“This is where you’ll be living from now on,” he told me.
It was a rehabilitation center under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, full of alcoholics and people too sick to make a living. It was called Hamakawa, located in the Shinagawa ward in Tokyo. What a place.
I was frustrated, to put it mildly. Why was I being treated like I was ill? We were wedged in, four people to a tiny room with only curtains as partitions. There were drug addicts shaking with full-body tremors as they went through withdrawal, tattoo-covered people muttering to themselves all day and all night. I would have felt sorry for them if I’d had the space in my mind and heart for such things. But I didn’t. I was just desperate to find a job and earn a living, and angry about anything that stood in my way.
But then something incredible happened. After a few days, the media started contacting me—people from the newspapers, including the Mainichi, the Yomiuri, the Japan Times . . . I had no idea how they had heard about me. The only people who were supposed to know I’d come back to Japan were a few individuals in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a few others at the Immigration Bureau. I panicked and contacted the First Secretary, except he wasn’t the First Secretary anymore. By this time, he was working at the Asia Pacific Bureau.
He was shocked when I told him what had happened.
“Christ! If it gets out that the Japanese government helped you, we’ll all be fired. Please don’t talk to anyone,” he begged.
I appreciated everything that the ministry had done for me, so obviously I wasn’t going to start talking to journalists. But then a member of parliament said he wanted to meet me. He was connected to a parliamentary committee that had worked on a North Korean abduction scandal when a number of Japanese citizens had been kidnapped, drugged, and whisked off to North Korea.
I decided to go see him in the hope that maybe, somehow, he could pull some strings and help get my family out.
He was frank and friendly. “I just wanted to meet you. You’ve lived through quite an ordeal, haven’t you?” he said.
I kept waiting for him to tell me what he wanted from me—or to give me a chance to talk about my family. But he had little to say except, “Good luck!”
After thirty minutes, I left.
Then I got the chance to meet another member of parliament, but he too ignored my pleas for help. Even worse, I could tell that he didn’t want to get involved in any way.
They all seemed to be the same. I was shocked to realize that they just weren’t interested in North Korea. I kept trying to make my case for my family, but it all fell on deaf ears.
After a year, I left Hamakawa. The truth is I never succeeded in finding a decent job. I tried everything, but it wasn’t easy. I hated that I’d been reduced to living on welfare and that I couldn’t send anything to my wife and children, but I wasn’t exactly an ideal candidate. Just imagine what my résumé looked like. Educational background? Tricky one, that. Work experience? You really want to know?
I once got a job in a cleaning company. On my résumé, I claimed to have returned from South Korea, following the First Secretary’s advice. Trouble was, people asked a lot of questions. What was South Korea like? What was this like, what was that like? Well, I’d never been there, so of course I couldn’t answer. Gradually a rumor spread that I was a North Korean spy, so I eventually had to leave.
After that, I went to many job interviews, but I failed every one of them because of the bad economy, my age, my unclear background, and who knew what else.
In addition to my work status, I had to endure another source of grief, a much more personal one. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs tracked down my mother’s relatives, but nobody wanted to see me. When I phoned one of my cousins, he suggested that we meet up. But the second time I called, he told me not to call him again and hung up on me. He probably thought I was going to ask him for money.
So no job. No family. No friends. Sure, I was glad to not be starving anymore. But it was hard being all alone. It was hard to feel so abandoned by a government that was well aware that we were practically browbeaten into emigrating. Still, they claimed that because we left of our own free will, we were not eligible for support or help.
One day, I was penniless and so desperate that I phoned the First Secretary.
“I need your help,” I said.
“I can’t meet you. I’m too busy. The Japanese government made sacrifices for you. You need to understand that. You need to find a way to live on your own and support yourself,” he said.
I really wanted to say, “Have you ever built a shack with your bare hands? Have you hauled your mother’s corpse up a mountainside? Have you struggled to survive on a diet of weeds?”
But it wasn’t his fault. He was a good man at heart. He just didn’t understand.
The first Inter-Korean Summit took place in Pyongyang in June 2000. The Japanese media said it marked “progress toward North-South reconciliation.”
Forget about the missiles.
Forget about the violation of territorial waters.
Oh, and we got it wrong about Kim Jong-il. Maybe he isn’t so bad after all. It was time for us to “modify our views.”
I saw the pictures of Kim Jong-il talking to Kim Dae-jung, the president of South Korea. They were all over the television at the time. But I couldn’t bear to watch.
Every day, I thought of my family still struggling to survive in North Korea. And countless others like them, slowly starving to death. I spent many nights lying awake, tormented by visions of them.
Kim Jong-il’s hold on power was tenuous at best. After the death of Kim Il-sung, the leading members of the party changed allegiance and took off to South Korea. And then the leading members of the military who were close to Kim Il-sung disappeared too. Kim Jong-il knew all the talk of unification was just a farce. He cared only that he was on the world stage and that he was finally being taken seriously.
“A country may be destroyed, but its mountains and rivers will always remain.” I’d always taken this expression to mean that, whatever happens, the scenery of your spiritual home will never change. But I was wrong. Or rather, the expression was wrong. After I returned to Japan, I visited the town where I was born. I yearned to regain a sense of belonging, and I thought that the once-familiar scenery would bring back some sweet memories of my childhood and help heal my pain. But no. The town had become unrecognizable. And the scenery that I thought would comfort and console me had vanished. I’d lost not only my country, but also my birthplace. And so here I remain, in a place where I don’t belong.
In a sense, I still don’t even exist; I remain in limbo between two worlds. The Japanese government still hasn’t officially admitted that I ever returned to Japan at all. So here I am, officially “not living” here. A life of “not living.” That seems to be my curse.
Though my life is far easier in terms of survival, I remain haunted by very simple things. When I’m eating something considered a basic food in Japan—far simpler than anything most Japanese people eat, plain rice, let’s say—I look at it and wonder how many meals it would provide in North Korea. And not just how many meals, but how many days of meals. The trouble is, such thoughts make it impossible for me to eat because my heart swells with grief. So when I feel that way, do you know what I do? I go to the ocean and toss the rest to the seagulls. I want to give this food to my family in North Korea. But I can’t. So I entrust it to the seagulls. And in my heart, they carry it off to my family. And I weep.
I learned from a letter long ago that my wife had died. She was buried on a mountainside in Hamju. The last letter I received from Myong-hwa came in the autumn of 2005.