It has been six decades since Mitsuko Minakawa
boarded a ferry on the Sea of Japan coast, bound
for a new life in North Korea. But the anguish of
that sunny day in the spring of 1960 has never
left her.
Two months earlier, Minakawa had married
a Korean man, Choe Hwa-jae , a contemporary
at Hokkaido University , where she was the only
woman in a class of 100 students. Minakawa, then
21, and Choe were part of the mass repatriation of
ethnic Korean residents of Japan – many of them
the off spring of people who had been brought
from the Korean peninsula by their Japanese
colonisers to work in mines and factories.
More than 93,000 ethnic Koreans, known as
Zainichi , moved to North Korea between 1959 and
1984, according to the Japanese Red Cross Society.
Among them were 1,830 Japanese women who, like
Minakawa, had married Korean men, and a smaller
number of Japanese men with Korean wives.
North Korea, founded in 1948 by Kim Il-sung ,
welcomed the repatriated Koreans with open
Aiko Nakamoto left Japan
in 1960 for a new life in
North Korea. Once there,
she realised she – and
hundreds of other women
like her – could never
return. Sixty years later,
photographer Noriko
Hayashi tells their stories.
Interview by Justin McCurry
Fa r from
home
Aiko Nakamoto (left), 87, has never been back to
Japan: ‘Even one or two hours would have been
enough,’ she says. Right: Nakamoto, aged 29,
in North Korea
→