself where you live. I think no one can take responsibility for others future.

Scmp must make more videos like this. Frankly I didn’t know all this.