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...Though he still retains affection for North Korea, Lee saw Chongyron as fatally beholden to Kim Jong Il, and in 2001 he broke with the organization, becoming a freelance journalist. (Lee Chek is a pen name he uses to protect relatives still living in North Korea from retribution.) Chongyron - which functions as North Korea's de-facto diplomatic voice in Japan - took away his North Korean passport, and he hasn't been back to Pyongyang. Permitted to take Korean or Japanese nationality, last year Lee took South Korean citizenship in order to travel abroad...
...their longtime support for the North, most zainichi hail from the southern half of Korea, before they moved (or were forcibly relocated) to work in Japan between 1910 and 1945, when Korea had been a Japanese colony. In their new home, the Koreans were an oppressed minority; Kim Kyoo Il, a 69-year-old zainichi activist, remembers that during the war years, "Japanese were first-class citizens, and the [Koreans] were considered second-rate people...
...viewed among zainichi as little more than an American poodle. But as Pyongyang took a firmer hand in the running of Chongyron, it became less concerned with improving the lot of its members than with furthering North Korea's agenda, soliciting money from the zainichi to enrich Kim Jong Il, and before him, his father, Kim Il Sung...
...Worse, still, for the organization's reputation, Chongyron encouraged tens of thousands of zainichi families to repatriate to North Korea in the 1960s, where they faced unimaginable hardship and oppression. "Chongyron became a tool of Kim Il Sung," says Kim Kyoo Il, who left the organization in 1965. "All he did was use the zainichi as human resources for the North Korean regime." (Chongyron did not respond to requests for comment.) Things became worse for the organization in the 1990s when undeniable proof of human rights atrocities in the North began to reach Japan's zainichi. The knockout blow came...
...Third- and fourth-generation zainichi, meanwhile, have been far more inclined than their parents had been to intermarry or take Japanese citizenship, as official discrimination against them began to ease. "They believe they can succeed in Japanese society," says Kim Kyoo Il. "Their understanding is that they'll live here permanently." Given an aging, shrinking Japan's need for more immigrants - and the country's recent mania for things Korean - that's a safe assumption...