CORRECTED FOCUS: Korean daughter disowned father…

Japan Policy & Politics, July 22, 2003

In 1972, the year after her husband left the university, Mun Ja visited her father's house in the western Japan city of Kitakyushu, 10 years after she had disowned him.

Seki, who had taken to drinking after a string of business failures and who lived cut off from the Korean community, seemed a strange old man to his daughter.

They sat face to face. Mun Ja bowed her head and said nothing.

''You have come a long way. I know you have also had hardships unknown to others,'' Seki said.

In 1979 father and daughter made a trip together to his home town, Sunchon. That was her first trip to South Korea, a country Mun Ja had been taught to regard as an enemy. At a banquet there they both met many relatives.

''That trip encouraged me to renew close contacts with my father and relatives. I now feel that I finally became a true daughter after betraying my father,'' Mun Ja said.

Seki died at the age of 72 in November 1986.