The Aquariums of Pyongyang (5 page)

Grandfather's social and economic star was continually on the rise. When the Second World War broke out, he abandoned the novelty jewelry business for the more lucrative rice trade. Later he opened up a gaming room across from the Kyoto train station, an
inspired idea that met with instant success. So great were the profits that Grandfather soon opened up a second casino, then a third, all of which continued to draw great crowds.

The number of Korean immigrants in Japan grew tremendously during the war. Within a few years, their numbers had swelled to 2 million. In addition to those who had come earlier, like my grandparents, hundreds of thousands of men and women were brought over during the war—often forcibly—to help offset labor shortages. Following the end of hostilities, many Koreans stayed on, but the exile community was deeply divided: one part supported the Sovietbacked North Korean administration, the other the Americanbacked administration in the South. With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, emotions flared higher. Positions hardened. The Korean residents formed two ideologically rival associations. The one that favored South Korea called itself
Mindan
, the Democratic Association, while the association that supported the North took the name it still holds today,
Chosen Soren
(Japanese) or
Chochongryon
(Korean), the Federation of Korean Residents in Japan. The latter group held more sway among the exile community; not only was the South having trouble getting its economic motor started, its government had taken in many well-known reactionary errants and given refuge to former pro-Japanese collaborators. The North, by contrast, was posting consistent economic growth and demonstrating unwavering national loyalty.

My grandparents had no idea that North Korea's leadership, like that of Europe's popular democracies, had fallen under Moscow's control and that the Communist leaders who once fought against foreign occupation were being systematically eliminated. Nor did they know that fabricated statistics made North Korea's barely passable economy look like a magnificent success.

Grandfather followed his wife and the rest of the Korean Communists and joined the Chosen Soren, under whose banner were assembled the majority of the poorest Korean emigrants. My grandfather was a decidedly odd case. His massive fortune counted little compared to the influence of his powerful wife. Though not insensitive to the patriotism of his Chosen Soren comrades, what truly mattered to him was joining in my grandmother's feverish activity. While continuing his private businesses, he agreed to direct the association's economic department and even contribute money to it. The growth of Chosen Soren's Kyoto branch, I learned, had a lot to do with his direct financial support.

In June 1949, the Koreans who previously had belonged to the Japanese Communist Party migrated en masse into the newly created Korean Worker's Party, as the North Korean communist party was called. Like its counterparts all over the world, the KWP showed a formidable knack for creating associations with the allure of democracy and openness to the general public. There were women's associations, movements for the defense of culture and peace, sports clubs, and various other groups which the Party could influence from the shadows. My grandmother was among the Party's most active organizers and eventually became director for the Kyoto region. This responsibility came as a supplement to her ordinary commitments as a party member. Had it been humanly possible, I'm sure her relentless activism would have driven her to join even more associations.

Yet she somehow still found time to take charge of her children's upbringing, which she did in a manner all her own. During their years in Kyoto, my grandparents lived in an opulent house located in a picturesque, well-to-do neighborhood dotted with vestiges of
Japan's historic past. The children had their own rooms. The kitchen, or rather kitchens, for there were more than one, were enormous, and paradox of paradoxes, their servants were Japanese—at a time when most domestic workers in Japan were Korean. These luxuries had my grandfather's hand written all over them. Nothing frightened my grandmother more than the effect such comforts might have on her and her family. Was anything more noxious to one's sense of justice than needless luxury? Were not her days in desperate poverty responsible for her understanding of the world? And what a demonstration of the Communist dialectic it had been: the negative turned positive, black misery sublimated into heightened consciousness, suffering into solidarity! “Luxury,” she once told me in reference to that period in her life, “is never a leaven to the desire for justice.”

And so Grandmother raised her kids as though they were poor. My father told me that he and his siblings often wore darned socks and threadbare clothes, even though their parents had enough money to buy them a new wardrobe several times over. Another anecdote confirms that the kids didn't look like daddy's boys and girls. A rather comic scene took place when, following Japanese custom, my father's teacher was supposed to drop by the house for a parent-teacher conference. Since the teacher had never visited before, my father led the way. The closer they got to the house, the more astonished and incredulous the teacher became. “You must be lost,” said the teacher. “We're going toward the rich neighborhood.” “No, no,” retorted my father. “It's just around the corner.” The teacher continued to voice his astonishment, but there was no mistake, and the bewildered man soon found himself standing inside a beautiful house in Kyoto's poshest neighborhood. I later saw the house in a home movie my father
had shot and brought with him to the North. It was a luxurious threestory villa with a pool and a garden.

I have always been at a loss to understand why my grandparents sent their kids to ordinary Japanese schools rather than institutions run by the Chosen Soren. These bastions of the counterculture were favored by parents who wanted their children tapped into their Korean roots. Why my father, uncles, and aunts never attended these schools will forever remain a mystery.

The Chosen Soren education network remained strong throughout the 1960s and 1970s and comprised some 150 institutions spanning primary school to university. By the 1980s, however, the network had been substantially weakened by the integration of Japan's 700,000 Korean residents into the mainstream culture, as well as by North Korea's withering public image and the general lack of interest in becoming “a proud soldier of General Kim Il-sung.”

Though it has lost much of its power and glory, the Chosen Soren still exists. In May 1998, it held its eighteenth congress and reelected to its head the stalwart old leader Han Duk-su (of whom more later). The Chosen Soren still owns a few dozen companies and controls some fifteen news organizations. Their profits help buttress North Korea's economy much the way money from Miami's exile community helps to sustain Cuba. In 1998, nearly $80 million was reportedly transferred from Japan to North Korea.

