As with just about anything regarding North Korea, even the surface-level truth belies deeper and darker realities. If it weren't for the chronic economic crisis and resulting famine that gripped North Korea in the 1990s, as well as a rising anti-North Korean strain in Japanese politics, then the criminal enterprises, communal bonds, and official connections that made Chongryon such a formidable political and cultural organization may well have remained intact. It took economic collapse, regional crisis, and domestic political upheaval to bring Chongryon to its knees.

North Korea has no official embassy in Japan, so the Pyongyang-linked Chongryon acts as an unofficial representative of a government that has kidnapped Japanese citizens and fired long-range missiles in the island nation's direction. It runs banks, a newspaper, dozens of schools, and a university named after Kim Il Sung, North Korea's "eternal leader" and the current despot's grandfather. In the 1980s, Chongryon's business and criminal enterprises, which included off-book pachinko parlors, pubs, prostitution rings, and real estate, reportedly produced over a billion dollars a year in revenue -- much of which, according to Michael J. Green of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was sent back to Pyongyang. As late as 1990, its banking system was capitalized to the tune of $25 billion.

Because North Korea has few exports and is under severe international sanctions, unofficial currency-gathering enterprises like this one can be crucial. And the group also serves as a propaganda outlet, pushing out the DPRK party line to ethnic Koreans. It would be unimaginable for North Korea to own a K-Street high-rise, and South Korea officially bans any expression of support for its northern neighbor. But Japan has allowed its enemy's outpost to remain, and even thrive.

Official Japanese tolerance of Chongryon is the result of "a very mixed, complex picture," Kongdon Oh of the Institute for Defense Analysis told me. She explained that much of Japan's Korean community (Japan's largest ethnic minority, but only about half a million strong currently) is descended from Koreans who arrived as forced labor during the Japanese occupation of the peninsula between 1910 and 1945. The country's 600,000 Koreans were officially discriminated against up through the post-war period, and even into the present day. "The Koreans living in Japan had a fundamental anger that they are deeply segregated and also registered as aliens, even though their grandfathers were born in Japan," says Oh.

In the '60s and '70s, when North Korea was a Soviet- and Chinese-backed export powerhouse -- neither country established diplomatic relations with South Korea until the early 1990s -- Chongryon played a central role in organizing Japan's socially isolated and largely pro-DPRK Korean community. According to some sources, 500,000 of Japan's 600,000 Korean residents were affiliated with Chongryon in the '60s and '70s.