CHIBA - Hiroko Saito was 19 years old when she left Japan for North Korea in June 1961 with her Korean husband and their one-year-old daughter, persuaded by assurances that they were heading to a "paradise on earth" and that she could return to Japan after three years. Instead, she would spend four decades in North Korea, enduring chronic hunger, the deaths of her husband and children and a desperate struggle to survive before finally escaping and returning home in 2001.
Now 85 and living in an apartment in Osaka Prefecture, Saito continues to pray for the husband and children she lost during a life shaped by North Korea's repatriation program, which brought about 93,000 people from Japan to North Korea between 1959 and 1984. About 1,800 of those who made the journey were Japanese wives like Saito.
Saito was born in 1941 in what is now Fukui Prefecture. The eldest of three sisters, she joined a textile manufacturer after graduating from junior high school. At 18, she married Shoji, a Korean resident of Japan who worked at an eyeglass factory. Her parents opposed the marriage, but after the birth of their eldest daughter, Yayoi, the young family settled into what Saito recalled as a peaceful and happy life.
That changed when her husband's family became interested in the repatriation program to North Korea.
People promoting the program told them that North Korea was a "paradise on earth," where food was plentiful, jobs and homes would be provided and there would be little reason to worry about daily life. Saito's husband, his parents and siblings decided that the entire family would move.
Saito resisted. She did not want to leave Japan, but her husband insisted that he would take their daughter even if Saito refused to go. With her child only one year old, Saito said the prospect of being separated from her daughter was unbearable.
Then came the assurance that ultimately persuaded her.
Saito was told that because she was Japanese, she would be able to return to Japan after three years. Believing that promise, she decided to accompany her husband and daughter.
In June 1961, the family boarded a ship from Niigata bound for North Korea. The atmosphere aboard was initially filled with excitement among passengers expecting to begin better lives.
Saito's doubts began even before she stepped ashore.
As their ship approached the North Korean port, she saw crowds waving flags in welcome. Among them, however, was a boy of about five or six who was wearing clothes on his upper body but nothing below. Saito recalled being shocked because even among poor families in Japan, she had never seen a child without underwear.
Shortly before passengers disembarked, an announcement warned them not to hand their luggage to anyone who was not wearing an armband because of the risk of theft.
Passengers began to panic.
Saito recalled thinking that they had come to the wrong place. Some people said they did not want to get off the ship. They had been told that food and necessities would be abundant, yet the conditions visible at the port immediately contradicted what they had been promised.
What had been promoted as a paradise, Saito later said, felt more like hell.
The new arrivals were sent to designated places of residence. Saito's family was assigned to a town near the border with China, and her husband found work at an eyeglass factory, the same type of job he had held in Japan.
The family was given a room in an apartment building, but the promised comfortable life never materialized.
Rice, flour and other supplies were distributed twice a month, but Saito said the amount was often exhausted within about a week. The family began exchanging clothing and household items brought from Japan for food. Within about a year, those belongings were gone.
From then on, survival dominated daily life.
Saito recalled that food distributed every 15 days had to somehow last until the next ration. Eating three meals a day was often impossible, and she continued to regret that she had been unable to provide enough for her children.
The promised opportunity to return to Japan after three years never came.
North Korea at the time encouraged families to have many children. Saito gave birth to five more children after arriving in the country, making her the mother of six.
Tensions also developed within the family. Saito said her husband deeply regretted moving to North Korea but could not openly express such feelings because people feared being reported for criticizing the state. At times, she said, his frustration was directed at her through violence.
By the mid-1980s, her husband's health had deteriorated. He developed tuberculosis, but medicine was difficult to obtain and he was unable to receive adequate treatment. Saito began working in his place, but the family's circumstances continued to worsen.
Around 1990, she wrote to her parents in Fukui Prefecture pleading for help.
Repeatedly apologizing, Saito asked her mother to somehow send 100,000 yen, describing life in North Korea as extremely difficult. Money sent by her family in Japan helped keep them alive for a time, but that lifeline ended after her father died in 1993.
Her husband died from tuberculosis in 1994 at the age of 57. Saito was 53.
His death came as North Korea was entering an even deeper crisis. Kim Il Sung died in 1994 and the country moved under the leadership of Kim Jong Il. Economic failures and natural disasters were followed by a devastating famine known as the "Arduous March," during which the source account says an estimated 3 million people died.
Saito recalled seeing people starving to death on roads and children waiting at railway stations for parents who had gone away looking for work or food and never returned.
Parents would sometimes leave enough food for their children for a week, promising to return within that time. When they failed to come back, Saito said, some children remained at stations waiting until they died.
