North Koreans In Japan

Language, Ideology, And Identity

Sonia Ryang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429978272
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book considers the language, ideology, and identity of three generations of North Koreans in Japan organized around Chongryun. It explores how, over three generations, individuals and the community reconcile cope with changing attitudes and approaches toward Japanese society and Korean culture.

Prt One

The School

Chapter One

The Performative and Its Effects

Chongryun Teaching

“We Are the Happiest Children in the World, Thanks to Our Father Marshal Kim Il Sung!” These words are normally inscribed on a large panel on the roof terrace of a Chongryun school. As you approach the classroom, you can hear children repeating after the teacher in loud voices in Korean:

Happy New Year, Father Marshal!

The new year dawns.

The round sun rises.

All of us gather together and send our greeting to Father Marshal:

“Happy New Year, Father Marshal Kim Il Sung! We wish you a long, long life.”

(Chongryun 1983b, 60–61)

The walls of the classroom are decorated with slogans and posters. Portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are placed high on the front wall, while the framed “teachings” of the two Kims are neatly hung on each side of the blackboard. Slogans read, “Let Us Be Faithful Children of Our Father Marshal!” One of Kim Il Sung’s “teachings” admonishes: “Our students must love deeply our glorious fatherland.”

This is a picture of the standard Chongryun school classroom. To see it, you would feel as if you were visiting a school in Pyongyang instead of Tokyo. In this chapter I introduce Chongryun’s education program, which provides the key to understanding the mechanism of reproduction of Chongryun’s social relations. Chongryun’s school curriculum was radically reformed between 1993 and 1995. In Chapter 2 I turn to the effects of the curricular reform; in this chapter, however, I consciously employ the ethnographical present, so as to depict a contemporary picture of Chongryun’s pre-1993 curriculum.

Upon its foundation in 1955, Chongryun took up the task of Korean education, which had started in 1945 but had been abandoned since 1949 (see Chapter 3). From the very beginning, Chongryun’s education policy was underpinned by a clear principle—to raise children as the new generation of North Korea. This meant the teaching of the Korean language used in North Korea, the North Korean version of Korean history, and knowledge of North Korean society. In 1956 Korea University was established in Tokyo. In the 1959–1960 academic year, there were a total of 30,484 students enrolled in all Chongryun schools. By April 1961 the number increased to 40,542, excluding about 10,000 students who were repatriated to North Korea at that time (Han Dŏk-su 1986, 187).¹ The number of students steadily decreased thereafter, partly due to the reduced birthrate. Today about 20,000 out of 150,000 Korean students in Japan attend the 150 Chongryun schools (Fukuoka 1993, 55); the rest attend Japanese schools. Before we proceed with an investigation of the teaching at Chongryun schools, let us first consider how it is possible for such schools to exist inside the Japanese state.

Chongryun schools are not considered equivalent to the Japanese schools of corresponding levels; they are treated as kakushu gakkō, schools of a special sort, which is a classification given to nonacademic schools. Because of this classification, graduates of Korean high schools are not eligible to sit for entrance examinations for Japanese state universities unless they take one more set of examinations, which allows them to reach the same level of qualification as graduates of Japanese high schools.

Chongryun schools are not funded by the Japanese government. The situation has changed slightly, but only very recently, as some local governments have decided to give some kind of aid to Korean schools. The amounts are small, though: In the case of the Osaka prefectural government, where about one-third of the Korean population in Japan is concentrated, the aid for Paekdu School, which is sympathetic to South Korea and which gives a qualification equivalent to Japanese schools, was about ¥124 million for its 551 students for the 1987 academic year, while the fifteen Chongryun schools in the same prefecture were given a total of about ¥20 million for 4,740 students (Minzoku Kyōiku Kenkyūjo 1991, 60). In Kanagawa prefecture, the allowances for the Chongryun school students are one quarter of those for Japanese private school students (Ra and Kim 1992, 142). Not a single yen comes from the Ministry of Education’s central funds.

Since 1957 Chongryun schools have consistently been funded by the North Korean government. The cumulative total of North Korean education aid amounted to about ¥42 billion as of 1 January 1995 (Chosŏn Shinbo, 1 January 1995). Dependence on this fund was heavier in the early decades; recently, the arrival of the monies became intermittent, and parents support the schools to a considerable degree. The Chongryun primary school fee in 1995 was ¥8,000 per month. This is not terribly expensive in terms of Japanese private education, but in addition parents are expected to pay “support money,” which the school authorities assess according to the parents’ financial situation. A South Korean news agency estimated that as of 1989 the ratio of North Korean funds to the overall education costs of Chongryun was only 10 percent, while over 70 percent came from school fees and donations (quoted in Kim Yŏng-dal 1995, 54).

