This article was first published on Hood Communist on 28 November, 2024.
In the short time between sunrise and boarding the 15 hour flight to Tokyo, all of my travel anxiety turned to excitement. In November 2023, I was invited to join the 2nd annual U.S. Peace Delegation to Chongryon (The General Association of Korean Residents in Japan), in a variety group of U.S. academics, journalists, high school youth, and organizers. The delegation was organized by Korean Reunification activists Dr. Kiyul Chung, a Visiting Professor at Tokyo’s Korea University and Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung University, and Derek R. Ford, a US-based activist and visiting lecturer at Korea University. The opportunity to join this exchange felt like a unique chance to build fundamentally anti-imperialist paths to solidarity, and proved itself to be.
As an International Youth Representative for the Cuba-based Red Barrial Afrodescendiente, I’m familiar with organizing delegations for Africans struggling in the U.S. to ground with Africans struggling against the blockade in Cuba. Aside from it being the longest flight I’ve ever taken, this trip to ground with Koreans in Japan was my first time on the ‘attending’ end of a delegation, putting anti-imperialist politics into practice from that perspective. My time at Korea University, as well as touring the impressive Chongryon Korean National Schools, reaffirmed my commitment to the examples of Cuba’s internationalist politics, and presented much educational dialogue, valuable exchanges, and material pathways for further solidarity.
I would especially like to thank Dr. Kiyul Chung, the only Korean born in the Southern portion of the Korean peninsula to ever teach at a Northern Korea university! The wonderful Korean comrade and longtime anti-imperialist organizer shepherded us throughout the entire delegation, losing his own sleep for the sake of ours. At 71 years old, Dr. Kiyul has more energy than the entire delegation combined, with his passion for his people and the Reunification of Korea beaming at all times. This experience provided me with further insights into the historical struggles of the Korean people under Japanese imperialism — both as an unrecognized, oppressed colonial diaspora within Japan, and in their Motherland as the target of limitless Western imperialist aggression.
I believe that traveling on delegations is a task that organizers in the U.S. should engage in, within an organized fashion, including domestic trips to share notes with organizers across the country. Our organizations must collaborate and strategize on how they, and in turn us, can do better in supporting a broad and fresh base of members within our ranks to experience the political transformations, solidarity, and exchanges that often come from delegations. In this context my reflection on my time grounding with Koreans, like my reflection on African power and politics in La Marina, is an attempt to offer some perspective on the broad map of global resistance to imperialism, the process of building ties to learn from our Global South siblings in struggle, and to share insights to both the experience itself and what I learned from it.
Koreans In Japan
One of the most staggering revelations of this trip was learning firsthand about the sheer scale of Korean suffering under Japanese imperialism. While the image constructed of Japan in the West is closely related to the island’s cultural exports — popular art, food, entertainment and fashion often associate the island and its history with all things fun and whimsical — the reality of its colonial violence is much less spoken. As Derek Ford details, the origins of Koreans in Japan is fraught with ‘profound violence’:
“From their founding after World War II, Koreans in Japan—who are sometimes called “Zainichi Koreans”, meaning “foreign Koreans”—have always had to struggle to create and maintain educational spaces and systems where they can teach and learn about their own history, culture, traditions, and languages, in addition to other essential disciplines and languages. This was a basic human right as well as a political struggle, as Japan’s colonization of Korea, which officially started in 1910 but began about 5 years earlier, forced over 2 million Koreans—about 90 percent of whom came from the southern part of the peninsula—to move to Japan through either physical violence, coercion, and deceit. The story of the formation of a Korean population in Japan in the 1900s is one of profound violence.
Some were “recruited” by Japanese companies after colonial forces stole their lands and gave them to landlords, promised great jobs and good pay but receiving the opposite. Many Korean women, hundreds of thousands, were kidnapped into Japan’s military sexual slavery network, which the U.S. [military] inherited after it replaced Japan as the occupying force in the south [in 1945]. In 1938, Japan forcibly conscripted and kidnapped workers from Korea and brought them to Japan as slave laborers, where they were forced to build the military, munitions buildings and construct secret underground bases and bunkers for the air force. In the latter instance, children were particularly valuable, as their small bodies and hands were essential for creating the tunnels with pickaxes.”
