The Invitation-Only Zone

by Robert S. Boynton

  Through wars hot and cold, the city has linked Japan to the outside world. In 1869 its ports were opened for trade by the Japan-U.S. Treaty of Amity and Commerce. During colonial times, many of Japan’s military incursions into Asia were launched from here. In the sixties and seventies it was the organizational hub for the ninety-three thousand ethnic Koreans who left Japan for North Korea. In the 1970s Niigata’s proximity to the North made it a natural destination for Kim Jong-il’s spies. As recently as 2006, it was the destination of a regular ferry route between Japan and North Korea. Kaoru and Yukiko Hasuike were taken from a beach forty-five miles south of here; and the most famous abductee, Megumi Yokota, was snatched off a residential Niigata street, barely a hundred yards from her home.

  I make a pilgrimage to Niigata whenever I’m in Japan, and have come to think of the city as psychologically divided into two neighborhoods: “Abduction-land” and “Repatriation-ville,” both tied to the Korean Peninsula. Hop a cab at the central railway station and head west toward the ocean on Route 7. When you come to the Shinano River, you have a choice, much like the choice facing modern Japan. Cross the river and you’re in Abduction-land, the neighborhood where a thirteen-year-old girl named Megumi Yokota was abducted in 1977. But if you turn right at the river and drive down Route 113 to the port, you’re in Repatriation-ville, the staging ground where ninety-three thousand Japanese-born Koreans and their spouses set out for new lives in North Korea.

  Something between a heavy mist and a light drizzle falls as my cab navigates its way over the Shinano River and through the narrow streets of western Niigata. The driver is puzzled that I want to visit the beach on such a miserable day, but when I explain that I’m investigating the disappearance of Megumi Yokota, he tells me he had just started driving his cab in 1977 and remembers the events of that fall well. “People were searching for her everywhere, on the beaches, on the streets,” he says. We arrive at the ocean and he gestures at the desolate seascape. “See how open it is here? There’s no protection for us. Anyone could come here without being noticed.” Using a map, I walk down Megumi’s street, searching for her house. I spot a mother and daughter, huddled beneath umbrellas, and ask if they know which house is Megumi’s. The mother doesn’t, but her daughter—a vision in neon, wearing a yellow raincoat and pink boots—perks up and tells me brightly that she knows exactly where it is. We make an odd trio: a little girl leading her mother leading a journalist. A few blocks on, the girl stops and points proudly to a well-tended stucco house behind an impressive latticed gate. Soon after I arrive, the next-door neighbor emerges from his house. Once he confirms I’m not a burglar, he introduces himself as Susumu Yamashita, an interior designer born and bred in Niigata. The house I’ve been led to isn’t Megumi’s, he tells me. Rather, it was used as the backdrop for a television movie about her, which is why the little girl recognized it. For her, Megumi is a television character. “The Yokotas’ house was torn down several years ago,” he says as we walk down the street, toward a cluster of smaller, more modern homes where Megumi’s once stood. “After the Yokotas moved, everyone in the neighborhood kept the house in pristine condition, not changing a thing, so that Megumi would recognize it if she came home. Even after the house came down, they took great care to preserve the gate in front of it. But they eventually took that down, too.”

  Megumi Yokota (Getty)

  The interior designer offers to show me around Niigata, and we hop into his car to trace Megumi’s last steps on Japanese soil. We pass by her elementary school, which he also attended. “The assumption is that she left through this gate and then made a right turn down the road. The dogs followed her steps until this point,” he says, gesturing to the intersection at which it is believed she was forced into a car. Over a thousand police from all across Niigata prefecture were called in to search for Megumi in the days after her disappearance, setting up roadblocks and stopping every car. “When she vanished, nobody used the word abduction. Nobody imagined her disappearance had anything to do with North Korea. From what I heard, the family was worried that a pedophile in town had taken her. The whole city was seized by a kind of moral panic,” he says.

