North Korea's Secret Schools in Japan are Failing.

[00:00:00]On the 15th of June 2010, North Korea's national football team lined up against Brazil in a football World Cup match, a tournament which was taking place that year in South Africa. This was a significant moment. The DPRK, a relative footballing minnow, had only once before qualified for the tournament 44 years earlier. As usual, television cameras scanned the faces of each set of players as the sides sang their respective count's national anthems. Stoic and poised, the North Koreans sang uniformly and dutifully, except one. The cameras couldn't help but focus on player number nine who failed to sing because his face kept welling up with tears and he wept bitterly throughout the rendition. This was Jong Ter, North Korea's 26-year-old center forward. Seen as the team's best player, Jong became the subject of great public intrigue and some amusement.

[00:00:46]Although his tears didn't do much good, North Korea lost all their matches at the tournament, including being demolished 7- nil by Portugal. [music] Yet his patriotic display lived on beyond the tournament and was later cited as one of the most memorable moments of that or any football world cup. Improbable as it may seem, Jong Tay was not born in North Korea, nor had he, as far as we know, lived a day of his life in the DPRK. He was actually born and had lived all of his life in Japan.

[00:01:14]And I know what you're thinking. Who on earth not born in the DPRK would choose to play for and be a citizen of that country? But Jong Ta was something highly unusual. Born to ethnic Korean parents, he was part of a unique minority in Japan. While his father was a citizen of South Korea, Jong had, like his mother, chosen to be a chosen, a Korean who had not registered for South Korean citizenship and instead held the passport of North Korea. Jong had attended Korean language elementary and secondary schools and a Korean language university, the aptly named Korea University in Tokyo. These were all Chongzen Gako or Korean schools in Japanese. And what made them unusual is their affiliation with an organization closely linked to the regime Pyongyang.

[00:01:57]That organization is known as Chong Ryong and its function is seen to be much wider than just education. It even operates as North Korea's deacto embassy in Japan since Japan does not recognize the DPRK as a sovereign state. It was Chong Rong that had secured a North Korean passport for Jong Ty and many other Japanese Koreans like him. And here's the thing, the students inside the Chon and Gako classrooms are not North Korean citizens in a practical sense, and most have never set foot on the Korean Peninsula. So to understand why these institutions exist at all, you need to understand the history behind them, including why the government of Japan has spent decades trying to shut them down, let's take a look, shall we?

[00:02:40]The families connected to the Chosen Gako schools are part of a community known as the Zinichi Koreans or ethnic Koreans living in Japan. The history of Korean migration to Japan can be traced back centuries. On some occasions, these were economic migrants or refugees fleeing upheaval in Korea. On other occasions, such as during the Sangoku period of the 1400s to the 1600s, the arriving Koreans were captives taken during Japanese raids. But the growth of the community reached its peak in the early 20th century as the entire Korean peninsula became a possession of the Japanese Empire between 1910 and 1945.

[00:03:15]Imperial Japan in the process of rapid state building took in tens of thousands of Koreans as laborers, leading their population to clear 400,000 by 1930. Not known exactly for its humanitarian treatment of minorities, the Japanese state woefully discriminated against the Koreans. They were underpaid, subject to subpar living standards, and experienced extreme social exclusion. And when an earthquake devastated Japan in 1923, anti Korean opportunists took advantage of the chaos to spread hateful propaganda. What followed was the Kanto massacre, an explosion of vigilante violence which left around 6,000 Koreans dead. All this meant that many Koreans never fully integrated, remaining a distant second-class minority throughout the entire colonial era. And when Japan entered World War II, its exploitation of Koreans reached a fever pitch. In 1938, Tokyo introduced the National Mobilization Law, hauling Koreans to Japan in order to fill labor shortages.

