CHAIRPERSON
Dr Bernardo Brown, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
From 1959 to the early 1980s approximately 93,340 Zainichi Korean and Japanese migrated from Japan to North Korea as part of the Red Cross (ICRC) organized ‘Repatriation Movement’. Enduring severe deprivation in the DPRK, in the last decade some 250-300 of these individuals have returned to Japan, commonly resettling in Osaka or Tokyo. Arriving alone or in small kin groups these “Zainichi returnees” struggle to adapt to modern Japan.
The Japanese government takes no responsibility for these individuals. This lacuna is instead filled by a handful of civic groups who invest time, money and effort in helping returnees settle into their new environment. The leaders of these groups are located at the center of networks of exchange that reach into government and down to the grassroots level. Their work with Zainichi returnees is a quest for redemption for their support, in the 1960s and 1970s, of the ‘Repatriation Movement’ that sent so many to North Korea.
Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Osaka and Tokyo, Japan, this paper examines the problematic relationship of returnees to Japanese civic groups and the leaders of these groups, as these people strive to accrue social credit to balance their past mistakes. Caught up in political extremes and personal ambition they risk exploiting those in their stewardship and, in the words of philosopher George Santayana, may be condemned to repeat the past.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Markus Bell is a PhD candidate in the anthropology department of The Australian National University. He is researching on North Korean defectors in Japan and the abductee issue and has published widely on these subjects. He can be contacted at mpsbell@gmail.com.
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