Teachers in the Meiji era tended to be former samurai, noblemen who had been replaced by the emperor’s new professional army. Disarmed, they traded their swords for books, although they kept their hair in the traditional style (pulled back) and wore kimonos over billowy silk pants and wooden sandals. Torii made a point of skipping their classes, interpreting their appearance as proof they were hopelessly out of touch with the exciting changes sweeping Japan. His favorite teacher wore modern, Western-style jackets and ties and had adopted a similarly forward-looking pedagogical style that favored empiricism and experience over rote memorization. On nice days, class would be held on nearby Mount Bizan, and the surrounding plants, trees, rivers, and hills were used to exhibit the lessons of botany and geography. Torii was thrilled to discover how much one could learn simply by exploring the natural world, and he yearned for adventures like those he heard about in the Saturday sessions when the teacher read aloud from books such as Robinson Crusoe.
Torii quit school when he turned nine. “One of my teachers told me I wouldn’t be able to survive without an elementary school certificate. I told him I could do better at home by myself,” he wrote. He found inspiration in Samuel Smiles’s book Self-Help (1859), a Victorian paean to perseverance, which was a bestseller in Japan. “Every human being has a great mission to perform, noble faculties to cultivate, a vast destiny to accomplish,” wrote Smiles. “He should have the means of education, and of exerting freely all the powers of his godlike nature.” Torii’s family supported his decision, buying him all the books he wanted, including the first Japanese-English dictionary. In the morning, a tutor would give him English lessons at home; in the afternoon, he’d scour nearby tombs for pottery and other artifacts; in the evening, he’d pore over scientific encyclopedias, history books, and archaeology studies, curating his growing collection.
One afternoon, Torii stumbled upon Yukichi Fukuzawa’s All the Countries of the World (1869), an illustrated geography textbook with a color-coded portrait of humanity. The book’s first sentences changed Torii’s worldview forever. “There are five kinds of human races: Asians, Europeans, Americans, Africans and Malaysians. The Japanese are part of the Asian race,” it read. Torii was familiar with “Westerners” and “Asians,” but he was surprised by the additional diversity. “I had always thought that everyone else in the world was more or less the same,” he wrote. What did it mean to belong to a race? he wondered. With this question, Torii was swept up in the Meiji-era effort to generate a Japanese national identity with which to navigate the modern world.
In September 1890, Torii, twenty, embarked on the three-hundred-mile journey from Shikoku to Tokyo. He had been following the development of Japanese anthropology from afar, reading the books and magazines in which the new scientific method was being applied to geology and archaeology. Torii had even submitted an essay on his fieldwork on Shikoku to the Tokyo Anthropological Society’s journal, which Shogoro Tsuboi edited. Impressed with the young man’s pluck, Tsuboi became Torii’s mentor, invited him to study with him in Tokyo, and put him to work classifying specimens at the Anthropology Research Institute. Like many other young men in the Meiji era, Torii was gripped by “city fever” (tokainetsu) and mesmerized by Tokyo, spending his days exploring bohemian bookshops and teahouses, writing poetry, and studying German.13 When not attending lectures, he pored over the precious English-language anthropology texts—E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture, Sir John Evans’s The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments of Great Britain—kept in the library’s protective glass case.
In order to establish the journal’s reputation as a center for modern research, Tsuboi included an English-language table of contents and discouraged breezy meditations from office-bound academics by stipulating that he would accept only articles based on “direct field observations.”14 Every issue included tales of expeditions from the northernmost reaches of Siberia to the distant islands of the South Pacific. Tsuboi needed a steady supply of intrepid explorers, and Torii was eager to oblige. Torii became the Japanese Indiana Jones, chronicling his adventures in bestselling books. Like Tsuboi, Torii was a true cosmopolitan. He studied the Incas in South America, and his books were translated into French and awarded the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. He was among the first anthropologists to use photography in his ethnography, often illustrating his pieces with photographs of “exotic natives,” in which he himself occasionally appeared.
