The Japanese government has submitted a written pledge to the Chinese government that its missions in China will not try to protect North Korean refugees, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported on Thursday. Tokyo pledged the missions will respect Chinese laws and refrain from taking North Koreans into their compound.

Beijing had asked Tokyo for the written pledge in negotiations over the transfer of five North Koreans who had been living in the Japanese consulate in Shenyang since they sought refuge there in 2008.

China is North Korea’s closest ally and has to contend with ever-growing numbers of refugees from the reclusive country.

China said the five North Koreans were illegal immigrants and refused to let them go to Japan. Beijing late last year said Japan must stop protecting North Korean defectors, and Japan promised to take the request under consideration. But eventually China insisted on a written pledge as a condition for letting the five go, the daily said. They were then taken to Japan with Beijing’s tacit approval.  [Chosun Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but I would have to say that their three year house arrest was ultimately worth it since they have now been sent to Japan to start a new life.

It has to be tough to be one of the defectors from North Korea and try to make a new life in such a completely different and highly competitive South Korean society.

A group of 21 North Koreans was found drifting aboard a boat off South Korea’s west coast earlier this week, officials said Saturday, the latest in a string of defections by North Koreans.

The boat carrying the North Korean family members, including children, was spotted by sailors on a South Korean Navy vessel in the Yellow Sea on Tuesday, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The North Koreans expressed their wish to defect to officers from the Korea Coast Guard, and were led to a nearby dock in Incheon, west of Seoul, for questioning by South Korean officials.  [Korea Herald]

Nine people who say they are from North Korea arrived Tuesday in a black wooden boat off the western Japanese coast in what authorities suspect is a rare defection from the communist nation to Japan.

A fisherman contacted authorities after spotting the unfamiliar vessel in waters near the Noto peninsula, which juts into the Sea of Japan.

The three men, three women and three boys found on the black wooden boat told Japanese coast guard officials they came from North Korea and wanted to go to South Korea. No one required immediate medical attention.

The vessel is about 26-feet (8-meters) -long and marked with Korean characters, said Daisuke Takahashi, a spokesman with the Japan Coast Guard.

The coast guard said the nine said they departed North Korea last Thursday. Although the boat’s engine was functioning when found, the group had run low on rations. The coast guard found a small amount of rice, some pickled vegetables and snacks. The group had run out of drinking water.  [Stars & Stripes]

2007 was actually the last time a group of North Koreans were able to defect to Japan by boat.  That group actually wanted to go to South Korea but got swept towards Japan by the ocean.  I wonder if the same thing happened here?

Anyway this documentary has a number of interviews with North Koreans that defected from the country between 1994 and 2006.  It also has a number of interviews with the most famous defector Kang Chol-hwan who wrote the book the “Aquariums of Pyongyang“.  This book was really the first written account of life in the North Korean gulags that received widespread attention.  It was even read by former President George Bush who invited Kang to the White House.  In the interviews Kang was very critical about countries giving aid to Kim Jong-Il, but that is unfortunately just what Bush would do during his 2^nd term as President.

Besides interviewing Kang the movie also has an interview with another defector Shin Dong-hyuk who was born in Camp 14 and tells the stories of his hardships at this maximum security camp.  Most people like Shin’s parents die at the camp, but he was able to survive long enough to eventually escape.  You can learn more about Shin at this prior ROK Drop posting.

ROK Drop readers may also remember my prior book review of “The Long Road Home” written by Kim Yong who was also once imprisoned in the notorious Camp 14.

The documentary features plenty of more heartbreaking tales from North Korean refugees such as highlighting the sexual slavery of North Korean refugees that continues to occur in China.  One inspiring story I thought was how a former North Korean Army captain sulked for 10 years wanting to escape North Korea because of what he saw the Kim regime doing to his country.  He finally escaped by sailing a small boat 200 miles to Incheon while avoiding North Korean patrol boats.  He brought his entire family with him due to his concern of them being separated if they try to defect through China.  His gamble worked out and he is a very outspoken critic of the Kim regime.  He says that when the Kim regime collapses he would be ready to go back to North Korea the next day to help rebuild his country.  I have always felt that the North Korean refugee community needs to be organized by the South Korean government to do just that, be used to help rebuild North Korea after the regime collapses.  Any post-regime collapse rebuilding effort needs to have as much of a North Korean face as possible and the refugee community is a good place to start.