She also recalled trucks traveling through towns roughly once a week collecting bodies until they were full. The dead were taken to the coast, where holes were dug in the ground to bury them. Families sometimes had no way of knowing where their children had died or been buried.
With the food situation collapsing, Saito turned to illegally trading copper wire on the black market.
The trade was dangerous and could lead to punishment if discovered, but she said there was no other way to survive. She hid wire underneath her clothes or inside cloth wrapped around her legs to avoid detection by police.
One incident aboard a train remained particularly traumatic.
Saito was traveling with hidden copper wire when she noticed a young mother holding a baby. Hours passed without the infant crying, prompting passengers to wonder why the child remained completely silent.
Police later entered the train and discovered Saito's concealed copper. She was taken away and all of it was confiscated.
The young mother was also detained.
When police ordered her to put the baby down on a table, Saito saw that the infant was already dead. According to Saito's account, there was an opening in the baby's abdomen, inside which copper wire had been concealed.
Saito asked the woman how she could have done such a thing.
The mother replied that she had been unable to produce breast milk and the baby had died, but she still had family members waiting at home and needed to bring back something that could be exchanged for food.
Saito was released after her copper was confiscated. She never learned what happened to the woman.
The episode left her stunned by the desperation surrounding her. She stopped smuggling copper afterward.
Further tragedy followed.
Her eldest daughter, Yayoi, and another daughter were also caught while illegally trading copper in an effort to survive. One was eventually released after serving a sentence, but Yayoi died in prison. Saito said she was never told the cause of death and her daughter's body was never returned.
Around the same period, Saito lost another daughter to malnutrition.
She said the greatest regret of her life remained the suffering endured by her children after the family had been told they were moving to a paradise.
In 2001, nearly 40 years after arriving in North Korea, Saito was presented with an unexpected opportunity.
A Chinese man approached her and suggested that she cross into China, telephone her family in Japan and ask them to send money. The man hoped to receive a commission for facilitating the transaction.
Saito knew that if she were captured while crossing the border, she might never see her children again. But she also believed it could be her only opportunity to change their circumstances.
In the middle of winter, she crossed a freezing river along the North Korea-China border with a broker. After traveling for about half a month, she reached the Chinese province of Jilin.
She attempted to telephone her mother in Fukui Prefecture, but the number no longer worked.
Having risked her life to reach China, Saito feared she would return to her children with nothing.
The broker then proposed another possibility: return to Japan, work there for two or three years, save money and send it to her family.
Saito decided to take the chance.
People assisting her contacted acquaintances in Japan, obtained documents from her family registry and contacted the Japanese Embassy in Beijing. About five months after entering China, arrangements were completed for her return.
In August 2001, Saito landed at Narita Airport and stepped onto Japanese soil for the first time in 40 years.
She immediately traveled to Fukui Prefecture to see her mother, who by then had dementia and was hospitalized.
"Mother, it's Hiroko. Mother, I've come home," Saito recalled telling her.
She said simply being able to see her mother again made her happy. She cried and apologized repeatedly for all the worry and hardship she had caused.
Saito later worked at a supermarket in Tokyo and continued sending money to children and grandchildren she had left in North Korea. She eventually helped one of her daughters and two grandchildren escape North Korea and come to Japan.
Loss continued even after her return. Her second son died from illness in 2011, followed by her eldest son the next year.
A daughter and grandchild remain in North Korea. Saito said she lost contact with them after the coronavirus pandemic began and does not know whether they are safe.
"If they are still living there, I want to do whatever I can so that their lives can become even a little easier," she said.
In 2018, Saito joined other defectors who had entered North Korea through the repatriation program and later escaped to Japan in filing a damages lawsuit against the North Korean government.
The plaintiffs argued that North Korea had lured them with false information, prevented them from leaving after their arrival, failed to provide even minimum food supplies and forced them to remain under conditions of severe human rights repression, violating their freedom of movement and ability to determine the course of their own lives.
Their lawyer said the case sought formal recognition of the fundamental nature of the repatriation program: people had been deceived into traveling to North Korea and then effectively trapped for decades in an environment where their rights and freedoms were severely restricted.
After eight years of litigation, the Tokyo District Court ruled in January 2026 that North Korea must pay a combined 88 million yen in damages.
The court found that the plaintiffs had suffered enormous physical and psychological harm and that it would not be an exaggeration to say that much of their lives had been taken from them.
For Saito, the lawsuit was never simply about money. She said many people who returned to Japan still have family members in North Korea, while others connected to the repatriation program remain there.
Her hope is that those people will one day be able to return to Japan and reunite with their families as quickly as possible.
Source: YOMIURI
