The Invitation-Only Zone

by Robert S. Boynton

  The terrorist Kim Hyon-hui being taken off a plane in South Korea (Associated Press)

  Her linguistic training was similarly thorough. After attending the Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies, she received Japanese lessons from a woman who had been abducted from Japan in June 1978. They became close friends, and the Japanese tutor told her about the children she’d left behind. One day, the tutor asked to see how ordinary North Koreans lived, and the next afternoon they snuck out of the military college to visit a nearby village. “We found a decrepit cluster of houses and filthy children running around the streets, some naked. I was ashamed at this and tried to pull [her] away. But she stared at the children with tears in her eyes,” recalls Kim. “‘So this is your brave new world?’ she asked. ‘I pity you.’” The description of the tutor matched that of a twenty-two-year-old bar hostess and mother of two who had disappeared from Tokyo in 1978. For the first time, the Japanese government had direct evidence of the abductions.

  * * *

  “She is even more gorgeous in person than in her photograph,” Hitoshi Tanaka, the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s director for Northeast Asian affairs, thought to himself. The man in charge of Japan’s relations with the Korean Peninsula, Tanaka was the first Japanese official to meet Kim Hyon-hui. The United States was pushing Japan to impose sanctions on North Korea immediately after the bombing, but Tanaka wanted to be sure that the crime had in fact been committed by North Korea. South Korean intelligence had manufactured cases against the North in the past, and the Americans were being too pushy for his taste. If nothing else, Tanaka wanted to show them that Japan was an independent state, with its own foreign policy.

  South Korean intelligence, fearing the North would assassinate Kim, had secured her at a safe house deep in the mountains. Tanaka’s car climbed up the twisting, remote roads for several hours. “I went to meet her, to see her with my own eyes, and understand who she was,” he says.2 For a woman who had just murdered more than a hundred people, she possessed an otherworldly calm he found unsettling. “You’ve traveled the world and can see through the lies North Korea tells its people. How could you have done such a thing? Didn’t you hesitate when you realized all the innocent people you’d kill?” he asked. Her response said as much about her as the regime that had produced her. She admitted she had traveled through the West but claimed she had been told what she saw there was an illusion. “I was taught that it was superficial, and designed to hide the awful capitalist reality that lurked behind it,” she said without emotion. It was astounding to behold someone convinced she was floating through a fictional world. She reminded Tanaka of a plastic flower: beautiful but lifeless.3

  14

  KIM’S GOLDEN EGGS

  Having sent her husband and four children off for the day, Kayoko Arimoto was enjoying a restorative cup of tea when the telephone rang. It was just after ten on a late September morning in 1988. She didn’t recognize the voice on the line, and nearly dropped the phone when she heard whom the woman was looking for. “Is this Miss Keiko Arimoto’s residence?” the woman asked.1

  In April 1982, Kayoko’s daughter, Keiko, had moved to London to study English. Keiko’s parents hadn’t liked the idea of her going so far away, but they gave their permission, on the condition that she return home the next year. She agreed, but as soon as she got to London, she began looking for a job. In March 1983 the Arimotos received a brief letter from Keiko: “I will be home later than the original schedule because I found a job here. I am not going to stay in one place, as this is marketing research. I’ll write to you from wherever I go.” They never heard from her again.

  Keiko Arimoto (Asger Rojle Christensen)

  The caller that September morning in 1988 explained that she was in a similar position. Her son, Toru Ishioka, had disappeared while traveling through Spain eight years before, and she had just received a letter from him, in which he asked her to contact Keiko’s family. “I can’t be more explicit, but during our travels in Europe we ended up here in North Korea,” the letter began. He and Keiko were living in Pyongyang with another Japanese man. “We basically support ourselves here, but we do receive a small daily stipend for living expenses from the North Korean government. However, the economy is bad, and I have to say it is a hardship to be living here for so long. It’s especially difficult to get clothes and educational books, and the three of us are having a hard time. Anyway, I wanted to at least let you know that we are all right, and I am going to entrust this letter to a foreign visitor.”

