afellowkid

Link includes Japanese original text and photograph of the article. English version:

This is a short article from 1939 where a Japanese abductee escaped captivity from Korean Communist Guerrillas to tell the Japanese police in Ranam, Korea about meeting Kim Il-sung and his comrades, many of whom were women.

[Translation]

Gyeongseong Ilbo June 3, 1939

Astonished by Female Bandits

Kim Il-sung was a Gentleman

A Kidnap Victim Shares His Experience

[Telephone Report from Ranam] On the 22nd of last month, a person who had been kidnapped by bandits in the jurisdiction of the Samjang Police Station returned and spoke about the interesting inner workings of the bandits, based on his experiences of living with them deep in the mountains for over ten days.

One surprising thing was the presence of many female bandits among them, not just men as he had initially thought. These people are primarily ethnic Koreans from the Gando region and usually handle cooking and sewing for the bandits.

It was unique that they cook rice in a washbasin, but it was also surprising that they skillfully made Western clothes and combat hats using a proper hand-operated sewing machine. All of them uniformly expressed nostalgia for their homeland and said they wanted to return to Korea as soon as possible.

He met the leader who introduced himself as Kim Il-sung. Kim was a fair-skinned, good-looking man in his thirties, about 5 shaku and 5 or 6 sun tall (167 to 170 cm tall). He was bald, wore a combat hat, dressed in brown woolen clothes, and wore jika-tabi footwear.

“I'm with Men's Solidarity” Man in his 20s arrested for assaulting female employee at convenience store - Nov. 5, 2023 (article in Korean)

[Machine translation + slight editing]

A man in his 20s who assaulted a woman in her 20s working at a convenience store was caught by the police. He told the police, ‘I am a member of the Men’s Solidarity. He is said to have said, “Feminists must be beaten.”

Jinju Police Station in Gyeongsangnam-do announced on the 5th, “We have applied for an arrest warrant for Mr. According to what the police said, Mr. A was drunk at around 0:10 a.m. on the 4th and acted unruly, including throwing items he had chosen at a convenience store in Hadae-dong, Jinju.

It is said that a female employee in her 20s who worked at a convenience store stopped him, but the throwing of objects continued. Mr. A took the mobile phone of an employee who was trying to report it to the police, put it in the microwave, and beat the employee who tried to stop him from doing so. Mr. A even assaulted a customer in his 50s who tried to stop him. The police responded to the scene following a report from a passerby and arrested Mr. A.

The police said, “Mr. A, who was being investigated, said, ‘I saw that (the convenience store employee) had short hair and thought she was a feminist. “I said, ‘I am a member of the men’s solidarity and you should be beaten,’” he said.

“Why does a woman have short hair?” A 20-year-old who indiscriminately assaulted a part-time worker at a convenience store. (article in Korean)

[Machine translated excerpts]

A man in his 20s who indiscriminately assaulted a female part-time worker at a convenience store because of her short hair was caught by the police.

Mr. A is accused of assaulting Ms. B, who was in her 20s and was working part-time at a convenience store in Hadae-dong, Jinju, by punching and kicking her

He assaulted Mr. C, a customer in his 50s who tried to stop the assault, several times, and also hit him with a chair provided in the store.

As a result of Mr. A's crime, Ms. B suffered a sprain, ligament damage, and an ear injury, and Mr. C suffered fractures in his shoulder, forehead, and nose.

At the time of the crime, he was found to have made remarks to Mr. B, saying, "When I see a woman with short hair, I see a feminist" and "I am a Men's Solidarity member, feminists should be beaten."

Excerpts:

Since 7 October 2023, more than 1,900 Palestinians have been killed, including at least 600 children, more than 7,600 injured, and over 423,000 people have been displaced as a result of the Israeli strikes. This fate befell a population which has already experienced five major wars since 2008 in the context of an unlawful blockade imposed by Israel since 2007, which Albanese said has been widely condemned by the international community as collective punishment.

