I find this article absolutely incredible. It just floors me. I had no idea these people existed. But this is the reason they do it. "These schools are our only way to educate our children in an ethnic Korean surrounding,
_____________
Revolution Is Brewing at N. Korean Schools in Japan
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 10, 2003; Page A01
TOKYO -- As the morning bell tolls at First Chosen Grammar School on the outskirts of this sprawling capital, students rush to class under a mural urging them to cram for the glory of North Korea. At recess they march to blaring North Korean hymns. Their history lessons extol the virtues of Kim Il Sung -- the North Korean "Great Leader" who, they are taught, won the Korean War in 1953.
For decades this has been the drill at First Chosen, one of about 130 schools across Japan partly funded by the North Korean government. The students are sons and daughters of ethnic Koreans living in Japan as North Korean citizens, about 150,000 in total. Almost all are descendants of laborers brought here by force or lured by the promise of a better life during Japan's occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. Generations of these ethnic Koreans have pledged allegiance to the North's Communist government, their cash remittances back home a critical source of hard currency for the isolated nation.
But a revolution is brewing at First Chosen and the other North Korean schools in Japan.
Spurred by an increasingly skeptical view of the North Korean government, parent groups have launched a movement to depoliticize the schools. In the past year they have pushed the schools to remove the official portraits of the late Kim Il Sung and his son, the current ruler Kim Jong Il, from the front wall of every classroom.
In addition, parents have insisted on the distribution of new textbooks that have less North Korean propaganda and give more facts on South Korea. A new curriculum unveiled this year includes brief accounts of South Korean history while an entire class, the "Revolutionary Activities of Kim Il Sung," has been cut, parents and teachers said.
"We can no longer look at the system in North Korea as the model to teach our children," said Pak Hyang Gu, 49, a Korean language professor at a Japanese university whose two children attend North Korean schools in western Tokyo. "We can see now that North Korea is not what we thought it was. It is not a workers' paradise. We have no wish to teach our children something that is not true."
Legends such as the one that Kim Jong Il's birth was heralded by rapturous lightning bolts and the appearance of a double rainbow are no longer being taught in grammar schools here, said O Beak Kun, principal of First Chosen. High school students are still presented with such teachings, but now "they are not taught as fact," he said. "The students make up their own minds about such mysteries. This is what the parents want."
In Tachikawa, just west of Tokyo, Pak sat with his wife, Kim Yong, 44, and their daughter, Pak Mire, 14, around their dining room table on a recent afternoon. They were among the first parents to demand changes to the system six years ago. "In the beginning, we didn't dare to mention bringing the portraits down. It was still too taboo," Kim said. "When we brought up changing the curriculum, we were sometimes shouted down. . . . But each year, we made progress."
Eventually, dozens of like-minded parents at North Korean schools across Japan united in new parent groups and school forums to pressure Chosen Soren, North Korea's representative organization in Japan, which oversees the schools, issues North Korean passports and handles the government's affairs in Japan. The two countries have no official diplomatic relations.
"They were shocked at first," Kim said of Chosen Soren authorities. "But they gradually began to listen and, then, to act." Korean analysts and parents said Chosen Soren has agreed to the changes at the schools largely out of alarm that the schools are alienating North Koreans in Japan. Enrollment at the Chosen Soren schools is falling, with 20,000 students today compared to 40,000 two decades ago.
But "the schools are the only way our children will learn about the atrocities committed by the Japanese against our people," Kim said. "They would never get that in Japanese schools."
Her daughter wears a coat to cover the traditional Korean dress she wears to school during fall and winter, fearing she might be targeted by Japanese children. But Pak Mire has no intention of going to Korea, and dreams of being a fashion designer in Europe.
Wearing a hot pink T-shirt and a funky hairstyle, she said bluntly: "I don't think Kim Jong Il is a good man. I think the Japanese still have a lot to atone for regarding Koreans, but the truth is that I don't particularly like North Korea either."
Once, her parents might have scolded her, but no more. "She has the right to her opinion," said Pak, her father. "We want her to know the good things, the bad things -- the truth."
