Numbers Down at Japan's N. Korea Schools

By HANS GREIMEL, Associated Press WriterWed Dec 28, 2:14 PM ET

At a run-down Tokyo junior school, portraits of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il cast a watchful gaze over the pupils. But after the bell, the kids share frank opinions about the so-called Dear Leader.

"Perhaps this is a little rude, but he's kind of fat," second grader Lee Miyong Hee says of the pudgy, bouffant-haired Kim.

Second Chosen Elementary is one of some 120 schools in Japan funded by Kim's regime for emigre Korean families who live in Asia's richest capitalist society yet see the communist "workers' paradise" as their homeland.

For decades, the schools indoctrinated the children in the glories of North Korea, the evils of Japanese imperialism and the revolutionary exploits of national founder Kim Il Sung, the "Beloved Father Marshal."

But enrollment has fallen to 12,000 from 40,000 in the 1970s, parents are disenchanted, and the dream of one day returning to Chosen, as Korea is historically known, is dying. So the schools are phasing out the Kim-worship and dipping a toe in the Japanese mainstream.

The change highlights deep changes in an enigmatic minority that has stood by North Korea through the Korean War, the Cold War and the entrenchment of one of the world's most rigid and secretive dictatorships.

"If we kept doing it the old way, parents won't send their children here," laments the Second Chosen's principal, Song Hyon Jin.

Some 600,000 ethnic Koreans among 127 million Japanese, most of them descendants of people who moved here voluntarily or by force during Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean peninsula. About 200,000 are affiliated with Pyongyang, the largest concentration of North Koreans outside the homeland or China.

Their residents' association, Chongryon, functions as a de facto embassy because Japan and North Korea have no diplomatic ties. Its walled compound is guarded by police. In recent years, Its offices have been firebombed by right-wing extremists, and its members treated like social pariahs. Now it is being dunned by the state-backed collection agency over bad debts, while Second Chosen is fighting to stop the Tokyo city government from taking over its playground, which stands on public land.

The relationship has always been prickly; Japanese society shuns outsiders, and many of its Koreans have refused Japanese citizenship out of loyalty to their homeland.

In this fraught situation, the schools have long been an anchor of Korean identity.

Classes are led in the Korean language, pupils wear traditional dress and teachers train annually in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. The high school rite of passage is a ferry trip to the impoverished North.

Pyongyang has also used the schools to build a loyal base that rakes in tens of millions of dollars a year from Korean businesses in Japan. The schools are so important to North Korea that it has paid $380 million since 1957 to keep classes running.

But today's Koreans in Japan are mostly third- or fourth-generation, barely speak Korean, are taking Japanese citizenship in growing numbers, and don't read much Karl Marx.

"We have eyes and ears and can decide for ourselves what the truth is," said Che Heng Sun, 41, mother of a Second Chosen first grader. "Love for one's country is good, but there is a better way to teach it."

The loyalty started fading in the 1990s when North Korea's economy flatlined and famines killed an estimated 2 million. Then, in 2002, Kim Jong Il shocked the world by admitting North Korean agents had been kidnapping Japanese citizens to train communist spies.

Kang Chang Hun, Chongryon's education chief, acknowledged the waning interest but blames it on the money shortage. Annual subsidies from Pyongyang are half what they were in the 1990s, meaning school fees at Second Chosen have risen to about $800 a year.

Second Chosen had to hold a flea market this year just to buy a new videocassette recorder.

Another problem is that most Japanese public universities and employers do not recognize the schools' diplomas.

"Most people think their families will never return to North Korea," history teacher Kim Song O said. "They want an education that will prepare them for lives in Japan."

So out went the parables about Kim Jong Il; in came computers, South Korean history and Japanese language. Some schools have taken down Kim Jong Il's pictures, while others have traded in traditional Korean garb for blue blazers.