On 12 October, Israeli forces issued an order for 1.1 million Palestinians in north Gaza to move to the south within 24 hours, amidst ongoing airstrikes. The next day, Israeli forces reportedly began to enter Gaza in order to “clear” the area. Palestinians have no safe zone anywhere in Gaza, with Israel having imposed a “complete siege” on the tiny enclave, with water, food, fuel and electricity unlawfully cut off. Rafah, the only border crossing that remained partially open to the Gaza strip, was closed after damage caused by Israeli airstrikes.

“There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale. The international community must do everything to stop this from happening again,” the UN expert said. She noted that Israeli public officials have openly advocated for another Nakba, the term for the events of 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and lands during the hostilities that led to the establishment of the State of Israel. The Naksa, which led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, displaced 350,000 Palestinians.

Summary: PDP gave a speech in front of US embassy in Seoul and a speech in front of the White House in Washington DC. The speech expressed that only when Palestine is liberated can the conflict be resolved, and that the "US and Israel are one body and it is public knowledge in the whole world that the US aggression forces are behind the indiscriminate bombing and aggression of the Palestinians" and "the imperialist powers led by the United States have turned the world into a powder keg of war" using Zionism in the Middle East, NATO in Europe, Japanese militarism and the formation of an "Asian version of NATO" in Asia, strengthening the war alliance against DPRK and plotting a war in East Asia.

The speech concludes: "the deeper imperialist aggression becomes, the stronger a unity of anti-US independent forces become. The Palestinian people, who seek independence and justice, will defeat the aggressive US imperialist and win their liberation. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!"

Link to English statement

This article is originally in Korean. These are some excerpts with machine translation and my slight additions:

Jeju Special Self-Governing Province and the Jeju April 3rd Peace Foundation announced that the identity of the missing April 3rd victim, whose fate was unknown, was confirmed in Golnyeonggol, Daejeon [Note: Several photos of violence and human remains are in that link], after 74 years.

The victims identified this time are 70 of the 1,441 remains excavated in Golnyeonggol through the first pilot project of 'Genetic identification of 4/3 victims from excavated remains from outside the province' conducted by Jeju Special Self-Governing Province and the Jeju 4/3 Peace Foundation.

The person whose identity was confirmed was the late Kim Han-hong, from Bukchon-ri, Jocheon-myeon, Jeju-si. During the April 3 Incident, he was hiding in a field away from the village to avoid punitive forces and armed forces. He came to the military at the end of January 1949 and surrendered himself on the rumor that he would be set free if he surrendered. The bereaved family said that after being detained in the distillery camp, no news was heard.

The list of prisoners shows that the victim was sentenced to seven years in prison on July 4, 1949 and served his sentence at Daejeon Prison.

On October 4, the remains of the victims went through a handover process with the bereaved families, the Jeju April 3 Victims' Families Association, the Sanae Incident Victims' Families Association, and officials from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety in attendance, and a ritual was held at Sejong Eunhasu Park under the auspices of the bereaved families, and then cremated in October. They are scheduled to be repatriated to Jeju by plane on the 5th.

At the site where the remains of the victims are returned to their hometown, the bereaved families and officials, including Governor Oh Young-hoon, will greet them in person, and a ceremony to return the remains will be held afterwards. Subsequently, an identification briefing session will be held on the same day to commemorate the victims and comfort their bereaved families.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is in the process of collecting remains from 2,000 of the 3,900 remains temporarily enshrined in the Sejong Memorial House, including the remains of the Daejeon Golryeonggol victims, and is conducting genetic tests on bereaved families. is planned to be carried out.

Chairman [of the Daejeon Mountain Incident Victims' Families Associatio] Jeon Mi-kyung said, “How good would it have been if something like this had happened to the families of the massacred people while they were still alive?” and “It breaks my heart that many family members of the massacred people are still passing away while the genetic identification is delayed.”

The son of the late Kim Han-hong, whose identity was recently confirmed through genetic identification, died in 2020 without being able to identify his father's remains. However, fortunately, he was able to confirm his identity because he left behind DNA data through blood collection while he was still alive.___

"The combined number of those seeking to stay in China and those wanting to return to the North is actually greater than those hoping to reach South Korea."

