The Invitation-Only Zone

by Robert S. Boynton

  * * *

  Tsutomu Watanabe’s heart sank as Koizumi and the others stepped up to the lectern. The officials looked nervous, their faces pale. Abe, the Cabinet undersecretary, spoke first. He described the Pyongyang Declaration as an important step toward normalization and quickly moved on to the only subject anyone wanted to hear about. As he began reading the names of the abductees, noting who was alive and who was dead, Watanabe was overcome with grief. When big news is announced at press conferences, reporters immediately run to their phones, but he and his fellow reporters just stood in shocked silence. “The Japanese people are going to be very angry,” thought Watanabe. “Koizumi, the gambler, has failed after all.”

  “Did you confirm that the eight abductees were dead?” asked the first reporter. Abe replied that the information came from North Korea’s investigation. “Well, why did you not confirm it?” asked Watanabe. He was surprised by how emotional he was. After a few more questions, the reporters finally ran to the pressroom to phone in their stories. “Five people alive, eight people dead,” Watanabe told his editor. The editor didn’t believe him. “Really? Eight people dead!?” he responded, incredulous.

  The next day, every newspaper in Japan ran similar headlines: “Eight Dead, Five Alive.” News of the Pyongyang Declaration was relegated to the second line, if it was mentioned all. The missing abductees, especially Megumi Yokota, were all anyone talked about.

  19

  RETURNING HOME: FROM NORTH KOREA TO JAPAN

  In the summer of 2000, Kaoru Hasuike received a visit from a high party official. With the attention the abductions had been receiving in Japan, such visits were rare, and seldom brought good news. Were they being moved to a new Invitation-Only Zone or, worse, away from Pyongyang altogether? No, the official had a question: Would he and Yukiko be willing to appear at a press conference and tell the world they were living happily in North Korea, of their own free will? Kaoru and Yukiko were confused. Was this a trick to test their loyalty to the regime? After twenty years of hiding their identities, trying to fit in as normal North Koreans, were they now really being asked to step out from the shadows?

  Kaoru could barely breathe, his heart beating so fast he feared it would burst from his chest. He tried masking his panic with the calm, deadpan façade he’d cultivated over the years. “If this is an order, we will do it,” he replied, choosing his words carefully.1 It was essential that he come across as dutiful above all, and he certainly couldn’t show any enthusiasm. But all he could think about was the possibility of seeing his family again. Kaoru had long ago given up the hope of returning to Japan, resigning himself to life in the North with his wife and children. Of course, it wasn’t the life he’d planned, but it was a life nonetheless, and after twenty years he’d gotten used to it. It was painful to again feel the longing for home and family, but he couldn’t pass up this opportunity.

  What Kaoru didn’t know was that this was the regime’s first step in the long process of normalizing diplomatic relations with Japan. Still reeling from the damage done by the famine, North Korea was desperate for the aid that was once provided by the Soviet Union. Japan seemed a promising source, but the abduction issue was a stumbling block. In negotiations, no matter how many times the regime denied the existence of the abductees, the Japanese would bring them up again. Kaoru didn’t learn anything more until a year and a half later, when he read an article in the regime’s official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, that reported a search for “missing people” from Japan, a woman named Keiko Arimoto among them. Kaoru didn’t recognize her name, but he assumed that she, too, had been abducted. Although the regime still denied the abductions, the article suggested to Kaoru that its position was changing.

  In April 2001, Kaoru received another visit from the official, who told him that the regime had concocted a cover story to explain his presence in the North. They wanted him to say that he had fallen in love with the idea of juche philosophy while a student at Chuo University and fled to the North with his girlfriend to live in the socialist paradise. Kaoru countered that he’d been such an apolitical student that nobody would believe the story. And how would he and Yukiko even have managed to get to North Korea in 1978? Undeterred, the official came up with another story: On the July evening in 1978 when he and Yukiko were strolling on Kashiwazaki’s main beach, Kaoru jumped into a motorboat bobbing offshore and zipped around for a few hours. The boat ran out of fuel and drifted all night, until a North Korean spy boat rescued them. Once in North Korea, the couple was grateful to be free of Japan’s “brutal capitalism.” Now married with children, they lived happily in Pyongyang. Even with minor adjustments, Kaoru said he would never be able to tell the story convincingly. “We don’t need to convince them,” the official replied angrily. “All you have to do is stick to the story. In the end, Japan will have to accept it.” Resigned, Kaoru rehearsed the ludicrous tale until he almost believed it.

