Revolution Brewing in Japan's North Korean Schools
Lee Hye Ryong, 15, playing Kayagum, a Korean harp at the Tokyo Korean First Chosen Elementary and Junior High School.
TOKYO, Oct. 10 — As the morning bell tolls at First Chosen Grammar School on the outskirts of this sprawling capital, students rush to class under a mural urging them to cram for the glory of North Korea. At recess they march to blaring North Korean hymns. Their history lessons extol the virtues of Kim Il Sung - the North Korean “Great Leader” who, they are taught, won the Korean War in 1953.
FOR DECADES this has been the drill at First Chosen, one of about 130 schools across Japan partly funded by the North Korean government. The students are sons and daughters of ethnic Koreans living in Japan as North Korean citizens, about 150,000 in total. Almost all are descendants of laborers brought here by force or lured by the promise of a better life during Japan’s occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. Generations of these ethnic Koreans have pledged allegiance to the North’s Communist...
