Japanese people in North Korea

Japanese people in North Korea consist mainly of four groups: prisoners-of-war in the Soviet Union, Japanese accompanying repatriating Zainichi Korean spouses, defectors, and kidnapping victims. The number who remain alive is not known.

In 1945, with the end of World War II and the collapse of the Empire of Japan, 200,000 Japanese colonists were stranded north of the 38th parallel; however, they were repatriated to Japan soon after. The earliest and largest post-war influx of Japanese to North Korea was involuntary: 27,000 prisoners-of-war from the Soviet Union. Their current whereabouts are unknown; documents from Russian archives suggest that only the physically ill were sent to North Korea, while able-bodied men were retained by Russia to perform forced labour there.

Voluntary migration of Japanese to North Korea began in 1959, under a repatriation campaign for Zainichi Koreans sponsored by ethnic activist organisation and de facto North Korean embassy Chongryon. Chongryon received the tacit support of the Japanese and American governments, who saw Koreans in Japan as "Communists" and "criminals", in the words of the US ambassador to Japan at the time, Douglas MacArthur II; they welcomed the repatriation campaign as a way of reducing the ethnic minority population. In total, 6,637 Japanese people are estimated to have accompanied Korean spouses to North Korea, of whom 1,828 retained their Japanese nationality. The numbers of both Japanese and Koreans going to North Korea dropped sharply in the 1960s as knowledge of the poor economic conditions, social discrimination, and political repression faced by both Korean and Japanese migrants filtered back to Japan by word of mouth.

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