Studying with Tsuboi, Torii resurrected his fascination with race. “From the point of view of civilization and human solidarity, they are in an unhappy state that merits our pity,” he wrote about Taiwan’s indigenous people. “But for the anthropologist, they constitute a marvelous field of studies. To what race of the human species do these populations belong?” Torii never missed an opportunity to embark on field trips, usually accompanied by his wife, Kimiko, an anthropologist who studied Mongolian history. He supplemented his university salary with journalism assignments, which both paid well and made him famous. Both literally and metaphorically, Torii’s career tracked the course of Japanese colonialism, with the explorer often arriving soon after Japan’s troops. Japan had just won the Sino-Japanese War when he arrived in China in 1895. In 1905 he went to Manchuria and Mongolia, conducting research in the areas where Japan had only months before defeated the Russian army. He made his first trip to Korea in 1911, and to Siberia in 1919, shortly after both territories were occupied by the Japanese.
Ryuzo Torii, 1896 (© University Museum, University of Tokyo)
The argument about Japan’s origins fell into two camps. The first held that the Japanese were a homogeneous people who had lived, relatively unchanged, in the same place for millennia. The other argued that the Japanese were a hybrid people whose ancestors drew from Korea, China, and other parts of Asia, synthesizing the most advantageous traits from each. The theories coexisted, each dominating different periods of Japanese history, depending on the political situation. When Meiji leaders were first fashioning an ideology to keep citizens obedient to the emperor, the notion of Japan as a homogeneous nation came to the fore. As the empire expanded across Asia, it made sense to characterize the Japanese as a collection of different Asian peoples.15
Torii’s voice was the most influential in the hybrid camp. He argued that the Japanese synthesized the best characteristics of indigenous cultures from Manchuria, Korea, Indochina, and Indonesia. In addition to archaeological evidence, he cited the existence of contemporary Japanese people who possessed continental faces, southern features, and curly hair. Torii labeled the Stone Age group who synthesized this multicultural brew the “Japanese proper,” a hybrid people who arrived in Japan after the Ainu, bringing sophisticated practices such as pottery, metallurgy, and monument building.16 Korea played a large part in this project, as it did in Torii’s career. “I have a particularly close relationship to Korea,” he wrote. “Korea has become the center of economic, cultural and material trade between the Asian continent and Japan, which should be happily welcomed.” Torii called Korea Japan’s “mythical and beloved ancient motherland,” which was why he favored uniting them in the modern era. “Korea is just like any other region of Japan such as the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe region or Kyushu,” he wrote in a 1920 essay. Even if the two are not quite as close as brother and sister, he adds, “Koreans and Japanese are equivalent to one’s parent’s cousins.” Torii cited studies that found affinities between the two countries’ language, material culture, religion, and customs. “Koreans are not racially different from Japanese. They are the same group and thus must be included in the same category. This is an anthropological and linguistic truth that cannot be changed.”17
The dominant theory was that the Japanese were an amalgam of races that had traveled to the archipelago and formed a nation whose cultural achievements towered over everyone else’s. In other words, although Asians were racially similar, some nations, such as the Japanese, had advanced further than others. Whether this was because of their system o
f government or their cultural prowess wasn’t certain. But as the Japanese Empire expanded and brought more races into the fold, the Japanese public turned to intellectuals such as Torii to explain how it was that the Japanese could colonize people with whom they shared so much.
3
REUNITED IN NORTH KOREA
In May 1980, Kaoru Hasuike received the first good news since he’d arrived in North Korea twenty-two months earlier. He was summoned to his minder’s office, where several of the officials who oversaw his education were waiting for him. The news? His girlfriend, Yukiko, with whom he had been abducted, was in North Korea after all. In fact, she was in the next room. Would he like to see her? “Yes!” Kaoru replied, so quickly that he was embarrassed.1
It turned out that the story about Yukiko being left behind in Japan had been a ruse designed to force Kaoru to cut all ties to Japan, leaving him with no choice but to accept his situation. In reality, she had been undergoing the same pedagogical routine: learning Korean, studying the regime’s ideology, wondering whether she could survive in this strange country. Like much else in North Korea, their isolation had been staged. They had been living barely a mile apart and were overseen by the same minder, who shuttled back and forth between them. At the very least there was now one other person who could understand what the other was going through.