  At six o’clock on the evening of November 15, 1977, Megumi Yokota was walking home from badminton practice with two friends. They parted company three blocks from the Yorii Junior High School, and the friends’ last glimpse of Megumi was of her pausing at a traffic light, her badminton racquet stuffed in a white bag, a black book bag in her hand. Megumi was never late, so at seven o’clock her mother, Sakie, panicked.1 Shigeru, Megumi’s father, called the police when he got home from his job at the Bank of Japan, and the parents and officers spent a good part of the night searching the neighborhood. The following morning, the police moved a special kidnapping unit to the Yokotas’ house to trace any calls. For the next week, the police, lined up ten abreast, combed the shore, prodding the ground with metal sticks. A helicopter looked several miles to the north and south. Divers scoured the harbor, and coast guard boats crisscrossed the sea beyond.2

  The Yokotas put their lives on hold, making sure that one of them was always at home in case Megumi returned. They stopped taking family trips with Megumi’s younger twin brothers, and they replaced the light on the gate with a brighter model, which they kept on day and night. Every morning, Shigeru walked along the shore, examining the objects brought in by the tide. During the day, Sakie circled the town on her bicycle, checking train and bus stations. Whenever a car idled in front of the house, Sakie would look out to see if her daughter was in it. She watched the movies Megumi had seen during summer vacation, hoping to find a clue as to whether she might have run away. Sakie and Shigeru appeared on several morning television shows with segments during which the families of missing people publicize their plights. Most guests received at least a few calls with information, but the Yokotas’ phone sat silent. For the next few months, if Sakie spotted a girl on the street with a round face and short, straight hair, she would rush over to her to see if it was her daughter. Once, when she saw a newspaper photo of a little girl who looked like Megumi, she contacted the newspaper, which sent her enlarged versions of the original. Over the years, Sakie took note of women who looked the way she imagined Megumi would appear at various points in her life, whether as a teenager in high school or a young professional in her twenties. Shigeru scolded Sakie for her obsession, but when they both saw a portrait of a young woman in an art gallery, even he was struck by the resemblance. Perhaps Megumi had amnesia and was working as an artist’s model? They contacted the artist, but it turned out the model was a friend of hers.

  The Bank of Japan’s policy at the time of Megumi’s disappearance was to transfer executives every five years, but it allowed Shigeru to remain in Niigata and look for his daughter. Six years later, however, the bank wanted to relocate him to Tokyo. As much as they wanted to stay, the Yokotas decided that with Megumi’s brothers about to start high school, it was as good a time as any to move. The strain of having lost Megumi was often unbearable, and perhaps the family would benefit from a change of scene. The Niigata police assured them that the investigation would continue, so in 1983 they sold the house, posted a note (wrapped in plastic) on the gate with their new address, and moved to Tokyo. For the next twenty years they received little attention from the government or the media as they looked for answers to their daughter’s disappearance. In 1997, Megumi became the patron saint of the abductee movement, her portrait, with dark bangs and dimpled cheeks, on posters at every event. Megumi’s story has been told in four documentaries, an animated movie, a two-volume comic book, a television drama, and two songs, one by Peter Frampton and another by Peter, Paul and Mary’s Paul Stookey.

  North Korea claims that Megumi struggled with depression and committed suicide in 1994. Her parents believe she would never kill herself and insist she is alive. What isn’t in dispute is that while in North Korea, Megumi married a South Korean abductee and had a daughter, Kim Eun-gyong, who majored in compute
r science at Kim Il-sung University and now has a daughter of her own. There is no need for genetic testing or diplomatic negotiations in this case. Kim Eun-gyong is the spitting image of her mother.

  In August 1978, Kim Young-nam, a sixteen-year-old high school student, was on a trip with his friends on Seonyu Beach in southwest South Korea. The boys slept in tents while the girls stayed in homes in a nearby village. Kim was small for his age, and the older boys tended to pick on him. Fed up, he retreated to a remote part of the beach and hid in a small rowboat, where he fell asleep. “When I woke up, I was in the middle of the ocean and had no idea where I was. The shore was out of sight. I was so nervous that I thought I was going to die soon,” he told a newspaper reporter many years later. After drifting a few hours, Kim says, he was picked up by a North Korean ship and taken to the port of Nampo. Choosing his words carefully, he describes the event as “neither an abduction nor a voluntary defection. It was simply a chance-happening in the era of confrontation.”3 The waters surrounding South Korea must have been particularly treacherous that August, because a week after Kim’s rescue, another student had a similar experience. And a week after that, it happened again. All told, five South Korean teenagers disappeared within a few weeks of one another.

