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By Root 1027 0

dead set against moving, couldn’t get out of it. Some members of the extended family tried to rally behind him, and certain cousins even offered to take him in. He put up a good fight, but winning ultimately would have entailed breaking with his parents, something he was not ready to do. He tried to explain his reasons for wanting to stay and even offered to manage the family casinos while continuing his university studies. Grandfather refused: once resolved to leave, he wanted to make a clean break of it. For my uncle the idea of leaving the country where he had grown up and gone to school, where his parents had met and fallen in love, was unthinkable. At boarding time, he ran away to his cousins’ house. Grandmother had to go there and fetch him, and when he refused to obey her—a rare thing in those days—she slapped him and dragged him to the docks, arriving just as the ship was about to sail.

My uncle still had one option remaining: he could raise a protest before the Japanese authorities, claim that his parents were taking him against his will, and request the protection of the Japanese state. When it had come to the Japanese government’s attention that the Worker’s Party and its associations were pressing heads of households to depart with their entire families, it opened a small government office near the turnstile of the Korean-bound ships, where a bureaucrat and several members of the Red Cross interviewed departing passengers to verify that they were leaving of their own accord.

My uncle wavered until the last moment. A terrible struggle took place inside of him. On one side was his love for his parents and his wish to obey them, on the other, his attachment to his current life and his uncertainty about the life awaiting him abroad. Perhaps he also had some dark foreboding. Still undecided, his eyes crossed his mother’s fearsome, imperious gaze, and his choice seemed already made. The authorities asked him if he personally wanted to move to Korea, and he answered that, yes, he did. And there, too, was a destiny sealed.

On the ship over, the long-awaited dream seemed actually to materialize. The family was treated with perfect solicitude, lodged in a luxury cabin and regaled with the finest meals. While the other returning patriots were treated like ordinary passengers, my family was catered to like Communist Party cadres—better yet, like a group headed to honor Kim Il-sung on his birthday. Grandmother told me that one of the ship’s passengers was Kim Yong-ghil, a Korean opera singer who had found fame and fortune in Japan. As the ship approached the Korean coast, he got up on the bridge, turned to the promised land, and sang “O Sole Mio,” causing emotions to swell among the passengers standing within earshot. The poor man. He was an artist who wanted to share his gifts with the people, but he wound up being condemned as a spy and sent to die in the Senghori hard-labor camp—reputedly one of North Korea’s harshest. When he first arrived in North Korea the regime welcomed him with great pomp, and Kim Il-sung even granted him the honor of a long handshake. In Japan, Kim Yong-ghil has gained legendary stature, having become a symbol of the tragedy undergone by so many Japanese residents who moved to North Korea. Call me hard-hearted, but I think the only thing Kim Yong-ghil symbolizes is foolishness.

His story—which is equally the story of my family and of all those who leapt so confidently into the maw of misfortune—mostly demonstrates the force of human illusion and its awesome power to render us utterly blind. I have since learned that at other latitudes and at other times, the same Communist powers created similar traps for making people believe and hope in illusions. This led to the misery of countless peoples: in France, in America, in Egypt, and perhaps most notably, in Armenia. Tens of thousands died there in 1947 under the spell of Stalin’s propaganda, which had painted the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia as the land of milk and honey. The Soviets allowed that much remained to be done and that everyone