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Hundreds of thousands of Koreans came to Japan, many forcibly, to work in mines and factories during Japanâs colonization of the Korean Peninsula â a past that still strains relations between Japan and the Koreas.
In 1959, North Korea began a massive resettlement program to bring overseas Koreans home and to make up for workers killed in the Korean War. The program continued to seek recruits, many of them originally from South Korea, until 1984.
North Korea had promised free healthcare, education, jobs and other benefits, but none was available and the returnees were mostly assigned manual work at mines, forests or farms, one of the plaintiffs, Eiko Kawasaki, 79, a Korean who was born and raised in Japan, said last month.
The Japanese government, viewing Koreans as outsiders, also welcomed the resettlement program and helped arrange for participants to travel to North Korea. About 93,000 ethnic Korean residents of Japan and their family members went to North Korea.
Today, about half a million ethnic Koreans live in Japan and still face discrimination in school, work and their daily lives.
The court case was brought in 2018 by five participants who ultimately defected back to Japan â four ethnic Koreans and a Japanese woman who joined the program with her Korean husband and their daughter.
âNone of us would have goneâ if we had known the truth about North Korea, Kawasaki said. She was confined to North Korea for 43 years until defecting in 2003, leaving behind her grown children.
The plaintiffs are demanding 100 million yen ($900,000) each in compensation from North Korea.
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