The Invitation-Only Zone
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About the Author
Copyright Page
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In memory of
ALICE TYSON BOYNTON
(1930–2013)
KEY PEOPLE
Note: Japanese names are rendered first name/last name. Korean names are rendered last name/first name.
SHINZO ABE—Japanese prime minister from 2006 to 2007, 2012 to present
KAZUHIRO ARAKI—chairman of the Investigation Commission on Missing Japanese Probably Related to North Korea
KAYOKO ARIMOTO—mother of Keiko Arimoto
KEIKO ARIMOTO—abducted in 1983 while studying English in London
FUKIE (NÉE HAMAMOTO) CHIMURA—abducted from Obama, Japan, in 1978
YASUSHI CHIMURA—abducted from Obama, Japan, in 1978
CHOI EUN-HEE—South Korean actress and former wife of Shin Sang-ok, abducted from Hong Kong in 1978
KENJI FUJIMOTO—sushi chef who worked for Kim Jong-il, 1988–2001
TAKAKO FUKUI—girlfriend of Japanese Red Army Faction member Takahiro Konishi
TADAAKI HARA—chef abducted from Osaka, Japan, in 1980
KAORU HASUIKE—abducted from Kashiwazaki, Japan, in 1978
KATSUYA HASUIKE—daughter of Kaoru and Yukiko Hasuike
SHIGEYO HASUIKE—son of Kaoru and Yukiko Hasuike
TORU HASUIKE—older brother of Kaoru Hasuike
YUKIKO HASUIKE (NÉE OKUDO)—abducted from Kashiwazaki, Japan, in 1978
KENJI ISHIDAKA—TV Asahi producer, author of Kim Jong-il’s Abduction Command
TORU ISHIOKA—Japanese student abducted from Barcelona in 1980
BRINDA JENKINS—daughter of Charles Robert Jenkins and Hitomi Soga
CHARLES ROBERT JENKINS—U.S. Army sergeant, defected to North Korea in 1965, married abductee Hitomi Soga in 1980
MIKA JENKINS—daughter of Charles Robert Jenkins and Hitomi Soga
KIM EUN-GYONG—daughter of Megumi Yokota and Kim Yong-nam
KIM HYON-HUI—North Korean agent who bombed Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987
KIM IL-SUNG—founder and leader of North Korea from 1948 to 1994
KIM JONG-IL—leader of North Korea from 1994 to 2011
KIM YOUNG-NAM—South Korean abducted in 1978, married Megumi Yokota in 1986
JUNICHIRO KOIZUMI—prime minister of Japan from 2001 to 2006
HARUNORI KOJIMA—abductee activist
TAKAHIRO KONISHI—Japanese Red Army Faction member
EDWARD S. MORSE—American zoologist (1838–1925)
HIROKO SAITO—emigrated from Japan to North Korea, 1963
KATSUMI SATO—director, Modern Korea Institute, abductee activist (1929–2013)
YASUHIRO SHIBATA—Japanese Red Army Faction member
SHIN KWANG-SOO—North Korean secret agent
SHIN SANG-OK—South Korean film director, ex-husband of Choi Eun-hee, abducted from Hong Kong in 1978
HITOMI SOGA—abducted from Sado Island, Japan, 1978
MIYOSHI SOGA—abducted with her daughter, Hitomi, from Sado Island, Japan, 1978
TAKAMARO TAMIYA—leader of the Red Army Faction (1943–1995)
HITOSHI TANAKA—senior Japanese diplomat
TAKESHI TERAKOSHI—abducted from Shikamachi in 1963; currently lives in Pyongyang, North Korea
TOMOE TERAKOSHI—mother of Takeshi Terakoshi
RYUZO TORII—professor of anthropology, Tokyo University (1870–1953)
SHOGORO TSUBOI—professor of anthropology, Tokyo University (1863–1913)
MEGUMI YAO—wife of Yasuhiro Shibata
MEGUMI YOKOTA—thirteen-year-old schoolgirl abducted from Niigata, Japan, in 1977
SAKIE YOKOTA—mother of Megumi Yokota
SHIGERU YOKOTA—father of Megumi Yokota
PROLOGUE
People began disappearing from Japan’s coastal towns and cities in the fall of 1977. A security guard vacationing at a seaside resort two hundred miles northwest of Tokyo vanished in mid-September. In November, a thirteen-year-old girl walking home from badminton practice in the port town of Niigata was last seen eight hundred feet from her family’s front door. The next July two young couples, both on dates, though in different towns on Japan’s northwest coast, disappeared. One couple left behind the car they’d driven to a local make-out spot; the other abandoned the bicycles they’d ridden to the beach.