[00:04:09]Almost 700,000 Koreans were forced to work in Japanese factories, mines, and elsewhere, often under appalling conditions. 60,000 are estimated to have died during the period, but it is thought that the population by the end of the war had reached as high as 2.4 million. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, its 35-year colonization of Korea ended overnight. Japan also came under the occupation of the victorious allies, an arrangement that would last 7 years until 1952. For the Zenichi Koreans, the most urgent project immediately became not politics, but language because a generation of children had grown up under forced strict assimilation. Many Koreans had been pressured to adopt Japanese names, and the Korean language had been pushed out of schools and public life. So in October 1945, the community formed the League of Koreans known as Joy Run, which moved quickly to organize schools across the country. These were improvised operations often run out of borrowed rooms where children sat down to learn Hangul, the Korean alphabet, sometimes alongside parents who had never been allowed to study it themselves. For families who had spent decades being told their language was worthless, those lessons carried enormous weight. Teaching a child to write their own name in Korean script was proof that the empire had not erased them. Meanwhile, instability on the Korean Peninsula and in Taiwan left immigrant populations from both territories in an ambiguous position in Japan. Since Korea lacked a unified government, Zanichi Koreans were provisionally registered under the name Jolon, or in Japanese, Chonson, the old name for an undivided Korea. The community was now in a kind of limbo.

[00:05:43]Tokyo treated them as foreign residents, but they couldn't claim Korean citizenship since there wasn't one to be claimed. The peninsula had now separated into the Soviet run north and the Allied run south at the end of the war. Both sides claimed the entire peninsula and inter Korean relations were both poor and deteriorating. Now, most of the 2 million strong Zenichi population returned to Korea anyway after the war ended. But hundreds of thousands chose to remain in Japan in spite of their pitiful circumstances. They did so for a variety of reasons. Some could not afford the trip back, while others feared, not unwisely, that instability and poverty in Korea would prove more ruinous than their circumstances in Japan. And there were some who, even if excluded from Japan's strict social structure, had built lives there and now had Japanese-speaking families. For those who remained, there was a small silver lining. Though Japan had made it clear the Koreans weren't welcome, the communities formed during the colonial era had arrived from what Japan saw as its rightful territory. This was still the case after the war. And so although Japan continued to see Koreans as foreigners, they were in Tokyo's eyes Japanese subjects. And so the Japanese citizenship of the community was preserved for a while. That is despite being legally registered as foreigners, many Zenichi Koreans had now lived in Japan for decades and their Japanese citizenship was their only citizenship.

[00:06:59]But the community was caught between a homeland rupturing in two and a host country that obviously didn't really want them. Soon enough, they were also caught between two competing organizations, both of which claimed to represent their interests in Japan.

[00:07:13]Mindon, formerly the Korean Residents Union in Japan, formed in 1946 as an alternative to the affforementioned Jorian. You see, Jorion, although ostensibly apolitical, quickly started to move towards the political left, expelling pro-Japanese conservatives and aligning itself with the Japanese Communist Party. The two Korean organizations began competing for loyalty within the community. Even if at this early stage, the classrooms themselves were less about ideology than about cultural recovery. Figures from the Japanese alien registration ordinance recorded 529,000 ethnic Koreans living in the country in 1947, probably an undercount. Because the circumstances continued to deteriorate in Korea in the late 1940s, more Koreans arrived in Japan in a new wave, mostly as illegal migrants. Japan certainly didn't love this new phenomenon. It drew a distinction between the colonial era Koreans already living in Imperial Japan before its surrender and those who entered Japan after 1945. This second group would be classified as unauthorized entrance and would therefore ineligible to receive Japanese nationality even though Japan still officially claimed Korea for itself. Not only that, but Japan soon began to implement measures that would in practice force Koreans to pick a side between the movements that represented them.

[00:08:33]On January the 24th, 1948, Japan's education ministry, operating under pressure from the American occupation authorities, issued an order requiring Korean community schools to close or submit to Japanese school regulations.

[00:08:45]The Zenichi community read the order as an attempt to finish what the empire had started, and resistance grew. So on April the 24th, thousands of Koreans took to the streets in the cities of Kobe and Daka in protests that became known as the Hanin education incident or the 424 education struggle.

