Patriotic Revolutionaries and Imperial Sympathizers: Identity and selfhood of Korean-Japanese migrants from Japan to North Korea

While the outward migration of North Korean refugees has received a growing interest in scholarly circles, little has been said about emigration to North Korea. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, this article considers the changing political subjectivities of migrants from Japan to the DPRK, from 1959 to the 1980s, and their relationship to both the ethnic homeland and the former colonizer. I suggest that the North Korean state’s effort to contain the imagined threat posed by arrivals from Japan was undermined by transnational exchange between divided families. Specifically, women on both sides of the East Sea/Sea of Japan engaged in kin work (di Leonardo 1987) that alerted ethnic Korean immigrants to their ambiguous status as both fraternal comrade and outsider in North Korea. My research illustrates how mobility provided opportunities for new subjectivities to emerge, as individuals who considered themselves Korean patriots developed identifications that translocally connected them to kin and communities in Japan.