What few knew at the time was that these people were abducted by an elite unit of North Korean commandos. Japanese were not the only victims, and dozens also disappeared from other parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East during the same period. In May 1978 a Thai woman living in Macau was grabbed on her way to a beauty salon. In July 1978 four Lebanese women were taken from Beirut; later that year, a Romanian artist disappeared, having been promised an exhibition in Asia. Some were lured onto airplanes by the prospect of jobs abroad; others were simply gagged, thrown into bags, and transported by boat to North Korea. Their families spent years searching for the missing, checking mortuaries, hiring private detectives and soothsayers. Only five were ever seen again.
Because the locations they were taken from were dispersed, and their numbers relatively small, almost nobody in Japan drew a connection among the incidents. A local paper slyly described one couple as having been “burned up” by their passion, the implication being that they had eloped after the woman became pregnant. Rumors about the disappearances surfaced periodically, but newspapers reported them as urban myths, akin to alien abductions. When the families of the missing went to the police, they were told that with no evidence of foul play, there was nothing to investigate. After all, thousands of people disappear from Japan every year, the police explained, dying lonely deaths or fleeing drugs, debts, or unhappy relationships. While some members of the Japanese government and police force became aware of the abductions, they avoided acknowledging them officially, which would have required them to take action. And what, after all, could be done? Japan had neither diplomatic relations with North Korea nor a military that could take unilateral action, and its mutual security treaty with the United States wouldn’t be triggered by a handful of kidnappings. And what if a Japanese official raised the issue and North Korea hid the evidence by killing the abductees? “It can’t be helped” (Shikata ga nai) is the phrase the Japanese commonly use to rationalize inaction. So, for the next quarter century, dozens of abductees were fated to languish in North Korea.
1
WELCOME TO THE INVITATION-ONLY ZONE
On the evening of July 13, 1978, Kaoru Hasuike and his girlfriend, Yukiko Okudo, rode bikes to the summer fireworks festival at the Kashiwazaki town beach. The cool night air felt good against their skin as they whisked down the winding lanes of the coastal farming village 140 miles north of Tokyo. They parked their bikes by the public library and made their way past the crowd of spectators to a remote stretch of sand. It was a new moon, and the fireworks looked spectacular against the black sky. As the first plumes rose, Kaoru noticed four men nearby. Cigarett
e in hand, one of them approached the couple and asked for a light. As Kaoru reached into his pocket, the four attacked, gagging and blindfolding the couple and binding their hands and legs with rubber restraints. “Keep quiet and we won’t hurt you,” one of the assailants promised. Confined to separate canvas sacks, Kaoru and Yukiko were loaded onto an inflatable raft. Peering through the sack’s netting, Kaoru caught a glimpse of the warm, bright lights of Kashiwazaki City fading into the background. An hour later he was transferred to a larger ship idling offshore. The agents forced him to swallow several pills: antibiotics to prevent his injuries from becoming infected, a sedative to put him to sleep, and medicine to relieve seasickness. When he awoke the next evening, he was in Chongjin, North Korea. Yukiko was nowhere in sight, and his captors told Kaoru she had been left behind in Japan.1
With his fashionably shaggy hair and ready smile, the twenty-year-old Kaoru Hasuike impressed those who met him as a young man who was going places. Like much of his generation in Japan, he wasn’t interested in politics and knew almost nothing about Korea, North or South. Cocky and intelligent, he was at the top of his class at Tokyo’s prestigious Chuo University. Yukiko, twenty-two, the daughter of a local rice farmer, was a beautician for Kanebo, one of Japan’s leading cosmetics companies. She and Kaoru had been dating for a year, and he planned to propose once he finished his law degree. Japan’s economy was surging ahead, and the future looked bright. He’d get a job at a corporation; they’d move from Kashiwazaki to Tokyo and build a life together. That was the plan, anyway.
