Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

DATE=02/19/03

TYPE=BACKGROUND REPORT

TITLE=NOKOR/JAPANESE WIVES - (BKG)

NUMBER=5-53138

BYLINE=AMY BICKERS

DATELINE=TOKYO

CONTENT=

VOICED AT:

INTRO: The Japanese wife of a North Korean returned to Japan last month

after a harrowing journey through

China. As V-O-A's Amy Bickers reports from Tokyo, her plight is raising

awareness of thousands of other Japanese women who followed their

spouses to the North decades ago in search of a better life, only to

find that their dreams were an illusion.

TEXT: Few details are known about the Japanese woman who returned to her

homeland in January after more than 40 years in North Korea - but the

facts that are available are chilling. What's even more worrying, aid

workers say, is that thousands of other Japanese women who followed

their North Korean husbands to their homeland are probably enduring

similar hardships.

Kenkichi Nakadaira is a representative of the Tokyo-based refugee aid

organization, Life Funds for North Korean Refugees.

/// NAKADAIRA ACT /// 14 (HK VOICEOVER)

The Japanese woman who returned to Japan tells us that there are more

wives in North Korea who are in a similar situation. She is urging us to

help them.

/// END ACT ///

The woman who returned, now 64 years old, went to live in the North with

her husband in the 1950s. They went as part of a repatriation program

established by the Kim Il Sung government, which was aimed at reviving

the population after the Korean War.

At the time, there were many ethnic Koreans in Japan who had been

forcibly brought here during Japan's colonial rule of the Korean

Peninsula. About 93-thousand Koreans voluntarily returned home between

1959 and 1985, bringing with them nearly two-thousand Japanese spouses

and about five-thousand children. Many, including this woman's husband,

were believers in a communist utopia, and confident that the North would

offer a satisfying and stable existence in which food and jobs would be

plentiful.

But ten years after arriving in the North, the recent returnee says, her

husband was arrested for political crimes. In interviews with the

Japanese media, she says she never heard from him again, and was forced

to raise her two children single-handedly. She moved from the North

Korean capital, Pyongyang, to a poor village near the Chinese border,

and supported her family by gathering firewood and edible plants in the

forest and selling them at a market.

The family was dirt poor, like countless others in North Korea. The

woman says she and her children survived on a diet of potatoes and

cornstarch, and could only afford rice on holidays.

Last November, with the help of two South Korean humanitarian workers,

she crossed the border into China by wading barefoot across a river.

This is a common route for North Korean refugees, who hope eventually to

reach a third country that will grant them asylum, since China refuses

to give them refugee status. Like tens of thousands of others fleeing

North Korea, the woman said she moved around the Chinese countryside to

evade the police, finding food and work where she could.

With the help of a Japanese aid group, she eventually wrote to the

Japanese Foreign Ministry, which brokered a deal with Beijing. The woman

arrived safely in Japan in late January.

Her case - a Japanese spouse returning home from North Korea - is the

first that the Japanese government has publicly confirmed. However,

Japanese officials speaking anonymously say the Foreign Ministry has

secretly offered help and protection to dozens of other women in similar

situations. The issue is highly sensitive because it could create

diplomatic disputes with China and could worsen Tokyo's already tense

ties with Pyongyang. The two have never established formal diplomatic

relations, because of North Korea's abductions of Japanese nationals in

the 1970s and 1980s, and more recently because of Tokyo's opposition to

Pyongyang's weapons programs.

Some Japanese aid groups are critical of the government, saying it

should do more for the many Japanese women who remain in North Korea and

may desperately want to return home.

/// MORIYAMA ACT IN JAPANESE, FADE ///

Justice Minister Mayumi Moriyama says the government is considering new

laws and procedures that could help these women, but she stresses that

for the time being, their cases can only be considered within the

existing legal framework.

The women who have made it back to Japan have all managed to flee via

third countries, including Russia and Thailand in addition to China.

Mr. Nakadaira, the aid worker, says humanitarian groups are trying to

assist those Japanese spouses who remain in North Korea and want to

leave.

/// NAKADAIRA ACT 2 /// (HK VOICE OVER)

We receive requests from their relatives in Japan and we try to get

money to the women still in North Korea so they can go to China. With

the help of people there, they wait for a good opportunity to return

Japan.

/// END ACT ///

But the fate of thousands of these women is still unclear. A former

North Korean spy, now based in Japan, has told the Japanese government

that about 30-percent of the Japanese women who went to the North have

died, from starvation, illness or other hardships. He says many perished

in the mid-1990s, when North Korea's famine was at its worst.

He reports that one group of women who asked to visit their homeland

were sent to a political prison camp by North Korea's Stalinist

authorities, and that some were never released.

The Japanese wife who arrived in Japan last month was warmly welcomed,

and her return was seen as a diplomatic triumph. At the same time,

concerns are mounting for thousands of other Japanese women who may be

trapped in the North against their will, without the knowledge or means

to return home. (SIGNED)

NEB/HK/AB/BK