By the time of Kaoru and Yukiko’s abduction, North Korea had perfected the process. All ships departing from North Korea in the 1970s were tracked by South Korean intelligence, so the spies would steer northeast to the Sea of Okhotsk, before doubling back toward Japan, where it would melt into the many fleets of Japanese fishing vessels to avoid being detected on radar. Once in international waters, it would release several smaller boats stowed in its rear. These vessels were disguised to look like Japanese fishing vessels; their users would conceal the presence of their high-speed engines by venting the exhaust underwater.
The strategy was to grab young Japanese couples from beaches and parks, and separate them before they arrived in North Korea. Isolation was the key variable. The regime found that it generally took a year and a half to break an individual down into a state of psychological helplessness, during which time they could teach him the Korean language and introduce him to juche, the regime’s official ideology. If all went according to plan, they would begin to build him back up right before he descended into a state of absolute despair. Having experienced the total control of the North Korean state, he would become passive and compliant. The process had been tried with intact couples, but it was observed that the presence of a partner encouraged the abductees to resist, collaborate, and occasionally fight back. On the other hand, an abductee who was completely isolated for too long was more difficult to control; loneliness had a way of turning into depression and even, in some cases, led to suicide. But if the correct balance was maintained and the couple was separated, trained, and then reunited, the options were unlimited. They could serve the state together, whether as spies or language teachers, each functioning as a hostage with which to threaten and manipulate the other—a strategy the North routinely employed with Korean diplomats, athletes, and anyone else given permission to travel abroad.
Yukiko Hasuike (Kyodo)
Kaoru and Yukiko married three days after reuniting. “I would have done it that morning,” says Kaoru. “I didn’t want to wait.” North Korean marriage ceremonies are straightforward affairs, with none of the opulence typical in the West. The groom received a haircut and was outfitted with a new white shirt and a necktie; the bride wore a simple flower-patterned dress. Six guests attended: Kaoru and Yukiko’s minder (the man who guided their education and oversaw every aspect of their lives in North Korea), the two high party officials who oversaw their minder, their driver, the woman who cooked the food for the wedding party, and the barber who cut Kaoru’s hair. Jewelry and adornments of any kind are frowned upon, so rings were not exchanged. The ceremony was officiated by the most senior official present, who opened by invoking the blessings of the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung. Kaoru and Yukiko then thanked their superiors for bringing them to the socialist paradise and allowing them to marry, and everyone bowed deeply before the photo of the Great Leader that hangs on the walls of every house and office in North Korea. Everyone raised his glass, shouted a hearty Geon Bae!, and sang a Workers’ Party of Korea standard. It wasn’t the wedding they’d dreamed of, of course, attended by family and friends, but it was the first time Kaoru and Yukiko had participated in a normal event since they’d been abducted, and it meant that, whatever their future held, they’d face it together.
* * *
The most important wedding gift a North Korean newlywed couple can receive is a home in which to start their new life. Because there is no private property, the gift is from the state and can be withdrawn at any time. The Hasuikes’ first home was a traditional one-story cinder-block house an hour south of Pyongyang. Painted white, it had a wooden roof with ceramic tile shingles, and five rooms: a kitchen, two bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom. In the back was a small garden where Kaoru learned to grow eggplant, cucumbers, lettuce, cabbage, and peppers. He got seed and fertilizer by trading cigarettes with a farmer from a nearby food cooperative, and arranged for a cow to till the field at the beginning of the growing season. The rest of the work he did himself. He had become fond of the spicy kimchi that had troubled his stomach when he first arrived, and now he made it for himself in the traditional manner, stuffing cabbage and hot red peppers into clay pots and burying them in the yard to ferment.
