In Japanese court, 5 ask N. Korea to pay for their suffering

TOKYO — A Japanese tribunal connected Thursday is proceeding from 5 radical who accidental they were promised “paradise connected Earth” successful North Korea but suffered quality rights violations alternatively and present privation the state and its person Kim Jong Un to compensate them.

The proceeding became imaginable aft the Tokyo District Court successful August agreed to summon Kim Jong Un to speak, according to Kenji Fukuda, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs. They are not expecting Kim to look oregon to compensate them if the tribunal orders it, but Fukuda hopes the lawsuit tin acceptable a precedent for negotiations betwixt Japan and North Korea connected seeking the North’s work and normalizing diplomatic ties.

Hundreds of thousands of Koreans came to Japan, galore forcibly, to enactment successful mines and factories during Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula — a past that inactive strains relations betwixt Japan and the Koreas.

In 1959, North Korea began a monolithic resettlement programme to bring overseas Koreans location and to marque up for workers killed successful the Korean War. The programme continued to question recruits, galore of them primitively from South Korea, until 1984.

North Korea had promised escaped healthcare, education, jobs and different benefits, but nary was disposable and the returnees were mostly assigned manual enactment astatine mines, forests oregon farms, 1 of the plaintiffs, Eiko Kawasaki, 79, a Korean who was calved and raised successful Japan, said past month.

The Japanese government, viewing Koreans arsenic outsiders, besides welcomed the resettlement programme and helped put for participants to question to North Korea. About 93,000 taste Korean residents of Japan and their household members went to North Korea.

Today, astir fractional a cardinal taste Koreans unrecorded successful Japan and inactive look favoritism successful school, enactment and their regular lives.

The tribunal lawsuit was brought successful 2018 by 5 participants who yet defected backmost to Japan — 4 taste Koreans and a Japanese pistillate who joined the programme with her Korean hubby and their daughter.

“None of america would person gone” if we had known the information astir North Korea, Kawasaki said. She was confined to North Korea for 43 years until defecting successful 2003, leaving down her grown children.

The plaintiffs are demanding 100 cardinal yen ($900,000) each successful compensation from North Korea.