As self-financing kakushu gakkō, Chongryun’s schools are exempted from regular inspection and other forms of intervention by Japan’s central and local education authorities. Textbooks are written in Korean, edited by Chongryun’s schoolteachers, and produced by Chongryun’s own publishing company, Hagu Sŏbang, which publishes other school-related materials and study aids. Journals and other books for students are published by Chosŏn Chŏngnyŏnsa, another of Chongryun’s publishers. The editing process is supervised by Chongryun’s Education Department; no Japanese authorities are involved. In contrast, all Japanese school textbooks are censored by the Ministry of Education (Horio 1988, 172–180). Nevertheless, although categorized as second class, Chongryun schools are fully legal. Thus, in a somewhat paradoxical way, in the sphere of education Chongryun is relatively autonomous from the Japanese government.

All teaching in Chongryun schools is carried out in Korean, except for the classes in foreign languages such as English and Japanese. The curriculum of Chongryun schools largely overlaps with that of Japanese schools; it includes Japanese, mathematics, English, natural science, history, geography, physical education, music, and art. But whereas the Japanese primary schools have moral studies, Chongryun schools teach the “childhood of Father Marshal Kim Il Sung”; whereas Japanese middle schools teach moral and social studies, Chongryun’s middle schools teach the “revolutionary activities of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung.” They also teach Korean history and geography, which inevitably reduces the hours spent on Japanese history and geography.

The editorial committees responsible for textbooks are organized by academic subject at various levels. For example, there is one editorial committee for middle school English, another for high school world history, and so on. The committees consist of teachers who are teaching those subjects. Prior to 1983, textbooks for Chongryun schools were modeled on North Korean textbooks and teaching manuals. Since 1983 the committee members have always visited North Korea over summer vacation to consult with North Korean experts.

The degree of North Korean intervention varies depending on the academic subject. For example, English, Japanese, and math textbooks are subject to relatively little censorship, while Korean, Korean history, revolutionary activities of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, and the childhood of Father Marshal Kim Il Sung come under close scrutiny. Chongryun’s Education Department classifies the latter as “ideological education subjects” or “loyalty education subjects.”

It would be rather unlikely to see a second-generation child in today’s Chongryun schools; most of the children are third-generation. University students may still be a mix of the second and third generations, but even among them the third generation would be the majority. Some primary and middle school pupils are even fourth generation. The first language of these children is Japanese, and they speak Japanese at home with their parents. For the initial several months in the first year of primary school, therefore, lessons are taught in a mixture of Korean and Japanese. The syntax of the two languages is almost identical, but the pronunciation is different; the first few months are thus spent correcting Korean pronunciation. Ten out of the twenty-four hours of the week’s instruction are devoted to Korean. The bilingual teaching in Chongryun’s schools is what Josiane Hamers and Michel Blanc call “consecutive childhood bilinguality,” by which the child acquires a second language early in childhood but after the basic linguistic acquisition of the first language (Hamers and Blanc 1989, 10).

Let us look closely at the teaching of Korean. In the first year of primary school, children learn the names of familiar objects in Korean. The beginning textbooks contain only pictures. For example, children are shown a picture of a door. The teacher calls it mun (Korean). She also says to (Japanese). She then makes the children repeat after her: “Mun” This could be done without reference to the Japanese name, but because all the children must already be familiar with this Japanese word from home, the teacher uses their shared knowledge as a springboard.

When they learn “Happy New Year, Father Marshal” (quoted at the start of this chapter), children are taught that Marshal Kim Il Sung is an important, respected person, for whom the words mansu mugang, “long life,” an archaic honorific, have to be used. They are taught that it is not right to use mansu mugang when addressing their parents and grandparents, although the latter are also to be respected, according to Korean tradition. Through these instructions, children learn that the phrase is reserved for Kim Il Sung and his oldest son, Kim Jong Il. Children are then exposed repeatedly to the “correct use” of this phrase in connection only with the two Kims. The homework is to memorize the greetings for Kim Il Sung in the sentence “We wish you mansu mugang!” The drill book attached to the text has the following questions:

• Q: What kind of day is it?
• (A: It is New Year’s Day.)
• Q: What did we, all of us, do together?
• (A: We wished our Father Marshal mansu mugang.)
• (Chongryun 1983g, 34)

Through these exercises, children learn the way mansu mugang is used. When I asked one of the first-years of a Korean school whether she knew what mansu mugang meant, she answered, proudly, “Yes, I do. A long, long life for Marshal Kim Il Sung!” For her, the name Kim Il Sung is inseparable from mansu mugang.

