This paper deals with the discourses deployed by South and North Korea, as well as the Japanese authorities, around the mass repatriation of Zainichi Koreans from Japan to North Korea in 1959~1984, which resulted in 93,339 Zainichi Koreans (and their spouses, 1,871 of whom were ethnic Japanese women) going to North Korea for permanent settlement. Such a mass movement from an advanced capitalist country to a society of socialist orientation was exceptional in Cold War context, when most mass migrations tended to take place in the opposite direction (the Armenian repatriation to Soviet Armenia in 1945~49 was one plausible precedent, but the numbers of French or American Armenians who ended up in Soviet Armenia were significantly lower compared to the Zainichi repatriates to North Korea). As this paper argues, this mass migration―which was to alleviate workforce shortages in the North and bind Zainichi society closer to North Korea―was discursively legitimized in nationalist terms by North Korean leadership, as a national (rather than individual) right. Japanese authorities justied their collaboration with North Koreans in the process of organizing this migration in terms of international humanitarian law, while South Koreans criticized their actions as de facto mass expulsion of discriminated Zainichi Koreans, focusing on the clause making return to Japan impossible for repatriates (and thus denying Zainichi repatriates the freedom of movement, exposing the emptiness of the “humanitarian” rhetoric on the Japanese side). All sides, in the end, were deploying human or national rights rhetoric to justify their self-interested behaviour.