ABSTRACT
Although Japan and North Korea have never established formal diplomatic ties, a surprising amount of engagement emerged between the two countries throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Such exchange was informal and gendered, primarily organised by women from families divided through a mass migration from Japan to North Korea that started in 1959. This chapter analyses the long-distance kinship relations that emerged between Japan and North Korea and the significance of items that moved across the Sea of Japan/East Sea. I suggest that correspondence between families reveals how letters, food, and other goods came to hold multiple moral and emotional meanings to people separated by Cold War politics. At an intimate level, food sent from family in Japan connected the recipient to the communities they had left behind. At the macro level, letters from North Korea sparked a transnational movement to “rescue” Japanese women who had gone to North Korea as part of Korean kin groups. Such exchanged items had a shifting value, within both a moral economy of kinship obligation and the political economy of the Cold War, as tools for survival in North Korea and as evidence of state abuse imbued with the potential for subverting ideological divisions.
