The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

by Chol-hwan Kang; Pierre Rigoulot

  The Chosen Soren education network remained strong throughout the 1960s and 1970s and comprised some 150 institutions spanning primary school to university. By the 1980s, however, the network had been substantially weakened by the integration of Japan’s 700,000 Korean residents into the mainstream culture, as well as by North Korea’s withering public image and the general lack of interest in becoming “a proud soldier of General Kim Il-sung.”

  Though it has lost much of its power and glory, the Chosen Soren still exists. In May 1998, it held its eighteenth congress and reelected to its head the stalwart old leader Han Duk-su (of whom more later). The Chosen Soren still owns a few dozen companies and controls some fifteen news organizations. Their profits help buttress North Korea’s economy much the way money from Miami’s exile community helps to sustain Cuba. In 1998, nearly $80 million was reportedly transferred from Japan to North Korea.

  After completing high school, my father enrolled at the University of Kyoto to pursue his great artistic passion for photography—despite being slated, as the eldest son, to replace his father in the family’s thriving casino business. The other children were excellent students who seemed destined for great success. My first aunt was a pharmacist; my first uncle, who attended the Waseida University of Tokyo, was a journalist; and the other siblings studied medicine and biology.

  The leaders of the Chosen Soren were very keen on seeing people with advanced education return to North Korea, and they continually played up the homeland’s need for individuals with knowledge and abilities. In North Korea a person could serve the people and the state rather than Japan, that pawn of American imperialism. Yet the Chosen Soren did not limit itself to recruiting the Korean elite, but worked tirelessly for the repatriation of every class of Korean emigrant. The true mastermind behind the Chosen Soren’s campaign was the North Korean state. In the 1960s, under Kim Il-sung’s direction, it made enormous efforts to lure Korean emigrants by representing itself as the last hope for reunification and the defense of national identity: for South Korea was reactionary and a puppet of the United States.

  Koreans never had an easy time integrating into Japanese life and often were targets of prejudice. The North Korean propaganda thus resonated with many in the diaspora, and thousands responded to Kim Il-sung’s call to return. Well-to-do Koreans such as my grandparents could expect to be wooed with an equal measure of ideological arguments and fantastical promises: there were managerial positions awaiting them, they were entitled to a beautiful home, they would have no material worries, and their children would be able to study in Moscow. Grandfather was rather against the idea, Grandmother all for it. Interminable conversations followed, from which my grandmother ultimately emerged victorious. No one was particularly surprised. And so it was that the family found itself heading for North Korea.

  THREE

  NEXT YEAR IN PYONGYANG !

  Grandfather agreed to the move, but he continued to drag his feet. The circumstances under which he ultimately arrived at his decision are rather comical, especially considering the political and economic stakes. Sometime in the past, Grandfather had become fast friends with the head yakusa, or boss, of the Kyoto mob. My grandfather was utterly enthralled by him and believed him to possess extraordinary intelligence, business acumen, courage, and, in a certain sense, honesty. My grandfather’s confidence in him was boundless. He and the yakusa were more than friends; they were like brothers, by which I infer they once took an oath of friendship. It is a common practice in the Far East, where two people become bound through an exchange of letters or of blood. What Europeans might consider a game for children is serious business for adults in that part of the world, and I’m sure that Grandfather and the local mafia boss truly considered theirs an oath for life. When time came for Grandfather to make up his mind, he naturally sought out this man’s advice, and it was this gangster who dispelled his last lingering doubts by telling him it was his duty to respond to the call of the fatherland, to help it flourish, and to change his life.

  Thus was determined the fate of my family, and mine with it. Everyone—those, such as my Grandmother, who really wanted to leave and those, such as my father and most of his siblings, who were merely resigned to leaving—boarded the ship for Korea. Even my first uncle, who was dead set against moving, couldn’t get out of it. Some members of the extended family tried to rally behind him, and certain cousins even offered to take him in. He put up a good fight, but winning ultimately would have entailed breaking with his parents, something he was not ready to do. He tried to explain his reasons for wanting to stay and even offered to manage the family casinos while continuing his university studies. Grandfather refused: once resolved to leave, he wanted to make a clean break of it. For my uncle the idea of leaving the country where he had grown up and gone to school, where his parents had met and fallen in love, was unthinkable. At boarding time, he ran away to his cousins’ house. Grandmother had to go there and fetch him, and when he refused to obey her—a rare thing in those days—she slapped him and dragged him to the docks, arriving just as the ship was about to sail.

  My uncle still had one option remaining: he could raise a protest before the Japanese authorities, claim that his parents were taking him against his will, and request the protection of the Japanese state. When it had come to the Japanese government’s attention that the Worker’s Party and its associations were pressing heads of households to depart with their entire families, it opened a small government office near the turnstile of the Korean-bound ships, where a bureaucrat and several members of the Red Cross interviewed departing passengers to verify that they were leaving of their own accord.

  My uncle wavered until the last moment. A terrible struggle took place inside of him. On one side was his love for his parents and his wish to obey them, on the other, his attachment to his current life and his uncertainty about the life awaiting him abroad. Perhaps he also had some dark foreboding. Still undecided, his eyes crossed his mother’s fearsome, imperious gaze, and his choice seemed already made. The authorities asked him if he personally wanted to move to Korea, and he answered that, yes, he did. And there, too, was a destiny sealed.