  Megumi Yokota’s daughter, Kim Eun-gyong (Associated Press)

  The South Korean National Security Service later learned that two of the students worked in a true-to-scale replica of downtown Seoul known as the Center for Revolutionizing South Korea. Buried deep beneath Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang, it is a vast underground facility, reputed to be forty feet tall, one hundred feet wide, and five miles long. Though North Korean spies possessed the language skills with which to infiltrate the South, they lacked the cultural literacy required to navigate the vastly different society the South had become. In order to blend into daily life, spies had to be familiar with the chaotic marketplace culture that dominates everyday life in the capitalist South. The center contained mock-ups of the president’s house, police headquarters, the Shilla Hotel, and the Lotte department store. South Korean television programs and radio shows blared from speakers. The center was a “Little Seoul,” replete with neon signs for cafés, hotels, nightclubs, restaurants, and boutiques where North Korean spies learned how to act like South Korean consumers. Every week, a spy received five hundred dollars’ worth of South Korean won to use for haircuts, checking into hotels, purchasing groceries from supermarkets, and buying drinks at bars. To add verisimilitude, some of the cashiers, porters, and bartenders were South Korean abductees. One student worked in a supermarket; another manned a sporting goods store; Kim Young-nam taught spies to speak with a southern accent.

  In February 1986, Kim was introduced to a young woman who was going to teach him Japanese. Barely thirteen when she was abducted, Megumi had been having emotional problems since she got to North Korea. She hadn’t yet completed junior high school in Niigata, so she was assigned a Japanese teacher to get her through high school. When she had difficulty learning Korean, she was placed in a remedial class with Yasushi and Fukie Chimura, the Japanese couple who lived in the Invitation-Only Zone. Fukie became something of a mother figure and taught Megumi how to sew.4 Before that, Megumi had lived for eighteen months with Hitomi Soga, another Japanese abductee. Megumi had been promised that if she studied hard she would eventually be released, and was devastated when she discovered this was merely a lie to placate her. Her minders hoped she would calm down if they found her a husband. Kim proposed six months after they met, and they were married in August. Megumi gave birth to a daughter on September 13, 1987, which Kim says brightened her mood. “When Eun-gyong was born, Megumi was delighted and put her heart and soul into raising her,” he said. She became a new woman, he says, cooking Japanese food and sharing a few details about her family with him, though not about her abduction.5

  Kim Young-nam, Megumi, and their daughter (Associated Press)

  In June 1994, Megumi and Kim moved into a house in the same Invitation-Only Zone where the Hasuikes and Chimuras lived. Fukie was delighted to see Megumi again but says that she was very depressed. According to Kim, Megumi was in and out of a mental hospital for several years, and the regime reports she committed suicide during one of her stays. Sakie and Shigeru believe their daughter is still alive. “I will never lose hope and believe there will be a day when we are reunited with Megumi. I will wait for that day,” says Sakie.

  * * *

  The northwest coast of Japan is a place of violent beauty. Volcanic cliffs plunge into craggy beaches punctuated by jetties and peninsulas where flows of molten lava are cooled by the sea. As I wander up and down the coast, visiting the sites where people were abducted, I am struck by the contrast between the coast’s physical beauty and the pain suffered by the families of the missing. Does anyone ever truly recover from the violence of sudden loss? For many, such as Sakie and Shigeru Yokota, time stopped the day their loved ones disappeared.

