Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War (review)

Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s Exodus to North Korea is the best book on Northeast Asia I have read in years. In keeping with her customary edgy and thoughtful work, Morris-Suzuki has published not simply the first substantial book in English about a remarkable recent history (its Japanese translation is already on bookstore shelves in Tokyo, and appreciation goes here at the outset to Mark Selden for including the book in his Asian Voices series). She has written the only nonparticipant, scholarly account of this unbelievable story. And she has done it beautifully. Exodus deserves every award the field can offer.

In clear, passionate, and compassionate prose, she describes the process, planning, and people involved in removing roughly 90,000 men, women, and children of Korean heritage from Japan to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as part of the Great Return to the Fatherland scheme between 1959 and 1984. During these very years while Japanese leaders positively rebuilt the nation’s nefarious wartime image on the global stage, the author demonstrates that the Japanese government intentionally sponsored the mass removal from Japan of tens of thousands of ethnic Koreans for largely regressive—if not immoral, unethical, and possibly illegal— reasons, despite the program’s progressive, internationalist veneer. She supports her argument through survivor testimony as well as plentiful reference to reams of government documents she has located in archives in Geneva, Tokyo, Moscow, Seoul, Washington, and Canberra (in all the languages that go along with these locations).

Throughout the book, she details the astonishing history of how a few powerful men in the Japanese government and the related quasigovernmental Japanese Red Cross Society took bold advantage of the “lack of knowledge about East Asia” (p. 192) of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to purposefully rid Japan of as many people of Korean descent as they could. They especially wanted to cleanse Japan of those Koreans rendered destitute after 1952 when various laws overnight transformed all Koreans there into “aliens” regardless of their prior status, a maneuver that suddenly stripped many people of long-assured access to subsidized housing, health insurance, and guaranteed welfare benefits. In simplest terms, the handful of Japanese government officials involved endeavored to guarantee that the Japanese government at large would not be responsible for having created its own problems (i.e., taking care of the “leftovers” of Japan’s rule of Korea and Koreans from 1905 to 1945), and they saw in Geneva, home of the ICRC, a way to take care of their problems.

To be sure, as Morris-Suzuki makes clear, a number of those who participated in the Great Return fervently believed in the socialist alternative that North Korea offered at the time the “exodus” began. Yet, and unfortunately for so many people of Korean descent who happened to be in Japan at the time, the author’s analysis makes clear that most found no alternative but to see euphemized deportation to North Korea as their only hope for financial and ethnically dignified survival. Swiss ICRC board members followed official Japan’s lead because they knew no better, and, for the most part, they did not bother to learn more even if and when they thought something was awry.

The pages of Exodus spell out how Japanese officials such as Okazaki Katsuo, Inoue Masutarō, Shimazu Tadatsugu, Shigemitsu Mamoru, and Kishi Nobusuke (and others whose descendants likewise remain centrally involved in Japan’s Northeast Asian affairs as Morris-Suzuki underscores) used the humanitarian gloss of the International Red Cross to work with leaders in Pyongyang and their counterparts in Japan’s General Association of Korean Residents (Chongryun) who were eager to aggrandize themselves over Seoul at any cost. Thus, Morris-Suzuki persuasively demonstrates that the combined desires for erasing the “Korean problem in Japan” (the motivating factor for Japanese officials involved) and for gaining for the communist North an advantage over the...