Young Kaoru (Jiji Press)
The overnight train from Chongjin to Pyongyang was extremely bumpy, and by the time Kaoru arrived in the North Korean capital the next morning he was furious. “This is a violation of human rights and international law! You must return me to Japan immediately!” he shouted. His abductor watched calmly as Kaoru vented. When Kaoru saw that confrontation wasn’t working, he tried evoking sympathy. “You have to understand that my parents are in ill health,” he explained. Their condition would worsen if they worried about him. Surely his abductors could understand that?
The abductor listened to Kaoru’s tirade in silence. “You know,” he said, pausing for effect, “if you want to die, this is a good way to do it.” He spoke in the flat, matter-of-fact way of one for whom such encounters were routine. He explained to Kaoru that the reason he had been abducted was to help reunify the Korean Peninsula, the sacred duty of every North Korean citizen. After all the pain his Japanese forefathers had inflicted on Korea, the man continued, it was the least that Kaoru, who had benefited from his country’s rapacious colonial exploits, could do. Precisely how Kaoru would hasten reunification was left ambiguous, although the abductor hinted that he would train spies to pass as Japanese, and perhaps become a spy himself. The good news was that so long as Kaoru worked hard and obediently, he would eventually be returned to Japan.
The abductor saved his most astounding claim for last. Far from suffering from having been abducted, Kaoru would ultimately benefit. “You see, once the peninsula is unified under the command of General Kim Il-sung, a beautiful new era will begin,” he explained. North Korean socialism would spread throughout Asia, including Japan. “And when that glorious day comes, we Koreans will live in peace. And you will return to Japan, where your experiences here will help you secure a position at the very top of the new Japanese regime!” Kaoru couldn’t believe his ears. How could anyone make such preposterous statements?
While North Korea today is one of the poorest, most isolated nations on earth, when Kaoru was abducted in 1978, it was one of the most admired and prosperous Communist regimes in Asia. In 1960 the North’s income per capita was twice that of the South’s. Despite being nearly obliterated by American bombs during the Korean War, the industrial North had enormous advantages over agrarian South Korea, having inherited 75 percent of the peninsula’s coal, phosphate, and iron mines, and 90 percent of its electricity-generating capacity. So equipped, the North’s economy grew by 25 percent per year in the decade following the Korean War.2 In 1975 the North exported 328,000 tons of rice and corn.3 The military dictatorship in South Korea, by comparison, was a basket case, its economy so far behind that its American backers feared it would never catch up. The bitter irony for Kaoru was that 1978 was precisely the year South and North Korea traded places, the former on its way to becoming a global economic powerhouse and the latter beginning its descent into destitution and even famine. In other words, it was the last point in history when the North’s political and economic system was thought to be so self-evidently superior that its spies could snatch people off beaches, show them the glories of the North Korean revolution, and assume they would join the struggle.
* * *
Born in 1957, Kaoru Hasuike had a blissfully innocent childhood. Overlooking the Sea of Japan, Kashiwazaki was largely rural farmland at the time, and he and his older brother, Toru, would fish for carp, catfish, and snake heads in the Betsuyama River, which ran behind their house. The brothers were extremely close, and Toru’s advanced knowledge of music and fashion helped Kaoru cultivate an aura of cool, worldly sophistication. An obedient, well-behaved child, Kaoru was captain of the baseball team and a student at the top of his class. Like so many creative, bright students of his generation, he grew more rebellious and bohemian, singing rock music and wearing hole-riddled jeans. In 1974, when Kaoru moved to Tokyo to attend university, the brothers shared an apartment. One day, Kaoru, ever careless, dropped a lit cigarette on a brand-new rug. Without pausing, he simply shifted a flowerpot to cover the smoldering hole. “He shot me that ‘Aren’t I clever?’ look and lit up another cigarette,” says Toru. “Kaoru had it all figured out.”4
Now a captive and with no one to commiserate with, Kaoru was desperately lonely. Although he didn’t have a religious background, he tried praying, placing his palms together and pressing them to his eyes. This display of piety elicited ridicule from his captors, because in North Korean movies the only characters who prayed were the cowardly Japanese prisoners begging for mercy. Not even sleep provided an escape, as Kaoru’s dreams were filled with fantastical versions of his nightmarish days. “I had a recurring dream that some of my friends from back home in Kashiwazaki had been abducted and taken to North Korea, just like me,” he says. “In the dream I’d see them and say, ‘Oh no, they got you too?’”