Koreans estimate upwards of 7-8 million were conscripted to Japanese colonial forced labor during the World War period, with at least 800,000 taken to mainland Japan as forced labor. Approximately 300,000 Korean women were kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, again, an operation later taken over by the U.S. military occupation. In their explanations of this history on our trip, the Koreans consistently made comparisons to the colonization of Indigenous people and chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas, and the plight of these individuals is a haunting testament to the universal brutality of colonialism. Similar to how African historians intentionally highlight and celebrate our resistance to colonialism and slavery, all of the Koreans made sure to remind us that they revolted consistently. One historian said that an estimated third of all Korean forced laborers actively resisted through guerrilla warfare, organized escape, and marronage, embodying a common anti-colonial spirit of resilience and defiance.
It’s worth noting the population dynamics among Koreans in Japan, because the Korean community in Japan has a complex and significant history, a main theme throughout the delegation. Japan’s policy towards ethnic Koreans living within its borders, particularly those who do not hold citizenship of either Japan or South Korea, reflects Japan’s enduring colonial policies and the greater geopolitical forces of the region. Japan only recognizes the Republic of Korea (‘South Korea’) as the ‘legitimate’ government of the Korean Peninsula. Consequently, Japan does not consider passports or citizenship issued by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or ‘North Korea’) as valid. This stance is rooted in Japan’s imperial legacy, subservient diplomatic relations with the U.S. who wages continual war against the DPRK, and its own colonial recognition policies. As one can imagine, immense issues related to things like traveling, housing, and education arise from not having your citizenship formally recognized.
Of roughly 1 million Koreans in Japan, thousands of them do not possess Japanese nor South Korean citizenship; the term “Choson” is used for them. This term is a reference to the Korean peninsula under the Choson Dynasty (1392–1897), before its division into North and South; from 1910 to 1945 the peninsula was ruled by the Empire of Japan under the name Choson. “Choson” is how the Japanese government categorizes these Koreans in legal, political, and administrative limbo, and it’s important to remember that many are descendants of Koreans brought to Japan during the colonial period who either only have DPRK citizenship, some combination of Japanese and Korean citizenship, or who have chosen not to obtain Japanese citizenship in place of citizenship to their Motherland, the DPRK. In 1947, Japan enacted the ‘Alien Registration Law’, which relegated ethnic Koreans to the status of foreigners within Japan. Following this, the Nationality Law of 1950 removed Japanese citizenship from Korean offspring born to Japanese mothers, while Korean children fathered by Japanese men could retain their Japanese citizenship.
Learning of these dynamics forced me to reflect on the colonial obsession with regulating national identity, citizenship, and ethnic classification; from the centuries-old ‘One-Drop Rule’ that continues to dictate the racial class system of the U.S., to the apartheid segregation system imposed onto the Palestinians by the Zionists, to the dangerous blood-quantum eugenics preoccupation of Nazi Germany. Whether implicitly implied through legal and cultural means, as is the case with Koreans in Japan, or through explicit and violent exclusion, colonizers are always necessarily obsessed with sternly dictating national and ethnic identity, marriage, citizenship, population diversification, and racial classification.
While some progress has been made, one can imagine the serious implications that these classifications have had for the identity, legal status, and discrimination of the Korean community in Japan for several generations. Those designated as Choson usually face challenges related to their imposed-statelessness, such as limitations on travel, difficulties in accessing most social services, ethnicity-based discrimination in housing and labor, and broader issues of societal oppression.
One example that we learned from students at Korea University was during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Japanese government created a special program to support students struggling financially. Japan allowed for students across the entire country of all nationalities, including students at international schools in Japan, to request and receive state funds to help needy students afford a laptop to do remote schoolwork during quarantine, access protective gear like masks and sanitizer, and even help paying university tuition. All students, that is, except for students at Korea University.
These students already faced a number of compounding financial and discriminatory issues long before the pandemic; students informed me that by simply attending Korea University, they have already curtailed the vast majority of their job prospects within Japan. Korea University was the only university where students were not allowed access to this COVID support, and Korean students launched a grassroots campaign in response to protest and calling out the Japanese government.