After completing high school, my father enrolled at the University of Kyoto to pursue his great artistic passion for photography—despite being slated, as the eldest son, to replace his father in the family's thriving casino business. The other children were excellent students who seemed destined for great success. My first aunt was a pharmacist;
my first uncle, who attended the Waseida University of Tokyo, was a journalist; and the other siblings studied medicine and biology.

The leaders of the Chosen Soren were very keen on seeing people with advanced education return to North Korea, and they continually played up the homeland's need for individuals with knowledge and abilities. In North Korea a person could serve the people and the state rather than Japan, that pawn of American imperialism. Yet the Chosen Soren did not limit itself to recruiting the Korean elite, but worked tirelessly for the repatriation of every class of Korean emigrant. The true mastermind behind the Chosen Soren's campaign was the North Korean state. In the 1960s, under Kim Il-sung's direction, it made enormous efforts to lure Korean emigrants by representing itself as the last hope for reunification and the defense of national identity: for South Korea was reactionary and a puppet of the United States.

Koreans never had an easy time integrating into Japanese life and often were targets of prejudice. The North Korean propaganda thus resonated with many in the diaspora, and thousands responded to Kim Il-sung's call to return. Well-to-do Koreans such as my grandparents could expect to be wooed with an equal measure of ideological arguments and fantastical promises: there were managerial positions awaiting them, they were entitled to a beautiful home, they would have no material worries, and their children would be able to study in Moscow. Grandfather was rather against the idea, Grandmother all for it. Interminable conversations followed, from which my grandmother ultimately emerged victorious. No one was particularly surprised. And so it was that the family found itself heading for North Korea.

G
randfather agreed to the move, but he continued to drag his feet. The circumstances under which he ultimately arrived at his decision are rather comical, especially considering the political and economic stakes. Sometime in the past, Grandfather had become fast friends with the head
yakusa
, or boss, of the Kyoto mob. My grandfather was utterly enthralled by him and believed him to possess extraordinary intelligence, business acumen, courage, and, in a certain sense, honesty. My grandfather's confidence in him was boundless. He and the
yakusa
were more than friends; they were like brothers, by which I infer they once took an oath of friendship. It is a common practice in the Far East, where two people become bound through an exchange of letters or of blood. What Europeans might consider a game for children is serious business for adults in that part of the world, and I'm sure that Grandfather and the local mafia boss truly considered theirs an oath for life. When time came
for Grandfather to make up his mind, he naturally sought out this man's advice, and it was this gangster who dispelled his last lingering doubts by telling him it was his duty to respond to the call of the fatherland, to help it flourish, and to change his life.

Thus was determined the fate of my family, and mine with it. Everyone—those, such as my Grandmother, who really wanted to leave and those, such as my father and most of his siblings, who were merely resigned to leaving—boarded the ship for Korea. Even my first uncle, who was dead set against moving, couldn't get out of it. Some members of the extended family tried to rally behind him, and certain cousins even offered to take him in. He put up a good fight, but winning ultimately would have entailed breaking with his parents, something he was not ready to do. He tried to explain his reasons for wanting to stay and even offered to manage the family casinos while continuing his university studies. Grandfather refused: once resolved to leave, he wanted to make a clean break of it. For my uncle the idea of leaving the country where he had grown up and gone to school, where his parents had met and fallen in love, was unthinkable. At boarding time, he ran away to his cousins' house. Grandmother had to go there and fetch him, and when he refused to obey her—a rare thing in those days—she slapped him and dragged him to the docks, arriving just as the ship was about to sail.

My uncle still had one option remaining: he could raise a protest before the Japanese authorities, claim that his parents were taking him against his will, and request the protection of the Japanese state. When it had come to the Japanese government's attention that the Worker's Party and its associations were pressing heads of households to depart with their entire families, it opened a small government office near the turnstile of the Korean-bound ships,
where a bureaucrat and several members of the Red Cross interviewed departing passengers to verify that they were leaving of their own accord.

My uncle wavered until the last moment. A terrible struggle took place inside of him. On one side was his love for his parents and his wish to obey them, on the other, his attachment to his current life and his uncertainty about the life awaiting him abroad. Perhaps he also had some dark foreboding. Still undecided, his eyes crossed his mother's fearsome, imperious gaze, and his choice seemed already made. The authorities asked him if he personally wanted to move to Korea, and he answered that, yes, he did. And there, too, was a destiny sealed.

On the ship over, the long-awaited dream seemed actually to materialize. The family was treated with perfect solicitude, lodged in a luxury cabin and regaled with the finest meals. While the other returning patriots were treated like ordinary passengers, my family was catered to like Communist Party cadres—better yet, like a group headed to honor Kim Il-sung on his birthday. Grandmother told me that one of the ship's passengers was Kim Yong-ghil, a Korean opera singer who had found fame and fortune in Japan. As the ship approached the Korean coast, he got up on the bridge, turned to the promised land, and sang “O Sole Mio,” causing emotions to swell among the passengers standing within earshot. The poor man. He was an artist who wanted to share his gifts with the people, but he wound up being condemned as a spy and sent to die in the Senghori hard-labor camp—reputedly one of North Korea's harshest. When he first arrived in North Korea the regime welcomed him with great pomp, and Kim Il-sung even granted him the honor of a long handshake. In Japan, Kim Yong-ghil has gained legendary stature, having become a symbol of the tragedy undergone
by so many Japanese residents who moved to North Korea. Call me hard-hearted, but I think the only thing Kim Yong-ghil symbolizes is foolishness.