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North Korea Koreans Living Overseas
Large-scale emigration from Korea began around 1904 and
continued until the end of World War II. During the Japanese
colonial occupation (1910-45), many Koreans emigrated to
Manchuria (China's three northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang,
Jilin, and Liaoning), other parts of China, the Soviet Union,
Hawaii, and the continental United States. People from Korea's
northern provinces went mainly to Manchuria, China, and Siberia;
many from the southern provinces went to Japan. Most émigrés left
for economic reasons because employment opportunities were
scarce; many Korean farmers had lost their land after the
Japanese colonial government introduced a system of private land
tenure, imposed higher land taxes, and promoted the growth of an
absentee landlord class charging exorbitant rents.
In the 1980s, more than 4 million ethnic Koreans lived
outside the peninsula. The largest group, about 1.7 million
people, lived in China; most had assumed Chinese citizenship.
Approximately 1 million Koreans, almost exclusively from South
Korea, lived in North America. About 389,000 ethnic Koreans
resided in the former Soviet Union. One observer noted that
Koreans have been so successful in running collective farms in
Soviet Central Asia that being Korean is often associated by
other citizens there with being rich, and as a result there is
growing antagonism against Koreans. Smaller groups of Koreans are
found in Central America and South America (85,000), the Middle
East (62,000), Europe (40,000), Asia (27,000), and Africa
(25,000).
Many of Japan's approximately 680,000 Koreans have belowaverage standards of living. This situation is partly because of
discrimination by the Japanese. Many resident Koreans, loyal to
North Korea, remain separate from, and often hostile to, the
Japanese social mainstream. The pro-North Korean
Choch'ongryn
(General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, known as
Ch sen s ren or Ch s ren in Japanese) (see Glossary) initially
was more successful than the pro-South Korean Mindan (Association
for Korean Residents in Japan) in attracting adherents among
residents in Japan.
Between 1959 and 1982, Choch'ongryn encouraged the
repatriation of Korean residents in Japan to North Korea. More
than 93,000 Koreans left Japan, the majority (80,000 persons) in
1960 and 1961. Thereafter, the number of repatriates declined,
apparently because of reports of hardships suffered by their
compatriots. Approximately 6,637 Japanese wives accompanied their
husbands to North Korea, of whom about 1,828 retained Japanese
citizenship in the early 1990s. P'yongyang had originally
promised that the wives could return home every two or three
years to visit their relatives. In fact, however, they are not
allowed to do so, and few have had contact with their families in
Japan. In normalization talks between North Korean and Japanese
officials in the early 1990s, the latter urged unsuccessfully
that the wives be allowed to make home visits.
Data as of June 1993
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