Guilt Trip

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Ikuko Nishimura approaches me as I stand on the deck of the Peace Boat, watching the North Korean port of Wonsan draw closer. A middle-aged Japanese housewife from the southern city of Yamaguchi, Nishimura is too young to remember much about Japan's colonization of the Korean peninsula more than half a century ago, too young to remember her country's brutal subjugation of Koreans during World War II. But as a Japanese, she feels a collective guilt for the sins of an older generation. "I'm sorry," she says suddenly, bowing in the direction of Wonsan's sweeping harbor, where a huge bronze statue of North Korea's late paramount ruler Kim Il Sung gazes down over parks, bland apartment blocks and children playing along the waterfront. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she repeats, bowing again and again.

Nishimura was one of 530 Japanese who sailed to North Korea last month with Peace Boat, a Tokyo-based ngo that sponsors trips to the world's trouble spots, hoping to promote grassroots exchanges. The trip offered the largest contingent of Japanese to visit North Korea in modern times a rare glimpse of the cloistered Stalinist state. It also afforded ordinary Japanese citizens an opportunity to experience what Junichiro Koizumi, their Prime Minister, will undoubtedly face when he makes his highly publicized pilgrimage to North Korea on Sept. 17: myriad and pointed reminders from North Korean officials of Japan's wartime atrocities and the need to pay war reparations.

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The only Western journalist allowed aboard, I came along to observe the "exchange" between these ancient enemies, and to get a better sense of how North Koreans view the outside world—particularly Japan and its other nemesis, America. I knew, though, that my perambulations would be tightly restricted by the North Korean government. Indeed, our itinerary proved to have been carefully pre-packaged. At the Grand People's Study House, a library overlooking Kim Il Sung Square with its giant portraits of Marx and Lenin, our North Korean hosts arranged a seminar on what life was like under the Japanese. In a lecture hall upstairs, the Japanese audience listened to Kwak Kum Nyo, 76, describe how she became a comfort woman at 16 when Japanese police ordered the manager of the silk factory where she worked to pick 20 girls with "good physiques." Handed over to the army, she was forced to provide sex to as many as 15 soldiers a day. Kwak eventually escaped through a sewage outlet. There was no way to confirm her story independently, but it jibed with the accounts of other comfort women from around Asia—and it was impossible to doubt the anguish in Kwak's voice as she insisted Japan should apologize and pay compensation or "we will all die still bearing our grudges."

North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung drew much of his legitimacy from his role in the guerrilla struggle against Japanese colonial rule, so these are the kinds of stories North Koreans grow up with. They help to explain why Pyongyang will demand billions in reparations as part of any normalization of relations with Japan—and why Koizumi is likely to exit North Korea with little to show for the visit unless he signals Tokyo's willingness to pay up.

At a model farm half an hour's drive northwest of Pyongyang, we were told about America's sins against North Korea. Standing in the doorway of the simple two-room home where she has lived for decades, Ri Yong Sun, 65, recalled how U.S. bombing during the Korean War destroyed fields and homes here. Ri wanted the Americans to apologize. The U.S., along with Japan, is the biggest donor of food aid to North Korea, yet it remains the enemy, viewed as the unrepentant instigator of the Korean War. Walking along the banks of the Taedong, I stopped to chat with a university student studying a computer science text on a park bench. Wearing a Kim Il Sung pin on his shirt, Son Song Jin said he liked basketball, so I asked him about his favorite stars. Had he heard of Michael Jordan? He looked perplexed. No, he hadn't. So what did he think of America? Pyongyang was destroyed by American warplanes during the Korean War, he told me, and he'd heard stories about Americans slaughtering civilians: "Even now, they have a very hostile attitude toward our country. They are trying to suffocate our socialism here."

Later, in the corridor of the People's Study House, I saw housewife Nishimura reflecting on an exhibition of black-and-white pictures of Japanese atrocities. She looked discouraged, overwhelmed by the unrelenting guilt trip. "I really wonder when North Korea and Japan can build friendly relations," she finally said. "They feel so strongly that this is unforgivable. It makes the gap so hard to bridge."