Other examples are much more dramatic, but equally illustrative of the oppressive nature of life in Japan for the Koreans. As Ford notes:
“In 2018, a Japanese man attacked a young Korean man with a knife, and he admitted to police he did so “because he had ‘looked down’ on him.” That same year, two men shot up Chongryon’s headquarters in downtown Tokyo.”
During our visit, the mixture of this painful past with the tenuous present was palpable.
“Just before the beginning of the COVID pandemic we had to crawl through a torn chainlink fence,” participants of the delegation from prior years told me, as we accessed the underground tunnels where thousands of Koreans perished as forced laborers. By November 2023 during my trip, the Japanese government had installed sparse lighting inside the opening of the tunnel, and had a small multilingual plaque acknowledging the historic nature of the site. Having legal access to these tunnels and the small commemorative plaque is itself the result of struggle by local Korean organizers and a small handful of Japanese historians, and remains a point of contention: the plaque doesn’t accurately describe the site, almost reading as a celebration of the horrors endured by Koreans in these tunnels, with absolutely no mention of forced labor. Of the roughly 1200 forced labor tunnels across the island, only less than a dozen are accessible by Japanese historians, who must receive tight-gripped government approval to enter.
These underground cave-tunnels were utilized by the Japanese imperial army, who moved most of their military operations underground to escape bombardments and military action during the World Wars. Once I ducked my way into the dark, humid tunnel, I quickly realized the space was filled with an ominous, heavy, and familiar feeling. We observed the physical marks on the walls of these underground tunnels painstakingly chiseled by the hands of Korean laborers, many just teenagers as young as 12, under the duress of Imperial Japanese guns. These marks are not just scars on stone; they are indelible imprints of a dark history, a somber reminder of the exploitation and suffering endured.
Exploring the legacies of chattel slavery causes a similarly chilling feeling for Africans in the Americas. At the Castillo de San Severino in Matanzas, Cuba, for example, historians point out where you can still see the bullet holes in the stone walls, where Africans who attempted to escape or revolt were punished by gunfire. There’s a level of reality that is communicated by experiencing the physical remnants of this deep oppression.
Dr. Chung and professor Curry Malott, another participant on the delegation, described that when there were no lights inside these colonial tunnels, only the guide’s flashlight, they were immersed in shadows and the echoes of brutal horror. To honor this, we turned off all the lights to experience just a few seconds of the darkness that plagued Koreans for decades.
Interestingly, the Japanese public’s awareness of their nation’s colonial history is markedly absent, intentionally hidden and disallowed from public memory in any capacity. The nation’s imperial history is not taught in their schools, nor part of public discussion in any meaningful capacity. The lack of historical consciousness among the Japanese populace about their own country’s role in colonizing Korea is concerning, but not dissimilar to the absolute and proud lack of public knowledge in the U.S. of the atrocities their European ancestors carried out against many colonized and enslaved populations. It points to a broader issue of historical amnesia as a tool of the maintenance empire, the nearly inescapable dominating power of U.S. imperialism, and the importance of truthful historical education in acknowledging and learning from the past.
Since at least 1948 the Koreans have engaged in organized resistance in the form of grassroots organization and DPRK-supported popular education. In 1955, this grassroots organizations would become Chongryon, a network of Korean schools that they began to build immediately following liberation. Chongryon now exists as a network of hundreds of Korean schools across the islands, cultural centers and businesses, and a humbly stunning university in Tokyo — all leading the struggle against the violent erasure of Korean people’s history, culture, and presence. And, as one professor made sure I understood clearly, all of this is achieved through belief in the values and principles of socialism.
Microcosm of Regional Imperialist Aggression
The complexities of this situation reflect the ongoing tensions in the East Asian region — due primarily to the presence of U.S. imperialist forces that occupy all of Japan and the Southern Korean Peninsula — and the wider Pacific region through United States Pacific Command (USPACOM).