  Written on a single piece of paper, the letter had been folded down to the size of a postage stamp. On the back was written, “Please send this letter to Japan (our address is in this letter).” The envelope bore a Polish postmark and stamp, and had presumably been mailed by a Polish tourist. In it were two photographs: one of Toru, Keiko, and a baby; and the other of an unidentified Asian man. Keiko looked thin, her normally plump face sallow. Still, Kayoko was grateful to receive news that her daughter was alive. But how had Keiko gotten to North Korea? And who, she wondered, was that baby?

  * * *

  One might say that Keiko Arimoto’s journey to North Korea began in November 1969, when the Japanese National Police raided a paramilitary training camp deep in the woods of rural Yamanashi prefecture, where a radical group called the Red Army Faction was preparing to attack the prime minister. The Red Army Faction advocated “simultaneous, worldwide revolution” through violent tactics, in the name of Third World and other oppressed minorities, and had developed links to Germany’s Red Army Faction and to New Left groups in Italy and the United States. The Red Army Faction had its roots in the student protests against the 1952 Japan-U.S. mutual security treaty, which gave the U.S. military the right to keep soldiers, aircraft, and other weapons in Japan. The Japanese left believed that the treaty turned Japan into a de facto military base from which the United States could support the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Initially under the auspices of the Japanese Communist Party, the Red Army broke away in order to refashion itself as a more youthful, New Left vanguard, mobilizing the students of Japan’s expanding postwar universities. In 1969 the protests grew so disruptive that academic activity across Japan came to a standstill. Tokyo University simply canceled that year’s incoming class.

  Only a few Red Army Faction members escaped the police raid on their training camp. With most of his comrades in jail, Takamaro Tamiya, the group’s leader, decided to move operations abroad. Charismatic and imaginative, Tamiya planned to hijack an airplane to North Korea and then get military training in Cuba, whose leader, Fidel Castro, was reputed to be on good terms with Kim Il-sung. “We are going to North Korea, determined to do everything necessary to receive military training and remake ourselves into great revolutionary heroes,” Tamiya wrote in a document called “Declaration of Departure.” “No matter what hardships we must endure, we will return across the sea to Japan to stand at the head of the armed revolution.”

  Nobody had ever hijacked a Japanese plane before 1970, so Japanese airports had no metal detectors and little security. The concept of a hijacking was so foreign that, when arrest warrants were issued, the only charge against the Red Army Faction allowed by Japanese law was for the “theft of a plane.” The plan was for each of the men, separately, to board the morning flight to the western Japanese city of Fukuoka carrying pipe bombs, traditional swords, and a toy gun. They rehearsed the action in Tokyo University classrooms, with chairs and desks arranged to approximate an airplane’s layout. Once airborne, Tamiya would stand and signal the others to rush the cockpit. Tamiya boarded the plane that morning, and all seemed to be unfolding according to plan until he glanced around and realized that only four of his eight comrades were on the plane with him. Never having flown before, the missing members of the group hadn’t anticipated the logistics of reservations, tickets, and assigned seats. Tamiya called off the action, and the five disembarked in Fukuoka, only to find they hadn’t enough money for a return flight. Deflated, the
y took the overnight train back to Tokyo.

  Four days later, on March 31, 1970, at 7:30 a.m., Japan Airlines Flight 351, nicknamed “Yodogo,” departed from Tokyo. This time, all nine hijackers sprang into action when the Fasten Seatbelts sign went off. “We are the Red Army Faction! You will fly us to Pyongyang!” Tamiya shouted. “If you don’t, we will detonate a bomb!” he said, waving a stick of dynamite. The pilot explained that the plane needed to refuel if it was to reach North Korea, and at Fukuoka, the hijackers released twenty-three passengers while the ground crew pumped gas. North Korea wasn’t on the pilot’s route, so he requested an additional map. After a frantic search, one was located and brought to the plane. The pilot gasped when he saw that the “map” was little more than a faded illustration photocopied from a grade school textbook. A note scrawled at the top read “No aviation map available; tune radio to 121.5 MC.”

  “Have you contacted the North Koreans yet?” the pilot asked Tamiya once the plane was aloft. “No. We won’t know whether they will take us until we get there,” Tamiya replied. The pilot was alarmed. According to the 1953 Armistice Agreement, any aircraft flying over the DMZ separating North from South Korea without permission could be shot down. The pilot’s radio calls to Pyongyang grew frantic. Finally, he got a faint response: “This is Pyongyang. Tune your radio to contact frequency 134.1 MC.”

