‘In here you only learn about the good things’: Inside a North Korean school

Nagoya: On a warm Sunday morning in mid-October, hundreds of members of the tight-knit Korean community in the Japanese city of Nagoya gathered on the grounds of the local school for a day of celebration and reunion.

From grandparents to toddlers, they were there for the opening day of the Aichi Korean Middle and High School’s new classroom block, which has been funded by the school and through donations without government support.

North Korean flags fly at the Aichi Korean Middle and High School in Japan, as past and current students celebrate the opening of a new building. Credit: Christopher Jue

In the school’s auditorium, students performed a pageant of colourful traditional Korean dances and songs to an audience of delighted parents and relatives. Outside, the forecourt had been transformed into a mini-festival, where food stalls dished up bibimbap and bulgogi alongside Korean soft drinks for a party that would continue long into the afternoon.

For this community, the new school building is a triumph of the endurance of Korean ethnic education in Japan, which is fighting for survival in the face of government funding cuts, dwindling enrolments and school closures across the country.

But a key factor in their existential crisis was also prominently and proudly on display.

Mounted on poles outside the auditorium, five North Korean flags waved in testament to the school’s ideological loyalty. Inside the newly built senior classrooms, portraits of former North Korean supreme leaders Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-Il – grandfather and father, respectively, of current leader Kim Jong-un – have been mounted above the blackboards, and on the office wall of school principal Kim Gui Dong. In January, the school will send its year 12 students to Pyongyang for several weeks, resuming the excursion program that it has run for years aided by funding from the North Korean regime after a COVID-19 hiatus.

Students perform traditional Korean dances and songs at Aichi Korean Middle and High School open day.Credit: Christopher Jue

It’s a political allegiance that sits uncomfortably in modern-day Japan where Pyongyang has become an unpredictable and feared nuclear-powered aggressor that tests its missiles by firing them into the Sea of Japan with increasingly regularity.

Principal Kim says the school’s pro-North Korea links are tied to a deep gratitude to the regime for its funding to establish the school in the aftermath of World War II, when discrimination towards Koreans in Japan was deeply entrenched.

“The people here really struggled to make a school, and North Korea helped a lot. The community is very thankful for that. That’s why we preserve the pictures, so we don’t forget how they helped us,” he says.

The school’s core purpose, he says, is to foster Korean identity through teaching language, history and culture. But he concedes that the criticisms of the North Korean regime’s human rights violations, which include claims of torture and forced labour camps made by credible international organisations, are not taught to students.

Kim Gui Dong, the school principal, in his office. Portraits of former North Korean dictators Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are on the wall.Credit: Christopher Jue

“It’s very true that in here you only learn about the good things. But the thing is that once you go out of this school, the Japanese media and others would tell you bad stories about North Korea,” he says, adding the school encourages students to form their own independent views on these issues.

Year 12 student Kim Jhanggui,17, says the school has helped him learn “about my country, and what it means to be Korean”.

“He’s a great person,” he says, when asked about the portraits of Kim Il-sung that preside over his classroom studies.

The Aichi school is one of 10 pro-North Korean high schools across Japan, often referred to as Chosen schools. They are affiliated with an organisation called Chongryon, a once-powerful and wealthy group established in 1955 to serve as a de facto embassy of North Korea in Japan, which channelled funds from the regime to set up schools in Japan in the postwar era.

At its peak, Chongryon was the dominant Korean representative body in Japan, and had more than 160 affiliated schools and 500,000 members, many of them descendants of Korean forced labourers conscripted by Japan during World War II.

As support for the North Korean regime has declined over the decades, Chongryon’s influence has diminished among the Korean diaspora population today, with its membership at about 70,000. Today, most Korean children attend Japanese schools, and their families are more likely to identify with the South Korean-aligned organisation, called Mindan.

The remaining Chongryon schools face an increasingly precarious financial situation after the Japanese government cut financial aid in 2010, excluding the schools from a tuition fee waiver program that gave students access to free high school education, saying the schools’ curriculums were unduly influenced by North Korean ideology.

The schools and their supporters argue this decision is a continuation of Japan’s oppression of Korean ethnic culture. Critics claimed that directing public funds to the schools was servicing the propaganda aims of the dictatorial Kim regime. The Japanese department of education did not respond to a request for comment.

Year 12 students Jo Kyeongfa, (left), 18, and Kim Jhanggui, 17, say the school’s education has helped them connect with their Korean identity.Credit: Christopher Jue

“There are families that send their children to the Korean schools to show political support [to North Korea] but there also are families who want their children to be raised as Korean as it exposes them to different aspects of the culture,” says Park-Kim Wooki, from the Human Rights Association for Korean Residents in Japan, which helps co-ordinate protests outside Japanese government office buildings in Tokyo every Friday.

