Tokyo court orders North Korea to pay €440,000 to victims of ‘paradise on Earth’ repatriation scheme
Tokyo — A Japanese court has ordered North Korea to pay €440,000 in damages to four plaintiffs who say they were lured to the country by a propaganda campaign promising a “paradise on Earth,” in a rare legal rebuke that rights advocates called historic.
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The Tokyo District Court ruled Monday that the four had “most of their lives taken away” and awarded each at least 20 million yen (about €110,000) in compensation. The case directly named Pyongyang as a defendant and symbolically summoned North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to appear in court; he did not attend.
More than 90,000 ethnic Koreans and their Japanese spouses migrated to North Korea between 1959 and 1984 under a now-defunct repatriation program widely promoted at the time as humanitarian relief and a path to dignity for Koreans in Japan. Instead, the plaintiffs and other participants said they faced repression and deprivation, alleging in a 2018 complaint that they were denied basic human rights and even minimum sustenance despite assurances of free education and medicine.
Plaintiff Eiko Kawasaki, 83, who arrived in North Korea as a teenager in 1960 and lived there for 43 years before fleeing, said she was “overwhelmed with emotion” at the decision.
“Monday’s verdict was the first time a Japanese court exercised its sovereignty against North Korea to recognise its malpractice,” said attorney Atsushi Shiraki, who represents the plaintiffs, calling the ruling “historic.”
The long-running lawsuit has had an unusual path. The district court dismissed it in 2022, saying a Japanese court lacked jurisdiction over the plaintiffs’ alleged detainment by North Korean authorities. A higher court overturned that decision last year and sent the case back for review, clearing the way for Monday’s damages order.
Human Rights Watch welcomed the ruling as a step toward accountability. “One very important, successful example of attempts to hold North Korea accountable” for international crimes, said Kanae Doi, the group’s Japan director. HRW has reported that those suspected of disloyalty under the repatriation program “faced severe punishment, including imprisonment with forced labour or as political prisoners.”
Whether the plaintiffs can collect remains uncertain. “I’m sure the North Korean government will just ignore the court order,” Kawasaki said. Kenji Fukuda, the plaintiffs’ lead lawyer, said the most realistic route would be to confiscate North Korean assets and property in Japan.
The repatriation initiative, promoted by pro-Pyongyang organizations and backed at the time by the Japanese government, was widely covered by domestic media as a humanitarian program for Koreans struggling to make a life in Japan. During Japan’s 1910–45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, millions of Koreans went to Japan, some forcibly. After World War II, hundreds of thousands remained, and many were targeted by the scheme’s promise of opportunity and belonging across the Sea of Japan.
Instead, many arrivals encountered a closed, surveillance-heavy state that sharply restricted movement and access to resources. The plaintiffs argued that the gap between North Korea’s promises and the lived reality amounted to fraud and systematic rights violations that cost them decades of their lives.
The court’s decision does not resolve those broader historical and political questions. But for the four plaintiffs — and for advocates who have sought recognition for people trapped by the scheme — it marks a rare judicial finding of North Korean responsibility in a forum that Pyongyang cannot easily influence, even if enforcement will be difficult.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
