최근 한 50대 탈북자 여성을 인터뷰한 적이 있다. 그는 지나가는 말로 1987년 혹은 1988년 즈음 북한의 한 농촌지방에 살 때 미국 영화를 봤다고 말했다. 깜짝 놀라 어떻게 그런 일이 가능하냐고 물었다.
그 시대엔 북한 극장에서 서구 영화가 상영돼선 안됐고 VCR은 미국에서 새로 나온 재규어 자동차보다도 상대적으로 비싼 물건이었을 것이다. 그러나 그는 한 이웃집에서 VCD를 봤고, 그 이웃들은 일본에서 귀환한 사람들이라고 했다. 실제로 40여년 간 일본인 귀환자들은 북한 사회에서 매우 부유한 집단에 속했다. 현재는 그 영광이 거의 완전히 사라졌지만 말이다.
1930년대 일본은 한국에서 많은 노동력을 들여오기 시작했다. 강제로 노동에 동원된 사람들이 있었던 반면 자발적으로 일본으로 간 사람들도 있었다. 어쨌든 1945년까지 일본에는 200만 명이 넘는 한국인이 있었다. 대부분은 2차 세계대전 이후 일본이 항복하면서 바로 돌아갔지만 70만 명 가량은 갈 곳이 없다는 이유로 일본에 남을 것을 결정했다.
이렇게 일본에 남은 사람들은 제도적으로나 일상생활에서나 자신을 사회적 차별의 희생양(犧牲羊)이라고 생각했다. 1952년 그들은 일본 시민권을 빼앗겼고, 대부분이 저임금 비숙련 노동을 통해 살아남아야만 했다. 이러한 공식적인 차별 조치는 일본 사회에 만연한 한국인에 대한 경멸적 태도로 더욱 강화됐다.
대다수 한국인들은 일본에서 차별을 당하면서 자연스럽게 도시 프롤레타리아 계급 구성원이 되어 갔고 그 결과 일본 급진좌파나 일본 공산당의 적극적인 지지자가 됐다.
▲ 도쿄에 있는 조총련 본부 www.en.wikipedia.org
1955년 조총련으로 알려진 재일본조선인총연합회가 결성됐다. 조총련은 결성과 함께 30만 명에 달하는 구성원들의 전폭적인 지지를 받았다. 그들은 자동적으로 북한시민이라고 여겨졌다. 그들의 대부분은 대개 한반도의 남쪽에서 태어났거나 일본에서 태어났으며 그들의 ‘고국’이 어디인지 본 적도 없다.
조총련은 ‘국가 안의 또 다른 국가’였다. 그들은 그들만의 법인회사, 신문사, 금융기관 그리고 한국어 학교 네트워크를 가지고 있었다. 학교는 김일성과 김정일의 초상화로 장식돼 있고 학생들은 북한 동포들이 누리는 풍요로움에 대해서 배웠다. 또 위대한 원수 김일성에 대한 글쓰기는 필수 교육과정이다.
애초부터 조총련의 궁극적인 목적은 (완곡하게는 ‘송환’이라고 말할 수 있는) 구성원들의 북송을 꾀하는 것이었다.
1960년대 북한은 가난과 억압이 있는 사회였고 어떤 면에서는 그들과 경쟁하는 스탈린주의자들의 러시아보다 더 스탈린주의적이었다.
북한당국은 곧 숙련된 기술이나 지식이 있는 조총련계 사람들이 가치가 있을 뿐만 아니라 일본 자금을 북한으로 끌어 오는데 이용할 수 있을 것이라고 생각했다. 북한 주민들은 편지를 써서 보낼 수 없는 반면 이들은 일본에 있는 친척들과 계속 연락을 취할 수 있었고 이런 기회를 이용해 돈이나 다른 형태의 물질적 지원을 요구할 수 있었다.
www.en.wikipedia.org
1990년대 초반 이들의 상황은 나빠졌다. 일본에서 유입됐던 자금은 빠르게 고갈되어 갔고 이는 20년 전에 비하면 10%도 안되는 수준이었다. 이것은 어느 정도 일본정부의 정책에 따른 결과였다. 2000년대 초반 악명 높은 납치 스캔들이 터지면서 일본 정부는 교역을 제한하고 사적인 자금이 북한으로 유입되는 것을 금지했다.
송금이 줄어든 것은 세대가 교체하고 한국인 집단 내부에 많은 변화가 생긴 점도 상당부분 기인한다. 2000년대 초, 북한으로 가게 된 이들을 알던 사람들은 대부분 60, 70대였고 직계 친척들은 죽었거나 죽음을 앞둔 사람들이었다. 직계 친척도 아닌 이들이 북한의 선전부를 믿을 만큼 순진한 이들에게 기꺼이 돈을 보내줄 이유가 거의 없다는 것은 말할 필요도 없다.