[00:09:03]Demonstrators in Kobe forced their way into the Hogall Prefecture office and pressed officials to withdraw the closure order on the spot. The American occupation authorities responded by declaring a state of emergency, the only one issued over a civil disturbance during the entire period. Armed police moved against the demonstrations in both cities and in a sarker, a 16-year-old Korean student was shot and killed. Mass arrests followed, though the numbers vary sharply on depending who is counting. Under that pressure, a compromise emerged. A May 1948 memorandum permitted limited ethnic classes within the public school framework, a narrow concession that kept Korean language instruction alive. For the school communities, April 24th became a founding wound, commemorated for generations as the day the Japanese state used armed force against parents defending their children's right to learn Korean. And the concession didn't hold for long. Only the following year in 1949, the occupation authorities dissolved the now North Korean alliance, Jorion, and shuttered most of its schools. For several years, the network survived in fragments in ethnic classes tucked inside Japanese public schools and in a handful of sympathetic institutions. The Allied occupation of Japan blasted until 1952 when the San Francisco Peace Treaty caused Japan to formally abandon its claim to the Korean Peninsula. With its claim to Korea now turned to dust, Japan saw absolutely no reason to continue to allow any Zanichi Koreans Japanese citizenship. And so every Zenichi Korean formally lost it the very same day the San Francisco Treaty came into force, the 28th of April, 1952. In practice, their Japanese citizenship had already meant nothing once Japan introduced the designation Johnson for the Koreans in 1947. They were basically Japanese citizens in name only, no longer really benefiting from many of the rights afforded by citizenship. But after 1952, the Zenichi Koreans were citizens neither in theory nor in practice. The 600,000 strong community was now classified simply as foreign residents. And this would have profound consequences. The community still around half a million strong now had a choice to make. They'd have to find some way of getting Korean citizenship or find a way to get Japanese citizenship once more, which was technically not impossible, but very difficult and subject to routine rejection out of racism. That or they could remain stateless and ostracized as ever before, if not worse. But there was some hope. From 1949, South Korean authorities in Japan began registering overseas nationals and issuing nationality documentation. This was often done through Mindan, the language and culture organization rival to the now disbanded Jorian. Mindan had become aligned with South Korea and led to the change to secure South Korean nationality for Japan's now otherwise stateless Korean community. But there were a couple of problems. On the one hand, the Korean Peninsula dispute erupted into open war in 1950. For a period, the North Koreans had the upper hand, driving the South Koreans all the way down to a small pocket of territory around the coastal city of Busousan by the late summer of 1950. Many Zanichi Koreans, even if tempted to do so, didn't dare take up the nationality of a country that might soon no longer exist.

[00:12:12]And then there was the second problem.

[00:12:14]You see, even if South Korea was stable and citizenship was on the cards, not every Zanichi Korean wanted it. Much of the community had developed left-wing or anti-colonial views during the Japanese occupation, something visibly displayed by Jorian, which developed [music] a pronounced pro-communist personality before its dissolution by Allied occupation authorities in 1949. Anger over this suppression even contributed to a violent Mayday demonstration in Tokyo in 1952. For many of Japan's Koreans, the Republic of Korea under Singman Ree was just another Americanbacked authoritarian government making its citizenship an unattractive choice even after they had few other options from 1952. And then in May 1955, pro- North Korean activists founded a new organization, Chong Rong, or the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan. Chongion was founded by a Zanichi Korean named Han Daku, a man originally from what was by now South Korea, but who'd arrived to study in Japan at age 20 [music] in 1927. Han quickly flunked his studies and became a newspaper delivery man before becoming involved with the labor movement of the 1930s. By 1955, with financial support and organizational muscle flowing from Pyongyang, he founded Chong, putting its focus on establishing schools, as the band Joron had once [music] done. By the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the network expanded from preschools through to high schools and eventually to the ironically named Korea University in Tokyo, a full educational ladder a Korean child could climb up without ever entering a Japanese classroom. The schools preserved language and identity, but they also embedded political allegiance, doubling as community centers, where the flag of North Korea flew and its anthem opened the morning assembly. Chong's headquarters in Tokyo came to be described by journalists and diplomats as North Korea's unofficial embassy in Japan since the two countries have never had formal relations. In 1965, Japan recognized South Korea as the only legitimate Korea, lending weight to the drive for Zenichi Koreans to take up South Korean nationality since receiving Japanese citizenship by naturalization [music] was still extremely difficult. Japanese security services also treated Chongyong as a surveillance target and scrutiny only intensified as the decades passed.

