The Invitation-Only Zone

by Robert S. Boynton

  It took four years for Kojima to break with the party. He opened a kimono shop in northern Niigata, avoided his political friends, and tried to forget about the repatriation project. Sato had a more visceral reaction. A month after the night that Kojima showed him the video footage of North Korea, he came down with a psychosomatic asthmatic illness that made breathing difficult, sometimes impossible. He’d awake in the middle of the night gasping for air. At first he feared his tuberculosis was back, but the doctors found no evidence of that.

  In 1965, Sato and his family moved to Tokyo, where he found a job with the Korea Research Institute, a pro-North Korea think tank that published policy papers about the peninsula. Working in a large city gave him access to a wider range of people and information than before, and he made the most of it, devouring anything having to do with North Korea. With his energy, Sato was soon running the institute. What’s more, his neurotic illness disappeared, and he was able to breathe freely. Though disillusioned with North Korea, he still believed in the ideals of equality and justice he associated with the global Communist movement, and he refocused the institute to lobby for the rights of ethnic Koreans in Japan.

  Sato visited China in 1975, during the final days of the Cultural Revolution, when Mao’s cult of personality thrived and all who opposed him were terrorized. Sato was startled to see evidence of authoritarian tendencies similar to North Korea’s. Mao, like Stalin and Kim Il-sung, dominated every aspect of society. Here, finally, was proof that the problems with the North Korean experiment weren’t an aberration, but part of the DNA of communism itself. Sato’s loss of faith was comparable to the one he had experienced at the end of the war. “I had memorized the Marxist discourse so well that I could pull it out and apply it to any situation. But now I had to refute all the ideas I had held as true, breaking down every theory. And then I had to build up my own sensibility from scratch, piece by piece. For the next three years I was barely able to write a sentence,” he says. Sato’s evolving ideology no longer fit with the Korea Research Institute’s pro-North Korea policies, and in 1984 he broke with it and founded the Modern Korea Institute, starting a journal that became an important outlet for anti-North Korea essays and research. “I helped send the Korean residents in Japan to hell,” he wrote in a remorseful 1995 essay, “instead of to the paradise they were promised.”11

  10

  NEIGHBORS IN THE INVITATION-ONLY ZONE

  For all the regime’s security arrangements, information circulated within the Invitation-Only Zone via one of humankind’s most durable cultural practices: gossip. Soon after Kaoru and Yukiko moved into their first house, the woman who looked after them stopped by to introduce herself. The Hasuikes had not yet assumed their new identities and simply told her where they were from. “Ah, so you’re Japanese!” the woman exclaimed, after hearing their accented Korean. “Another Japanese couple arrived a while ago. You should meet them!”

  Engaged to be married in the fall of 1978, Yasushi Chimura and Fukie Hamamoto, both twenty-two, lived with their parents in Obama, a small coastal town three hundred miles west of Tokyo. Fukie sold cosmetics, and Yasushi worked in construction, and when they wanted to be alone, they drove Yasushi’s car up a steep, twisty single-lane road to a cliffside park where couples came to gaze out at the ocean and kiss. July 7 was a moonless night, and Yasushi and Fukie were sitting on a bench, picking out the familiar lights from the blackness that had enveloped the town, when four men jumped out from behind nearby bushes. After restraining the couple and placing them in separate bags, the men slung them over their shoulders and carried them several hundred feet down the hill to a waiting dinghy. As the men crossed the road from the bluff to the beach, Yasushi peered through the bag’s mesh material and caught a glimpse of a passing car’s taillights.

