Tokyo court orders North Korea to pay compensation to former settlers

A Tokyo high court this week ordered North Korea to pay at least 20m yen (£94,000) to each of four former settlers who say they were lured from Japan under a programme promising a "paradise on Earth". The four plaintiffs had escaped to Japan and had campaigned for years for compensation.

Between 1959 and 1984 more than 90,000 people, mostly zainichi – Koreans living in Japan – were recruited under the scheme. The regime, with the support of the Japanese government and help from the International Committee of the Red Cross, had promised free education, healthcare, guaranteed jobs and housing, but many say they were denied basic rights, forced to endure extreme hardship and prevented from travelling back to Japan.

Eiko Kawasaki, who left Japan aged 17 and boarded a ship to North Korea in 1960, said she was "overwhelmed with emotion" after the verdict. Kawasaki stayed in North Korea for 43 years before defecting to Japan via China in 2003; she said one daughter and two grandchildren have since escaped but she has had no contact with other children since the regime sealed the country's borders during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic: "I don’t even know if they are still alive," she said.

The plaintiffs, who launched their action in 2018, are among an estimated 150 people to have escaped from the programme and returned to Japan.

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