  On May 11, 1963, Tomoe Terakoshi’s thirteen-year-old son, Takeshi, disappeared while on a fishing trip with his two uncles.6 Their small boat was last seen at four in the afternoon, as they set out nets to catch rockfish a quarter mile off the coast of Shikamachi, a fishing village one hundred forty miles southwest of Niigata. The plan was to fish all afternoon and evening, and return that night. The next morning, the boat was found floating four miles offshore. Its motor was intact, but the left side of the bow was damaged, marked with traces of green paint. The fishing net and Takeshi’s school uniform washed up nearby. The town’s fishermen suspended work and searched the sea and coastline, and the police checked every boat in the harbor for traces of a collision. With no clues, the search was suspended after a week. The Terakoshi family held a funeral, using photos of the missing in lieu of their remains. Takeshi’s father couldn’t bear to continue fishing in the same sea that had swallowed up his son and two brothers, and found work in a quarry. But even with the funeral, Tomoe couldn’t move on. Every morning, she’d burn incense where Takeshi’s uniform was found and make an offering of flowers and bean buns, Takeshi’s favorite. She visited a fortune-teller who told her that Takeshi was dead, “wrapped in a fishing net, which is why his body can’t be found.” Years passed, and the Terakoshis moved to nearby Kanazawa, where there were fewer memories of Takeshi. Then, in January 1987, the family received a letter:

  Sister, I cannot express myself well trying to write how lonely I have been for twenty-five years, and how much I want to see my parents. Shoji, Takeshi and I suddenly wound up living in North Korea in May 1963. Please don’t worry, since I married here, have two children and am happy with my family.

  The letter was signed Kim Chul-ho, the Korean name the uncle had taken, and the address was in a northern province in North Korea. Could Takeshi be alive? A few weeks later, a letter from Takeshi to his mother arrived, written mostly in Korean and sprinkled with bits of Japanese. “Mother, I hope you can use this to confirm it’s me. There was a bus stop at the cooperative office, I got off the bus and climbed a hill. In front of a house, there was Grandma’s rice field. There were four persimmon trees, two of them were sweet persimmons, and there was a loquat tree,” he wrote. The description matched the area around Tomoe’s mother’s house, where Takeshi had played as a child. He was alive! She’d finally found her son! But what should she do now?

  She brought the letter to the local police, who were skeptical about her story and told her that North Korea wasn’t within their jurisdiction. She visited the Red Cross, hoping that an international aid organization might help her. “Ma’am, what do you think the Red Cross does?” a clerk asked her. “We help those who are in danger. But this letter says your son is alive and happy.” She met with members of the local government and went to Tokyo to meet with her national representatives. But every time she mentioned North Korea, their facial expressions changed and a hardness set in. No one was willing to get involved—until she met a Socialist politician who was also a member of the Japan–North Ko
rea Friendship Association. The Socialists then had friendly relations with the North, and he told Tomoe he would help her arrange a trip to see her son.

  That August, Tomoe and her husband spent three days in Pyongyang touring the sites. They visited the Juche Tower, the Arch of Triumph (thirty-three feet taller than the one in Paris), and the USS Pueblo, and they took an overnight trip to the DMZ. “By the end of the third day, I thought I had been fooled and Takeshi was dead after all. I feared they were going to bring in someone who looked like him. I was too sad even to cry,” she tells me. The next morning, her interpreter arrived at her hotel, brought her downstairs, and asked if she wanted to see her son. “My legs froze. They opened the door and I saw a crowd of party officials. “I didn’t recognize anyone and thought, ‘Oh, this is a big lie!’” Finally, Takeshi emerged from the crowd. He hugged his father but not his mother. “I cried and cried, but he didn’t,” she says. “He had been instructed not to show too many emotions.”

  Takeshi worked in a steel mill in a remote industrial area three hours north of Pyongyang, near the Chinese border. His wife was a singer and a member of the corps of beautiful young women charged with entertaining Kim Il-sung. They’d met when Takeshi was in his twenties, having spent his formative years in the North, successfully passing as a full-fledged North Korean citizen. Ethnic purity is taken very seriously in North Korea, so Takeshi’s Japanese heritage would have diminished his social standing and made him a much less desirable mate. He hid his past from his wife and in-laws, but in the back of his mind he feared that one day the truth would come out. In preparation for Tomoe’s visit, the regime shipped Takeshi’s whole family to Pyongyang for a month so that they could eat well and acquire the veneer of urban sophistication. The day before Tomoe arrived, Takeshi finally confessed to them that his mother, and therefore he, was from Japan. With the realization that she had unwittingly married an enemy foreigner, a match that would surely diminish her family’s status, Takeshi’s wife fainted.