  Young Yasushi and Fukie Chimura (Kyodo)

  Like the Hasuikes, the Chimuras were separated before they arrived, each assured that the other had been left behind in Japan. Each morning when she awoke, Fukie would at first think she had only dreamed about the abduction. She yearned for Yasushi, whom she had expected to marry that fall. As weeks turned into months, and the reality of her situation sank in, her mood shifted from absolute despair to a kind of grim determination. She had to survive her ordeal. “I can live here, if I have to. But please, God, don’t let me die here,” she thought to herself.1

  Fukie’s minder repeatedly inquired whether she had any interest in getting married, which she interpreted as a tease about being of a “marriageable age.” Gradually she realized he was serious, and feared she’d be forced into an arranged marriage, perhaps with a North Korean spy. “I knew I didn’t want to marry anyone from North Korea, so I just replied as if it were a big joke. I’d say ‘Are you kidding me? I couldn’t do anything like that.’” So she had good reason to be apprehensive on the day she was presented with a pretty new dress and ushered into a suite of rooms that had been decorated for a formal occasion. An arranged marriage was indeed on the agenda, but the groom was familiar to her. After eighteen months of study and despair, Yasushi and Fukie wed the same day they were reunited.

  Given that everyone living in the Invitation-Only Zone had secrets to hide, neighbors tended to keep their distance. It turned out that Kaoru and Yasushi had actually met during their first few months in captivity, but each had avoided discussing his circumstances for fear that the other was a spy planted to test his loyalty. In the Invitation-Only Zone, the two couples lived a few houses from each other. In order to talk privately, Kaoru and Yasushi developed a schedule for secret get-togethers, usually meeting at a designated spot in the surrounding woods. At the end of each meeting, they’d set a time, date, and place for the next one. They grew close, almost like brothers, and looked forward to talking, if only for the opportunity to compare notes and commiserate. Yasushi, a high school dropout, was impressed by Kaoru’s intelligence and often turned to him for advice. After the birth of their children—the Hasuikes had a son and a daughter; the Chimuras, two sons and a daughter—the families would get together regularly for birthdays and holidays. There were times when, amid the pleasant excitement of friends and food, Kaoru would look out over the two families and momentarily forget where he was.

  * * *

  By paying the abductees for their work, as it would any other citizen, the regime perpetuated the myth that they were in North Korea under normal circumstances. Although heavily regulated, certain markets were allowed in the North, even though the regime occasionally issued currency reforms and took other measures to curtail the freedom that came from exercising economic power. Paying the abductees in North Korean won would have been risky because it would have given them too much freedom to shop wherever they liked. So, initially, abductees were paid in a kind of government-issued scrip that could be used at only one store, the better to keep track of them.

  During the later part of their captivity, the abductees were paid in American dollars. The official dollar-won exchange rate was absurdly low, fixed at the symbolically significant ratio of 2.16 North Korean won per U.S. dollar. (February 16 was Kim Jong-il’s birthday.) One day, one of the chauffeurs offered to change Kaoru’s dollars into won on the black market. He received a better rate and could therefore frequent inexpensive local merchants rather than only the designated foreign currency stores, where prices were several times higher. In the upside-down world Kaoru and the others inhabited, Japanese abductees posing as North Korean citizens were now able to exchange American dollars for North Korean won in order to purchase European toiletries.

  Traveling outside the Invitation-Only Zone was permitted but was regulated by procedure. Fukie tried to leave the zone as often as possible. It was a change of scenery, a chance to buy some of the items she, a professional cosmetologist, missed from Japan. She usually shopped at the duty-free shop in downtown Pyongyang, using her government per diem to buy sweaters, cotton underwear, and a particular brand of French shampoo she was fond of. For her minder, however, every foray o
utside the zone was a potential security breach. A routine developed. Fukie’s minder would pick her up at her home in an unmarked sedan and drive forty-five minutes to downtown Pyongyang. As their car approached the duty-free store, he would scan the license plates of the cars parked out front. North Korean license plates are color-coded—the license plates of foreign diplomats are blue, military plates are black, and the few people wealthy enough to own private cars have orange plates—so that the provenance of every vehicle can be identified from a distance. If he spotted a foreigner’s plate, Fukie’s minder would circle the block until the suspicious car left.