  The voice on the radio fed the pilot instructions, and two hours later the plane landed. Everyone on the plane could hear the sound of Korean-language announcements blaring over the airport’s loudspeakers: “This is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea! Please disembark from the aircraft. We welcome all of you who are against Japanese imperialism!” Rows of women wearing traditional Korean hanbok lined up along the tarmac cheering. But as airport workers wheeled stairs toward the plane, Tamiya sensed that something was amiss. If this was Pyongyang, why did he not see any North Korean flags or portraits of Kim Il-sung? Peering out of the cockpit window, he spotted a tanker with a Shell Oil emblem on it, and a plane with a Northwest Airlines logo on its tail—not the kinds of things one expects in North Korea. “This is Seoul, isn’t it?” Tamiya shouted out the window to a nearby soldier. Startled by the direct question, the soldier instinctively told the truth. The hijackers had been tricked into landing in South Korea.

  Surrounded by military vehicles, the plane sat on the tarmac for four days, the standoff broadcast live on Japanese television. The hijackers kept the plane’s doors and air vents locked to prevent soldiers from storming the aircraft or injecting it with sleeping gas. The stifling heat and the odor from the overflowing toilet were unbearable. The South Korean government wouldn’t agree to Tamiya’s demands because a South Korean flight had been hijacked to the North three months before, and while most of the passengers and crew were returned, eleven had been abducted. Finally, it was agreed that the Japanese vice minister of transportation could trade places with the passengers and accompany the hijackers to Pyongyang. On the final evening of the standoff, the passengers and hijackers celebrated with the plane’s remaining rice balls and juice. “We will fight to the end on behalf of the world’s oppressed proletariat,” Tamiya promised in a farewell speech. “We have caused you unhappiness, but we hope you will understand that we did it because we love Japan.” Despite the hardship, the passengers had grown fond of their captors. “If those nine hijackers ever get back, I’m going to recommend them to Japan Airlines,” said one passenger. “They cleaned up the ashtrays, picked up paper from the floor, and even brought me a magazine to read.” Others were concerned that the serious young men didn’t know what they were getting into. “Take care of yourselves,” said the last passenger to leave.

  * * *

  The “Japanese Village of the Revolution,” the Red Army Faction’s North Korean home, is twelve miles outside Pyongyang, bordered on three sides by forests and on the fourth by the Daedong River. Set apart from nearby farms and shielded from the road, it is patrolled by soldiers. The village consists of a dozen buildings, including living quarters, offices, classrooms, and a tennis court. Each apartment has three bedrooms, a dining room, and a kitchen, and is equipped with Japanese washing machines and televisions. The compound is fully staffed, with an on-site doctor and nurse, a chef who presides over a well-stocked kitchen, and a fleet of chauffeured cars. The compound’s radios can pick up any signal, and bundles of Japanese newspapers and magazines arrive weekly. Every morning the residents awake at dawn to exercise and raise the Red Army flag. In the mornings they take classes on ideology and Korean language from a professor at Pyongyang’s social sciences institute, and in the afternoons they hold review sessions.

  After a year of this routine, Tamiya grew restless. While the North Koreans had made it clear that Tamiya and his comrades weren’t going to be allowed to continue on to Cuba, they promised to provide some military training. But when? Every time Tamiya asked, his minder told him that the Red Army Faction first needed to acquire a deeper knowledge of North Korean ideology and language. This didn’t make any sense to Tamiya, as he and his comrades intended to return to Japan once they were trained. So why learn Korean? And as for ideology, they’d already spent four years fashioning their theory of “simultaneous world revolution” as students at Japan’s most prestigious universities. What more did they need to know? They started to pose questions about juche, going so far as to criticize it, using the kind of free-ranging inquiry that is unheard of in North Korea.

  What Tamiya and his comrades failed to understand was that in North Korea, technical and ideological training were parts of a perfect whole, and that whole was Kim Il-sung’s philosophy of juche. Because the Red Army’s theory of “simultaneous world revolution” hadn’t emerged from Kim Il-sung’s mind, it was by definition ideologically impure. The fact that the group clung to its idiosyncratic ideas was a problem. Fortunately, Kim Il-sung’s philosophy provided guidance for how to deal with those who resisted it.

