Key Figures

Syngman Rhee (이승만, 1875–1965) became the first president of the Republic of Korea when a separate southern government was declared in 1948. US-educated and fiercely anti-communist, he led an authoritarian, American-aligned state until mass protests forced him from office in 1960; he died in exile in Hawaii. The South he built was the home Sunja's generation had left — but it was no longer the country they remembered, and for most of them it was no longer a place they could simply return to.

Kim Il-sung (김일성, 1912–1994) founded the Democratic People's Republic of Korea the same year and ruled it until his death. His state is the one Chongryon represented inside Japan, and it was the destination of the repatriation campaign of 1959–1984, which carried roughly 90,000 people from Japan to a North promised as a workers' paradise and which proved, for most, impossible to leave.

Korea was divided at the 38th parallel in 1945 and hardened into two opposed states in 1948; the Korean War (1950–1953) made the split permanent.

Mindan (Korean Residents Union in Japan, founded 1946) is affiliated with South Korea. It provided legal assistance, community services, Korean-language education, and political representation to Zainichi Koreans aligned with the Republic of Korea. After the 1965 normalization treaty, Mindan-affiliated Koreans gained a pathway to special permanent residency.

Chongryon (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, founded 1955) operates as North Korea's de facto diplomatic representation in Japan. In the 1950s and 1960s, when North Korea's economy outperformed South Korea's, Chongryon was the dominant Zainichi organization. It ran Korean-language schools, provided community loans, and organized the mass repatriation campaign of 1959–1984 that sent approximately 90,000 people to North Korea — most of whom found conditions far worse than promised and were unable to leave.

For a Zainichi Korean family in the 1950s and 1960s, affiliation with one organization or the other determined which schools your children attended, which banks would lend to your business, and what legal assistance you could access. The division was imposed not by Zainichi Koreans themselves but by Cold War geopolitics that split the Korean peninsula and forced the diaspora to choose sides.