[00:14:27][music] Now, it's important to mention that the vast majority of Zanichi Koreans eventually did take up South Korean citizenship. Of the estimated 430,000 non-naturalized Koreans living in Japan today, it's thought that some 400,000 have Republic of Korea nationality. Certainly the 1965 treaty helped and it is thought that as many as 65,000 Sinichi Koreans immediately swapped their Chongyong affiliation for the South Koreabbacked mindan instead.

[00:14:52]Those who chose not to become South Korean nationals retained the designation chosen literally translating as a Korean doicile. This is a term established for Koreans following the 1947 Alien Registration Act. But after many started to take up South Korean nationality, the designation became narrower and narrower in scope. In practice, Charlesi is today a byword for the Zenichi Koreans who aligned themselves with North Korea and chose not to take up South Korean citizenship.

[00:15:22]It's not quite known how many there are.

[00:15:24]Current estimates are at most 30,000 in 2025. A small community, a vanishing community perhaps, but they do exist and may even be larger than the official figures. The footballer Jong Ti is a noteworthy example. Even though he represented North Korea internationally and was educated in Chong Ryong schools, his father was a South Korean national.

[00:15:45]Because Japan does not recognize North Korean nationality in law, he has long been treated officially as a South Korean national for administrative purposes. Likewise, the Chongyong organization continues to exist, as do its schools and the Korea University in Tokyo. And the students who fill the corridors of these establishments are almost without doubt all members of this elusive and for Japan highly suspicious minority. [music] Given those numbers, it seems clear that the heyday of Chong Rong has faded. But for a long period, in spite of Japan's surveillance, it held significant somewhat murky power both in the Zenichi community and as a channel for the promotion of Pyongyangs interests in Japan.

[00:16:29]In 1959, North Korea began a repatriation program known as Paradise on Earth, selling itself to ethnic Koreans in Japan as a proud socialist homeland waiting for them across the sea. This wasn't exactly a hard cell.

[00:16:43]Many Zenichi Koreans did indeed cling to the socialist dream, which was at that time not only still very much alive, but stretched over almost half of continental Asia and all of China except Taiwan. North Korea appeared a strong state, a patriotic state, which appealed to many Koreans who'd known little but extreme discrimination in Japan for generations and who developed pro-communist leanings to boot. South Korea, meanwhile, had taken years to recover from the devastation of the Korean War. And by the end of the 1950s, it was still one of the poorest countries in the world, deeply reliant on American aid, and still just as capitalist as ever. Chongyong helped promote the paradise on Earth vision.

[00:17:21]And so families who had spent years living at the edge of Japanese society bought into it. They were promised work, dignity, education, housing, and a place where being Korean would no longer be treated like a problem. One of the people who believed it, or at least hoped it might be true, was Aiko Kawasaki. She had been born in Kyoto around 1942 and was 17 when she boarded a ship from Nigata to North Korea in 1960. As such, she became one of more than 93,000 people who would make that journey between 1959 and 1984. Both Sichi Koreans and some Japanese spouses who also suffered discrimination for having married non-Japanese. But although the campaign was framed as a return, in practice, it became something much closer to a trap. Kawasaki's part of the story disappeared from Japan, but it wasn't a particularly happy one.

[00:18:09]We'll [music] return to that later.

[00:18:10]Meanwhile, the Chongrian run schools in Japan continued their operation at pace.