  On the ship over, the long-awaited dream seemed actually to materialize. The family was treated with perfect solicitude, lodged in a luxury cabin and regaled with the finest meals. While the other returning patriots were treated like ordinary passengers, my family was catered to like Communist Party cadres—better yet, like a group headed to honor Kim Il-sung on his birthday. Grandmother told me that one of the ship’s passengers was Kim Yong-ghil, a Korean opera singer who had found fame and fortune in Japan. As the ship approached the Korean coast, he got up on the bridge, turned to the promised land, and sang “O Sole Mio,” causing emotions to swell among the passengers standing within earshot. The poor man. He was an artist who wanted to share his gifts with the people, but he wound up being condemned as a spy and sent to die in the Senghori hard-labor camp—reputedly one of North Korea’s harshest. When he first arrived in North Korea the regime welcomed him with great pomp, and Kim Il-sung even granted him the honor of a long handshake. In Japan, Kim Yong-ghil has gained legendary stature, having become a symbol of the tragedy undergone by so many Japanese residents who moved to North Korea. Call me hard-hearted, but I think the only thing Kim Yong-ghil symbolizes is foolishness.

  His story—which is equally the story of my family and of all those who leapt so confidently into the maw of misfortune—mostly demonstrates the force of human illusion and its awesome power to render us utterly blind. I have since learned that at other latitudes and at other times, the same Communist powers created similar traps for making people believe and hope in illusions. This led to the misery of countless peoples: in France, in America, in Egypt, and perhaps most notably, in Armenia. Tens of thousands died there in 1947 under the spell of Stalin’s propaganda, which had painted the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia as the land of milk and honey. The Soviets allowed that much remained to be d
one and that everyone would have to roll up their sleeves, but it also promised that the ancestral culture and religion would be respected and that the newcomers would shortly see a new generation rise and flourish in social justice.

  The Koreans who enthusiastically cast off from the port of Nikada on Japan’s western coast were like those Armenians who left from the Port of Marseilles fifteen years earlier, tossing loaves of good white bread, that had been distributed to them, to their relatives on shore. Several years later they were cursing themselves and anyone who had ever told them about that land of supposed plenty. They sent desperate appeals to France, were willing to do anything just to get out. But it was too late. It was just the same for the returning Korean patriots. They set off full of confidence and hope, often with Japanese spouses and children who had only known life in Japan, and they, too, were heading for a big fall, at the bottom of which they would find isolation, poverty, daily surveillance, and sometimes, the concentration camps.

  At the end of a fifteen-hour voyage, my grandparents landed in Chongjin in northeastern Korea. My third uncle later told me about the family’s arrival: “It was like the city was dead—the strangest atmosphere. The people all looked so shabby and aimless in their wandering. There was a feeling of deep sadness in the air, and no movement betrayed the slightest hint of spontaneity.” My uncle was frightened by these shadows, who were so at odds with the earthly paradise he had been led to expect. A sense of dull terror lent new weight to the warnings his family had received prior to its departure. But what reason had they to heed the reactionaries’ drivel? My uncle downplayed one incident that later came back to him like a boomerang: when the passengers descended down to the docks, several Koreans, who had arrived from Japan a few weeks earlier, took advantage of the general mayhem of family reunions to whisper their astonishment at the new arrivals’ decision to immigrate.

  One of them came up to my uncle. “What happened?” he asked. “We sent our friends and family letters warning people not to come! Why didn’t your family listen?” My uncle turned suddenly pale. My father stepped forward and answered in his place, asking the young man how long he’d been in the North. “A few months,” he answered, “but that’s long enough to understand.” My father insisted that the Chosen Soren had hidden nothing of the difficulties and challenges involved in building the country. “But it’s just propaganda,” responded his interlocutor. “You’re not going to build a new life here; your parents will be stripped of all their belongings, then left to die. You’ll soon find out what these North Korean Communists are all about.”

  The furtive exchange cast a palpable chill. This wasn’t the sort of welcome my father and uncle had expected. Yet it was true that these detractors had only recently arrived. Big moves always take some adjustment; these people just hadn’t been there long enough. And why had that strange man come up to them afterward? Might they not have been provocateurs? Grandmother later pointed out that if their intention really was to get us to turn back, they certainly picked the wrong time and place to do it. “We were wearing rosecolored glasses when we arrived. Our faith in our new life was anchored so deep, had been cultivated for so long, that these grim warnings simply couldn’t touch us.” Besides that, it looked like the North Korea dream might still prove a reality: the receiving officials waited on the family hand and foot. While the other newly arriving immigrants were summarily routed off to various cities around the country, my family received the sort of attention generally reserved for Party cadres. Grandfather had brought his car over on the ship. It was a late model Volvo—probably the only one of its kind in all North Korea. The officials suggested the family drive the Volvo to Pyongyang while a second, government, car followed with the family’s luggage. The authorities trusted them and tried to make their arrival as pleasant and agreeable as possible.

