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Filmmaker shows Japan human side of arch-enemy North Korea
2006-10-15
As Pyongyang looms as public enemy number one in Japan, a filmmaker is telling the story of her family divided between the two countries in hopes of driving home a message -- that North Koreans are people, too. Yang Yong-Hi, a Korean born in Japan, spent a decade filming her father who was formerly a top North Korean representative in Osaka, her mother, and three brothers who live in the communist state. The result is "Dear Pyongyang," a light-hearted and overtly apolitical documentary of her family life which won awards at this year's Berlin and Sundance film festivals and opened in Tokyo in late August. "For me, Pyongyang is merely the name of the place where my brothers, nephews and a niece are living. The city has neither a meaning as North Korea's capital nor the city of revolution," Yang, 41, told AFP. The timing of the film could not have been more appropriate as it came amid a flare-up in tensions, with North Korea last week announcing its first test of an nuclear bomb. Japan has banned all imports and most nationals from North Korea in retaliation. On Saturday, the UN Security Council unanimously agreed to impose sanctions on Pyongyang. "It is unacceptable that that hatred extends to common people living there. So I thought, through my film, I could contribute by telling the audience that North Korea is also a place where the same kind of people live," she says. "There are also common people's lives there. They fall in love and marry, or some of them divorce. Children are adorable, women are interested in their fashion and university students are keen to go on the Internet," she says. The relationship with North Korea is complicated for Yang. She is one of around 700,000 Koreans who live in Japan, mostly descendants of people who immigrated or were enslaved during Tokyo's 1910-1945 occupation of the Korean peninsula. Born to die-hard communist parents, Yang was raised at schools for ethnic Koreans. Her father was an executive at the Generation Association of Korean Residents in Japan, better known as Chongryun, which serves as Pyongyang's de facto embassy in Tokyo in the absence of diplomatic relations. Yang's father sent his three sons to Pyongyang in the 1970s, believing life would be better for them than in Japan where Koreans have long faced discrimination. But Yang says she enjoyed the democratic values of Japan. Like other people in Japan, she could go to see movies, concerts and plays. After some work on radio and television shows, she went to the United States to learn filmmaking. Unlike her family, she has acquired South Korean nationality, saying it makes it easier for her to travel. She says she never hides her father's past or the fact that her brothers live in Pyongyang. "I think a society which can accept being different is a free society. I have openly spoken about my family," she says. -- 'Journalism has created a strong prejudice' -- Yang first had a vague idea that she wanted to make a documentary about her family in 1995 when she started videotaping her parents in Japan and her brothers and their families in Pyongyang. But it took her a decade to decide to make a film out of the 120 hours worth of videotapes. "One of the reasons why I could make the film is, as I grew older, I have come to be able to see my family at a distance," Yang says. Chongryun encouraged a campaign of "repatriation" to the North under which 90,000 Koreans and their families left Japan for the communist state between 1959 and 1984. Yang was six years old when her older brothers left Japan. She did not see them again until 11 years later when she visited Pyongyang on a trip with her ethnic Korean high school. In making the film, Yang overcame concerns that she would cause problems for her brothers, who are not allowed to visit Japan. There are no plans to show the movie in North Korea, one of the world's most tightly controlled countries. Scenes involving her brothers are studiously apolitical, instead showing footage of their lives in Pyongyang such as her nephew playing the piano. In one scene, Yang's father is honored at a party in Pyongyang at which he makes a toast saluting North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il. Yang's voice is heard saying, simply, that she does not understand her father and she wanted to escape from the party. "I constructed the film trying to express my thoughts without mentioning the country nor its leader directly, but rather through my father," she says. Although critical of North Korea, Yang is unsparing in her criticism of Japanese and Western media coverage of the country, which US President George W. Bush famously labelled part of an "axis of evil," along with Iraq and Iran. "While it is possible that people feel hatred for the country's leader, like I do, journalism has created a strong prejudice and preconception about North Korea," she says. North Korea is widely reviled in Japan for kidnapping Japanese civilians in the 1970s and 1980s to train the regime's spies. Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who took office last month, built his career campaigning on the abduction issue and has vowed to make the communist state pay dearly for its nuclear test. Yang's documentary won the award for the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Special Jury Prize for a world cinema documentary at Sundance. Film distributor Cinequanon said the film will be screened in other parts of Japan from late October to December and that it has received a growing number of inquiries from local theaters. "Amid mounting attention on the Korean Peninsula, people tend to have stock images of North Korea. I would like people to watch the film, especially at this timing," Cinequanon spokesman Oh Dok-Chu said. Muzi.com News
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