AFP – Ethnic Korean mothers living in Japan hand out fliers to pedestrians on a street in Tokyo.
Tue Mar 16, 7:02 am ET
TOKYO (AFP) – Hundreds of mothers whose children attend pro-North Korean schools in Japan rallied on Tuesday, demanding that the government include them in plans to make high school tuition free.
Japan's six-month-old government on the same day passed a lower house bill to scrap school fees and give aid to private schools, meeting one of their key pro-family election campaign pledges.
The pro-Pyongyang schools have so far been excluded from the programme that starts in April after opposition from conservatives who say Tokyo should not support schools linked with the nuclear-armed communist country.
About 2,000 students attend 10 pro-Pyongyang schools in Japan, which are run under the instructions of the North Korean residents' association Chongryon, Pyongyang's de facto embassy, and feature portraits of national founder Kim Il-Sung and his son Kim Jong-Il in their classrooms.
On Tuesday about 300 ethnic Korean mothers, many walking with toddlers and pushing prams, rallied in Tokyo, urging the centre-left government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama not to discriminate against their children.
"We must move the government to include our schools in the tuition-free programme with the power of omoni ('mothers' in Korean)," one woman shouted at the rally organised by a network of Korean mothers in Japan.
Ryang Son-ryo, a 37-year-old mother, said: "We were born in Japan and will continue living here. We have been discriminated against in many ways in Japan, but we don't want our children to go through the same thing."
Some 700,000 ethnic Koreans live in Japan, mostly descendants of migrants and forced labourers who were brought to the country during its 1910-1945 era of occupation of the Korean peninsula.
Most identify with South Korea or hold that country's passport, but a minority are affiliated with the Pyongyang regime, which has angered Japan with missile and nuclear tests, and by kidnapping its citizens in the 1970s and 80s to train the regime's spies.
Hiroshi Nakai, state minister in charge of handling the North Korean abduction issue, has openly voiced his opposition to letting pro-Pyongyang Korean schools receive Japanese public funds under the programme.
At the rally 17-year-old pro-Pyongyang high school student Cho Ei-Ok said: "Can the Japanese government solve the kidnapping and nuclear issues if they discriminate against us?"
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