The fourth year of primary school (age nine to ten) is a turning point. All the schoolchildren above that year must join the Young Pioneers, styled after the North Korean equivalent, and Korean classes begin to teach the vocabulary necessary for the Young Pioneers’ life. With this, the imbalance between Korean vocabulary and Japanese vocabulary becomes notable, as pupils are not taught as many Japanese words related to the Young Pioneers’ life as they are Korean. The fourth-year Korean textbook includes the following:

Lesson 19 Leaving the Hospital

Kyŏng-il, who had been sick for some time, at last became disabled; his legs were paralyzed. His mother was deeply disappointed. She went from one hospital to another, but it was too expensive for her to have Kyŏng-il’s legs checked. One doctor told her that it was possible to cure his legs, but it would cost 300,000 yen. His parents could not afford it. ...

The benevolent love of the Respected and Beloved Father Marshal Kim Il Sung finally reached Kyŏng-il’s family: His family decided to be repatriated to the fatherland. In the bosom of the socialist fatherland, Kyŏng-il was admitted to a big hospital, and the doctors gave him an operation. ...

Indeed, our socialist fatherland regards human lives as most important. The bosom of the socialist fatherland is so warm. “Thank you, our Respected and Beloved Father Marshal Kim Il Sung!” Kyŏng-il was happy, and he made up his mind to become a true son of the fatherland and a model member of the Young Pioneers, who is eternally loyal to the Father Marshal. (Chongryun 1983d, 111–115)

In one class I visited, the teacher gave a quiz when the lesson finished. She asked the following questions:

1. Why was Kyŏng-il’s mother disappointed?
2. What saved Kyŏng-il and his family?
3. What is Kyŏng-il determined to do now?

One of the pupils, Myŏng-hŭi, showed me her answers, which were marked very high:

1. She was disappointed because Kyŏng-il’s legs were paralyzed and the family could not pay 300,000 yen for an operation.
2. Kyŏng-il’s family was repatriated to the bosom of the socialist fatherland. He and his family were saved by our socialist fatherland. The love of our Father Marshal saved them.
3. Kyŏng-il made his mind up to become a true son of the fatherland and a model member of the Young Pioneers, loyal to our Father Marshal Kim Il Sung.

The test paper includes excerpts from the text of the lesson, so the answers do not require much imagination or the capacity to compose original sentences. Myŏng-hŭi was fully aware of this: “The second question was a little hard, but the rest was easy. You don’t have to think or calculate the answer, like you do in math. All you have to do is to find the right part in the text. Then you must put ‘our Father Marshal’ correctly, otherwise you get a bad mark and Ms. S [her classroom teacher] will say that your ideology [sasang] is wrong.” For example, if a student had written “the doctor” or “the hospital” instead of “the bosom of the socialist fatherland” or “the love of our Father Marshal” in answer to the second question, it would be considered insufficient. This form of examination works effectively as a device to institutionalize the “correct” usage of Father Marshal Kim Il Sung.

From the fourth year of primary school, lessons in the childhood of Marshal Kim Il Sung begin. This subject is taught for three years. In the fourth year, Kim Il Sung’s family tree (starting with his great-grandfather) is taught. It is emphasized that the members of Kim’s family are all patriots and revolutionaries. Lesson 8 includes the following story:

Lesson 8 The Promise

One day the little Marshal Kim Il Sung was taken by his mother, Mrs. Kang Ban-sŏk, to the Chilgol village where his grandparents lived.² After a while, Mrs. Kang had to go to Pyongyang. She said to the little Marshal that she would be back home before noon. The little Marshal promised that he would wait for her so they could have lunch together....

When his mother had not returned home, his grandparents told him many times to have lunch. But the little Marshal said:

“No, I cannot. I promised my mother that I would wait.”

After a couple of hours, Mrs. Kang finally came home. She was glad to see that the little Marshal had kept his promise. (Chongryun 1983a, 70–75; boldface in the original, to designate Kim’s words)

The story is simple. Sticking to one’s word is a standard topic in moral studies taught in Japanese primary schools. It is only that in the Chongryun lesson, the characters who appear in the story are Kim Il Sung and members of his family.

I was allowed to sit in the corner of the classroom when Ms. S taught lesson 8. The children wore the red neckerchiefs of the Young Pioneers, as they were required to do when they attended the class on the childhood of the Father Marshal. Ms. S bowed to the portraits of the two Kims before beginning the lesson. Whenever an answer required a reference to Kim Il Sung, the full address—”our Father Marshal” or “the Respected and Beloved Leader”—preceded Kim’s name.

Almost every child could correctly cite the epithet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Photographs
• Foreword, Gavan McCormack
• Acknowledgments
• Note to the Reader
• Introduction: Writing About North Koreans in Japan
• Part 1 The School
• Part 2 The History
• Part 3 The Search
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index