The Invitation-Only Zone

by Robert S. Boynton

  North Korea had cultivated ties with “nonaligned” developing nations since the mid-1950s, offering juche as a model to emulate. For many postcolonial countries, the idea of self-reliance, and North Korea’s economic record, held a powerful allure. The regime funded a global network of study groups and research institutes, with a large concentration in Japan, which even today hosts the International Institute of the Juche Idea. By 1977 every prefecture in Japan had at least one juche study group. When Megumi moved to Osaka to study nursing, she joined a group filled with students, office workers, and teachers. They viewed North Korea as a socialist “Paradise on Earth,” where everyone was treated equally and the state provided for all its peoples’ needs—the mirror opposite of the capitalist Japanese society. The members of the group seemed so pure and kindhearted that she felt immediately accepted.

  When Megumi told the group’s leader she wanted to study juche in Korean, he offered to arrange for her to go to North Korea and asked only that she keep the trip secret. She told her parents she was taking a trip to Europe. The day before she left, the group’s leader presented her with half a dozen postcards, prestamped and addressed to her parents, and asked her to fill them with the kinds of banalities one often finds on postcards (“The weather here is beautiful”). He told her they would be mailed from European countries over the next few months so that her parents wouldn’t worry about her.

  Megumi Yao arrived in Pyongyang in March 1977 and spent the first six weeks studying Korean. In April a North Korean official stopped by her dorm to check on her progress. Did she like Pyongyang? Was she lonely? If so, would she be interested in making friends or even meeting a man? “After all, no one can make a revolution by oneself,” he reminded her cheerfully. She declined his initial offer, but he was persistent, calling on her every few weeks. In fact, he said he had a particular young man in mind. It soon became clear it was more than a suggestion, and she reluctantly agreed to meet him.

  Yasuhiro Shibata, the youngest member of the Red Army Faction, only sixteen at the time of the hijacking, hadn’t matured much during his seven years in North Korea. Still, Megumi liked him at first. Boyish, if a bit impulsive, he was less stern than his comrades. Anyway, it didn’t seem she had much say in the matter. It was rumored that Kim Il-sung himself had decided who was to marry whom. While the circumstances of the matches were unusual, the practice was not. Arranged marriages were common in Japan at the time, as they still are in North Korea.

  The Marriage Project, as it came to be known, culminated in May 1977, when the entire Red Army Faction group got married, one by one, over the course of a week. On May 14, Kim Il-sung visited the Revolutionary Village to celebrate the occasion. Now that they were married, he said, they must “continue the revolution by giving birth to the next generation.” The first child was born within a year, and nurseries, kindergartens, and single-family homes began popping up all over the village. Kim’s visit was thereafter referred to as the “5.14 Enlightenment.”

  Takako Fukui came to North Korea with the intention of marrying her boyfriend. It is unclear how the other wives got there, or whether they were aware that they were being recruited as brides for the Japanese hijackers. Like Megumi Yao, most were members of juche clubs back in Japan and were drawn to North Korea for ideological reasons. To this day, the Red Army Faction’s Japan-based supporters argue that the women went of their own free will and that neither they nor anyone else was misled or “abducted.”

  Takako returned to Japan in 2002, served a year and a half in prison for passport violations, and is now part of the defense team lobbying the government to allow the four remaining members of the Red Army Faction still in Pyongyang to return home. She agrees to talk with me in the hope that I will be sympathetic to her plight, but she clams up when I ask how the other women who were married that week in May 1977 got to North Korea. “Every few months another one would just show up in North Korea,” she tells me, looking me in the eye. And did they ever discuss how they got there? “No, we never discussed it,” she says. I try to compose myself in the face of this obvious lie. So you are telling me that the subject didn’t come up during the entire twenty-three years you lived together? I ask. “No, we never discussed it. Not once during that entire time,” she says.3