[00:18:14]These became known as the Johnson Godeo, literally Korean schools. The name Chonen was deliberately used by Chongyong reflecting its claim to represent the peninsula before diplomacy had mudded the issue. Most schools were concentrated in Tokyo, Asaka, Kyoto, Hyo, and Aichi, where the largesti Korean communities lived. By the late 50s and into the 60s, the network comprised well over 100 schools educating around 40,000 to 50,000 pupils, making it one of the largest ethnic school systems in Japan. Notable examples included Tokyo Korean Junior and Senior High School, Kyoto Korean Junior and Senior High School, Asaka Korean High School, and numerous affiliated primary and kindergarten campuses that taught generations of Zanichi children in the Korean language and probably all had equally creative names. At the top of the system sat Korea University. Founded in 1956 in Tokyo as the network's flagship higher education institution. Teaching largely in Korean, it offered degrees in subjects including literature, economics, law, engineering, and the sciences while also training teachers for the Chosen Gako system. Its graduates went on to become educators, lawyers, doctors, engineers, academics, business leaders, and journalists within Japan's Xichi Korean community, with some also taking positions in Chongyong, or more rarely, but not unprecedentedly, relocating to North Korea. The organization's ties to North Korea were obvious and started to attract growing scrutiny from Japanese authorities, particularly from the 1970s onwards.

[00:19:42]Although the schools were generally recognized as legitimate educational institutions, critics argued that they functioned as important instruments of Pyongyang's soft power in Japan. Several former students began to describe pressure to participate in North Korean events or to support the return to paradise repatriation program. Defectors also recalled being encouraged to view North Korea as their true homeland, which to be fair was hardly surprising given the absence of recognition they received in Japan. [laughter] But with time, wider world events began to work against the curious school system in Japan.

[00:20:20]By the 1980s and '90s, the economic support the schools had been built on was collapsing. South Korea experienced a military coup in 1961, led by Park Chunghi, and in some ways, not unlike North Korea, fell into a period of military dictatorship. But unlike North Korea, Park's dictatorship revived South Korea's economy. The government focused on exporting manufactured goods, rapid industrialization, 5-year economic development plans, investment in education, and directing bank loads towards strategic industries. It also worked closely with private firms that would later become the famous cable, including companies such as Samsung, Hyundai, and LG. The results were remarkable. Real GDP grew at around 8 to 10% annually for much of the 1960s.

[00:21:06]Exports increased from around 55 million US in 1962 to over 500 million by 1970.

[00:21:14]This pace continued into the 80s and urbanization accelerated as millions moved from rural villages to cities like Seoul. South Korea was becoming a wealthy industrial democracy while North Korea slid into stagnation and eventually toward famine as the Soviet Union faltered and began to collapse.

[00:21:31]This would dramatically alter the landscape for the once heralded Chongrean schools. Zinichi families quietly moved their children into Japanese schools or mindan aligned ones and as enrollment thinned every empty desk made the finances harder to balance. Pyongyang kept sending money but the amounts shrank along with the country's economy. A Washington Post report in October 2003 put North Korea's annual contribution at about $3.6 million, roughly a quarter of what it had sent in the 80s. Chongyong's other financial pillar was community money.

[00:22:02]And here's where this story takes a rather interesting turn. Zenichi entrepreneurs had built substantial businesses in industries like pachinko, the pinball style gambling halls found across Japan, partly because mainstream sectors and corporate employment had long been closed to them. In turn, these businesses funneled donations into the schools for decades. But with time, this too went away. Pachinko, basically an arcade game, stopped being so popular, and many of the gambling halls started to fail. And young Zanichi Koreans had gradually started to assimilate or simply align more with South Korea, resulting in fewer donations going to the Chosen Gako. As the business and donation network aged and weakened, the cushion under the classrooms thinned with it and pressure began to mount on the schools from within. Some of the strongest pressure came from parents who still loved the institutions but could no longer defend the curriculum. Inside Chikawa, west of Tokyo, a mother named Kim Yong and her husband Pack began pressing their daughters Johnson School in the late 1990s to soften its political instruction. Kim told the Washington Post that in the beginning, even raising the idea of removing the leader's portraits was taboo. This was the kind of suggestion that could mark a family as disloyal within its own community. She raised it anyway. She was not alone. Teachers and other parents across the network were asking the same questions. A former teacher named Park Tol Jinn spoke openly about the systems problems, and voices like his gave cover to families who had been keeping the doubts private. Pushing for reform inside Chong Rong carried real personal cost since the organization was the center of these family social lives, their business networks, and in many cases their identity. But that pressure had produced visible results. In the 2000s, some schools started to take the portraits of Kiml Sunsung and Kim Jong- off classroom walls, an act that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.

