TOKYO -- A Japanese court on Thursday is hearing from five people who say there were promised "paradise on Earth" in North Korea but suffered human rights violations instead and now want the country and its leader Kim Jong Un to compensate them.
Hundreds of thousands of Koreans came to Japan, many forcibly, to work in mines and factories during Japan's colonization of the Korean Peninsula -- a past that still strains relations between Japan and the Koreas. North Korea had promised free healthcare, education, jobs and other benefits, but none was available and the returnees were mostly assigned manual work at mines, forests or farms, one of the plaintiffs, Eiko Kawasaki, 79, a Korean who was born and raised in Japan, said last month.
Today, about half a million ethnic Koreans live in Japan and still face discrimination in school, work and their daily lives.