“In April 1960, not yet finished with high school, 17-year-old Eiko Kawasaki boarded a Soviet ship called the Kryl’ion in the Japanese port of Niigata and set sail on the journey of a lifetime, to a place she was told was paradise: North Korea.
She and hundreds of her fellow passengers had heard about free housing and guaranteed jobs in Kim Il Sung’s socialist state. And they felt a sense of kinship: All were either ethnic Koreans born in Japan or Koreans brought to Japan to work during the 1910–1945 colonial era, when Japan harshly occupied and ruled the Korean peninsula.”
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