Communism is rice

2020-05-01T23:44:26.326Z

The memories of Masaji Ishikawa, a Japanese fled from North Korea, are not only the torn cry of a victim, but also the denunciation of a corrupt and cruel system.

What is the meaning of a life that only consists of pain? Only pain is what Masaji Ishikawa narrates in his memories, marked by hunger, uprooting and loss of identity. The story of this Japanese, belonging to a family of returnees to North Korea after the World War, is not only the torn cry of a victim, but also the denunciation of a corrupt and cruel system in which its leaders behave like medieval kings, masters of the lives and estates of their subjects.

A couple of years ago, a book by Yeonmi Park, a young North Korean who fled south through China, had already rocked Western consciences by revealing the living conditions of her country, a communist dictatorship whose hermeticism has only been broken by the histrionics. appearances of his first president, now apparently seriously ill. Little more than a teenager, she was the daughter of a smuggler, from a relatively wealthy family and with certain connections to the regime. Ishikawa is, however, a true pariah, half Japanese, half Korean, victim of Japanese racism, who used the inhabitants of his former colonies as slave labor and even as cannon fodder during the war. Segregated in Japan for being his Korean father, vilified in Korea as a "Japanese bastard", he crossed the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China, in his successful attempt to return to his native country. He did it fleeing hunger, which decimated his family and which in the 1990s ended the lives of hundreds of thousands of North Koreans. Hunger, corruption and terror continue to mark the daily life of a country that has now become a nuclear mini-power.

The book is easy to read and surprisingly short for the number of things it counts. Constructed on the basis of short sentences, its structure seems to indicate that the author narrated it verbally in order for someone to transcribe it. Whether or not this has been the case, the drama experienced by the protagonist is such that only the sparseness of his descriptions, sometimes more akin to a notarial act than to a literary exercise, allows him to bear the anguish. Along with the suffering and disappointment suffered by him, it also helps us to understand the daily life of that unknown country that grew up under the slogan "communism is rice." Even that was not true for hundreds of thousands of North Koreans who survived or cursed by feeding (that is to say) on pine bark. “You boil the bark to eliminate toxins (many people did this step badly and died in tremendous pain); then corn flour is added and the dismal concoction is cooked; finally it is allowed to cool, it is shaped into a cake and eaten. Easier said than done".

There are worse viruses than covid-19, more lethal and destructive to the community. They are the viruses of power that are masked in apparently benevolent totalitarian ideologies at the service of the domination of the other. There is no happy ending, there cannot be, for stories like that of Masaji Ishikawa, who grew up in a family marked by violence and repeatedly saw his hopes perish, destroyed by fear and the rule of force. "You have to tell the world that North Korea is a huge prison camp," her mother told Yeonmi Park. Ishikawa, escaped from such a gigantic prison, sums up the return to his new normality thus: “… I don't even exist yet. I continue in a limbo between two worlds. I lead a life 'not alive'. That seems to be my curse. "