"The more South Korea and the international community get involved in defector issues with their own political agenda, the more likely it is to end up further cementing our national division."

Lee Sung-hwan (pseudonym): "I hate being called a ‘defector.’ I didn’t leave because I’m opposed to the politics in North Korea. I’m just someone who left to earn money, and I plan to return once I’ve made some."

Note: Hankyoreh is a center-left liberal newspaper from South Korea.

Excerpts:

Since 1997, Cho has met with North Korean defectors primarily in China’s Yanbian prefecture and the North Korean-Chinese border region. Other than last year, when the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to visit China, he has met with defectors virtually every year for the past two decades or so. Based on his meetings, they presented quite a different image from the one commonly perceived in South Korea, he said.

For example, Cho administered a survey to 100 female North Korean defectors whom he had met with three or more times between August 2001 and October 2003. Forty-one of them said they wanted to travel to the South, while the other 59 did not: 34 wanted to return to North Korea, 21 hoped to remain in China, and four wanted none of the above. Indeed, Kim Ryon-hui, the so-called “Pyongyangite in Daegu,” has demanded repatriation ever since she arrived in the South in 2011, insisting that she only came because she had been “deceived by a broker.”

Lee Sung-hwan (pseudonym), one of the defectors who hoped to return to the North, is quoted as saying, “I hate being called a ‘defector.’ I didn’t leave because I’m opposed to the politics in North Korea. I’m just someone who left to earn money, and I plan to return once I’ve made some.”

Pak Kyong-hwa (pseudonym) is a native of Onsong, North Hamgyong Province, whom Cho met in the Chinese city of Yanji in 2014. “If it’s someone who left after committing a crime, someone who’ll be punished if they go back, you’ll never hear them talk about going back to North Korea. But people like us just quickly earn money and go back,” she explained.

“Certain brokers, NGOs and missionary groups have been orchestrating and expanding North Korean defections to South Korea for political purposes. And as certain far-right and conservative media in South Korea and Japan have either parroted the things they say or actively orchestrated things themselves, things have really crossed the line,” Cho said.

The primary victims of actions like these are the defectors themselves. Orchestrated defections lead to intensified controls on the North Korean-Chinese border, leaving far fewer options available to those who seek to remain in China or return to the North.

Some defectors, NGOs and missionary groups have also taken advantage of this “defector myth” to perpetrate fraud. As a representative example, Cho mentioned the Yerang Mission incident, which the Supreme Court declared a case of fraud in 2008. Beginning in the early 2000s, the mission appropriated over 2 billion won (US$1.8 million) in donations raised through internet posts about “risking death to evangelize in North Korea” and the “martyrdom and defections of North Koreans.” In 2006, the church was tried amid accusations by congregation members, and most of the messages it posted were found to have been false.

“The more South Korea and the international community get involved in defector issues with their own political agenda, the more likely it is to end up further cementing our national division,” he warned.

Related:

• Nearly 1 in 5 North Korean defectors say they regret coming to South Korea
• Interview: A North Korean mother’s quest to return home to Pyongyang
• [CW: Child abuse, SA] S. Korean pastor under investigation for molestation at the boarding school he established for N. Korean defectors
• "Spy Nation" (2016): Film Shines Light on South Korean Spy Agency’s Fabrication of Enemies
• Unreliable witnesses: The challenge of separating truth from fiction when it comes to North Korea
• The insidious threat of fake news surrounding North Korea

Excerpts:

In 1922, only one American in ten owned an automobile. (Everyone else used rail.) At that time Alfred P. Sloan (President, General Motors) said, 'Wait a minute, this is a great opportunity. We've got 90 percent of the market out there that we can somehow turn into automobile users. If we can eliminate the rail alternatives, we will create a new market for our cars. And if we don't, then General Motors' sales are just going to remain level.'

Sloan wanted to get in very big in this field. What he bought was phenomenal: the largest bus-operating company in the country and the largest bus-production company. And using that as a foothold, GM moved into Manhattan. They acquired interests in the New York railways and between 1926 and '36 they methodically destroyed the rails.