  Oddly, once inside the shop, Fukie’s minder didn’t pay much attention to the people she encountered there. In fact, she suspects there were times when he intentionally arranged for her to come into contact with foreigners, just to see how she behaved. In addition to Pyongyang’s few tourists and diplomatic staffers, Fukie met a virtual United Nations of abductees—from Italy, Thailand, Romania, and Lebanon. Always cautious, she would glance at her minder before initiating contact. “As long as I didn’t talk to any Japanese people, I don’t think he cared whom I met. After all, what could any of us do?” she says. Conversations were always circumspect, and nobody said a word about how they’d come to be living in North Korea. The abductees would swap items among themselves, trading shampoo for cosmetics and other goods, before getting back into their respective cars and returning to their own Invitation-Only Zones.

  * * *

  Having children tied Kaoru and Yukiko more firmly to life in North Korea. The couple gave their son and daughter secret Japanese names, Shigeyo and Katsuya, when they were born in 1981 and 1985. Kaoru had lost interest in his own life, but with children he now felt a sense of hope for the future. “I lost my family bonds due to the abduction, but was now able to create new bonds,” he says. “To ensure that our kids could eat, have their own families, and live a life worth living after we died—that became the goal of my life,” he explains. “Dreaming about their future made our lives more bearable.” North Korea was his children’s home in a way that it had never been his, and he had to do whatever he could to help them survive.2

  Kim Jong-il’s first public appearance, in October 1980, gave Kaoru cause for hope. The aging Kim Il-sung had been making arrangements for his son to succeed him since the late 1960s, and while newspapers had mentioned Kim Jong-il before (as when he joined the Politburo in 1974), his image had never appeared in public. “He represented a brand-new hope for us. A strong, young man who would lead the country into a new era,” Kaoru recalls. “There was a great deal of excitement throughout the country, and I shared it.” In addition to introducing Kim Il-sung’s successor, the Sixth Congress of the Workers’ Party kicked off a new seven-year economic plan, at the end of which every citizen was promised a color television, new clothes, and improved housing. “We were promised a new era with a very specific description of what that would entail,” Kaoru says.

  If he and Yukiko were confined to a bubble, their children lived in a bubble within the bubble. Every day, a minder would ferry the Hasuikes’ son and daughter back and forth to daycare facilities outside the Invitation-Only Zone. Like kids growing up anywhere, the children perceived their lives as normal. For native North Koreans, secrets and omnipresent surveillance were as common as air. To them, the Invitation-Only Zone was not a prison, but rather the North Korean version of a gated community.

  The Hasuike and Chimura children led happy, even privileged lives. Both Kaoru and Yasushi’s daughters danced in the mass games, the synchronized multimedia extravaganza performed in Kim Il-sung Stadium each fall. All was well until their eighth birthdays. Receiving an education so close to the Invitation-Only Zone posed a problem. Now that they were entering the kinds of friendships in which children compared the details of their family lives, the regime feared that information about the Invitation-Only Zones would spread, along with curiosity about these special communities. The coast of North Korea is peppered with dozens of islands, many of which are too small for proper schools. For the children of those who inhabit the islands, the state set up a system of public boarding schools. So it was decided that the abductees’ children would attend a boarding school two hundred miles north of Pyongyang, where whatever they had gleaned about the zone would be less meaningful. If none of the students knew precisely where, or with whom, their fellow students lived, any information they learned about them was useless. The abductees’ children would visit home for three months, during winter and summer holidays. There were no parents’ day visits or phone calls, and care packages took a month to arrive, if they were delivered at all.

  Like their parents, the children were passing as North Korean. Unlike their parents, however, they believed they were North Korean. As they got older, they began to question parts of their parents’ cover story. Doing so sometimes led to tension. Although they spoke only Korean in public, Fukie and Yasushi occasionally lapsed into Japanese at home. Hearing the language he had learned to associate with colonial oppressors, their eight-year-old son turned on his mother. “You’re Japanese!” he shouted. Fukie couldn’t help herself. “Well, if I’m Japanese, then you’re Japanese, too!” she replied. He was taken aback by her irrefutable logic. The thought that he might not be pure North Korean upset him. “But I’m different … I’m not like that,” he stammered. “Maybe Dad is Korean.”

