Pyongyang’s Classroom in the Middle of Tokyo

Over 700 students attend Korea University in Tokyo—not to be confused with the South Korean institution of the same name. This one is funded directly by North Korea, the only institution of higher learning in the world with that distinction. The students who attend it are almost entirely from the diaspora community that still, in some form, calls the DPRK home.

A Vice Japan piece followed two of them: Oh Hyang-son and Fina Hwang. Both study in the middle of Tokyo. Both travel to North Korea when they can. Both describe it with the warmth you’d use for a beloved hometown—the hospitality, the festivals, the sense of belonging. The warmth appears genuine. That’s exactly what makes it hard to sit with.

A few kilometers from the celebrations they’re describing, people are dying inside prison camps whose existence is documented by satellite imagery, survivor testimony, and the UN. Hyang-son and Fina don’t engage with that. Whether they can’t, won’t, or simply haven’t been given the framework to do so is a question the piece leaves deliberately open. Maybe that’s the right call. Deciding for them feels too easy from the outside.

What strikes me more is the other side of the frame: Japanese far-right groups who would reportedly like to see the university burned down. Their objection isn’t ideological nuance—it’s ethnicity. A Korean face is a Korean face to them, regardless of whether it belongs to a true believer or just someone trying to finish a degree. Both species of hatred occupy the same city, operating at different temperatures.

Hyang-son and Fina study their curriculum, absorb the mythology of their leaders, and navigate a Tokyo that doesn’t entirely want them there. The cognitive dissonance is almost architectural. You build a life in the gap between what you’re told and what’s visible, and eventually the structure holds itself up without you needing to look at the foundation.