The 20th century was an era of utopias. Until the mid-1970s, many young Japanese believed that a socialist society was a utopia. While I was a student at a prefectural high school in Kyoto in the late 1950s, a classmate of mine with North Korean parentage returned to his homeland, which he thought was a dreamland. In those days, Japanese media used to describe North Korea as a "paradise on Earth." I majored in economics at a university because I wanted to specialize in Marxist economics.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union was consistently ahead of the United States in science and technology, leading it in the satellite-launching race until the successful U.S. manned flight to the moon in 1969. Regarding economic management, many experts believed that a planned economy was more efficient than a market economy. It was generally agreed that the major problem with a socialist system was that democracy, freedom, individual liberty and other modern Western principles were denied under single-party rule.

North Korea was by no means a paradise on Earth. In the late 1970s, the economies of the Soviet Union and its East European satellite states started on a path of long decline and it became clear that a socialist society as a utopia had no realistic possibilities.