hankyoreh

Tokyo

By Jeong Nam-ku, Tokyo correspondent

“Even now, parents are paying 20,000 yen (US$213) a month for middle school students and 30,000 yen (US$320) for high school students. We can’t increase the burden on parents any more. We’re not even sure whether we will be able to pay our teachers.”

Kang Mun-seok, principal of Kanagawa Joseon Middle and High School in the city of Yokohama in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, let out a sigh during a phone interview with the Hankyoreh on Feb. 20. The school is in trouble because Kanagawa Prefecture has decided to cut off funding to it and the other four Joseon schools located in the prefecture starting this year due to North Korea’s rocket launch and nuclear test.

There are 214 students in the school. While the school is associated with the pro-North General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon), about half of the students are citizens of South Korea. The school had been receiving 30 million yen (US$320,649) in annual funding from the prefecture, or about 150,000 yen (US$1,603) per student, but that aid was suddenly cut off.

Saitama Prefecture also recently decided to stop providing the approximately 9 million yen (US$96,040) in aid that it had been giving to a Joseon school located in the prefecture. In a Feb. 13 press conference, Kiyoshi Ueda, governor of the prefecture, said, “We can only be patient up to a point,” referring to the North Korean nuclear test. “While this is an unfortunate development for the students, we hope that the school will inform the North Korean government why we did not include the aid in the budget.”

More and more regional governments in Japan are cutting off subsidies to Joseon schools. According to a Feb. 19 article by the Asahi Shimbun, last year, Tokyo, Osaka, Miyagi Prefecture, and Chiba Prefecture stopped giving aid to Joseon schools, and this year, Kanagawa Prefecture, Saitama Prefecture, and Hiroshima decided to cut off aid. Of the 27 regions with Joseon schools, seven have decided to eliminate funding.

The suspension of aid from local governments is expected to jeopardize the schools’ survival. “Our teachers are only making half of what teachers at Japanese schools make, and it will become difficult to pay even that,” said Kang, the principal at the school in Kanagawa. “Korean-Japanese are considering coming together to request that the prefecture reconsider its decision.”

There are also many Japanese who argue that the suspension of funding to Joseon schools is a violation of human rights.

“Seeing as the right for people to receive the education of their own people is also mandated in various human rights’ agreements that Japan has ratified, the administration must not be swayed by popular sentiment and must guarantee these rights. Cutting off the funding will also hurt Japan, which is asking the international community for a solution to the issue of the kidnapping of Japanese citizens by North Korea.” The comments were made by Takeshi Komagome, a professor of education at the University of Tokyo, as quoted in the Asahi Shimbun.

The cabinet of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe also decided recently to exclude Joseon schools from the list of schools eligible for plans to provide free high school education. In response, an association of Japanese lawyers released a statement criticizing this, saying that it “constitutes discriminatory treatment that is forbidden in the constitution.”

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