{"id":28380,"date":"2021-02-13T20:00:11","date_gmt":"2021-02-13T11:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2021\/feb\/13\/japanese-women-married-koreans-north-korea-family"},"modified":"2021-02-13T20:00:11","modified_gmt":"2021-02-13T11:00:11","slug":"my-mother-begged-me-not-to-go-the-japanese-women-who-married-koreans-and-never-saw-their-family-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=28380","title":{"rendered":"\u2018My mother begged me not to go\u2019: the Japanese women who married Koreans \u2013 and never saw their family again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mitsuko left Japan in 1960 for a new life in North Korea. Once there, she realised she \u2013 and hundreds of others like her \u2013 could never go back<\/p>\n<p>It has been six decades since Mitsuko Minakawa boarded a ferry on the Sea of Japan coast, bound for a new life in North Korea. But the anguish of that sunny day in the spring of 1960 has never left her.<\/p>\n<p>Two months earlier, Minakawa had married a Korean man, Choe Hwa-jae, a contemporary at Hokkaido University, where she was the only woman in a class of 100 students. Minakawa, then 21, and Choe were part of the mass repatriation of ethnic Korean residents of Japan \u2013 many of them the offspring of people who had been brought from the Korean peninsula by their Japanese colonisers to work in mines and factories.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2021\/feb\/13\/japanese-women-married-koreans-north-korea-family\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mitsuko left Japan in 1960 for a new life in North Korea. Once there, she realised she \u2013 and hundreds of others like her \u2013 could never go backIt has been six decades since Mitsuko Minakawa boarded a ferry on the Sea of Japan coast, bound for a new life&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":271,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[41,88,1918,421,40,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific","category-japan","category-kim-jong-il","category-kim-jong-un","category-north-korea","category-world-news"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/271"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28380"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28382,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28380\/revisions\/28382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}