When they finally motorized New York, General Motors issued ads throughout the country [...] trying to show that motorization is the wave of the future. They issued these ads and they said, `The motorization of 4th and Madison is the most important event in the history of community transportation.'

GM worked hard to create the impression of a nationwide trend away from rail. But there was no trend. Buses were a tough sell. They jolted. They smelled. They inched through traffic. City by city, it took the hidden hand of General Motors to replace streetcars with Yellow Coach buses.

In 1936, a company was founded that would grow to dominate American city transportation. National City Lines had no visible connection to General Motors. In fact, the director of operations came from a GM subsidiary, Yellow Coach, and members of the Board of Directors came from Greyhound, which was founded and controlled by General Motors.

Over the next few years, Standard Oil of California, Mack Truck, Phillips Petroleum and Firestone Tire would join GM in backing this venture.

"They don't take the service out, they just cut it back. They'll take and cut it from 10 minutes to 12 minutes, from 12 to 15, from 15 to 20, from 20 to 30. So they reduce the service. And every time you reduce the service you make it less attractive. And the less attractive the fewer riders. And then they say, `Well see, we can't make any money.' So they abandon it."

Narrator: Edwin Quinby was a rail buff with a talent for financial sleuthing. In 1946, he mailed a warning to influential people in hundreds of cities across the country. His 33-page broadside was filled with surprisingly detailed research. It brought to light what GM had worked hard to hide.

Edwin Quinby (voice over): "The plan is to destroy public utilities, which you'll find impractical to replace after you discover your mistake. Who are the corporations behind this? Why are they permitted to destroy valuable electric railways?"

Mass Transportation Magazine (voice over): "Queer Case of Quinby, by Ross Schram. Edwin J. Quinby took full advantage of the great American privilege of the free press to feed the lunatic fringe of radicals and crackpots springing up like weeds in the United States today."

National City Lines, General Motors and the other defendants were found guilty of conspiracy to monopolize the local transportation field.

"These companies, that had probably eliminated systems that in order to reconstitute today [1996] would require maybe $300 billion, these companies were individually fined $5,000."

Narrator: The Justice Department would spend the next 25 years trying to limit GM's influence on transportation. It would begin three major investigations into monopoly practices: two were settled out of court; one was eventually dropped. An effective way to rein in GM was never found.

I believe this is the survey being discussed.

Some quotes from the article:

Survey results showed that 18.5% of North Korean defectors expressed that they “regret” moving to South Korea.

Those who regret settling in the South reported experiencing difficulties due to cultural differences, psychological isolation, and economic issues.

Based on her analysis of North Korean defectors’ adaptation to life in the South, IPUS senior researcher Choi Eun-young Christina explained that 18.59% of the 312 defectors surveyed who had left North Korea between 2017 and 2019 answered in the affirmative when asked whether they “regret coming to South Korea.”

Among those who reported regretting their decision, 84.48% complained about struggles with cultural differences, 70.69% with psychological isolation, and 65.52% with economic issues.

“Given that the suicide rate for defectors is over double that of South Koreans and there has been a recent rise in defectors leaving the South — including those returning to North Korea — we need to be looking more closely at the problems that defectors are experiencing in South Korea,” she suggested.

I read some of this article today, it is looking at a policy speech and going over the economic development and future outlook for DPRK. This website writes from a south Korean perspective with a fairly positive view of DPRK (it's illegal to praise DPRK).

They compare DPRK's expected growth rate of 7% to OECD countries and found that only Ireland is higher than DPRK, and that DPRK's growth is higher than China's.

Ireland 9.94%

Turkiye (Turkey) 5.24%

Estonia 4.12%

Israel 3.85%

Poland 3.84%

For reference, Korea is 2.44%, the US is 1.98%, Japan is -0.20%, China is 6.74%, India is 4.00%, and the global average is 2.42%.

In this comparison, if North Korea's goals are realized, North Korea can be said to be the country with the fastest economic growth except Ireland. In particular, it is noteworthy that the level is higher than that of China, which leads the world economy with its high economic growth rate.

