An interesting story from Bloomberg News about the zainichi North Korean community in Japan:

Kim is a 66-year-old businessman who owns a shoe factory in Kobe, Japan. In 1997, he resolved to switch his citizenship to South Korea from North Korea after deciding that “I could no longer support a government that allowed children to starve to death.”

Since then, thousands of North Korean residents in Japan have made the same decision. And that is bad news for the other Kim Jong Il — the one, no relation to the businessman, who has ruled North Korea since 1994.

For the last four decades, Japan’s North Korean residents have sent billions of yen in money and goods back home to their relatives and the Pyongyang regime. As more and more of them switch their allegiance to South Korea, they are choking off the flow of resources to an isolated and impoverished country already coping with trade sanctions.

While there is no way of knowing exactly how much they have sent, Katsumi Sato, director of the Modern Korea Institute in Tokyo, estimated that in the early 1990s, the annual total was some 60 billion yen ($600 million) in money and supplies.

“The cash and goods sent from Japan in the late 1980s were bigger than their national budget,” Sato said. “It was North Korea’s lifeline.”

And that lifeline is being cut by sanctions, as well as the following:

The flow of North Koreans changing citizenship shows no sign of abating. In Tokyo alone, residents have been switching at a rate of roughly 100 a month since 2006, according to statistics from the South Korean consulate in Tokyo. In February 2007, the latest month available, 120 switched.

Sounds like terrible news for the other Kim Jong-Il.

[via FG]