Abstract
A total of 93,340 Korean residents in Japan, including their Japanese wives, were repatriated to North Korea in the Repatriation Project by the Red Cross of Japan and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) between 1959 and 1984. Approximately 97% of Koreans in Japan originate from the southern part of the Korean Peninsula. The return of South Koreans from Japan – a capitalist country - to North Korea - a socialist country –can be called “immigrant return,” the ethnic return migration to the non- ancestral homeland under a newly established regime. This article objectively examines the conditions of the Repatriation Project from Japan to North Korea during the Cold War and the information about North Korea that prompted it. Korean immigrants failed to adapt smoothly to North Korean society. The North Korean government’s false information and propaganda, which depicted North Korea as a “paradise on earth,” is regarded as having caused the failure of their adaption. This article compares articles from the newspaper for The General Union of Koreans in Japan and Japanese national newspapers and examines their characteristics and their impact on Korean migrants’ decisions to repatriate to North Korea.
