Wednesday, February 05, 2003
JAPANESE-BORN KOREANS IN THE DPRK WANT OUT (but life in Japan, clearly better than the "hell" of North Korea, is no picnic)
The Associated Press ("FORMER NORTH KOREAN SPY SAYS 100,000 JAPAN-BORN KOREANS, KIN IN NORTH KOREA WANT TO ESCAPE THEIR 'HELL,'" Tokyo, 02/05/03) reported that a former DPRK spy said Wednesday that about 100,000 Japan-born Koreans and Japanese nationals living in the DPRK want to flee their "hell," and urged Japan to welcome those who make the dangerous journey. Disguised in a wig, sunglasses and a gauze mask, Kenki Aoyama said those who left Japan for the DPRK under a repatriation program organized by Pyongyang decades ago are living in near-starvation conditions in the DPRK. "I would say 100 percent of them want to come to Japan. Why? North Korea is hell," Aoyama, who goes by a pseudonym, told a news conference in Tokyo. Aoyama, a Japan-born Korean, was 21 when he left Japan for the DPRK in 1960. Under the DPRK's repatriation campaign, about 93,000 Koreans, most of them originally from the ROK, and their 6,700 Japanese spouses went to the DPRK to escape the discrimination they faced in Japan. The survivors and their kin currently number about 100,000, Aoyama said. Aoyama, who said he developed missile technology for the DPRK and later stole secrets in the PRC as a spy, told the news conference that he and about 50 others who fled the DPRK don't feel safe in Japan and can't receive aid because Tokyo doesn't consider them refugees. They can't find jobs because they can't use their real names for fear of reprisals against relatives they left behind, he said. "We have no legal status here," he said. "We are both asylum seekers and refugees ... We want Tokyo to recognize us as refugees and guarantee our human rights."
