Masaji Ishikawa

Heartbreaking, hopeful, and eye-opening. I'm so glad I picked this out for my December Kindle First read. This is actually the first memoir I've ever read, but I've always been interested in North Korea, always the country shrouded in mystery, and what life is REALLY like there, aside from what they want you to see. And what better way than to read a firsthand account of someone who actually lived there?

This was a quick read, but so very emotional. In it, our author describes how he was born in Japan and lived a life of poverty, only to be promised a better life in North Korea, and then coming to the realization too late that it was nothing like him and his family imagined. He describes in such great detail the hardships they go through, his family life, his emotions, of anger, hope, sadness, and despair.

The will to survive is truly overpowering, and reading this will make you appreciate all we have, living in the Western world, and all we take for granted. Shelter, and never having to worry about where our next meal is coming from, to name a few. I so wish there was a happy ending in this book, and I do hope that at some point in the future, he will get it, without giving away too much. I finished the final chapter with a heavy heart, and for the first time in a long time, the story weighs on my mind. I do hope that there will be an update of some sort in the future on the author.… (mere)

During the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula (1910-1945), Koreans were conscripted as laborers or emigrated to Japan in search of jobs after losing their land to the Japanese. By 1945 two million Koreans lived in Japan. These Zainichi found conditions to be little better for them in Japan, due to intense discrimination. Beginning in 1956, the Japanese Red Cross began repatriating ethnic Koreans to North Korea. The Communists wanted labor, and the Japanese wanted to get rid of a potential source of social unrest. The General Association of Korean Residents in Japan convinced many that life in North Korea would be a paradise of socialist humanitarianism and that returnees would be home again (despite the fact that most were from the southern part of Korea). Between 1960 and 1961 alone, 70,000 Zainichi were shipped to North Korea. Masaji Ishikawa was one of those.

Ishikawa's father was Zainichi, but his mother was Japanese. He was thirteen years old when he left Japan with his parents and two younger sisters. From the moment they landed in North Korea, however, they learned that everything they had been told was a lie. North Korea was far from paradise, and, equally devastating, the Zainichi were treated as badly in North Korea as they had been in Japan. His family was ostracized for being Japanese, and from the moment they arrived, they never had enough food. When Kim Il-Sung died in 1994 and his inept son took over, hunger became starvation. In 1996, Ishikawa decided that the only hope for his family to survive was if he escaped back to Japan, got a job, and sent them money until he could bring them to Japan as well.

I found this memoir mesmerizing from his descriptions of life in 1950s Japan to his life under the harsh North Korean regime to his reception after his escape. His writing is straightforward and plain, but his words pack a punch. It's not an easy book to read as things go from bad to worse, but it is invaluable for it's depictions of the Zainichi in North Korea.… (mere)