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Title card for the documentary “I Am From Chosun” (courtesy of MNCF)

A total of 2 million Koreans moved to Japan to escape a difficult life during Japan’s colonial occupation of the country, just like the characters in “Pachinko,” the series recently released on Apple TV+. Many of them returned to their homeland after Korea’s liberation in 1945.

But other Koreans had no choice but to continue living in Japan either because the American military government would only allow them to bring with them a portion of the money they had made in Japan or for other reasons.

The documentary “I Am From Chosun” (2020) is an exploration of those Koreans’ efforts to preserve their national identity while enduring discrimination in Japan over the past 76 years. It also examines the horrific ways in which they have been ostracized from South Korean society.

Kim Cheol-min, the film’s director who has been getting to know Koreans in Japan since 2002, begins the documentary by examining why the local Korean community set up the Korean schools known as Chosen gakko in Japan. Shortly after liberation, Koreans in Japan launched a movement to set up these schools to help them remember their language and culture until they could return home to a completely independent country on the Korean Peninsula.

More than 600 Chosen gakko were built at the time, funded by the hard-earned money of the Korean community in Japan. Thanks to that campaign, many students were able to preserve their identity as Koreans.

But in the 1960s and 1970s, there was virtually no way to avoid discrimination as a Korean living in Japan. Even Koreans with a university degree had no chance of getting hired by Japanese companies, which created a major obstacle for planning for the future.

That led some of those young Koreans to opt to study in South Korea as they searched for a new identity and sought to realize their hopes and dreams.

But the Park Chung-hee regime arrested some of those students and tortured them, extracting false confessions about being spies for North Korea. That was what happened to Lee Cheol, Lee Dong-seok and Kang Jong-heon, all of whom appear in the documentary.

Lee Cheol was sentenced to death a week before his wedding, while Kang Jong-heon was sentenced to death while in medical school at Seoul National University. The incident came as a tremendous shock to Lee Cheol’s father, who had been a passionate opponent of Communism with the South Korea-linked Korean Residents Union in Japan (Mindan), rather than the North Korea-linked General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon). The shock of the death sentence sent Lee to an early grave at the age of 53.

Kang recalled feeling more sadness than shock when he heard the judge declare that such a spy could not be allowed to live. Viewers are confronted with the astonishing irony that Kang was sentenced to death by the very homeland where he had gone to escape discrimination and prejudice.

While these people were rejected by their country, they never abandoned their identity or their love for life. They continued campaigning for the unification of Korea while fighting for the right to be free from discrimination in Japan.

When Kim Chang-o said in the documentary that Koreans in Japan were the biggest losers of the division of the Korean Peninsula, he was referring to the double discrimination they faced.

After Kang Jong-heon was released following 13 years in prison, he made up his mind to live a life of unparalleled happiness. There is a nobility in his determination to feel “anger but not hatred” despite the terrible trial he faced while searching for his identity and the double discrimination that continues today.

Everyone has the right to maintain their identity in life. This documentary fervently underscores that creating a society without discrimination or infringement of that right is an important task that goes beyond the issue of Koreans in Japan.

By Kangyu Ga-ram, film director

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]