Ethnic minorities in North Korea

Jaegaseung are Jurchen people descendants who live in Korea. Historically, they formed villages of married lay monks.[2] They produced oatmeal paper and substituted their tax with it.[3] These local communities survived through the colonial period without serious pressure from outside.[4]

Their villages existed in North Korea, from the 18th century when their descendants migrated from China, until the 1960s.[2] In modern times, Jaegaseung people have been assimilated with the Korean people in North Korea.[5] The monastic identity of lay monks was seen as antisocialist, and the villages have ceased to exist.[5]

There is a dwindling community of Chinese people, locally as huaqiao, in North Korea. The decline of the Chinese community is due to migration to China in the search of a better life and education. Similar trends have been observed in Chinese communities living in South Korea. In the 1980s Chinese people were uniquely privileged in North Korea by being allowed to freely make visits abroad.[6]

Heijō Shrine was a Shinto shrine built by Japanese in Pyongyang

Former Japanese prisoners of war in the Soviet Union,[7] Japanese accompanying their repatriated Zainichi Korean spouses,[8] defectors such as Japanese Red Army members,[9] and abductees[10] form a small Japanese community in North Korea. In 1997 a small number of ethnically Japanese wives were allowed to return to Japan.[8]

Charles Robert Jenkins was part of the American community in North Korea.

Small communities of Americans and Indians exist in North Korea.[11][12][13] 200 Westerners live in North Korea and 5,000 Westerners visit the country each year.[14]

Less than 10,000 Russian-Korean people moved to North Korea, although the Soviet Union had one of the largest Korean minorities in the world. Most of the repatriates to North Korea came from island of Sakhalin where they had moved during Japanese colonization of Korea. The Russian-Koreans have mainly assimilated, and do not form a separate ethnic group in modern North Korea.[15]

The community of Koreans in China grew in the late 19th century. In 1945 there were up to two million ethnic Koreans living in China. In the late 1950s and 1960s, tens of thousands of ethnic Koreans moved to North Korea. Between 50,000-70,000 people are believed to have moved to North Korea. However, no official published statistics exist to confirm the numbers. In the late 1950s the Great Leap Forward resulted in economic troubles and famine. In comparison, North Korean economy of that time did well. While the emigration was legal at first, it was banned after 1958. The Cultural Revolution and resulting persecution of Korean intellectuals caused them to flee to North Korea. North Korean government had to establish two or three refugee camps for the large numbers of Chinese-Korean refugees fleeing China.[16] Since the 1960s, there have been schools for the Chinese-Koreans, but very little Chinese is taught in them.[17]

Kang Chol-hwan is a well-known member of Japanese-Korean minority.[8]

Japanese-Koreans are descendants of people who were repatriated from Japan between 1959 and 1980. There were around 94,000 people who moved to North Korea. As of 2013 their current number is between 100,000 and 150,000. They were isolated from mainstream society in North Korea. However, they were more affluent than typical North Koreans in the 1960s and 1970s. The Japanese-Koreans are known from anecdotal evidence to have mainly married among themselves. After North Korean famine the community has lost much of its affluence but it still exists as a separate group within North Korean society.[8]