A Court Verdict for a Promise That Wasn’t: Remembering the Repatriation That Became Captivity
There are moments when a courtroom’s wooden bench does more than parse law — it holds memory. On a gray morning in Tokyo, a district court did just that, handing down a judgment that felt as much like historical reckoning as it did legal remedy.
The decision ordered North Korea to pay roughly €440,000 in compensation to four people who, decades ago, were convinced to leave Japan for what they were told was a “paradise on Earth.” Each plaintiff was awarded at least 20 million yen — about €110,000 — a modest sum, perhaps, for lives stolen, but a powerful symbolic recognition of wrongs that have long been whispered about in basements and over kitchen tables.
The Lure: How a “Humanitarian” Promise Became a Prison
Between 1959 and 1984, an estimated 90,000 ethnic Koreans living in Japan — and some of their Japanese spouses — boarded ships and planes under a government-backed repatriation program promising free education, healthcare and a return to roots. The program was framed as humanitarian: a chance for those with few prospects in Japan to start over in a homeland reborn.
Instead many found deprivation, suspicion, and isolation. Human Rights Watch and survivor testimonies describe systems that targeted those seen as insufficiently loyal, meting out forced labour, imprisonment, and the denial of basic rights. Some families were ripped apart; some detainees lived under surveillance for decades. Others escaped, after years of limited contact with the outside world, returning with haunted faces and stories few in Japan wanted to hear.
“I thought I was going to find a garden of roses,” said 83-year-old plaintiff Eiko Kawasaki, who arrived in North Korea as a teenager in 1960 and spent 43 years there before fleeing. “When I heard the verdict, I was overwhelmed with emotion.”
What the Evidence Shows
The plaintiffs’ 2018 complaint catalogued denials of food, movement, education and medical care — the very things that had been promised. Experts who have studied North Korea note that repatriation was not merely migration; for many it became a form of state-directed relocation that morphed into sustained human-rights abuses.
“This was not a simple flow of people choosing new lives,” said Kanae Doi, Japan director at Human Rights Watch. “It bears the hallmarks of state coercion, deception and, for many, conditions tantamount to imprisonment.”
Law Against Silence: A Case That Defied Convention
Bringing suit directly against Pyongyang is an audacious and unusual step. The plaintiffs’ lawyers symbolically summoned North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to court; unsurprisingly, there was no appearance. For years the case wound through Japan’s legal system: initially dismissed in 2022 for lack of jurisdiction, it was later sent back to the district court by a higher court for reconsideration.
Atsushi Shiraki, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, called Monday’s ruling “historic,” saying it was the first time a Japanese court had exercised its sovereignty to recognise North Korea’s malpractice in this context. “For survivors who returned, this is acknowledgement,” he told reporters. “It’s small, but important.”
Impossible to Enforce — and Why That Matters
Even as survivors breathed a measure of vindication, reality intruded. Kawasaki herself acknowledged the likely futility of collecting the award. “I’m sure the North Korean government will just ignore the court order,” she said.
Kenji Fukuda, lead counsel on the case, outlined a pragmatic alternative: seek to seize North Korean assets or property in Japan as a means of enforcing the ruling. But that path is thorny. North Korea’s foreign assets are limited and often masked behind diplomatic channels, front companies, or quasi-cultural organizations that have deep roots in Japan’s postwar history. International sanctions and the vagaries of state-to-state enforcement make the recovery of funds uncertain at best.
So the verdict may be less about immediate compensation than about narrative. It places on the public record — in a court’s clean language — an affirmation that promises of paradise became something else entirely for many.
Faces, Streets, Community: The Zainichi Korean Experience
Walk through neighborhoods like Shin-Ōkubo in Tokyo or Tsuruhashi in Osaka and you encounter the layered life of Zainichi Koreans — a community shaped by colonial history, wartime migration, and decades of marginalisation. Small restaurants hum with dialects, incense mingles with the smell of grilling meat, and conversation often travels between Japanese and Korean, stitched together by generations of shared hardship and resilience.
“My mother told me stories of the repatriation meetings,” said a shopkeeper in Shin-Ōkubo who asked to be called Mr. Nakamura. “They handed out leaflets like they were gifts. People believed in the promise because what they had was so little.”
For those who left, the promise was often not just nationalist nostalgia but the hope of security, a chance to belong somewhere that could be called home. For those who stayed, the repatriations remained a painful rupture: neighbors gone, names missing from family albums, unanswered letters that grew older and colder each year.
Beyond One Verdict: What the World Is Watching
Why should this resonate beyond Japan and the Korean Peninsula? Because it speaks to universal questions: How do states redress wrongs when treaty mechanisms fail? Can courts provide moral validation where politics offers none? What responsibility does a society bear for policies, however well-intentioned, that result in systemic harm?
Around the world, displaced communities are confronting similar questions — from refugees lured by false promises to minorities promised protection that turns into surveillance. The Tokyo ruling is a reminder that legal acknowledgment can be a stepping stone to broader societal reckoning, even when monetary recompense remains out of reach.
- Estimated migrants to North Korea under the programme (1959–1984): ~90,000
- Compensation per plaintiff ordered by the Tokyo District Court: 20 million yen (~€110,000)
- Time spent in North Korea by one plaintiff, Eiko Kawasaki: 43 years
Closing: Memory, Accountability, and the Quiet Work of Justice
This verdict will not change every scar. It will not replace decades of lost birthdays, vanished kin, or the stolen certainty of a childhood. But it does do something hard: it names what happened. It asks a country that closes itself off to the world to answer, even if only in absentia, for the lives it shaped and broke.
As you close this piece, consider a simple question: when a promise is broken on the scale of nations, what weight should acknowledgement carry? Is recognition enough if material justice is not forthcoming? The Tokyo court offered a partial answer — one that invites more than legal debate; it calls for memory, conversation, and the slow, often painful work of reckoning.
