Of course, like my mother, I was anxious about the future, but for me—a fast-growing thirteen-year-old—the most alarming thing was when we sat down to our first meal. I couldn’t believe the dish that appeared in front of me. They served us dog meat. Yes, dog meat. The stench was overpowering. We were ravenous, so we held our noses, but even then we gagged. I really tried to overcome my nausea, but none of us could get so much as a bite down. Except my father.
It was strictly forbidden for us to leave the reception center. So there we were—the beneficiaries of smug humanitarianism—prisoners in paradise on earth. Each family was given one room about six tatami mats wide. Icy gusts of wind blew into the room through the flimsy walls, and gravel pelted our cheeks. That first night, as we all lay side by side, shivering on the freezing-cold floor, I wondered what was going to become of us. My sisters just kept calling out to me softly, plaintively, “Brother! Brother!” They were exhausted, trembling with cold, and scared. I wanted to comfort them but couldn’t think of much to say.
We spent several weeks in this state of limbo, sitting in the cold day after day and shivering on the floor night after night, fearful of the future and uncertain what awaited us. I tried not to think about anything—to ignore my memories of the life I’d left behind and not imagine what our life here would look like.
A few weeks later, our destiny was determined. Our future home was to be in the village of Dong Chong-ri. I was nervous about this place I’d never heard of, but figured it had to be an improvement over the confines of the reception center. The journey took about twelve hours by steam train and another hour by oxcart. When we pulled slowly into the snowbound village, the oxcart came to a stop and we clambered down. My youngest sister, Masako, fell into the snow and began to cry. Soon she was wailing uncontrollably. She’d somehow withstood the horrors of our situation until that moment, but her tumble into the snow was the last straw. She’d just turned six, and her whole little life had been turned upside down in a few short weeks.
She kept wailing, “I want to go home!” as tears streamed down her cheeks. I was stunned when my father picked her up to soothe her. I’d never seen him show any fatherly affection before. He spoke to her softly and tried to calm her down as our guide led us down the road. I looked around at the ramshackle cottages with their thatched roofs sprinkled with snow. It sounds picturesque. But it wasn’t. It was desolate.
The house that we were destined to call home was being used as a party office. It was the village’s only building with a tiled roof. Our guide became excited, almost hysterical, as he pointed it out. Apparently, it was “a great honor to live in such a house.” I looked at the thing in all its jerry-rigged glory, its walls riddled with cracks. I was puzzled. Did he really believe what he was saying? If so, I could almost have wept for him. Except that I was the one who had to live there.
A belligerent-looking woman was waiting for us by the door. She spoke to us in a hectoring, hysterical tone that was to become very familiar to me in the years to come. I later discovered that she was the chairperson of the local Democratic Women’s Union. She’d dragged over some of our neighbors to welcome us. They were waiting inside. As soon as we crossed the threshold, she launched into a speech.
“These people were bullied in Japan, but thanks to the warmth and kindness of Grand Marshal Kim Il-sung, they could come back to their mother country!”
I couldn’t help but notice that our future neighbors paid little attention to her words and were busy staring at us—ogling our watches and bicycles and the few other things we’d managed to bring with us. The lady turned to me. “I’ll take you to school tomorrow, so be ready!” she said. And with that, she and the neighbors all left the house.
The lights appeared to be on, but the bulbs emitted only a thin and feeble glow. I didn’t know about low voltage at the time. I looked around for gas points, but there weren’t any. I couldn’t even find a cold-water tap. I looked out the window. And there it was, about thirty yards away. A well.
My mother was distraught. Like me, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
“How are we ever going to live here?”
The bleak walls echoed her words. I felt numb, overwhelmed, unable to think or feel anything. After the long journey, I lay down on a mat and tried to sleep. I tossed and turned and woke up exhausted and disoriented.
True to her word, the chairperson of the Democratic Women’s Union came to collect me the following morning for my first day at school in North Korea. She turned up with her daughter, who proudly announced that she was the “scout leader.” Although I couldn’t speak much Korean at the time, I vaguely understood what she was talking about. I just said, “Good morning” and followed them. There were no first-day-of-school photographs for the family archive.
When I walked in, I saw about a hundred pupils and teachers gathered in a single room. I greeted them in my clumsy Korean.
“Thank you for welcoming me.”
“Japanese bastard!” someone muttered.
And then everyone seemed to be whispering the words. “Japanese bastard!”
I was mortified. I felt the heat rising to my face. I wished I could disappear.
The pupils started pointing at my plastic shoes and other things they didn’t approve of.
“Look at his bag!”
“He’s wearing a watch!”
“Japanese bastard!”
I noticed that they didn’t have bags themselves but simply wrapped their stuff in a cloth. I resolved to do the same from then on.
After this welcome, I watched as twenty pupils put on a play. It was a crude piece of propaganda that portrayed my life up to that point. According to the play, I’d led a hard life in Japan, but thanks to the kind efforts of the Workers’ Party of Korea and the good old League of Koreans, I’d been able to “return” to my “mother country.” When it was over, everyone clapped rapturously. I clapped too, just to be polite.
School was difficult, not because of my studies but because I could understand very little Korean. All I could do was vaguely deduce what people were saying from the context. I often got called “Japanese bastard” because I couldn’t speak Korean. In hindsight, it was probably just as well that I couldn’t answer back.
On my way home from school one day, I witnessed a fight among my schoolmates. I couldn’t stand the sight of one guy getting beaten so badly, so I jumped on the bully. Although I was small, I was fearless and tough thanks to my father’s genes and the tough Korean school I’d attended in Yokohama. To my surprise, I knocked him out. Then some man in uniform grabbed my collar. He came out with the obligatory “Japanese bastard!” and proceeded to beat me up. He didn’t stop until my mouth was cut and my clothes were spattered with blood. When I got home, my mother asked me what had happened, but I didn’t want her to worry, so I just said it was a scuffle with some of the other kids at school. The last thing I wanted was to have her fretting on my account. She was already living in a constant state of fear thanks to the warning from the chairperson of the Democratic Women’s Union not to speak any Japanese.
My father, however, seemed quite content with our new life. He never hit my mother. He started working as an agricultural laborer on a cooperative. There weren’t any private farms, only cooperatives with teams. He had no choice but to also join the Agricultural Workers’ Union and attend compulsory study-meetings twice a week to explore the thoughts of Kim Il-sung and the policies of the Workers’ Party.