조총련의 영향력이 약해지며 한때 강대했던 조직은 거의 파산 지경에 이르렀고 이제는 거의 4만 명도 남지 않게 됐다. 경제적인 붕괴와 기아에 허덕이는 북한으로선 이들의 자금에 접근할 수 없다는 것이 시기적으로 굉장히 안 좋은 것이었다. 한때 북한을 도왔던 송금 자금은 옛날 일이 돼버렸다.
오늘날에도 이들 대부분은 (첫 세대가 살아 있기는 하지만 오히려 그들의 자식이나 손주일 것이다) 북한의 평범한 주민들과 별다를 바 없는 삶을 산다. 일본당국이 이들을 여전히 의심의 눈초리로 바라보지만 이 특별한 그룹이 가졌던 의도나 목적은 더 이상 북한 사회에 독립적인 실체로 존재하지 않는다.
글=안드레이 란코프 (Andrei Lankov 국민대 교수, 전 호주국립대 한국사 교수, 레닌그라드대 한국사 박사, 김일성종합대·레닌그라드 동양학부 졸업)
번역=최선화 기자 sun@theasian.asia
▲ 일본에 있는 조총련계 학교 교실 www.en.wikipedia.org
Chosen Soren, a state for leftist Koreans in Japan
Recently I was interviewing a North Korean refugee, a woman in her 50s. In passing she mentioned that she saw her first US movie in 1987 or 1988 while living in a North Korean countryside. I was surprised and asked how that could possibly be case.
In those days in North Korea, Western movies would not be shown at theaters, and a VCR would probably be more expensive in relative terms than a brand new Jaguar would be now in the United States. She explained that she saw it in the house of her neighbours who had a VCD due to the fact that they were returnees from Japan. Indeed, for near forty years, ‘Japanese returnees’ constituted an unusually affluent group within North Korean society. Nowadays, their glory has passed almost completely.
These people found themselves in North Korea under a rather peculiar set of circumstances. Starting from the 1930s, Japan began to import labor from Korea in large quantities. Some people (like, say, parents of the incumbent South Korean President Lee Myung-bak) went there voluntarily whilst many others were forcibly mobilized. At any rate, by 1945, there were over two million ethnic Koreans residing in Japan. Most of them were to move back immediately after Japan’s surrender at the end of World War Two. But some 700,000 would elect to stay in Japan, often because they had no place to go.
Those left behind in Japan were to find themselves the victims of social discrimination, both institutionalized and informal. In 1952, most of the ethnic Koreans were deprived of Japanese citizenship. In 1952, they also lost their right to public housing and a number of welfare benefits. Most of them had to survive by doing unskilled, low paid jobs. These official discriminatory measures were further reinforced by the generally contemptuous attitude that Japanese society took to them.
Facing such discrimination, and being, overwhelmingly, members of the urban proletariat, many of the ethnic Koreans naturally gravitated towards the Japanese hard-core Left and became active supporters of the Japanese Communist Party. Soon though, a major disagreement arose among Korean expat community leaders. While all agreed that both the nation and communism were important, some believed that Koreans’ nationalist goals should be given clear priority over the international goals of the world communist movement. These people who can be described as left-leaning nationalists with strong sympathy towards Pyongyang, were soon to establish contacts with the North Korean government, and eventually won the support of the majority in the ethnic Korean community.
In December 1955, The General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (known short-hand in Korean as Chongryon and in Japanese as Chosen Soren)was established by the leftist nationalists. Soon after its foundation, Chosen Soren boasted a massive support within community, with some three hundred thousand members. All of these people by default were considered to be citizens of North Korea, even though the overwhelming majority of them were essentially born in the southern part of the Korean peninsula or in Japan and never seen their supposed ‘native country’.
In due time, Chosen Soren was to become a state-within-a-state. It had its own corporations, newspapers, financial institutions and, significantly, it ran its own network of Korean-language schools. Like was the case with schools in North Korea proper, the classrooms were adorned with the portraits of Great Leader Kim Il Sung and the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. The school curriculum taught ethnic Korean children about the affluence enjoyed by their brethren in North Korea. In due time, the writings of Great Leader Generalissimo Kim Il Sung would also become an obligatory element within the school curriculum.
From the very beginning, it was assumed that the ultimate goal of Chosen Soren was to engineer the sending (euphemistically known as ‘repatriation’) of all its members to North Korea. As recent research by Tessa Morris-Suzuki indicates, the idea essentially originated in Japanese right-wing political circles. These people perceived the militantly anti-Japanese, pro-Pyongyang Korean association as a potential fifth column, even more so since close interactions between Chosen Soren and North Korea’s intelligence agencies were an open secret at the time.