In my short time in Japan, I was repeatedly stunned at the extremely visible and influential presence of U.S. military forces on the small island. Signs in some places read “U.S. Military Housing”, while others advertise “Best Car Rentals For U.S. Military Men.” When I ventured into the fashion district in my free time, massive and popular second-hand clothing markets were on most corners filled with used military paraphernalia, proudly sitting across from the McDonald’s on every block. In true ‘traveling while Black’ fashion, I sought out other Black people whenever possible; in Tachikawa, nearly every Black person I saw, including those who messaged me on social apps, were U.S. soldiers and their families. In some regards, what I observed and experienced of the U.S. Military presence in Japan was more visible and aggressive than their presence domestically in many places. The juxtaposition of Japanese culture and context with the U.S. military presence gave the same feeling as the police who occupy U.S. cities, who stick out within a society designed to cater to them.
The U.S. has not only occupied and wedged its way into virtually every aspect of Japanese life and economy, it has also stunted and outright stopped virtually all attempts at Korean reunification, regional peace and stability, and sustainable diplomatic ties between the DPRK, its citizens, and Japan.
One afternoon on the trip we drove up a winding, narrow road to park our van at a stunning mountaintop park, surrounded by cherry blossoms and lush greens. The beauty felt like a scene from a movie.
“Right there, you see it,” Said Dr. Kiyul, one hand on my shoulder and the other pointing at the various cargo and military ships in the ocean. “See that big U.S. ship right there? That’s where the nukes are!”
The ship he was referring to was the unavoidable USS Ronald Reagan, a massive nuclear-powered aircraft ‘supercarrier’ sitting off the shore of Yokosuka.
“That ship is readied with nuclear weapons and other devastating heavy artillery, aimed at the DPRK at all times. One may think that the Japanese, being the victims of the world’s most tragic and infamous nuclear attack by the U.S., wouldn’t cooperate with this nuclear chauvinism,” said Dr. Kiyul.
Unfortunately, the U.S. uses the nonsensical guise of “deterrent diplomacy” and maintains a subservient Japanese government to assert that they are keeping Japan ‘safe’ from the DPRK and others, even if the opposite remains true. Most Japanese people I spoke with in my free time felt, for lack of a better term, deeply indifferent to the U.S. military occupation across their island, though some have said that the events in Palestine since October 7 have changed that.
It’s important to underscore how deeply ingrained the U.S. military presence and militarization is in the Pacific region is. Similar to how U.S. AFRICOM has turned the entirety of the African continent to a subservient militarized zone, or how the U.S. SOUTHCOM has designated Latin America as its “yard” to dominate, so too has the U.S. PACOM (Indo-Pacific Command) carved the entire Pacific region into its playground. U.S. military bases, naval carriers, occupation installments, and joint-training endeavors completely surround the DPRK and China, utilizing Japan, Southern Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Guam, and surrounding areas in the region to encircle those the U.S. deem as enemies.
This all-encompassing military presence aligns with the U.S. strategy of “full spectrum dominance” to control all land, sea, air and space possible. Across the continent of Africa the presence of the U.S. AFRICOM resulted in a 100,000% increase in terrorism across the continent, deteriorated the already shaky regional stability, and left neo-colonial forces with new caches of U.S. weapons. In a similar manner, the U.S. presence in the Pacific has caused a breakdown of negotiations between the DPRK and neighborhooding countries like Japan, as well as the Southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. Each time the North and South Korean governments have attempted peace talks, let alone discussions of any potential reunification, the U.S. has swiftly halted such talks; the easing of Japanese hostility against the DPRK was also stunted by the U.S., who deemed the DPRK a grave safety and forbade the Japanese government from seeking peaceful solutions. The U.S. has consistently denied DPRK-initiated proposals to discuss a peace treaty to formally end the Korean war, for example, the longest war in U.S. history.
What’s clear is that the U.S. prefers to continue an aggressive and antagonistic policy towards the DPRK, using its subservient “allies” in the region as mere launching pads from which they can target their regional enemies. Despite the DPRK remaining politically consistent on the question of peace talks, consistent on the common sense policy not relinquishing nuclear weapons (for fear of suffering the same fate of Libya’s Qaddafi), consistent on their expressed desire for reunification of Korea, the U.S. has been equally consistent in denying the region stability and demilitarized peace. The largest military occupation is in Luchu (Okinawa), which doubles as a U.S. and Japanese colonial occupation of these Indigenous islands.