  * * *

  In June 2002, Kaoru Hasuike’s family moved from the Invitation-Only Zone into a modern thirty-story high-rise on Tongil (“Unification”) Street, a massive boulevard in one of Pyongyang’s most exclusive neighborhoods, full of shops and restaurants. With three bedrooms, a living room, dining room, kitchen, color television, refrigerator, fish tank, and telephone, it was the kind of dwelling reserved for the North Korean elite. The apartment afforded a clear view of downtown Pyongyang, across the Taedong River. The relocation wasn’t an act of kindness or generosity on the part of the regime as much as a shrewd calculation that Kaoru and Yukiko needed some practice living freely in order to convince their families they were thriving. The plan was for the abductees’ relatives to come to North Korea for the reunion so they could see the splendor in which they were living. Like most of the staged experiences visitors to North Korea are allowed to have, the reality was less appealing. The Hasuikes’ fourth-floor apartment was prized because there often wasn’t enough electricity to power the elevators. The stairs leading to the apartment were dirty and dimly lit, even during the day. Most of the building’s windows were broken and had been patched with sheets of plastic. The streets behind the grand boulevard were unpaved and lacked proper drainage, leaving enormous puddles when it rained. Kaoru knew his parents would be dismayed by his family’s circumstances, which even the most impoverished Japanese wouldn’t put up with. “They shouldn’t judge it by Japanese standards,” the official replied. “Tell them that this is a very high-class apartment in our country.”

  The four months he and his family lived in the apartment was the only period during Kaoru’s twenty-four years in the North when they were not under surveillance. With no friends or relatives, Kaoru and Yukiko wandered through Pyongyang, the capital city of two million people, for hours. It was thrilling to be free from the watchful eyes of minders, although Kaoru noted how dingy even the nicest neighborhoods were. Hidden behind rows of imposing high-rise apartments lay decrepit three-story buildings built in the fifties and sixties, with cracked façades covered in black soot from coal and wood stoves. Even in central Pyongyang, vacant lots were planted with corn, a reminder of the famine. The prices of goods and services were higher than Kaoru was used to, with basics such as rice and public transportation more than he could afford. With the children home for summer vacation, he took them to a nearby restaurant for Naengmyeon, the local specialty of cold noodles and beef broth. The meal cost 480 won for the four of them, a quarter of Kaoru’s monthly wage. Everywhere he turned, Kaoru was struck by a fact he hadn’t had to deal with in decades: freedom is expensive.

  At the end of September, Kaoru and his fellow abductee Yasushi Chimura were summoned to a meeting with their minder. They knew that Kim Jong-il had confessed to Koizumi about the abductions (which made Kaoru’s implausible cover story unnecessary) and that the two countries had embarked on the path to normalization. While the original plan was for the abductees’ families to visit them in the North, the diplomat Hitoshi Tanaka had insisted the abductees go to Japan instead. Kaoru a
nd Yasushi were informed that they and their wives were to visit Japan for ten days, two weeks at the most, and return to the North, where their Japanese families could visit them at a later date. Their children would remain in the North. Because no loyal North Korean citizen is supposed to want to leave his beloved country, Kaoru and Yasushi struggled to mask their reactions. They feared the whole scheme was an elaborate loyalty test, and responded accordingly. “Do we have to go? Can we come back quickly?” they asked. Finally, grudgingly, Kaoru told the minders that he and Yasushi would agree to visit Japan, as much as it pained them to do so, and then return “home” to the North.