[00:23:50]A course called Revolutionary Activities was dropped from curricula and textbooks began including more balanced material, even coverage of South Korean history that earlier generations of students had never been shown. With that said, not every school reformed, and the changes never amounted to a clean break with Pyongyang. Later reports described portraits continuing to hanging some Chonaka establishments, and above all, the school's institutional ties to Chongyong remained. Then, Pyongyang managed to torpedo the school's image entirely. On September the 17th, 2002, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koisami traveled to North Korea for a summit during which Kim Jong-il made an admission that stunned Japan. North Korean agents, he acknowledged, had abducted Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 80s, snatching them to train spies in Japanese language and culture.

[00:24:40]Five abductees returned to Japan a month after the summit, but the Japanese government today identifies a total of 17 Japanese citizens as abduction victims, eight men and nine women. The anger in Japan was immediate and understandable. Families had spent decades being told their missing children were runaways, accident victims, or had become jhatsu, translating to evaporated people, individuals who'd abandoned everything for a new life elsewhere. Few had realized that Pyongyang was behind these disappearances. Soon enough, anger began falling on Korean school children in Japan, tied by association to the organization held up as the source of all this pain. In the months and years that followed, reports described students hiding their uniforms on trains, and schools began advising pupils to cover their chima gori, the traditional Korean dress worn by girls at Chosen schools. Some schools eventually allowed students to commute in ordinary clothes and change after arriving. quiet institutional admission that the walk to school was no longer safe.

[00:25:44]So, here's a question that we haven't answered so far. What actually happened inside these classrooms? And the honest answer is that most of the day looked like school anywhere. Math, science, exams, sports days, after school clubs, and the long grind of university preparation. The difference lay in the language and the framing because instruction ran in Korean and social studies followed a narrative aligned with uh let's say Pyongyang's version of history. The Washington Post's Anthony Fiola visited these schools in 2003 and documented what students were being taught at that time. According to his reporting, children learned that Kimmel Sunung had won the Korean War and older students took courses with titles like Revolutionary Activities of Kimmel Sun.

[00:26:28]Although, as you heard earlier, this disappeared in the early 2000s following internal pressure. Portraits of Kimmelson and Kim Jong-il still hung in the front of some classrooms, gazing down at rows of students. At first chosen primary on the outskirts of Tokyo, Fiola described a recess scene where students marched in formation while North Korean hymns played over loudspeakers. So, yeah, Japanese suburbs beyond the fence. Inside the fence, children stepping in time to anthems from a state many of them only knew through lessons, family politics, and the institution that surrounded them.

[00:27:01]And you can kind of understand, given this onslaught of patriotism, what spurred Jong Thai's tearful display at the 2010 World Cup, but that description is from 2003, not a timeless description of every chosen school in every decade since. Later reporting shows real variation by school, grade level, and period. Some classrooms changed faster than others. Some symbols came down, some didn't. The schools produced loyalty, but they also produced accountants, nurses, engineers, university students, and teenagers trying to pass entrance exams. What stayed constant was the code switching between Korean inside the walls and Japanese beyond them. That's the part that's often missed from the outside.

[00:27:43]For many students, the school was not simply a political institution. It was the only building in daily life where their Korean name, Korean speech, and Korean family history did not have to be explained.