For Koreans in Japan, I was told by students, Japanese aggression and discrimination against internal Koreans tends to match the larger geopolitical situations they face. As the geopolitical sphere becomes more complex and contentious, local Koreans face knife attacks, are scared to wear their traditional clothing outside of their schools, are made into the society’s punching bags, and experience a microcosm of the larger regional warcraft by the U.S..
68 years of Internationalism, Popular Education In Practice
The delegation took place just one month following the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation in Occupied Palestine on October 7, and therefore the consistent backdrop of most conversations on the trip was Palestine, the resistance struggle being waged there, and how it is related to the burgeoning potential of a multipolar world. The DPRK has long supported the struggles of the Palestinian Resistance both materially and politically, as they have to a lesser known extent African liberation struggles, including training various militant Black Panthers and supporting some seeking asylum. In fact the DPRK has never recognized the Zionist state, consistently calling for the liberation of Palestine.
In the Korean elementary and middle schools, I flipped through pages in their history books and saw images of Martin Luther King Jr., Muamar Qadaffi, the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, Ahmed Ben Bella, and other revolutionary figures in African history, which was particularly warming. While in in the U.S. the DPRK is extremely and harshly vilified, the Global South still largely recognizes the DPRK for having never surrendered to imperialism, and as an “unwavering ally of the South and the resolute torchbearer of anti-imperialism”, as the Communist Party of Kenya put it in their December issue of Itikadi. Reverence for the DPRK exists across Africa, with organizations like the Nigerian-DPRK Friendship Association highlighting the role that the DPRK played in supporting African liberation movements of the 60s and the 70s, and African development beyond that. This support includes providing tractors and agricultural supplies, helping to develop local infrastructure like roads and hospitals, exchange of academic training, import-export exchange, and technological cooperation.
Inside each room of the Korean high schools and the Korean University, images of their anti-colonial heroes Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il hang proudly, similar to the endless images of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Jose Martí plastered across Cuban walls. The Koreans recognize their struggle as primarily a struggle against the contradictions of imperialism and colonialism, with the Korean Juche ideology guiding them, and sew this recognition into the fabric of their work inside Japan.
In the middle school classes, a young Korean girl was asked to practice her English in front of the class by speaking to us; the students all turned their chairs around and sat quietly, attentively to show her respect. To our surprise, she didn’t simply introduce herself, but rather introduced her entire class, speaking almost exclusively in the collective “we” — telling us what ‘we’ as a class like to do, why they are excited to meet us, and so forth. We all noted the collective, communal nature of the Chongryan system, and the beautiful display of this collectivism in the student’s persistent use of “we.”
Toward the latter half of our trip, I was able to guest lecture alongside other delegation participants for two different classes at Korea University. The topic of the class that I joined is itself a testament to the advanced nature of their revolutionary education: “End of the Unipolar World, Creation of Multipolar World: Histories of Korea-U.S., Russia-U.S., and China-U.S. Confrontation” taught by professor Kiyul Chung. We discussed the globalization of anti-imperialist principles of self-determination, the role of the DPRK in supporting a burgeoning multipolar world, and the active application of DPRK principles of self-reliance and self-defense.
When it was my turn to speak, I put into context the struggles of Africans within the U.S. as an internal colony, highlighted several moments of joint history between DPRK and African liberation struggles, and discussed the strong commonalities between Pan-Africanism and Korean Reunification as strategies and political ideologies. The commonalities in these two ideological northstars needs to be further explored. The same way that Korean Reunification wishes to see the U.S., Japanese, and Western imperialist grip on Korea fall, we too wish to see this imperialist grip on Africa fall. The same way that they desire the reunification of the Korean Peninsula under scientific socialism, so too do we wish to see the unification of Africa under scientific socialism. In the same way that they envision safety and security for the Korean diaspora as being existentially linked to the reunification of Korea, we also understand the safety and security of Africans in our diaspora from imperialist racism as only being achievable through Africa’s unification.
And as they wish to see the fall of the neo-colonial puppet governments of Japan and South Korea — who take their orders directly from the U.S. — we, too, wish to see the fall of the neo-colonial comprador class, who exploit Africa and Africans at the command of Western imperialists.