A few months after arriving in Pyongyang, where he was kept in an apartment, Kaoru realized he was probably stuck there for the foreseeable future, the secretive regime not being in the habit of releasing witnesses to its espionage operations. He was certain that nobody in Japan knew what had happened to him, so he didn’t expect any search parties or diplomatic missions to secure his release. Escape was impossible; three “minders” monitored him twenty-four hours a day, each taking an eight-hour shift. And even if he somehow managed to slip past them, where would he go? It wasn’t as if he could count on receiving help from ordinary North Koreans, who would surely turn him in. The stories he heard about those who had tried to escape weren’t encouraging. The regime had once assigned two military units, three thousand men in all, to capture an abductee who had managed to slip away. Kaoru wondered if he might be able to get help from one of the few Western embassies in Pyongyang. Then he heard about a female detainee who was forcibly removed from an embassy where she had sought asylum—a violation of international law. Kaoru took stock of his options. He was too young to give up on life, no matter how bizarre the circumstances. “As long as I didn’t know the reason for my abduction, or what was going to happen to me, I felt that I couldn’t just die like this,” he says. But how could he survive, cut off from everyone he loved and everything he knew?
Kaoru was given access to a restricted library that held a collection of Japanese-language books about North Korea. Japan’s postwar educational system dealt superficially with the period during which it colonized Korea and much of Asia, so most of what Kaoru was learning was news to him. He was surprise
d to find out that North Korea had a large following of international sympathizers, many of them in Japan. He read about the wartime exploits of Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese insurgency, and the lengths to which ordinary Koreans had gone to resist the Japanese. “After some time, I had to admit that the people of this land had fought bravely against Japanese colonialism. I was able to rationally separate the troubled history of the Korean people from my forceful abduction,” he says.
Over and over, Kaoru’s captors told him he was in North Korea to help right the wrongs of his Japanese colonial forebears. His minders regaled him with accounts of how Japanese soldiers had raped Korean women, dragooned men into slave labor, and generally humiliated Korea’s ancient civilization. “I was horrified by what they told me. I didn’t doubt it was true, but I didn’t know what it had to do with me,” he says. Coming from the quiescent seventies generation of young Japanese, Kaoru had seldom heard history discussed with such vitriol. How had Japanese-Korean relations gotten to the point that, thirty years after the end of World War II, Koreans were so filled with hatred toward the Japanese that they talked about them as if they were a different species? How had the two cultures developed such a twisted relationship?
2
THE MEIJI MOMENT: JAPAN BECOMES MODERN
The problems between Japan and Korea began long before 1910, when the former annexed the latter into its burgeoning empire. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 set Japan on the course to modernize its economy and culture in order to avoid being colonized by the West, and the two themes of modernization (renewing oneself) and colonization (ruling another) were thereafter intertwined. Forty years later, Japan imposed upon Korea the same practices it had adopted. It used the Western pseudoscience of racial classification to legitimize its actions, arguing that Japan and Korea’s ancient racial kinship fated them to reconnect. As non-Western colonizers, the Japanese faced a dilemma: Could a classification scheme that white colonizers had deployed to distinguish themselves from the distant, darker colonized be applied to a nearby and similarly hued people? In other words, could a theory that bound Japan to Korea be construed to justify rule over it? Japan’s answer—a brew of racial reasoning and military power—enabled it to build one of the largest empires of the twentieth century, and has poisoned relations between the two cultures to this day.