Inside North Korea's bubble in Japan

Vox Borders

S01E03
October 31, 2017 15 min

Overview

For this episode I found myself embedded with a small community in Japan. They were born there, they speak the language. But they're not Japanese citizens, or even ethnically Japanese - they're North Korean. There's about 150,000 of them living in Japan today, and they've been there for over a century. This community has close ties with the regime in Pyongyang, which supports them financially (and vice-versa). But more importantly, Pyongyang offers them an identity, a heritage, and cultural legitimacy - things that some elements of Japanese society work to deny them.

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