  The family spent their first few weeks in a shabby temporary apartment before being moved, as promised, into a beautiful new house in the capital, not far from the central train station and very close to the Soviet embassy. Despite the relative prosperity of Pyongyang and the magnificence of the countryside, despite Pyongyang’s cleanliness and the majesty of its monuments, a feeling of malaise soon set in. With every passing day, the family felt more forgotten. There were no official visits, no warm welcomes from the new neighbors, no updates from the central bureaucracy, which claimed always to be awaiting further instructions from on high.

  They were a long way from the brotherly relations advertised by the propagandists in Kyoto; a long way, too, from the collective effort the country needed—the effort that was supposed to be paved with difficulties and sacrifices but also with enthusiasm and brotherhood. The family felt like it was missing some of the pieces it needed to make sense of the situation, but no one was eager to help fill in the blanks. I’m sure it wasn’t long before they began fearing they had made a mistake. Their apprehensions could only deepen before the ubiquitous propaganda, the food shortages, and the incompetence of an ultra-hierarchical bureaucracy incapable of addressing even the most basic problems of everyday life: how to get food, how to find an electrician, a hairdresser, a doctor. Why was it so difficult to get eight gallons of gas? Why were the neighborhood’s Party representatives nowhere to be found? Why was the family left with nothing to do when it wanted to make itself useful? Nothing corresponded to their expectations. Among the children, none wanted to be the first to confess the feeling they all shared: the feeling that maybe, just maybe, their parents had led them down a bad road.

  Since everyone was being kept waiting—the children for their admittance to the university and my grandparents for their prospective jobs—Grandfather decided the family should get to know the country a bit better. Making the best of a difficult situation, he took the whole family out for long meandering drives in the Volvo. It was during these vacations that the family first felt the grip of government surveillance. They didn’t get far before members of the People’s Security Force, the political police, let my grandfather understand that in North Korea outings were not undertaken without authorization. My grandfather and uncles were indignant at the admonition, which they saw as a manifestation of the country’s idiotic bureaucracy.

  At long last my grandmother was summoned to appear before officials of the Union of Korean Democratic Women, an association that the Worker’s Party controlled every bit as tightly as it did the Chosen Soren. Grandmother was awarded the vice-presidency of the association’s Pyongyang section. Later she was also elected deputy to the People’s Supreme Assembly, a purely honorific position which nevertheless made her very proud, as did the three medals the government subsequently awarded her. Grandfather’s appointment, when it finally came, was also to his liking. He was named vice-president of the Office for the Management of Commercial Affairs, the agency responsible, among other things, for managing the flow of foodstuffs into the capital. It was this position that accounted for our surfeit of select foods and the frequent honorific visits by interested officials.

  My mother was also born to a family of Koreans residing in Japan. My maternal grandfather, a native of the southern city of Taegu, had worked as an undercover operative of the Pyongyang regime. One day he was arrested by the Japanese police and died in custody. The North Korean government subsequently named him an official hero of the revolution and awarded his survivors the title of heroic family. Who would not wish to return to a country where one’s husband was a hero? My maternal grandmother, her five daughters in tow, thus left Japan without a moment’s hesitation, arriving in North Korea shortly after my paternal grandparents. The six women settled in Nampo, a large port city on the western coast. While the rest of the family stayed in Nampo, my mother and her youngest sister moved to Pyongyang to study economics and medicine, respectively. All five sisters were soon married off through the agency of a matchmaker, as was customary at the time. Still today, a fourth of the marriages in South Korea and half of those in supposedly revolutionary North Korea are arranged with lit
tle, if any, consultation with the spouses-to-be. This was how my mother and father met and married in 1967.

  By the time I was born, my family—by that I mean the part of the family that lived under the same roof: my paternal grandparents, my mother and father, and my third uncle—had grown accustomed to life in North Korea. It had more than its share of daily dissatisfactions, but thanks to my grandparents’ jobs and the packages that kept arriving from friends and family back in Japan, it was not without its material comforts. Friends and playmates always wanted to come to my house, because they knew they would get cold cuts, sweets, and desserts. Yet my grandfather’s position was also the cause of constant worry, and it eventually cost him his life. He was a businessman who had learned how to get things done under a free market system. When faced with the muddle of North Korean bureaucracy, he tended to let his frustration show, which in retrospect was not too wise. Though he only ever criticized the country’s excellent political and economic methods “for the sake of improving and strengthening the country,” his desire for reform inevitably collided with his “comrades’” lapidary work routines. He had constantly to endure their animosity, which since he refused to keep quiet, only grew. Despite all the honors and benefits that sprang from my grandparents’ positions, North Korean life was not meeting the family’s expectations. The ideological shackles foisted on every North Korean, the sometimes discreet, sometimes indiscreet police surveillance weighed heavily on the children. They judged severely the poverty of this would-be paradise and the narrowness of its intellectual and artistic life. Eventually, something inside them gave way and the long-restrained accusations began to fly. “Why did you bring us here? You promised us we would have a new life. We’ve lost our freedom. We don’t even have the bare essentials you can find anywhere in Japan. We’re not happy here. And neither are you, only you don’t want to admit it.”