Heaven across the water: migration, memory, and identity of North Korea’s Zainichi returnees

Abstract

Between 1959-1984, approximately 87,000 Koreans and 6,000 Japanese spouses migrated from Japan to North Korea as part of a ‘repatriation project’. This project was organised and facilitated by the Japanese and North Korean governments with the collaboration of the International Committee of the Red Cross. ‘Repatriates’ endured severe deprivation in North Korea. In the last decade, some 300 people have returned to Japan, completing a migratory loop between the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese Archipelago. These ‘Zainichi returnees’ commonly resettle in Osaka or Tokyo, areas with large ethnic Korean populations. This thesis examines the lives of Zainichi returnees, their intergenerational, transmigratory journey, and the significance of their memories of movement and resettlement in shaping a diasporic identity. I contextualise this migration within the larger social processes and historical forces that shaped the latter half of the twentieth century in Northeast Asia, and the epoch defining challenges that continue to cast a long shadow on relations between North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. I seek to address five key questions: first, how do multiple migrations affect the identity of migrants? Second, how do migrants experience and negotiate the liminality of displacement on an everyday basis? Third, what kinds of belonging emerge through the everyday lived experiences of ‘uprootedness’? Fourth, how does memory shape and inform the movement and resettlement of migrants? Fifth, what do the lives of North Koreans in exile say about the dynamics of power in contemporary Northeast Asia? Show more