Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War (Asian Voices) [Paperback]

Tessa Morris-Suzuki (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0742554422 | ISBN-13: 978-0742554429 | Publication Date: March 15, 2007 | Edition: annotated edition

Ranging from Geneva to Pyongyang, this remarkable book takes readers on an odyssey through one of the most extraordinary forgotten tragedies of the Cold War: the 'return' of over 90,000 people, most of them ethnic Koreans, from Japan to North Korea from 1959 onward. Presented to the world as a humanitarian venture and conducted under the supervision of the International Red Cross, the scheme was actually the result of political intrigues involving the governments of Japan, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The great majority of the Koreans who journeyed to North Korea in fact originated from the southern part of the Korean peninsula, and many had lived all their lives in Japan. Though most left willingly, persuaded by propaganda that a bright new life awaited them in North Korea, the author draws on recently declassified documents to reveal the covert pressures used to hasten the departure of this unwelcome ethnic minority. For most, their new home proved a place of poverty and hardship; for thousands, it was a place of persecution and death. In rediscovering their extraordinary personal stories, this book also casts new light on the politics of the Cold War and on present-day tensions between North Korea and the rest of the world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In this beautifully written book Tessa Morris-Suzuki, the consummate researcher and historian, imaginatively utilizes previously untapped archival sources and numerous interviews to give us a compelling account of how state and nonstate actors irrevocably changed the lives of tens of thousands of Korean residents in Japan who found themselves caught in the vortex of contradictions engendered by the Cold War and decolonization. Both sophisticated and engaging, this is a must-read for anyone from specialist to undergraduate who is interested in the human costs of the transition to 'postcolonial' East Asia. (Takashi Fujitani )

A remarkable and engaging book on some of the forgotten victims of the Cold War in East Asia. . . . By utilizing recently declassified documents and numerous interviews, the author brings to light not only the tragedies of this "repatriation," but also complex political intrigues involving the governments of Japan, North Korea, the USSR, and the US. The process of the repatriation and the plight of those who arrived in North Korea reveal all the paradoxes of decolonization during Cold War conflicts, while illustrating the historical significance of this episode for contemporary tensions in East Asia. . . . Highly recommended. (Choice, Dec 2007 )

A tragic tale of dashed hopes and human betrayal that captivates like a John Grisham novel, while maintaining the dignity of a well-researched and rather provocative academic achievement. . . . Exodus to North Korea is pathbreaking and fills an important gap in Japan-Korea relations, and offers the increasingly popular area of migration studies an interesting case study and research model. (Korean Studies Review )

Tessa Morris-Suzuki's book is based to a great extent on previously untapped archival sources that have recently been declassified . . . complemented with a number of interviews with Koreans in Japan who were part of this repatriation movement but somehow escaped or stories of those who ended up in North Korea and the misery they were or still are being put through. . . . [She] makes a strong case in chronicling these brutal events . . . of which the . . . West has heard very little. I strongly recommend reading this book. (Winter 2007-2008 Pacific Affairs )

The best book on Northeast Asia I have read in years. In keeping with her customary edgy and thoughtful work, Morris-Suzuki has published not simply the first substantial book in English about a remarkable recent history. . . . She has written the only nonparticipant, scholarly account of this unbelievable story. And she has done it beautifully. Exodus deserves every award the field can offer. In clear, passionate, and compassionate prose, she describes the process, planning, and people involved in removing roughly 90,000 men, women, and children of Korean heritage from Japan to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as part of the Great Return to the Fatherland scheme between 1959 and 1984. (August 2008 Journal Of Japanese Studies )

Tessa Morris-Suzuki's book is based to a great extent on previously untapped archival sources that have recently been declassified . . . complemented with a number of interviews with Koreans in Japan who were part of this repatriation movement but somehowescaped or stories of those who ended up in North Korea and the misery they were or still are being put through. . . . [She] makes a strong case in chronicling these brutal events . . . of which the . . . West has heard very little. I strongly recommendreading this book... (Winter 2007-2008 Pacific Affairs )

In a lucid and engaging style, Tessa Morris-Suzuki sheds a fascinating light on a little-known piece of postwar Japanese history—the story of the Korean residents who made the one-way journey to North Korea. By intertwining the personal stories of the individual with the grand scheme of global politics, the book illuminates the human face of power politics in East Asia. (Glenn D. Hook )

Morris-Suzuki’s meticulous research, careful analysis, and keen reflections make for a captivating story and a solid historical monograph that engages readers emotionally and intellectually. . . . I highly recommend this book to scholars and students of postcolonialism, war, migration, and international politics. (Journal Of Asian Studies )