  * * *

  Perhaps the oddest aspect of the abduction project is how little the regime benefited from it. At first Kaoru taught Japanese language and customs to spies, but this came to an end in 1987, when a captured North Korean spy confessed to having been trained by a female Japanese abductee. From then on, their main job was to translate articles from Japanese into Korean, a task that could have been performed by any one of the millions of North Koreans who had learned Japanese during the colonial era. At the start of every week, the Hasuikes and Chimuras would receive a huge stack of Japanese magazines and newspapers—Asahi, Akahata, Yomiuri, Mainichi, Sankei—with large sections blacked out by the censor and specific articles circled for translation. (The elite members of North Korean society were allowed limited access to the foreign press through a government publication that aggregated approved international news for circulation.) Kaoru and Yasushi would translate, and Yukiko and Fukie would type the finished product on enormous manual typewriters. “I was able to hear more about the outside world than average North Koreans. I read Japanese and South Korean magazines, and there was a period when I could listen to NHK and the Voice of America broadcasts on a shortwave radio. I had a general grasp of the major global developments, although I was always one beat behind,” says Kaoru.3 And like all North Koreans, the abductees learned to read between the lines. In the run-up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the North did everything it could to detract from its rival’s success. As with Japan in the 1964 Olympics, the 1988 Olympics symbolized the South’s arrival as a democratic world power. In a desperate attempt to upstage the South, the North blew up a Korean airliner the year before, killing everyone on board. Kaoru could tell from the vehemence and character of the denial that the North was guilty.

  The newspapers were heavily redacted, but censors inevitably missed things; because they weren’t aware of the top-secret abduction project, articles about the abductions weren’t always blacked out. One morning in 1997, Fukie came upon an article in Asahi about a new association created by the families of alleged abductees. At the top of the page was an old photograph of her. It wasn’t the most flattering picture, but it meant that someone in Japan knew what had happened to them. She ran home to show Yasushi. She wanted to cut the article out and keep it, but he insisted she return it along with the other papers, so as not to arouse suspicion. All their friend Kaoru could think when he saw the photos was how much older his father looked. “I felt like I was suffocating,” he says. “I knew that my disappearance was the reason my father had aged so much.”4

  Like consumers of news anywhere, the abductees follo
wed each world event with one eye on its implications for their lives. The assassination of South Korean president Park Chung-hee (by the head of the South’s own intelligence agency) in October 1979 was immediately trumpeted over North Korean radio. The South was on the verge of collapse! Reunification was imminent! Kaoru wondered what reunification would mean for him and the other abductees. Would they be freed? However, when nothing happened, the official media went silent on the subject.

  The fall of the Soviet Union was the most difficult story to comprehend. Kaoru deduced that the North Korean regime was feeling threatened from the fact that the censors were blacking out more material than ever. In 1985 he had interpreted Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika as portending socialism’s rebirth. He was therefore shocked four years later when the Communist leaders of East Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary were ousted. And not only were North Korea’s friends falling from power, but those who survived, such as Russia and China, were normalizing relations with South Korea. Reading between the lines, Kaoru felt it was clear that nothing was going to change and that, in the future, the North was going to be more isolated than ever.

  11

  STOLEN CHILDHOODS: MEGUMI AND TAKESHI

  The two-hour bullet train from Tokyo to Niigata traverses a seemingly endless patchwork of rice fields. Intersected by two rivers, and hard by the Sea of Japan, Niigata is known as the “city of water,” receiving more than one hundred fifty days of rain a year, the source of its prized sweet rice and sake. There is another sense in which it owes its existence to its climate. One of five cities the United States considered for the 1945 atomic bombing, Niigata was judged too cloudy for an accurate shot, so Nagasaki was obliterated instead.