  After the meeting, Kaoru and Yasushi went over what had transpired, wondering what else they should have said or asked. It was the first time in years they had been consulted about their future, and it made them anxious. “We didn’t know what our lives would be like somewhere else. All we knew is North Korea,” Yasushi tells me. “We would go to Japan for our country, and then come back and see our children again. That is all we knew.”2 In particular, Kaoru worried about the effect their visit to Japan might have on his children. If the fact that they were Japanese was known in the North, his children’s reputation would suffer. And how would they feel learning that they had grandparents and relatives in Japan? Or that everything their parents had told them was false?

  Kaoru had no choice but to lie to his children one more time. He explained that he and their mother were taking an extended educational tour through the North’s important historical sites and would be gone for two weeks. The children returned to school on the day before their parents left for Japan. Whereas Kaoru usually saw them off with a few parting words, this time he found himself delivering a lecture urging them to work hard and take care of themselves—hardly the words of a parent leaving for a short trip. The children, twenty-one and seventeen, waved back warily, aware that something wasn’t quite right.

  20

  AN EXTENDED VISIT

  The government-chartered Boeing 767 landed at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport at 2:20 p.m. on a clear October day, one month after Koizumi’s trip to Pyongyang. Kaoru Hasuike and Yasushi Chimura wore dark suits, while their wives wore beige skirts with matching jackets. Hitomi Soga, in a demure blue jacket and skirt, was alone, her husband, Charles Jenkins, having stayed in North Korea, afraid he’d be arrested for desertion if he set foot in Japan. Each of the abductees wore two pins: a small image of Kim Il-sung, and a small blue flag, the symbol of Japan’s abductee rescue movement. The two symbols provided a visual snapshot of their predicament: from one perspective they were loyal North Korean citizens visiting their families in Japan; from the other, they were Japanese abductees escaping from their North Korean kidnappers.

  The looks on their faces alternated between relief and terror: relief at seeing their relatives again and terror that the army of waiting reporters would ask questions that might imperil their children in the North. They had been told by their minders that their every move would be monitored from Pyongyang, and that two members of the North Korean Red Cross had been assigned to keep track of them in Japan. They were instructed to check in at the end of every day, and given special cell phones with which to call the North. The surveillance aside, at the bottom of the steps the abductees fell, sobbing, into the arms of their relatives awaiting them on the tarmac.

  Abductees descending from plane: Hitomi Soga (top left); Yukiko and Kaoru Hasuike (center); special adviser on the abduction issue, Kyoko Nakayama, and Fukie and Yasushi Chimura (bottom) (Associated Press)

  The major television stations ran specials and live coverage all day, devoting thirty hours to the homecoming.1 The story became a national obsession, dominating newspapers and magazines. A poll found that 80 percent of the Japanese believed they were on the brink of war with the North. The sudden return of the abductees left the public feeling simultaneously aghast at North Korea’s treachery and patronized by the Japanese government’s incompetence. In the following weeks, every major political party included the abduction issue in its official election agenda.

  The fanfare around the five abductees’ homecoming was in stark contrast to the subdued welcome Takeshi Terakoshi had received two weeks earlier when he visited Japan for the first time in thirty-nine years. Since disappearing at sea with his uncles when he was thirteen, Takeshi had made a life for himself in the North and rejected the abductee label. He’d taken the name Kim Yeong-heo, and was visiting Japan in his capacity as a North Korean union official. The only extraordinary aspect of the visit was its timing, with Takeshi returning to North Korea only days before the other abductees arrived in Japan. By sending two groups of Japanese-born North Koreans to visit their original home, the North sent a message. North Korea and Japan were now “true neighbors,” the phrase Kim Jong-il had used with Koizumi in Pyongyang, and these visits exemplified the new relationship.

