Inside North Korea’s bubble in Japan

For this episode I found myself embeded with a small community in Japan. They were born there, they speak the language. But they’re not Japanese citizens, or even ethnically Japanese — they’re North Korean. There’s about 150,000 of them living in Japan today, and they’ve been there for over a century. This community has close ties with the regime in Pyongyang, which supports them financially (and vice-versa). But more importantly, Pyongyang offers them an identity, a heritage, and cultural legitimacy — things that some elements of Japanese society work to deny them.