I’d never seen him frightened by anything before. When we lived in Japan, if anyone crossed him, he’d simply punch their lights out. Even when he was arrested, he didn’t care. But now he was scared, plain and simple. And that scared me to death. When I saw the terror in his eyes and heard the miserable realization in his voice, I knew once and for all that we’d been consigned to hell. It made my flesh crawl to think about it. My father had bought a pig, a chicken, and a sheep to feed his family, and some jealous neighbor had seen fit to rat him out for this gross misdemeanor. And that policeman would happily have killed him for it.
I’ve thought about that moment many times. From that night on—newly aware of where I was and where the League and the Japanese government had landed me—I studied like mad to make up for my “hostile” background. I naively thought I could overcome it with work and diligence, and was determined to do my utmost to turn things around for my family. My Korean language skills gradually improved, and I was eventually able to speak Korean easily with my father. As I made this progress, I felt myself growing slowly closer to him.
After a year in North Korea, I was in the third year of junior high, and my efforts at school were finally recognized. I became the class monitor. I guess I just wanted to be accepted and prove that I was more than a “Japanese bastard.” If one of my classmates got sick and had to be absent from school, I brought him medicine and taught him the things he’d missed in class. I saw it as my duty and responsibility.
But what were we learning? Our lessons went well beyond the standard subjects of spelling, math, and physics. We also had to learn about the miraculous revolutionary changes the divine Kim Il-sung had brought about. The most important thing was how faithful you were to the Great Leader. Teachers and every other adult I knew tried to brainwash us into becoming slavish members of their pseudo-religious cult. I played along. I learned quickly that in that sort of situation, if you want to survive, you have to stifle your critical faculties and just get on with things. I had to pick my battles carefully and not let myself get riled up by every little thing. But the trouble is that some people really do end up brainwashed. They come to believe all the bullshit. But, thankfully, there are also many who don’t. And one day, they’ll be the downfall of the house of cards that is North Korea.
When I was fourteen years old, I joined the Democratic Youth League. I also became a member of the school committee. I was sick and tired of being told, “You’re Japanese, you stupid bastard, so of course you’re useless.” I knew I wasn’t useless, and I was determined to prove it.
At the joining ceremony for the youth groups, you had to stand in front of a bunch of party officials and sing a song in praise of Kim Il-sung. Then you lined up and swore allegiance to him and vowed to do your best to promote his brand of socialism. Then an official tied a red scarf around your neck and pinned a badge on you. The red stood for the blood of the revolution and the spirit of communism.
The Youth League members ranged from fourteen to thirty years old. The lofty aim was to bring about the total victory of socialism. I didn’t give a whit about socialism, of course. I just wanted to improve my life and that of my family. Some groups only wore red scarves, but those of us in the Youth League carried membership cards.
I’ll never forget the day I received my card. It read, “All of you must protect the foundations of socialism and strive for the triumph of the revolution.” The leadership still churns out such vacuous exhortations to this day. Though normally I didn’t believe any of that nonsense, even I was kind of taken in for a moment.
I stared and stared at that card, feeling as if perhaps I actually was a person with a noble aim.
That spring, the Youth League spent a month planting rice seedlings and fertilizing them. Planting rice seedlings in the spring was the hardest job, and everyone hated it. It was the first job I was ordered to do. To this day, I can recall every detail of planting those seedlings. I was quite excited to get the task under way, as I’d never planted rice before. I rolled my trousers up to my knees and sank my feet in the cool, watery mud of the paddy field. We formed a line, seedlings at our sides. Our instructor stood on a path between the paddy fields. When he saw that we were ready, he barked, “Go!” as though announcing the start of a race. We leaped into action.
The instructor scrutinized us for a while.
“No!” he barked. “You aren’t doing it correctly. Narrow the distance between the seedlings!”
I glanced over my shoulder. And there he was, strutting about self-importantly and shouting orders. I couldn’t understand why he was telling us to plant the seedlings closer together. Or why he wasn’t doing some of the work himself.
I turned to a classmate laboring next to me.
“What’s he talking about?” I asked.
My classmate looked at me as if I were an idiot.
“Don’t you know?” he asked with a great show of incredulity. “This is the latest scientific method. It can produce more.”
I hadn’t planted rice seedlings before, but I knew what every Japanese kid learned in elementary school. If you plant rice seedlings too close together, they crowd one another out and can’t produce a decent crop. Rice Growing 101, if you like. But then I thought, This guy can’t be an amateur. He must know something I don’t. Maybe they’ve discovered something new. So I carried on. Needless to say, the crop was a miserable failure. I often wonder how many people starved as a result of that idiotic policy.
At first, I enjoyed the planting. Despite my misgivings, it was a kind of novelty. But after a few hours, I got cramped and sore. I straightened up to stretch my aching back.
“Don’t take a rest!” someone snapped at me.
I looked around. It was one of the permanent farmworkers, who was standing there doing nothing at all. I couldn’t help myself. “You don’t seem to know anything about farming. What gives you the right to boss me around like that?” I mumbled.
I checked to see whether any of the party officials were watching me. They weren’t, so I wandered off for a smoke.
After that, I noticed that the permanent farmworkers did hardly any work at all. They spent all their time telling the members of the Youth League and the soldiers what to do. But at the end of the day, the farmers claimed they’d put in a full day’s work, and the officials logged their hours without question. We didn’t protest. When you find yourself caught in a crazy system dreamed up by dangerous lunatics, you just do what you’re told.
Though I kept my mouth shut, I couldn’t help but wonder why the farmers were so blatantly two-faced. When listening to the bogus agricultural “experts,” they were embarrassingly humble and self-deprecating. But when speaking to us, they turned into tyrants. The reason for this became obvious later that year, at harvest time.
Harvest was known as the “autumn battle.” I don’t know who came up with that expression, but it has the stamp of Kim Il-sung all over it. Everything was a “battle” or a “march” or a “war.” Stirring words to encourage the people to fight hard. And always uttered with that overblown intonation that sounded simultaneously preposterous and deranged.
Come harvest time, we were instructed to line up in the fields just as we had in the spring. Some clown shouted, “Go!” and we moved off together, reaping the rice with our sickles. Sure enough, the instructors were busy barking orders, the full-time farmers pretended to work, and the only people doing any real work at all were the members of the Youth League. It was backbreaking work.
As the sun began to set, I felt a surge of relief at the thought that our workday was nearly over. Except it wasn’t. As the evening grew dark, one of the instructors told us to line up old tires on the path that ran between the rice fields. I had no idea who’d brought the tires and placed them there, but we lined them up as instructed.
“What’s with the tires?” I asked one of the farmers.
“We have to finish the harvest today,” he answered quietly. “Orders from the top.”
As night fell, the farmers set fire to the old tires. The light from the stinking flames would enable us to work all night.