Mire excitedly interrupted. "You know, we sometimes sing a song at school about the leader in North Korea being born on a mountaintop," she said. "But I think it is sort of funny. Everyone knows that's not true. He was born in Russia!"
Her mother glanced at her daughter and smiled. "She's a smart girl."
Interviews with more than two dozen parents, students, school officials and Korean analysts indicated that discontent has been building since the mid-1990s, and quickened with the shock over the North's admission last year that it had abducted Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 1980s for use in spy training camps.
North Korean citizens in Japan, although still reluctant to speak out too strongly against the North Korean government, said their frustrations are an echo of the growing dissatisfaction among their relatives back home, many of whom have passed word of the increasingly harsh conditions there. These overseas Koreans -- the largest group of North Koreans outside the Korean Peninsula -- offer a window into their shuttered homeland, enjoying unrivaled access through relatively frequent travel to the North, the exchange of letters and packages, and even telephone calls.
After the Korean War ended, the 600,000 ethnic Koreans in Japan had the option of becoming citizens of either South or North Korea. The North moved quickly, setting up a network of grammar schools, high schools and a university, which lured not only ethnic Koreans with leftist sentiments, but also those who felt disenfranchised in Japan -- a homogeneous society where for years the bureaucracy largely prevented ethnic Koreans from becoming citizens.
South Korea, on the other hand, encouraged ethnic Koreans to assimilate. Today there are only four schools for South Koreans in Japan, with about 1,600 students, although there are three times as many South Korean citizens here as North Koreans. Since the 1990s ethnic Koreans have had a much easier time becoming Japanese citizens, and tens of thousands have done so.
The North Koreans, meanwhile, are still largely viewed as outsiders by most Japanese. They found community and purpose inside the Korean schools run by Chosen Soren. Until recently, all but a few of the ethnic Koreans holding the North's citizenship were strident supporters of its government.
"What is happening in the North Korean community in Japan are indications that the thought control wielded by the regime is weakening," said Park Towjin, a former teacher at Chosen Soren's university just outside Tokyo who is now a critic of the government. "It has become obvious that either Pyongyang has decided it must soften its doctrine to survive or that it has become so weak that it can no longer turn back the tide of change."
The decision to change the curriculum was pragmatic, said Lee Ju Hyung, Chosen Soren's chairman in the northern port city of Niigata, where North Korean ferries dock. "We recognize that it is now wise to lessen the political content in schools," he said. "Their role has changed. These children will now be a bridge to unite North and South following our great reunification."
The North Korean government still sees the schools as vital. With a dreamy smile, Lee recounted a chat he had with Kim Jong Il at a February 2002 party in the suburbs of Pyongyang. The North Korean leader "said to me, 'We must continue with the education of Koreans in Japan,' and then, in an act of incredible generosity, he gave us a $1 million donation to fortify our teachings here." The money, Lee said, later arrived by bank transfer.
The budget of the schools used to be mostly covered by the North Korean government, but that money has tapered off over the last 15 years. Today, North Korea gives the schools $3.6 million a year, a quarter of what it provided in the 1980s and early 1990s. As a result, tuition is higher, with parents paying from $150 to $450 a month, depending on the school, grade level and whether the child is receiving room and board.
Yet it is politics, Korean residents here said, that has driven many parents to take their children out of Chosen Soren schools, and others to push the schools toward more independence.
"I don't like those guys in Pyongyang, and I agree 100 percent with the changes being made," said Lee Ung Chul, a board member at the Chosen school in Niigata and president of a company that makes pachinko machines, a popular gambling device.
Lee switched his citizenship from North to South in the 1990s, in part so he could visit family members in South Korea. North Koreans cannot travel freely there. His wife, Lee Bong Sung, changed her citizenship this year. Towjin, the former university teacher, estimated from his own research that about 30,000 North Korean citizens had switched citizenship in the past two years, largely out of growing disgust with the North and its policies.
But Lee still sends his daughter to the North Korean school. "These schools are our only way to educate our children in an ethnic Korean surrounding, so we are working to change the belief system from the inside," he said. "It is not easy. but I think we are showing that it can be done."
Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.
washingtonpost.com |