Needless to say, the initiative was much welcomed in Pyongyang as well as by the Japanese left – politics does indeed sometimes produce strange bedfellows. Technically the repatriation began in 1959 and lasted until 1984, but the vast majority of some 93,000 Korean returnees left Japan for North Korea in the early 1960s.
They expected to find themselves in the paradise presented to them in the glossy propaganda magazines of North Korea (and also much extolled by the Japanese Left). Their first impressions however were decidedly disappointing, and alas, not misleading. The point of almost all arrivals from Japan was the dirty and visibly poor port of Wonsan on the East Coast of North Korea. If the returnees were greeted by earlier arrivals, they were often quietly told that they had made a terrible mistake which unfortunately could not be fixed. Indeed, this was a decisively one-way trip. Once returnees disembarked from the ship, they would have to stay in North Korea for the rest of their lives (most of them did not realize this when they boarded the ship in the Japanese port of Niigata).
North Korea of the 1960s was a poor and repressive society – in a sense, it was remarkably more Stalinist than Stalin’s Russia, which was what it was emulating. Returnees from Japan were bitterly disappointed and, alas, their experiences in Japan had not taught them to keep their mouths shut. As one North Korean woman told me whilst talking about these people in the 1970s, “They came from a poorly controlled and liberal Japan. They did not know what must remain unsaid, and what could be said only with the most trusted friends”. Indeed from anecdotal evidence it seems that the average returnee faced unusually high chances of being arrested for making subversive statements about the Glorious Party or Great Leader.
However, very soon, the North Korean authorities discovered that the new arrivals were valuable not only because some of them had useful skills and/or technical knowledge, but also because the community as a whole could be used to pump money from Japan. Whilst North Koreans were not allowed to write and send letters overseas, an exception was made for returnees. They were allowed to stay in touch with their relatives back in Japan and most of them would use this opportunity to ask for money and other forms of material support.
Family ties were very strong among the Koreans of their generation, so requests were usually satisfied. It did help also that income gap between Japan and North Korea, already huge in the 1960s, kept growing in the subsequent decades. As a result, sums that would make a real difference for the returnees were comparatively small for the average family back in Japan.
Visits were encouraged as well, but it was nearly always visits from Japan to North Korea. The visitors came with bagloads of household items, consumer electronics and of course, fat envelopes stuffed with Japanese yen.
These developments soon became known in Japan and by the mid-1960s, interest in returning to the fatherland dwindled. Ideological fiction was maintained though, for the next few decades. With the passage of time however, the influence of Chosen Soren declined. The second and third generation of ethnic Koreans were much more ready to integrate into Japanese society and at the same time, anti-Korean racism in Japan began to decline significantly. Nonetheless, Chosen Soren remained a significant political and social force until the mid-1990s.
Meanwhile, the nearly 95,000 returnees maintained a strange existence in North Korea. They were simultaneously discriminated against and privileged. In most cases, they could not join the nomenklatura or make a serious career in the party-state, even though they could and often did become successful professionals, engineers and academics. At the same time, most of the returnees could rely on regular money transfers from Japan which made them remarkably wealthy by the then meager North Korean standards. They could eat well, they had TV sets and from the 1980s, even VCRs and fridges.
If their relatives in Japan were willing to make a particularly large ‘contribution’ to state coffers, they could even move to Pyongyang and, if the sum was sufficient enough, could find themselves in the first-class apartment, usually inhabited by army Generals and Central Committee officials. The sums we are talking about equate to around $10,000 USD in the 1980s – a substantial sum, no doubt, but one should consider the fact that if such apartments were sold on the then emerging real estate black market, they would felt a price three times higher.
Since the early 1990s, however, the situation for returnees deteriorated. Money transfers from Japan began to dry out very fast and as of today they are around 10% (or less) of what they used to be some 20 years ago. To some extent, this was the result of Japanese government policy: in the early 2000s, following the notorious abduction scandal, the Japanese government introduced a number of bans which heavily restricted trade with and private payments to North Korea.
To a much larger extent, though, the decline in remittances resulted from generational change and other changes in the ethnic Korean community. By the early 2000s, those people who once knew the returnees personally were in their late 60s or 70s. Actually, most of their immediate relatives were dead or dying. Needless to say, their second cousins or nephews are much less willing to provide for family members who once were naive enough to believe Pyongyang’s agitprop department. The influence of Chosen Soren has also waned considerably and the once mighty organization is nearly bankrupt and has hardly more than 40,000 members.
The timing could not have been worse, since returnees lost access to funds at the time of economic disintegration and famine in the North. The remittances often helped them to muddle through, but their affluence is now a thing of the past. Nowadays, most of the returnees (or rather their children and grandchildren, since few of the first generation members are still around) live lives which are indistinguishable from those of common North Koreans. While the authorities look upon them with some residual suspicion, for all intents and purposes this unique group has ceased to exist as a separate entity within North Korean society.
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