Pro-North Korean school mothers rally in Japan

Japan's six-month-old government on the same day passed a lower house bill to scrap school fees and give aid to private schools, meeting one of their key pro-family election campaign pledges.

The pro-Pyongyang schools have so far been excluded from the programme that starts in April after opposition from conservatives who say Tokyo should not support schools linked with the nuclear-armed communist country.

About 2,000 students attend 10 pro-Pyongyang schools in Japan, which are run under the instructions of the North Korean residents' association Chongryon, Pyongyang's de facto embassy, and feature portraits of national founder Kim Il-Sung and his son Kim Jong-Il in their classrooms.

On Tuesday about 300 ethnic Korean mothers, many walking with toddlers and pushing prams, rallied in Tokyo, urging the centre-left government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama not to discriminate against their children.

“We must move the government to include our schools in the tuition-free programme with the power of omoni ('mothers' in Korean),” one woman shouted at the rally organised by a network of Korean mothers in Japan.

Ryang Son-ryo, a 37-year-old mother, said: “We were born in Japan and will continue living here. We have been discriminated against in many ways in Japan, but we don't want our children to go through the same thing.”

Some 700,000 ethnic Koreans live in Japan, mostly descendants of migrants and forced labourers who were brought to the country during its 1910-1945 era of occupation of the Korean peninsula.

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