They were promised a 'paradise' in North Korea. Now they are suing over the lies
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Osaka: Hiroko Sakakibara was only a young girl when the North Korean agents came to her father’s house trying to sell him on a dream of earthly paradise in the family’s ancestral land.
A socialist utopia awaits, they were told in the early 1960s. Your every need – work, home, clothes, health care – will be guaranteed by the state.
“I was small so I couldn’t join the conversation, but I could hear them talking,” she said. “I told my father, ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’ “
Hiroko Sakakibara was taken to North Korea at the age of 11 by her parents, but later escaped back to Japan.
Photo: Simon Denyer/Washington Post
In all, more than 93,000 people – mostly ethnic Koreans whose Japanese citizenship was stripped after World War II – left Japan between 1959 and 1984, lured by the promise of a new life in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea during the heart of the Cold War. The ethnic Koreans, known in Japan as Zainichi, were joined by a few thousand Japanese spouses and children.
Instead, they say they encountered discrimination, desperate poverty and a complete denial of basic freedoms.
Article source: http://watoday.com.au/comment/obituaries/doreen-warburton-stalwart-of-sydney-theatre-for-more-than-three-decades-20170726-gxj4kf.html
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