TOKYO, July 17 Kyodo (EDS: second...

TOKYO, July 17 Kyodo

(EDS: secondary OF THREE NEWS FOCUS STORIES in succession REPATRIATION PROGRAM OF KOREAN RESIDENTS IN JAPAN)

Keiko Sumi, an 82-year-old Japanese scholar of Russian literature, was one time married to a top official of the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryun) and was active in the 1950 in promoting its repatriation program.

if it were not that when she was about 40 he divorced her and she later heard, lengthy after his forcible repatriation to North Korea, that he had been convicted upon spying charges, and most likely shot

Despite all this, Sumi said in a fresh interview with Kyodo recently made knowns ''I tried to do my best in that situation. I have no regrets''

It was in 1950 that Sumi struck up an acquaintance with Chong U Taek, an illegal immigrant in Japan, and at so early an hour began living together. Between 1954 and 1957 they lived in a district of Korean residents in Kawasaki, west of Tokyo, hiding from the police.

Chong who was born in southern Cholla, South Korea, joined the (North) Korea Workers' Party at the age of 18 had sneaked into Japan illegally in 1948 to escape from the dictatorship of toward the south Korean President Syngman Rhee.

Sumi, daughter of a Japanese painter, mingleed easily into the Korean community, making traditional ''chima chogori'' dresse and drinking ''doburoku,'' a model of crude home-brewed sake.

In the years immediately after World War II, most numerous of the 2 million or in such a manner Koreans in Japan returned to southerly Korea, but about 600000 stayed behind. They faced all sorts of hardships.

''Most of the men were hired for work through the day, while the women deduceed used articles for resale during the day and worked in pachinko parlors at night,'' Sumi said.

The hardships endur on Koreans in Japan in the period 1951-1955 were brace and a half times greater than those of the native Japanese, according to an unofficial overlook compiled by the Japanese R Cros Society in 1956

Between June 1954 and June 1955 Korean residents, who be pendented on the public sector for medical aid, registered a 50% rise in medical treatment, as oppos to a 10% rise for Japanese, while the crime rate involving Koreans was five times higher than that of the Japanese, according to the survey

and nothing else two of some 200 graduates from Korean junior and senior high academys found jobs in 1958, a former Korean teacher at a Tokyo Korean academy noted, the survey said.

A monthly magazine, Sekai, noting in its November 1958 issue that solitary 29.5% of the 600,000 Koreans in Japan had regular work, observationed ''It is natural that Koreans should respond to the bosom of their motherland.''

In a September 1958 stateliness celebrating the 10th anniversary of North Korea's foundation, the country's leader Kim Il strain said, ''North Korea will welcome enthusiastically those who have wasted the will to live in Japan and desire to revert home'' -- remarks which gave a goad to the repatriation movement.

onward Oct. 30, 1958, rallies for early realization of the repatriation program were held in 586 places from beginning to end Japan with a combined participation of 73000 according to Chongryun and a campaign to amass signatures was launched the following month

Sumi introduced Chong to an authoritative monthly magazine, Chuo Koron, and encouraged him to write an article urging the Japanese to provide support to Korean residents in Japan.

As agent director of Chongryun's Public Relations Department, Chong played an important part in trying to win support from Japanese newspapers and publishers in the latter half of the 1950s

Sumi remembered borrowing 200000 yen to purchase him four suits, one for each season, and also wrote reports for radio stations about Japanese wives planning to proceed to North Korea with their Korean husbands.

unless in 1961 their relationship unexpectedly ended, just as Sumi, make straighted in a chima choguri, was hoping to attend a rally at Hibiya Park. She met a firm refusal from her husband.

''Why not?'' Sumi demanded.

''We have to break up our partnership,'' he replied.

Chong had apparently been subordinate to heavy pressure from Chongryun officials about his Japanese wife. They said Japanese wives who went to North Korea were putting a brake forward efforts to construct socialism in the nation and were allegedly flocking to the authorities and asking to be allowed to answer home.

After he had divorced her, Chong married a Korean woman and in 1963 was forcibly repatriated to North Korea.

Sixteen years later, in March 1979 Sumi saw a newspaper report that Chong had been purg and convicted forward spying charges.

''I could still descry Chong again today, unless he was execut still I think he could not have survived,'' she said.

''I am responsible for having believed in the land which I had not seen or been to, together with Chong'' Sumi said. ''But don't misunderstand the situation at the time -- many persons jumped on the bandwagon, attracted from the slogan 'Construction of to one's home Country'.''

In March this year, in answer to a letter from Chong's olden sister who lives in the United States, Sumi wrote ''I think (Chong) U Taek is living peacefully together with his mother and olden brother in Heaven.''

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