The high concrete walls of Hwang In Suk’s school enclose a world different from the rest of Japan. Another language echoes through the halls. The classrooms, with their chalky blackboards and flimsy desks, look like they haven’t been changed since the 1950s, when the school first opened.
The government has begun denying funds to schools like this, and the reason is most evident at the front of each classroom, where portraits hang of North Korea’s first leader, Kim Il Sung, and his son, Kim Jong Il.
Nearly 10,000 ethnic Koreans in Japan go to schools, from kindergarten through college, closely affiliated with North Korea. The schools serve a community that is in many ways stateless, created by the movement of Koreans to Japan prior to the end of World War II, when the Korean Peninsula was a Japanese colony.
Hwang, who commutes four hours a day, six days a week, to attend this aging school with a dustbowl of a playground, considers it a haven. She and her classmates can speak Korean, study their own culture and call each other by their real names, not the Japanese pseudonyms most use to get by in the mainstream.
“This is the only place where we can be ourselves,” the 18-year-old said.
In a nation where ethnic Koreans like Hwang have suffered intense discrimination for decades, the schools are a target of rightists and an enigma to the Japanese public. Some have no signs out front saying what lies inside. Their girls stopped wearing Korean-style school uniforms off campus years ago amid harassment and physical threats.