Making and Breaking Family: North Korea’s Zainichi Returnees and “the Gift”

Abstract

From 1959 to 1984, some 90,000 Koreans migrated from Japan to North Korea as part of the “repatriation movement.” Enduring severe deprivation in North Korea, in the last decade some 300 of these individuals have returned to Japan. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, this paper asks how gift giving and the attendant obligation to reciprocate impacts on relations between non-profit organizations (NPOs) and the people they seek to help. I answer this question by examining the resettlement of returnees from North Korea, and their relationship to members of Japanese civil society. The organizations working with returnees primarily consist of elderly Japanese men who aid returnees out of guilt for their support in the 1960s and 1970s of the socialist left, North Korea, and the repatriation movement. Their assistance engenders a feeling of debt in the people they help. Returnees try to mitigate this debt by performing acts of “flexible filial piety” toward NPO members. But returnees’ attempts to renegotiate the burden of the gift consequently endanger themselves and their families who remain in North Korea

Performing Death and Memory: Ancestral Rites of North Koreans in Exile

“…2 While there is an increasing interest in the long-distance economic and political relationships within the North Korean diaspora to the homeland, little has been said on the significance of North Koreans' everyday cultural practices in the places they resettle and how, through these practices, ordinary people attempt to resist and avoid the state and its mechanisms of surveillance (Choi, 2013:657). Cultural practices here refer to such activities as the preparation and consumption of North Korean food (Bell, 2013), the performance of North Korean song and dance (Koo, 2016;Sands, 2018), the participation of North Koreans in religious and secular civic institutions (Han, 2013;Jung, 2015;Bell, 2016), and otherwise overlooked interactions that take place in daily lives and living spaces (Choi, 2013). Based on a year of interviews and participant observation, this article examines an often-overlooked aspect of North Koreans' spiritual life: the performance of commemorative practices in North Korea and in the homes of North Koreans now living in South Korea and in Japan.…”

The other city: alternative infrastructures of care for the underclass in Japan

“…481; 'Kotobuki chiku o Korea taun ni',Kanagawa shimbun, 10 October, 1994). The zainichi Korean doya owners I talked to, who were mostly second and third generations, did not have good recollections of the plan.21 For more on the "repatriation movement," seeBell 2016 22 Conversation on June 17, 2011.23 Conversation on June 17, 2011. 24 While the Japanese government had long pointed the finger at North Korea over the disappearance of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s, North Korea had strongly denied the allegations and criticized Japan for false propaganda.…”