  The Red Army Faction wives were in many respects more useful operatives than their husbands. They were women without pasts, having led fairly uneventful lives. They hadn’t broken any laws, weren’t on any international Most Wanted lists, and could move around the world freely. According to Japanese intelligence, in the next decade, the wives passed through fifteen European countries, traveling between North Korea and Europe more than fifty times. Most missions were launched from Zagreb, where they kept an apartment they referred to as the “front office.” The Yugoslavian government gave North Korean spies and their Japanese affiliates safe passage to and from Western Europe, refraining from stamping their passports and thus making it more difficult to track their movements. The wives’ most important possessions were their Japanese passports, which they each renewed several times. One might think of them as traveling agitators, spreading the word of Kim Il-sung’s revolution. They worked with antinuclear groups in Europe and made multiple recruiting trips to Japan. While abroad, they communicated with their minders by tuning into a shortwave radio frequency at an appointed time every evening, receiving coded instructions.

  In the winter of 1979 the wives spread out across Europe on the “Consent Mission,” their most ambitious project yet, the goal of which was to recruit young Japanese who, once properly reeducated, would join the Red Army Faction and, in turn, recruit more members. Using a Japanese equivalent of the Lonely Planet guide, they prowled through hostels and cheap hotels, striking up friendships with Japanese students, sharing meals, sightseeing, and even going on dates. They would quiz potential recruits about their hopes and dreams, their education and background. (Did any of their family members work for the police?) If a recruit was judged acceptable, he or she would be offered a free trip to North Korea, the assumption being that, once there, he or she would be turned into a true believer by the power of Kim Il-sung’s juche philosophy. Megumi Yao later confessed that she believed even those whom she deceived would thank her once they comprehended the glory of Kim Il-sung.

  In March 1980, Toru Ishioka flew from Niigata to Russia and took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow. An agriculture student, he wanted to study Spain’s dairy industry, so he traveled to Barcelona, where he met another male Japanese student, who was there working on his Spanish. One afternoon, the men met two attractive Japanese women, and the foursome spent several enjoyable days sightseeing and flirting. One of the women said she knew someone who could arrange a free trip to North Korea. Were the boys up for an adventure? The only evidence of their stay in Barcelona is a photograph of Toru that emerged many years later. In it, he is smiling, sitting on a bench in the city’s zoo beside two women—Yoriko Mori and Sakiko Kuroda, wives of Red Army Faction members. The two men never returned.

  Red Army Faction wives and Toru Ishioka in Barcelona (Jiji Press)

  Still, the logic of the Consent Mission had a fatal flaw—a flaw impossible for a loyal follower of Kim Il-sung even to imagine. It turned out that not everyone exposed to juche was won over by its truth. The two Japanese students from Barcelona, furious at being seduced and tricked, resisted it fiercely after they arrived in Pyongyang. To make matters worse, one of them fell in love with the wife who’d tricked him into coming to North Korea, which only fueled his rage. One day, he leaped up and grabbed her. “You bitch! You deceived me! You led me on, and then you tricked me!” he screamed. The two Japanese students were immediately transferred to a more rigorous educational institution, run by the North Korean Workers’ Party.

  The episode posed a serious problem. The Yodogo group’s members could have as many children as they liked, but if they didn’t recruit more adult comrades, there was no way the revolution could succeed. The group mulled
over their failure at several meetings. Because questioning the transformational potential of juche was forbidden, they restricted their scrutiny to operational matters. Maybe they were targeting the wrong people? Perhaps their techniques were too subtle? One wife suggested that perhaps the two men were lonely and would be easier to work with if they had girlfriends. “Well, if it’s going badly because it’s just the two of them,” replied another wife, “let’s bring in some women for them.”

  * * *

  Growing up in Kobe, Japan, Keiko Arimoto was a shy, quiet girl with a passion for the English language. As a teenager, she moved from her parents’ to her aunt’s home in downtown Kobe, to be closer to an English school. She received a degree from Kobe University of Foreign Studies in 1981, and arrived in London to continue her studies in the spring of 1982. She didn’t have much money, so worked mornings as an au pair, taking care of a six-year-old girl and her eight-year-old brother, and took English classes at International House in the afternoon.