The article also mentions that Ireland's high growth rate can be attributed to foreign capital investment, and the article notes that when countries invite foreign capital in, they tend to get looted, and so DPRK is trying to grow without doing this. They also mention that DPRK's growth would likely be more rapid if sanctions were removed.

The article also looks at what sectors DPRK is developing, and compared DPRK and ROK's economic sectors, as well as the U.S.

Looking at the industrial structure [of the United States] as of 2020, the manufacturing sector accounted for 11.2%, while the service sector accounted for a whopping 80.1%. The country's economy is immersed in the service industry. This deformed economic structure is the root cause of today's economic crisis in the United States.

Later in the article, they talk about the policy of pursuing balanced regional development, and mention how it is often said that only people in Pyongyang have a high quality of life. The article grants that it's hard not to notice the development of Pyongyang which has grown to be a bustling city. However, the article points out the promotion of regional and rural development is being emphasized.

In his address to the city administration, Chairman Kim Jong-un said, “We should open up a new era in which regions change and develop on their own by promoting local industries across the country.” The idea is that local industries should be established so that the provinces can develop on their own without central support.

In addition, Chairman Kim Jong-un said, “We need to strongly push forward the business of modernizing local industrial factories in Kimhwa-gun and expanding the practical experience of ensuring demand within the military with its own raw material source to cities and counties across the country.”

North Korea has set Kimhwa-gun as a model for regional industrial development this year. The goal is to produce consumer goods necessary for the region in a factory that has realized modernization and automation using raw materials from their own region.

On rural development:

North Korea also has the idea of ​​developing Samjiyon City to make rural areas across the country like Samjiyon. Large-scale greenhouse farms such as Jungpyeong Namsae (vegetables) Greenhouse Farm and Ryeonpo Greenhouse Farm are also being developed one after another. Thousands of apartment complexes were built in the Geomdeok district as an example of mountain villages and Gwangsan villages.

The article compares DPRK's program of regional and rural development to south Korea's, where an imbalance between the capital and the regional areas also exists, and points out that although many approaches have been tried to improve the balance of development in the south, the concentration in the cities is still getting worse, and so it will be worthwhile to keep an eye on DPRK's plans and developments in this regard.

The article then moves on to the topic of wealth inequality:

North Korea has a policy that aims to distribute the results of economic development evenly to the entire nation.

The article points out that wealth disparity is a chronic issue in capitalist countries, and adds that south Korea's situation is further complicated by the presence of foreign capital:

In South Korea, unlike other capitalist countries, the issue of foreign capital is added. Since a lot of foreign capital is coming into Korea, foreign capital takes a large part of the profits, and the domestic chaebols take a lot of the rest, so very little goes back to the common people. So, as of 2021, Korea's gross domestic product is ranked 10th in the world, but few people feel that they are living well economically.

The article then mentions that while some socialist countries have used the tactic of reform and opening up to increase their economic growth, it has resulted in some wealth inequalities in their countries, then notes that it seems that DPRK's policies aim to avoid that outcome in their own development strategies.

If you see inaccuracies in my summary compared to what the article says, please let me know.

Excerpts from article:

Between the end of the Korean War and the early 1990s, more than one million Korean women were caught up in a state-controlled prostitution industry that was blessed at the highest levels by the U.S. military. They worked in special zones surrounding U.S. bases—areas licensed by the South Korean government, reserved exclusively for American troops, and monitored and policed by the U.S. Army. These camp towns were known to the Koreans as kijichon.

The system was designed to strengthen the U.S.-South Korean alliance, which was formalized in a 1954 Mutual Defense Treaty; its less formal mission was to boost morale for the thousands of U.S. military personnel stationed on the peninsula after the Korean War. It was the same for South Korea, where prostitution was encouraged as a woman’s patriotic duty to the state. Dongducheon, with some 7,000 registered prostitutes at its height, was the largest of the kijichon, and the strip of camp towns stretching from the DMZ down to Seoul was known as “GI Heaven.”