A tragic tale of dashed hopes and human betrayal that captivates like a John Grisham novel, while maintaining the dignity of a well-researched and rather provocative academic achievement.... Exodus to North Korea is path breaking in its exposure of the hitherto hidden history of Korean mass migration to this unknown land. Morris-Suzuki fills an important gap in Japan-Korea relations, and offers the increasingly popular area of migration studies an interesting case study and research model. (Mark E. Caprio Acta Koreana )

About the Author

Tessa Morris-Suzuki is professor in the Division of Pacific and Asian History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 302 pages
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; annotated edition edition (March 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0742554422
• ISBN-13: 978-0742554429
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,614,354 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tessa Morris-Suzuki was born in England and lived and worked in Japan before emigrating to Australia in 1981. She is professor of Japanese history in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University, where her research focuses on Japan's frontiers and minority communities and on questions of historical memory in East Asia.
Her most recent book is To the Diamond Mountains: A Hundred Year Journey through China and Korea.
To learn more about this book, WATCH THE VIDEO "To the Diamond Mountains: Behind the Book" below!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Departure to Oblivion, September 25, 2007

By 

Aloysius Oneill (Vienna, VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War (Asian Voices) (Paperback)

Tessa Morris-Suzuki has written a remarkable account of the various forces behind the emigration of as many as 90,000 Koreans from Japan to North Korea in the late 1950's into the 1960's. By dint of thorough research, she has shone a light on the unexpected origins of that exodus. Perhaps most Westerners who are aware of that migration know that the vast majority of the Korean "returnees" were not of northern Korean origin but from southeastern Korea or from Cheju Island. However, far fewer probably realize the tangled origins of their departure from Japan. I have worked on Korean affairs fairly steadily for much of the past thirty years and was generally familiar with the emigration story. However, I thought the movement started as a result of North Korean propagandizing among the sad and badly treated Koreans in Japan, who numbered perhaps 600,000 in 1952 when Japan regained its sovereignty through the San Francisco Treaty.

"Exodus to North Korea" shows that the impetus for emigration came not from Kim Il-Sung or from the Chosen Soren, the North Korean front organization in Japan, but from Japanese officials. Only several years later and for his own purposes did Kim Il-Sung buy into the migration idea. The author points out that one of Kim's motives was a need for laborers, including in North Korea's mines, after the 1958 withdrawal of the last Chinese People's Volunteer units. For five years after the armistice those soldiers did a lot of reconstruction work in the North. Professor Morris-Suzuki points out the irony that many of the Koreans who went to the North had been taken to Japan in the first place as conscripted miners; they would wind up being used by the North Koreans for the same kind of dangerous labor.

Professor Morris-Suzuki identifies Japanese foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu as one of the protagonists behind the exodus. There was no reason to expect sympathy toward Koreans of any political stripe from him. The reason he had to limp aboard the USS Missouri to sign the surrender as foreign minister in 1945 was that a Korean nationalist had blown his leg off with a bomb at a Shanghai railway station in the 1930's. (For some reason, despite all her detailed research, Professor Morris-Suzuki does not mention that factoid.) It would undoubtedly be incorrect to describe the entire Japanese motivation for the exodus as "Shigemitsu's Revenge," but the project must have given him a great deal of satisfaction. The Japanese wanted to get rid of a troublesome minority that was no longer needed or useful, people whom the Japan stripped of their colonial-era Japanese nationality as quickly as legally possible. Their existence in Japan was not only politically troublesome and a drain on the welfare budget, but also a reminder that Japan's population was not as homogeneous as the national mythology maintained.

The International Committee of the Red Cross does not come off well in this account. The Japanese Government and Red Cross and the North Koreans drew the ICRC into their ostensibly humanitarian plans. The Geneva officials, despite misgivings about Japanese motives and largely in ignorance of what awaited the Koreans who left for the North, failed in a basic duty: to satisfy themselves that each person was making an informed and willing decision to leave Japan for North Korea, a place almost none of them had ever seen.

Professor Morris-Suzuki honestly identifies gaps in her excellent work, pointing out that she had no chance to talk with returnees still in North Korea and also that she barely addresses the South Korean dimension of the story. On the first point, she is too hard on herself; it would be impossible for anyone to do. Exploring the second point may be worth another book. She did interview several returnees who managed to escape from North Korea in recent years. This book is a major contribution to understanding many of the tensions and animosities that still color relations between Japan and the two halves of the Korean Peninsula. It is a wrenching and troubling story.