A Japanese researcher says he has discovered that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's maternal grandfather worked for the Imperial Japanese Army during the second world war, making uniforms for soldiers whose comrades were hunting Kim's other grandfather, Kim Il-sung.
Such a lineage would technically make Kim Jong-un part of North Korea's 'hostile class' and the grandson of a traitor. That could have 'a devastating impact on North Korean society', says researcher Ken Kato.
Kato, a Japanese human rights activist who discovered documentation of Kim's ancestor files in military archives in Tokyo and the library of the Japanese parliament, said his evidence that Kim's maternal grandfather - Ko Gyon-tek - was a collaborator undermines his legitimacy.
'Now that it is clear Kim Jong-un is actually from the pariah class, according to North Korea's political classification system, the entire foundations of the system have been proved to be nonsense,' Kato said.
'He has to liberate all the others who have been identified as 'hostile class' and halt human rights abuses immediately.'
Kato unearthed Imperial Japanese Army documents that show that during the war, Ko worked at the Hirota sewing factory in Osaka making uniforms for Japanese soldiers, at a time when imperial troops were hunting Kim Il-sung, the guerilla leader who would much later become his daughter's father-in-law.
To have collaborated with the Japanese occupiers of Korea would normally have meant a long incarceration in North Korea's notorious gulags, for the traitor and his entire family. Ko probably avoided that fate after he returned to North Korea in the early 1960s thanks to his daughter being in the favour of Kim Jong-il.