Questions about North Korean atrocities are a highly sensitive topic for these Chosen school communities, who have grown wary of speaking with foreign media, and distrust the critical portrayal of North Korea they see in Japanese media.

Year 12 student Jo Kyeongfa, 18, has fond memories of visiting North Korea as a 13-year-old as part of a dance group, and being warmly embraced and welcomed “like it was our home country”. She is also aware of the reports of “bad stories” from North Korea, including the famine in the 1990s.

“I believe that the people there in North Korea have something big that they believe in, and that’s why they’re there ... I try to listen to both sides and form my opinion,” she says.

She also listens to K-pop (music that is banned in North Korea) and feels a cultural connection to the south, where her family is from.

Dr Sayaka Chatani, a historian at the National University of Singapore who has extensively researched the Chongryon community, says many members grapple with these competing tensions every day.

“Their love for North Korean society and people is real. But they can be critical about the leadership, even Kim Jong-un. They can be very frank about these problems once you get to know them,” she says.

Regime-sanctioned trips to North Korea, including tours catering to international tourists, are an established feature of the country’s propaganda machine aimed at projecting a tightly controlled positive image to the world.

The schools’ annual excursions to North Korea have also played a key role in fostering a sense of belonging and identity among students, Chatani says.

“That’s the only place that they do feel like such an intricate and extensive amount of welcome and care. That doesn’t happen in South Korea.”

Hostility within Japanese society towards Chongryon-affiliated schools and communities has intensified over recent decades, fuelled by a rise in Japanese nationalism and the increasing belligerence of the North Korean regime under leader Kim Jong-un, who has ramped up the country’s nuclear program and missile testing.

Tensions were also inflamed after Pyongyang admitted in September 2002 that its agents had abducted 13 Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 1980s, a number Japan believes is understated. This triggered a rise in attacks by Japanese nationalist groups on schools and students.

Lawyer Kim Myongae, 37, who was a junior at the Aichi school at the time, says she and her friends were targeted and verbally abused by Japanese men on the way to school.

“We had some scary moments. They would say things like ‘go back to your country, get out of Japan’,” she says.

Today female students typically avoid wearing their traditional North Korean chima jeogori uniforms to and from school, only changing into them once on school grounds.

The children who attend these Chosen schools today are mostly fourth or fifth-generation Koreans born in Japan, most of whom trace their family roots to South Korea, but have developed a sense of the north as the fatherland.

It is one of the many complexities that can confound those trying to understand the Chosen schools’ enduring connection and loyalty to North Korea even as it has become a pariah state, accused of human rights abuses and sanctioned by the West for its nuclear weapons program and, more recently, its support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Kim Myongae, a lawyer and former student at the school, with her son, a student at the primary school.Credit: Christopher Jue

Experts trace this connection to a complicated past, rooted in Cold War ideology and the racism and oppression endured by Koreans during the period of Japanese colonisation between 1910 and 1945. This included a crushing of Korean culture through a banning of language, practices and use of Korean names.

In the post-war decades, after the Korean peninsula split into the Soviet-aligned north and US-aligned south - a border that was maintained at the end of the Korean War in 1953 - it was the Chongryon and the schools that provided an avenue for disenfranchised and stateless Koreans in Japan to connect with and feel proud about their identity.

Their efforts were aided by the fact that the right-wing governments in South Korea, which was dominated by authoritarian and military rule until its transition to democracy in the late 1980s, viewed the Korean diaspora in Japan with suspicion due to the community’s largely left-wing tendencies.

“They didn’t want to encourage them to return to South Korea at that stage because they thought they would be subversive, and they didn’t do anything much about supporting schools during the ’60s and ’70s,” says Dr Tessa Morris-Suzuki, an expert in Japanese and Korean history at the Australian National University.

Chatani says the unification of the Korean homeland became the singular most important goal for the community living Japan after the period of US occupation of South Korea from 1945 to 1948.

“That was seen as another colonisation of their homeland and they had to support an independent regime, which was the Kim Il-sung regime. They always thought that within three years it would be unified,” Chatani says.

In the decades since, they held on to this dream of unification. But this year Kim Jung-un formally abandoned this goal, a fundamental change in the regime’s priorities after seven decades, while denouncing South Korea as the “principal enemy”. It’s a move that has split the Chongryon community and caused significant angst, Chatani says.

Japan has never formed diplomatic ties with North Korea. Today, the prospect seems as improbable as ever, as Japan strengthens its security ties with the United States and South Korea, while North Korea’s anti-American alliance with Russia deepens.

It’s a geopolitical divide that is only likely to contribute to the isolation of Koreans in Japan sympathetic to the Kim regime, as they retreat into the embrace of their school communities and networks, and away from the politics and animosity that comes with it.

“Right now, the politicians are not really aligned, but it used to be one country,” says Jo, the year 12 student. “I really hope that one day it can be united.”

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