  Keiko was lonely in London and wanted to make foreign friends. A plain girl who wore no makeup and had never visited a nightclub or attended a rock concert, she had trouble socializing with non-Japanese people. That fall, Megumi Yao had leased a furnished room in West Kensington, where she entertained the Japanese students she met at International House as part of the Consent Mission. It was natural that Keiko Arimoto and Megumi Yao would become friends. Only a few years apart in age, they’d both grown up in Kobe, their homes barely a thirty-minute drive from each other. Megumi made Keiko feel less lonely by cooking her favorite Japanese meals and talking about home. One evening, Keiko complained to Megumi that her year in Britain was almost up and she hadn’t found a job. She wanted to see more of the world, but would soon have to return home. Megumi mentioned that she knew of a position at a trading company in market research that would entail traveling the world comparing the prices of various goods. The job sounded like a fairy tale to Keiko, and although she knew her parents would be upset, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity. “This could be my first step into grown-up life,” she wrote to a friend in a June 13, 1983, letter.

  I will leave London at the end of this month. I feel a little sad, but I have so many things to do now. London has been so much fun! And I’ll come back again someday. I already bought a ticket home, but what do you know, suddenly I have found a job. The job is in “market research,” and involves doing research into the prices, demand, and supply of foreign products. If I take this job, I will be able to see all different parts of the world. I really want to give it a try!… I feel pretty lucky!

  Megumi and Keiko went to Copenhagen to meet Keiko’s future employer. Denmark at the time was one of the few European countries that recognized North Korea, which repaid the compliment by using its Copenhagen embassy to oversee its Western European intelligence network. The two young women spent the day exploring the city, taking rides in Tivoli Gardens, and laughing. That evening they met a man over dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Keiko was nervous, but he spoke perfect Japanese and was so kind and funny that she soon felt at ease. It was a skill Kim Yu-chol had perfected during his career as a North Korean agent. He explained that the job was based in North Korea, and assured Keiko she would be well cared for. He showed her catalogues with pictures of the kinds of goods she’d be doing research on, and Keiko accepted on the spot. Keiko and Kim Yu-chol would leave the next day, but first he suggested she write a few letters to her parents in advance, so that they wouldn’t worry about her.

  And that was the last her parents heard of Keiko Arimoto until the day in the fall of 1988 when her mother received a copy of Toru Ishioka’s letter, along with a photograph of Keiko and the infant grandchild she didn’t know she had.

  15

  A STORY TOO STRANGE TO BELIEVE

  In December 1991, Japanese television producer Kenji Ishidaka was in Seoul interviewing a former North Korean diplomat about the North’s nuclear weapons program for Sunday Project, the Japanese equivalent of 60 Minutes. Over dinner that night, the South Korean intelligence agent who had set up the interview asked if Ishidaka was interested in meeting an Osaka-born Korean who’d immigrated to the North in 1973 and later defected to Seoul. “He was one of the repatriates,” the agent said.1

  Despite the fact that a quarter of Japan’s ethnic Koreans lived in Ishidaka’s hometown, Osaka, he knew almost nothing about the repatriation project that had transported ninety-three thousand of them to North Korea. Ishidaka was only eight years old when the program began in 1959, and the news of Japan’s postwar economic success had pushed memories of the project aside. Ishidaka met with the defector, and his ears pricked up when he told him that half the repatriates had disappeared after they arrived in North Korea. What had happened to them? Ishidaka wondered.

  Back in Japan, Ishidaka tracked down a former Chosen Soren official whose book, Paradise Betrayed, criticized the repatriation project. Most of the author’s family had moved to the North in 1962, and he was unprepared for what he’d found when he visited them for the first time in 1980. His family was in tatters, with several in North Korea’s gulag and the rest living in poverty. “Why didn’t you grab my leg and hold me back when I was getting on the boat?” his eighty-year-old mother screamed at him.