  A new routine developed. As before, their professor arrived every morning to lecture on the thoughts of Kim Il-sung. But when Tamiya and the others bombarded him with questions, he would ignore them, smile, and simply repeat the lecture. The next day, the process would begin all over again. It wasn’t long before the group’s defenses began to crumble, leaving them in a state of depression and self-doubt. Disoriented, they finally reached out and grabbed the sturdy rope their teacher dangled in front of them.

  In April 1972, when Kim Il-sung judged that the group had been successfully reeducated, he called an impromptu press conference with a group of Japanese journalists who were already in Pyongyang to interview him. “When they arrived [the Red Army Faction members] were anarchists who made fanatical statements about world revolution,” Kim announced. “But now their ideological state seems to have improved.” The members of the Red Army Faction, wearing black suits with Kim Il-sung badges, sat stiffly at a conference table. “Under the generous and revolutionary leadership of our comrade, the supreme leader, we have finally reached the point where we understand the relationship between the leader, the party, and the masses, who are the source of authority,” announced Tamiya.2 It was a perfect description of juche thought.

  Why did Kim take such a keen interest in the Red Army Faction? Seventeen years after the Korean War, the two Koreas were competing fiercely to prove that theirs was the superior system. As with the “return” from Japan of ninety-three thousand ethnic Koreans in the 1960s, the arrival, and conversion, of a group of elite Japanese students was a coup for the North. Kim took to referring to them as his “golden eggs,” and planned to use them to spread the gospel of juche. The only problem was that there simply weren’t enough of them. “A revolution must grow to survive” is one of juche’s principles. But how could Kim increase the number of Japanese in North Korea?

  In 1975, Takako Fukui, the girlfriend whom Red Army Faction member Takahiro Konishi was dating before the hijacking, arrived in Pyongyang. Her presence immediately altered the chemistry of the all-male
group as she became the group’s Yoko Ono, the woman who comes along and upends the band. She and Konishi took romantic walks and kept the others awake at night with their lovemaking. With Konishi alone able to satisfy his sexual appetite, the group’s frustration boiled over. The only other women in the Revolutionary Village were North Korean staff, and there had always been some tension between them and the men. Soon after Takako arrived, several of the Yodogo men forced themselves on female staffers. One of the women filed rape charges.

  Given the vexed history of Japanese-Korean relations, the image of Japanese men forcing themselves on Korean women was intolerable. Tamiya called a group meeting to announce a change in the group’s plans. “Men preparing for revolution should have wives and children,” he explained. “We all must find women. It is our revolutionary mission to do so.” It was a subtle but significant shift in tactics. The plan up to that point had been for the Red Army Faction to return to Japan and spread the gospel of Kim Il-sung. But if they got married and had children in North Korea, the members of the group would have to stay there for the foreseeable future. Because North Korean law forbids marriage between its citizens and foreigners, the wives would have to come from somewhere else.

  Ever the romantic, Tamiya proposed that he and the six remaining bachelors crisscross Europe, wooing Japanese tourists and students with the prospect of joining the revolution. His North Korean overseers rejected the plan as too complicated, and made a countersuggestion. What if North Korean spies recruited suitable Japanese women and brought them to North Korea to get married? Tamiya was doubly disappointed: not only did this undercut his self-image as a romantic revolutionary, but it also made it clear that his fate lay firmly in North Korean hands.

  * * *

  Megumi Yao grew up in the city of Kobe, in the Kansai region of central Japan, home to the majority of its ethnic Koreans. As a child, she was outraged by the discrimination she witnessed against them. It wasn’t unusual for Koreans to “pass” as Japanese in order to avoid being treated badly, but she was stunned to learn that even her best friend was an ethnic Korean who had taken a Japanese name and was pretending to be Japanese. The revelation brought the injustice closer to home and inclined Megumi to be even more sympathetic toward Koreans. She knew almost nothing about North Korea when she saw The Story of a Troop Leader, a propaganda film about a North Korean soldier during the colonial era whose girlfriend is tortured to death by Japanese soldiers when she refuses to betray him. A few days later a member of a local juche study group invited her to come to a meeting.