The Monkey House was a virtual prison for sex workers. It was built during a series of camp-town “cleanup” campaigns first launched by the South Korean government and the Pentagon in the 1960s. Their object was to ensure the sexual hygiene of American troops; rates of venereal disease among the GIs in South Korea were then far above the norm for American military installations in Japan and Europe. [...] Korean and U.S. security forces combed through the towns searching for women suspected of carrying STDs. Once in custody at the Monkey House, the women were inspected, shot up with penicillin supplied by the U.S. military, and confined inside its walls until they were “cured.” Then they were sent back to service their American customers.

In a sweeping decision in February 2018, Lee [a South Korean judge] ruled that the Korean state “operated and managed” the military camp towns to contribute to the “maintenance of a military alliance essential for national security” and abetted the industry “through patriotic education praising prostitutes as ‘patriots who bring in foreign currency.’” He directly referenced the Monkey House detention facilities, and concluded that the government had violated the human rights of its citizens. Specifically, he denounced the practice of segregating “camp town prostitutes in forced internment facilities or through the indiscriminate administration of penicillin, which carries serious physical side effects.”

The “overwhelming majority” of prostitutes in the camp towns were either orphans or abandoned children [...] The sex workers in the camp towns typically experienced a combination of “poverty, low-class status, physical, sexual and emotional abuse even before entering the kijichon world.” Once inside, “they were no longer treated as a person but as merchandise,” Kim Tae-jung, a counselor at Durebang, the support group for sex workers, explained at the forum in New York.

Eventually, the camp-town industry bulked up into a nationwide franchise operation. Kijichon zones were established around 31 U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy bases in South Korea. In Gyonggi province, which extends from south of Seoul up to the DMZ and was home to the majority of U.S. bases, some 10,000 sex workers were registered every year from 1953 to the late 1980s. They were part of a major industry: Moon estimates in her book that at the peak of U.S. troop strength in the 1980s, the kijichon economy contributed 5 percent of South Korea’s gross domestic product.

One former sex worker starkly laid out the conditions faced by many kijichon women in a documentary film produced by Durebang. “A pimp sold me to a U.S. camp town,” she recalled. “Inside a warehouse, I was raped. The police sent me to the Monkey House, where American medics gave us injections” of penicillin and other drugs to prevent the spread of STDs. After her release, she was required to wear a plastic badge showing she’d been tested—“c**t tags,” she called them. All sex workers and bar owners were required to hang these registration certificates on the walls of their establishments as well.

If the comfort women for Japan were kidnap victims, the U.S. camp-town women were victims of sustained economic coercion—much like indentured servants or tenant farmers. Once they were recruited to the camp towns, women found themselves trapped. They carried out their sex work in rooms they had to rent from the bar owners. They also had to buy all their supplies, including their bed, their clothes, and the phonographs they set up to entertain their American clients. “From the get-go, you have a pile of debt,” Choi said. “You try to pay your way out, but it’s a never-ending story.”

By and large, however, the Korean public has refrained from treating the kijichon women as victims of a heartless imperial power, in the manner of the comfort women. Instead, many Koreans see the camp-town prostitutes as “fallen women bringing shame to the nation,” said Park Jeong-mi, a professor at Chungbuk National University who was an expert witness in the 2014 lawsuit against the South Korean government. But Park argues that this sentiment is misleading and unfair, and in her research she has found a direct historical link between the Japanese and American systems that supplied Korean women to their troops.

During the years of direct U.S. occupation from 1945 to 1948, the U.S. military government created an administrative state that was dominated by Koreans who had collaborated with Japan’s colonial rulers. The leaders of this first occupying regime outlawed prostitution, but got around the prohibition by building brothels for U.S. troops. These outposts were dubbed “comfort stations” after the Japanese wartime model, according to documents Park recently unearthed from South Korea’s Ministry of Health. The shift from Japanese- to American-coerced sex work was an easy transition, she said: “High-ranking Korean officials who served under Japanese colonial rule were familiar with the comfort station system.”