North Korea has offered no official response since a Japanese court found that Pyongyang lured people to move to the country with false promises, ordering it to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

But an article published in state media days after the ruling, featuring the testimony of a resident who migrated from Japan, appears to be aimed at countering the narrative put forward by the victims.

“One’s homeland is precious to everyone. All the more so for those who were born and raised in a foreign land,” the 77-year-old Hwang Jong Sun writes in the article, which