  Ishidaka began interviewing dozens of Koreans throughout Japan, all of whom asked for anonymity to protect their families in the North. He learned of relatives whose minor infractions had sent them to labor camps, where they either starved or were executed. The brother of an Osaka native named Grace Park had a successful career as a radio announcer after repatriating. She listened to him every night via shortwave radio, until the fall of 1980, when he was replaced, with no explanation. Grace Park never heard her brother’s voice again. Ishidaka’s documentary, People Who Went Missing in Paradise, aired in May 1994, and the reaction of the Japanese public was one of disbelief. Ishidaka received threatening phone calls, and Chosen Soren complained to his employer. It was a sad story, of course, but he had to move on. He assumed it was the last North Korea story he’d produce.

  Kenji Ishidaka (Kenji Ishidaka)

  Kenji Ishidaka originally wanted to become a novelist. Born in Osaka in 1951, the youngest of three children, he attended Tokyo’s prestigious Chuo University, where he was two years ahead of Kaoru Hasuike, the Japanese man who was abducted from a beach with his girlfriend in 1978. In the summer of 1972, Ishidaka hitchhiked through Europe and the Middle East. He had never been abroad and was thrilled to encounter foreign people and places. He initially held the common Japanese prejudices against Africans and Arabs, but these were soon washed away by the fraternal feelings that emerge among young people, of all races, traveling the world on a budget. Where were the safe places to sleep? Which restaurants had the cheapest food? He picked up bits of French, Arabic, and English, and funneled his newfound cosmopolitanism into his poetry. He published a book of poetry when he returned to Japan, but felt the pull of journalism. So he completed his undergraduate degree and took the entrance exam at the Asahi Broadcasting Company.

  Japanese television news until the late sixties was a fairly primitive affair, consisting of little more than print journalists reading their articles on air. In order to draw a larger audience, the Tokyo Broadcasting System began requiring journalists to study film techniques, and TV Asahi, its competitor, soon followed suit. Ishidaka was among the first of its journalists to undergo the training, although he considered himself first and foremost a writer and wasn’t sure how he felt about this emphasis on the visual. He had never so much as touched a video camera when his boss put a 16 mm camera in his hand and told him to “figure it out.”

  Large Japanese corporations employ a strictly hierarchical apprentice system, and Asahi was no different. During his first two years, Ishidaka carried heavy equipment—lenses, lighting, tripods—for more senior cameramen. In his third year, he was allowed to shoot some footage of his own. Those in the senior ranks were loath to share their secrets, so when he’d as
k a veteran cameraman how he got a particular shot, the man would just stare back at him silently. But Ishidaka was crafty, and he learned the techniques he needed by, essentially, spying on his colleagues. His natural talent was soon recognized, and he was sent for advanced training sessions at a Tokyo film school, where he learned the basics of directing and producing. He immersed himself in the work of iconoclasts such as Eisenstein, Fellini, and Godard. He identified with the rebellious themes that ran through their movies and was particularly taken with Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, in which unhappily married Jean-Paul Belmondo is fired from his job at a TV company and runs off with his girlfriend. Handsome, with tousled hair and a booming voice, Ishidaka developed a Belmondoesque swagger, and began wearing monogrammed collarless shirts. His documentaries were thoroughly researched and stylishly edited. He was never one to follow the crowd, and after a stint in Tokyo he returned to Osaka, where he could be a big fish in a somewhat smaller pond. He married and had two daughters, but he was hungry, always on the lookout for a big story.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1996, Ishidaka received a call from Grace Park, one of the Osaka-based ethnic Koreans he had interviewed for his repatriation documentary. She and her family were loyal members of Chosen Soren, and most of the family, including her brother, had moved to North Korea in 1964. Park, who had stayed behind in Tokyo to run the family’s barbecue restaurant, asked about her brother’s disappearance in 1987, when she visited her family in North Korea. They were too scared to discuss him, but her sister-in-law later pulled Grace aside and told her that he had been charged with espionage and executed in 1985.