A Tokyo court ordered Pyongyang on Monday to pay a total of ¥88 million in compensation to four people lured to North Korea by a fantastical propaganda program promising a “paradise on Earth.”
More than 90,000 ethnic Koreans and their Japanese spouses are said to have migrated to North Korea between 1959 and 1984, drawn by the claims that North Korea was a paradise under a now-defunct repatriation initiative critics say amounted to state kidnapping.
Instead of finding a “paradise on Earth,” victims of the scheme said in a 2018 complaint that they had been denied basic human rights and even minimum sustenance under the program, despite assurances of free education and medicine.