The Korea University
The Korea University in Tokyo has over 700 students, all from North Korea, all here to study what amounts to advanced propaganda classes while living in one of the world’s most connected cities. I didn’t know it existed until someone mentioned it the way you mention a building you pass every day.
Oh Hyang-son and Fina Hwang are two of them. They seem fine with it. They study, they talk about trips home when they can get them, they describe the hospitality they experience there—the feasts, the outings, the sense of being welcomed. They’re not stupid. They know the world is different elsewhere. They’ve just accepted that their world works differently, or decided it’s easier that way.
What gets me is the setup. A Japanese university, in Tokyo, which might be the most open, most wired city on earth, existing as a closed system where students are taught that the world outside their country is failing, hostile, designed to destroy them. They walk through a city that proves them wrong every second of every day and somehow this doesn’t register as contradiction. Or it does, and they’ve learned to hold both things in their heads at once. Governments are good at teaching that particular skill.
Japanese people around them oscillate between indifference and hostility. Some want the university gone. There’s a baseline xenophobia here—Korean people, doesn’t matter which direction, just means you’re not one of them. The joke is dark: these students are being told that Japan is dangerous while living in one of the safest places on earth. No one’s going to harm them for it. They’re just uncomfortable, and they’re learning to interpret that discomfort as evidence that their education is correct.
I keep thinking about that gap between what’s happening and what they’re being taught is happening. It doesn’t close. The students will graduate, some will go back, some will stay, but that contradiction stays with them either way. They’re living proof that you can be surrounded by evidence and still believe the opposite, but I don’t know if that’s their failure or something all of us do differently.