Overall the documentary provides plenty of good general information for people unfamiliar with the North Korean refugee issue.  For those that follow the issue closely there isn’t really much new presented in the documentary you wouldn’t already be familiar with.  Something that I think may turn off viewers watching the movie is the awful music and the cut scenes of a Korean woman doing provocative dancing in a Pyongyang Traffic Girl outfit.  I guess the director must have thought the dancing had some kind of artistic merit to it; I just found it annoying.  The music and the strange dancing I thought really took away from an otherwise informative documentary for those unfamiliar with the North Korean refugee issue.  Like I said before if you are already closely following the North Korean refugee issue you probably won’t get much from this movie but if you subscribe to Netflix it is worth checking out and recommending to others unfamiliar with the issue to view.

Authorities in northern Thailand are struggling to cope with a 50-fold increase in refugees from North Korea.

It’s a long journey, but the number of North Korean migrants making the 5,000-kilometre trek to Thailand has jumped from 46 in 2004, to 2,500 last year.

The police in Chiang Saen, in Thailand’s northern Chiang Rai province, have got used to these arrivals.

The town is close to the border with Laos and Burma, a once notorious area of the region known as the Golden Triangle.

Tu Shanaroon runs the Chiang Saen Guesthouse along the riverfront, and says she’s seen many North Korean refugees, especially in the cold season.  [Radio Australia News]

A seminar has found that North Korean defectors who have relocated to the South to build new lives for themselves and their families tend to obsessively pursue money and remain alienated from their communities. The seminar was hosted by the Institute for Modern Korea at the Academy of Korean Studies on Tuesday.

Over 20,000 North Koreans have risked their lives so far to escape the harsh realities of their homeland — including collectivism, oppressive rule, famine and the threat of being interned in a Soviet-style gulag — for a new life in the South.

However as they attempt to fit in to a new democratic society and raise funds to try and be reunited with those family members they left behind, many have become overrun with unhealthy ideas of materialism, or “distorted mammonism,” participants of the seminar found.  [Chosun Ilbo]

Read the rest at the link, but how is it that North Koreans are “unhealthy ideas of materialism” by wanting to save money to bring their family members over from North Korea?  Even if they did have unhealthy materialism it sounds like they would fit right in with many people from South Korea and western societies.

North Korea warned yesterday that it will launch full-fledged attacks against people sending propaganda leaflets over the border, and it won’t give any advance warnings.

The threat to anti-North Korea campaigns by South Korean activists came amid rising hopes that the two Koreas will join China, Russia, the United States and Japan to revive the stalled six-party talks on the North’s nuclear weapons program.

“Under this situation, our army officially informs the south side that it will expand the scope of direct fire, already declared, into full-scale destruction fire at any area, any time,” said the North Korean military in a report from the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

In March, the North said through Korean Central Television that it was losing patience with groups sending propaganda leaflets via balloons across the border and would open fire on certain South Korean sites used to launch the balloons.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but these balloon activists must be having an increasing subversive effect within North Korea with their activities.  They may want to keep their balloon launch times secret from now on as just a security measure against any North Korean action against them.  The North Koreans have already sent their leftist thugs against them and I would not be surprised if they didn’t try to do something provocative in the near future in response to these balloon launches.

North Korea celebrated its biggest annual holiday on Friday — the 99th birthday of the late dictator Kim Il-sung — and despite a few recent signs of an easing of tensions between the Koreas, hopes for rapprochement remained dim.

Pro-democracy activists released hydrogen balloons carrying $1 bills and tens of thousands of ant-regime leaflets from a tourist park at Imjingak, just a few miles upwind of North Korea. There was no gunfire although North Korea has threatened to shell Imjingak and other South Korean border towns if the balloon launches continue.

“It’s bluffing, just bluffing and empty threats,” said Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector, as he assembled the balloons and leaflets, helped by his wife, a former captain in the North Korean Army. “Kim Jong-il is just bluffing.”  [New York Times]

You can read the rest at the link but appears that the leftist thugs must not have gotten the word out about this latest balloon launch.