  Kaoru Hasuike, before and after (Kyodo)

  Everyone attributed Kaoru’s gaunt appearance to malnutrition, but the truth was he’d been too tense to eat in the weeks leading up to the trip. Despite the immense joy he felt at reuniting with his family, he was racked by anxiety. “I’ve just got to get through these ten days, and then I’ll be back with my kids,” he thought to himself.2 With his children serving as de facto hostages, he had to avoid saying anything that might upset the North Korean regime. The first challenge came not from the media, but from his brother, Toru, who had become a leader of the Abductee Family Group and took a particularly hard line against the North. Toru hadn’t been particularly political and knew nothing about North Korea before meeting the communist-turned–North Korea expert Katsumi Sato. Over the years, Sato had become an eloquent critic of the North, using his perch as director of the Modern Korea Institute to attack the pro-North Korean sentiments he had himself once held.

  Toru was spellbound by Sato, who became his mentor at a time when the Japanese establishment either ignored Toru and the other abductee activists or dismissed them as delusional. “He spoke with so much authority, as if he had just returned from North Korea. He would hold forth for hours, on every aspect of the country, providing more and more information, answering any questions we had. We drank it in,” he tells me.3 Toru had been granted a leave of absence from his job as a nuclear engineer at Tokyo Electric Power Company to dedicate his time to rescuing his brother and the other abductees. Now that this seemingly impossible goal had been attained, he was intoxicated by the triumph. The first thing he wanted to do was hold a press conference at a downtown Tokyo hotel for the five abductees to denounce the North Korean regime.

  Kaoru, who had become the informal leader of the group of visiting abductees, at first refused. Making public statements of the sort his brother envisioned would expose them and their families to risks Toru couldn’t conceive of. Had they so much as thanked the “Great Leader” or spouted the requisite patriotic pabulum, it would horrify the millions of Japanese who had rallied to the cause in the month since Koizumi met with Kim Jong-il. On the other hand, if they neglected to acknowledge Kim Jong-il or dared criticize the regime, they might never see their children again. “You have to say something, even if it is only a few words. If you don’t, the media will never leave you alone,” Toru begged his brother. The five finally agreed to address the press but looked terrified as they stared at the microphones in front of them. Kaoru spoke first, choosing his words carefully. “I apologize for the inconvenience I have caused my family,” he said. “I apologize for any grief I’ve brought to my loved ones,” followed Yasushi Chimura. When it was her turn to speak, Hitomi Soga could barely get a word out. “I look forward to, to…” she whispered, before trailing off.

  A rift emerged between the families of those who had returned and the families of those whom the North said had died. It had started the day Koizumi returned from Pyongyang, when all the families were ushered into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and informed, one by one, whether their son or daughter was either alive or dead. The encounters were curt and
unemotional, and the families were furious that the Japanese government was uncritically conveying information from the North Koreans. How could anyone believe a country that had lied about the abductions for twenty-five years? Katsumi Sato, in his capacity as head of the abduction support group, drew a line in the sand: until the North proved that the other abductees were dead, he would proceed on the assumption that they were alive. “The information about the fate of the abductees is utterly ungrounded,” he said, accusing Koizumi and Tanaka of bungling the operation and imperiling the unaccounted-for abductees’ lives. “Because the Japanese government has informed their families that those eight are dead, there has emerged the danger that they actually will be disposed of.”

  After the news conference, the families of the missing begged Kaoru and the others for information about their sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters. The brother of the woman who had taught Japanese to the terrorist Kim Hyon-hui asked about his sister. “They were looking down, and wouldn’t make eye contact. I think they were forced to say that they knew nothing about other abducted people,” he said. “I felt like I was listening to a tape recorder.” The only abductee the five were willing to discuss was Megumi Yokota, whom they had met. However, they wouldn’t say much other than that she was a quiet girl who had suffered from depression. They were careful neither to confirm nor to deny the North’s claim that she’d hanged herself in 1993 while a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Many found the similarities in their accounts odd. “They all tell us that my daughter was so quiet, but she was really a very active girl, always loud, and almost never got sick,” said Sakie Yokota. When asked whether he thought it likely that Keiko Arimoto could have been accidentally asphyxiated by a malfunctioning coal heater, as the North alleged, Kaoru launched into a detailed explanation of heating problems in the North. “It sounded like he was justifying the information provided by North Korea,” said Toru.4 Some of the most right-wing members of the activist group started wondering if Kaoru was a North Korean “sleeper” spy.