We’ve often written about the discrimination that Japan-born-and-resident “zainichi” Koreans have to put up with in Japan, but as it turns out, they also face a certain amount of discrimination in Korea, too. A June 14 story in the Asahi Shimbun explained the situation of 71-year-old Kim Byung-jin, who lives in the city of Sakai in Osaka Prefecture, where he teaches Korean language and culture along with his wife. Kim was born in Kobe and attended university in South Korea. In 1983, while a graduate student at Seoul’s Yonsei University, he was arrested by state security police and his wife and two-month-old baby were placed under house arrest.
This was at the height of the Chun Doo-hwan dictatorship, when anyone suspected of having anything to do with North Korea was tortured, imprisoned, and sometimes disappeared. Kim was accused of spying for the North in the 1970s and duly tortured for three months. His case was sent to state prosecutors with the expectation that he would be tried as a spy. However, according to the National Security Act, a prosecutor may suspend the filing of an indictment while considering the motive behind a violation of the security law and the circumstances of the suspect following the commission of a crime, and during that period the suspect is released pending a formal indictment.
During this period when the prosecutor supposedly studied his case, Kim remained in Korea under surveillance and forced to act as a Korean-Japanese interpreter for the Defense Security Command (DSC, now defunct), where he worked for two years. In 1986, the prosecutor had still not indicted Kim and he returned to Japan with his family, settling in Sakai. In 1988, he published a book in both Japanese and Korean editions about his ordeal that was heavily critical of the South Korean military government. As a result, the DSC subpoenaed him to return to South Korea for violating the Military Confidentiality Protection Law, but he ignored the subpoena.
Nevertheless, Kim’s wife, Kang Yon-mi, has said their son was being “observed” by strange men at his kindergarten and feared that he might be abducted. When Kim tried to renew his South Korean passport, he was turned down at the consulate. It wouldn’t be until 2000, when Kim Dae-jung became president, that he would be able to obtain a new passport.
In August of last year, Kim went to the Seoul prosecutor’s office with a lawyer to submit a petition to cancel the still pending indictment, explaining in an attached letter that he has been living in constant fear for more than 40 years. On May 28, the prosecutor’s office finally decided that there were no grounds to suspect Kim of spying and that he was cleared of all charges. However, this conclusion was reached in a rather roundabout way. Since Kim’s case had never gone to trial, there was no procedure in place to acquit him of the crime he was accused of. As it happens, another man who was accused of being Kim’s “accomplice” had been indicted and convicted, but after Korea underwent democratization in the late 80s, the man won the right to a retrial and was acquitted, so the prosecutor simply deemed that had Kim also been indicted and convicted, he would have been acquitted also. According to the Asahi, this was the first time in Korean legal history that such a set of circumstances led to the dropping of charges.
Kim says he didn’t even know he had an “accomplice,” but the information was not surprising. Under South Korea’s military dictatorship in the 70s and 80s, many young Zainichi Koreans were arrested as North Korean spies and sentenced to death or long-term prison stays. After 2010, many were retried and acquitted. Zainichi Koreans, who weren’t necessarily trusted by the Korean citizenry, were always stuck in a legal limbo between the country of their birth and residence, Japan, and the country of their heritage, which after the mid-50s was either South Korea or North Korea. They were thus easy scapegoats, especially those who originally declared themselves North Koreans for nationality purposes and then switched to South Korea when they wanted to attend a South Korean university, since they couldn’t attend a Japanese university and North Korea didn’t have any such programs. Kim’s lawyers told Asahi that there were other Zainichi Koreans arrested during the dictatorship and never tried, and that he hopes they can be exonerated as well.
According to an article that appeared last December in the magazine Shukan Kinyobi, in 1975, a number of Zainichi Koreans were arrested in South Korea as North Korean spies during the so-called Nov. 22 Incident, when suspected communists were rounded up by the security police in the wake of the collapse of Saigon. Zainichi Korean students were specially targeted because so many were studying in South Korea at the time due to an atmosphere of violence against Zainichi Koreans that prevailed in Japan, thus prompting many to want to learn more about their heritage. Nine were sentenced to death, and 29 were sent to prison. In 1987, when South Korea adopted democracy in the runup to the 1988 Olympics, many of these Zainichi Koreans were retried and acquitted. Those who were not retried had either died in prison or had not applied for a retrial and simply been released. The article states that the archive for the democratic development of South Korea is now housed in the intelligence offices where much of the torture of suspected communists during the military regime was carried out.
philipbrasor.com 