The smallest organized social unit in North Korea is the “people’s group” (inminban), of anywhere between twenty and forty households, each with the duty of monitoring the others and providing labor for parades and state celebrations. The head of each group works with the resident police officer to make sure that everyone is properly registered and that all radios and television sets are rendered incapable of receiving signals other than those broadcast by the state. In addition, the Ministry of State Security has a network of informers, reputedly maintaining one for every fifty adults, for a total of three hundred thousand.2 Even when there were no overt signs of surveillance, Kaoru and Yukiko knew they were always being observed.
Their house was located in one of the many mile-square, guarded Invitation-Only Zones that dotted suburban Pyongyang. The area served a dual function by limiting its inhabitants’ freedom while warning nosy outsiders that only those “invited” to enter were welcome. All North Koreans develop a heightened sensitivity to coded language, and knew well enough to avoid anyplace that required an “invitation.” Still, the area’s euphemistic name did little to keep Kaoru from perceiving it as the gilded cage it was—a spacious, well-tended prison inside the secretive state. The Hasuikes’ neighbors were an odd assortment: abductees, spies, and foreign-language experts—anyone whose access to outside information made him or her a threat to the regime’s carefully crafted official narrative. Living in the area wasn’t punishment, and in fact the housing and food supply were of a higher quality than that enjoyed by most North Koreans. As part of its attempt to control the flow of information into the country, the North grants few visas to foreign visitors, and rarely permits those allowed in to stay for more than a week. Therefore, the cluster of Japanese abductees provided a rare opportunity for the North’s spies, many of whom would infiltrate Japan, to observe them in the way one might observe the habits of caged zoo animals.
With small clusters of houses fanning out from a central building, each separated from the others by densely wooded artificial hills, the Invitation-Only Zone was designed to discourage private contact among residents. At its center, the roads converged on a large guesthouse, which had spaces for meetings and classes. Monday was the designated study day, but when the New Year Editorials or Kim Il-sung’s new policy declarations were published, work was suspended and everyone would retreat to the guesthouse and study for several days straight.
As much as Kaoru loathed the peo
ple who had abducted him, he was touched by the kindness and humanity of the ordinary Koreans he met. The cooks in the zone were usually women in their fifties whose husbands had been killed in the Korean War. The managers were unmarried young women in their twenties who prized the job because it came with membership in the Korean Workers’ Party, a credential that could help them marry someone of higher status. Kaoru was in a frail state of mind and was grateful for the kindness of “Granny Kim,” a cook at the first of several Invitation-Only Zones he lived in during his time in North Korea. The combination of despair and an unfamiliar cuisine had caused him to lose weight, and the kindly cook prepared him blanched spinach and pickled cabbage in the milder Japanese style he was used to. Later, when his liver acted up and no suitable medicine was available, she prepared a traditional Korean remedy from roots and herbs. She treated him as a member of her family, confiding that she had lost her husband in an accident and had supported her three children by working in a munitions factory before becoming a cook. She raised his spirits with stories of her weekend visits to Pyongyang, when she brought her grandson snacks and candies. Kaoru was alone at first, so he sometimes ate with Granny Kim and the other workers. One night over dinner, his inhibitions lowered by a few glasses of beer, he told them the story of his being abducted from Japan. Using a combination of pantomime and primitive Korean, he described being beaten, put in a bag, and dragged to a boat. Kaoru had been instructed by his minder to keep the episode secret, but he hoped that Granny Kim and the others would show some sympathy for the ordeal he had been through. At first the women refused to believe it. How could their beloved country do such a thing? “But in their expressions, if not in their words, I knew that they felt empathy for me,” Kaoru says.3 It felt good to have bonded with a few other people. But a week later, his minder scolded him for divulging the state secret. Evidently, one woman’s sense of duty had trumped her empathy, and she reported Kaoru’s indiscretion. He was beginning to understand that in North Korea, loyalty to the state is the highest value.
The Invitation-Only Zone Page 3