DPRK, South Korean leftists object to alleged Japanese suppression of Chongryon
EAST ASIA – The Japanese agreement’s alleged actions against a long-standing group of pro-Pyongyang Koreans in Japan have raised hackles from Japanese-Korean and South Korean activists and North Korean government officials.
The General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon) is a group, mainly consisting of older people, whose members claim Joseon (North Korean) citizenship. Chongryon’s official Website is illegal in the Republic of Korea. The Japanese government has often been accused of taking repressive measures against the organization. In a February 8 statement by the Youth and Students Solidarity for Implementing the June 15 Joint Declaration in South Korea headlined, “The Japanese authorities and right-wing forces, stop at once suppression of Koreans in Japan.”
The statement noted a number of actions by Japanese police, including allegedly illegal searches of Chongryon’s offices, homes of Koreans in Japan, and an elementary school. It is unclear from the language from the report in a February 12 article published by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the official news agency of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), it appears that Japanese police also arrested an “official of Chongryon and a Korean businessman.” The article did not specify whether the businessman claimed North or South Korean citizenship.
“Japan is inciting the anti-DPRK confrontation and intensifying the suppression of Chongryon and Koreans in Japan under the pretext of the DPRK’s access to (the) nuclear deterrent of self-defense,” the statement continued. “But such actions are evidently intended to revive militarism,” a reference to the 1930s and 1940s era of fascism in Japan.
“We, youth and students,” the statement added, “will launch a free struggle, mindful that the Japanese authorities’ crackdown upon Korean residents in Japan is immediately the suppression of the Korean nation, and it is mainly designed to realize Japan’s ambition for reinvasion of the Korean peninsula and (for the revival of) militarism.”
DPRK officials, communicating through the KCNA, have also denounced the anti-Chongryon campaign, claiming that Japan is violating pro-Pyongyang activists’ civil liberties.
Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945. Following World War II, US forces occupied the South, while Soviet troops occupied the North. The ROK and the DPRK were established as separate, independent republics in 1948. Soviet troops withdrew from the DPRK in late 1948, US troops from the ROK in the summer of 1949. However, US soldiers returned to South Korea a year later at the start of the Korean War and have never left. Chinese soldiers entered to assist the DPRK in 1950, but withdrew in 1958, leaving the North without foreign soldiers ever since.
Many Koreans and persons of Korean residents reside in Japan, but under Japanese law, most must cling to some sort of Korean citizenship. After the division of the peninsula, Chongryon members and those of similar views elected to maintain Choson (Joseon) citizenship, even though Japan still does not formally recognize the DPRK. Chongryon is in decline; most Koreans in Japan either align themselves with the ROK or remain neutral. The two Koreas are in the midst of talks with the US, Japan, the Russian Federation, and the People’s Republic of China in a push for the DPRK to de-nuclearize in exchange for energy aid.