[00:27:57]All right, so let's get back to the mid-200s and to the school's now ruined reputation. Every North Korean provocation made the cycle of hatred against Shong Rong in Japan worse and worse. After the DPRK tested a nuclear device in 2009, the harassment peaked in scale. Members of Zidokai, a far-right anti Korean group, gathered outside Kyoto number one Korean elementary school with loudspeakers and broadcast abuse directly at the building, calling the students spies and demanding that Koreans leave Japan. And the incident dovetailed with a more pressing issue for the Chosen Gako. A fight over funding was beginning with the arms of the Japanese state. You see, under Japanese law, Johnson have never been treated as ordinary schools. They're registered as kakushako or miscellaneous schools, a category that also covers things like driving schools, not fully accredited institutions under Japan's education framework. That limits their access to public funds and has historically complicated how their diplomas are recognized by universities and employers. Now, funding might not have been a problem when support from the schools was widespread in the Zenichi community and Pyongyang was providing hard cash, but by 2010, that was increasingly not the case. That year, Japan introduced a program making high school tuition effectively free nationwide, something which extended to many international and ethnic schools.

[00:29:17]Chosen high schools expected to qualify too, but their applications were frozen.

[00:29:22]At the same time, Chong's finances became critical. The organization faced claims of roughly 62.7 billion yen, some $700 million arising from the collapse of affiliated credit unions. To address this, in June 2010, the Supreme Court authorized the seizure and auction of its Tokyo headquarters. Come to think of it, maybe that's what Jong Ta was actually crying about during his infamous World Cup appearance that same month. Then in 2012, Shinszo Abe returned as prime minister and his nationalist government soon amended the education funding program's rules, formally shutting the Chosen schools out publicly. the decision related to the lingering uproar over North Korea's abductions, missile launches, and nuclear program. Legally and administratively, the argument centered on doubts about whether the schools were sufficiently autonomous from Chong Ryong and whether tuition support could be handed properly under the waiver framework. I mean, kind of fair that people wouldn't want Japanese tax money winding up in the hands of the DPRK.

[00:30:21]Following the government's lead, various prefectures and cities across Japan began cutting or suspending their own subsidies to the schools. Families were left carrying the weight of tuition, which at some schools ran into the hundreds of thousands of yen per year.

[00:30:32]Basically, those who were sympathetic to the Chongion cause now had to be really, really sympathetic because the Japanese public school down the road would cost only a fraction of the fees. The schools and their families did not accept the exclusion quietly and lawsuits challenging the 2013 decision were filed in courts across Japan. For four years, the case's ground forward until in July 2017, the Asaka District Court handed the plaintiffs a stunning victory. The court ruled that excluding the Asaka Korean High School from the tuitionfree program was illegal, finding that the decision had been driven by political considerations rather than the educational criteria the law actually set out. Videos from outside the courthouse that day showed graduates and parents in tears holding banners announcing the win. But the celebration didn't last long. In September 2018, the Asaka High Court overturned the ruling entirely, accepting the government's argument on the Chongyong autonomy question and pointing to school textbooks that praised Kim Jong-il. Over the following years, the Supreme Court declined to reopen the issue, and the exclusions were left standing as settled law. The plaintiffs had asked the courts to say that children should not pay for Pyongyangs conduct and the courts had answered that the government's doubts about Chongyong's influence were reasonable enough to stand. The legal door was closed and the enrollment numbers were about to show what that meant. Dozens of Chosen Gako campuses quietly shut down or merged because there were simply too few pupils to keep them open. from educating tens of thousands of children at their post-war peak. The schools fell to only a few thousand students nationwide by the late 2010s. In April 2019, Alazer visited Tokyo Korean Junior and Senior High School, the largest institution left in the network during the ceremony marking the new academic year. The principal stood before his students and an enormous North Korean flag, and pledged to keep the school's mission alive despite the funding cuts and the pressure from outside around him. The school year began the same way school years begin everywhere with bulletin boards freshly covered in Korean script and students filing between classrooms in Chima Gagori uniforms. Several students were interviewed and spoke favorably, almost mournfully about their experiences. Some described the feeling the community the school brought. Others spoke of the sense of isolation and discrimination they felt outside the school walls. It was pointed out that Zinichi Koreans had long faced discrimination in the job market and many consequently entered self-employment or industries where barriers were lower such as pachinko parlor. The article also cited John Lee, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, who stated that the current climate of anti- Korean sentiment in Japan was causing the Zenichi people to cling closer together. But it added that given North Korea's ongoing weapons testing, its lack of remorse for the Japanese abductions, and the positions of Shinszo Arbe and Japan's Liberal Democratic Party, it didn't seem like there was much hope for the Tronako remaining.