The discussions highlighted the irony of certain academic narratives that focus exclusively on single-issue oppression with a U.S.-centric lens, while ignoring the broader history and experience of imperialism globally. While discourse of ‘global anti-blackness’ has gone viral in recent years, rarely have I seen this perspective properly contrasted with the experiences of Koreans under Japanese imperialism, including the mass rape and enslavement of Korean women, or other colonized populations. It underscored the importance of recognizing and respecting the diverse histories of both suffering and resistance across the world, rather than subsuming them under singular narratives of blanket oppression hierarchies.
This trip helped me to think deeper on the often cited concept of ‘the world being built on antiblackness’, critically examined in the light of the Pacific region’s experiences, the Arab (West Asia) region’s experiences, and so forth. The sufferings of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran, in Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii, and in other regions includes levels of dehumanization, mass murder, sanctions, exploitation, and slavery by Western powers that challenge the narrative that centers solely on anti-Blackness as the foundational for global oppression. This view feels reductive in light of serious engagement with the world history of imperialism, as it overlooks the multifaceted nature of imperialist violence and the diverse experiences of those suffering under it, in favor of grand narratives.
While I do not claim to be an expert on such subjects nor want this occasionally controversial topic to overshadow the overall reflections in this piece, I do hope that we can broaden our understanding of our own oppression in light of global struggles. Conditions of enslavement, colonization, vicious racism and discrimination emanate from a system of imperialism that dictates super-exploitation at all costs, that simply reappears in various forms and locations. We must resist the urge to claim a form of chauvinism which asserts a global preoccupation, consciously or subconsciously, with our oppression as the ‘psychic’ lifeblood of the modern world. In reality, imperialism is the lifeblood of the modern world-building project, with the U.S.-EU-NATO bloc dictating the terms of exploitation to the world.
This, perhaps, is why the Chongryon school network is primarily based on Korean culture as their basis of community and education. “Korean culture is thousands of years old, and our oppression is not,” one student at Korea University told me. “That is why we focus on learning our Korean language, our mythology, our history. if we do not preserve it, Japan will squash it out of us.”
In Cuba, a similar phenomenon exists. The depth of African culture, from language and dance, to fashion and spiritual practice, help to unify and sustain the Revolution, by creating a common African identity that Afro-Cubans unify around. For the Koreans in Japan, their culture is not just an act of resistance against Japanese erasure, it is also a source of unity and great ethnic, national pride. For African organizers in the West, we have to remember that our culture is a powerful tool for unification and pride, taking the lessons from other colonized individuals who have proven as much.
Under the guise of building a ‘battery factory’ and with firm belief in the power of their culture, Koreans in Japan secretly built Korea University without the knowledge of the Japanese government, which opened in 1956. On the basis of culture and popular education, they have turned this act of defiance into a network of contested spaces, where they are able to exercise their autonomy. Language, song, dance, history, traditions, clothing, all are celebrated as a basis for the socialist experiment in self-determination that is Chongryon. I couldn’t help but wonder, what it would mean for us to return to and celebrate our African culture in a similar and serious manner.
As we move forward, it is crucial to carry these lessons with us, fostering an empathetic and decisive discourse on resistance and liberation. Delegations are not simply to perform a more ethical form of tourism, but rather are crucial moments to witness and learn the opportunities that exist for colonized peoples who are organized and dedicated. After my trip to Chongryon to ground with Koreans in the belly of another beast, I am reaffirmed that our struggle as Africans must be decisively socialist and anti-imperialist, firmly rooted in notions of cultural power, and remain consistent in our solidarity with the Korean struggle. We have to join them in calling for the reunification of Korea and supporting the U.S. Out Of Korea Movement, because the intertwined nature of our struggles are profound.
About the Author
D. Musa Springer is a cultural worker, community organizer, and independent researcher. They are a member of the Walter Rodney Foundation, and host of the Groundings podcast.
Featured photos: The 2nd U.S. Academic Peace Delegation to Chongryon meets with school and organization Officials; the Korea University student orchestra performs songs from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Credit: ANSWER Coalition.