[00:33:28]Now, you could say that the Zinichi Korean students getting a rough ride because of the actions of the DPRK was quite sad, not least given the legacy of Korean persecution that helped create the schools in the first place. But on one hand, there does remain the option of the less controversial schools affiliated with Mindan, Chongyong's South Korea linked rival. What's interesting is that Mindan had never had the same level of educational reach as Chong Ryong. Despite having a huge number of organizational branches, at least one in all of 47 of Japan's prefectures, there are only four known Mindan affiliated schools. One in Tokyo, one in Kyoto, two in Asaka. Chong, for its part, once had hundreds and still has dozens of elementary and high schools. Also, before lamenting the Chonen Gako too much, it is important to revisit one rather harrowing story that was touched upon briefly earlier.

[00:34:21]Remember Aiko Kawasaki, the girl who had boarded a repatriation ship with her parents at Nigata in 1960? Well, she came to find out that life in North Korea was nothing like the sunlit uplands she had been promised. It turned out the regime had just wanted to attract ethnic Koreans, especially skilled workers and technicians, to address a labor shortage. Kawasaki realized she had been deceived as soon as she arrived when she was greeted at the port by hundreds of sunburnts and malnourished people covered in soot. She stayed in North Korea for 43 years, during which time she witnessed cannibalism amidst the great famine of the 1990s. She succeeded in defecting back to Japan via China in 2003, having paid a broker to help her cross the Yaloo River. In doing so, she left her adult children behind. One of Kawasaki's daughters subsequently escaped from North Korea with her two children, but Kawasaki claimed to have no contact with her other children since North Korea sealed its borders during the CO9 pandemic. In Japan, she joined other survivors in suing over the Paradise on Earth campaign, demanding damages and arguing that they had been lured across the sea by false promises. The defendant was North Korea itself, although Pyongyang never participated in the proceedings and never acknowledged the Japanese court's authority in any form.

[00:35:33]In March 2022, the Tokyo District Court dismissed the case, ruling that the statute of limitations had expired and that jurisdictional problems blocked the claims. Kawasaki and the other plaintiffs carried the case upward rather than letting the dismissal stand.

[00:35:45]On October the 30th, 2023, the Tokyo High Court reversed course and ruled that Japan's courts did have jurisdiction to consider the case, sending it back for a decision on damages. Then in January 2026, the Tokyo District Court went further. It held North Korea responsible for rights violations against the plaintiffs and ordered Pyongyang to pay damages of 22 million yen to each of the four plaintiffs, 88 million yen in total.

[00:36:10]Now, of course, there's little realistic chance that Pyongyang will voluntarily pay. The judgment also did not settle the much larger question of Japanese responsibility for allowing, tolerating, or failing to stop the campaign at home.

[00:36:26]The network that once taught tens of thousands of children at its postwar peak has shrunk to a fraction of that size, squeezed from every direction at once. Tuition has climbed as subsidies vanished. And each generation of Zinichi families had drifted a little further into Japanese schools and Japanese lives. And yet, there are families who keep paying for something they say no Japanese school can offer. Parents interviewed in recent years have described the schools as the one place where a Korean name and Korean language are treated as ordinary rather than as a problem to be managed. As John Lee described, the decades of external pressure did not dissolve this identity so much as harden it, binding the core community more tightly to the [music] institutions under attack. So here's where our story rests today. At a small school gate somewhere in Japan at dismissal time on an ordinary afternoon.

[00:37:17]Inside the fence, the signs and chatter are in Korean. Beyond it, the streets are in Japanese. Each student stepping through that gate decides whether to keep the uniform visible or cover it up for the walk home. A few thousand still make that walk each day. And whether their own children ever will is a question no court ruling in a Saka, Tokyo, or anywhere else has answered.

[00:37:39]Thank you for watching.