The nation descended into a ten-day period of mourning, during which dancing and amusement of all kinds were forbidden. While the people of North Korea pondered the frightening prospect of a future without the Great Leader, Kaoru faced a different dilemma. How would he, a Japanese prisoner, mourn Kim’s death? “Citizens were expected to wail and cry, but I couldn’t grieve over the death of the man who had abducted me. I didn’t think my heart or pride would allow me to,” he says. The stakes were high. If his minder suspected that Kaoru’s grief was fake, his family might be in jeopardy. He decided to watch how others acted and imitate them. That afternoon, he and his minder brought flowers to a nearby statue of Kim Il-sung, where Kaoru noticed some people sobbing, while others merely wiped tears from their eyes and bowed their heads, a style of mourning he felt he could mimic. During a service held at the Invitation-Only Zone the next day, several people threw themselves to the ground. Kaoru couldn’t risk standing out, and quickly fell to his knees, wiping fake tears from his face. The real test came on July 19, when one million people lined the streets of Pyongyang for Kim’s state funeral. A car from the Invitation-Only Zone deposited Kaoru in downtown Pyongyang early that morning, and he waited several hours in the sweltering summer heat before he heard faint chords from “The Song of the Supreme General Kim Il-sung.” As the limousine bearing Kim’s body came into sight, the crowds of people who had stood silently for hours spontaneously began stamping their feet and tearing at their clothes, swept up in a moment of religious fervor that Kaoru found frightening. He stood on tiptoe to glimpse the hearse, which had a huge flower-ringed portrait of a smiling Kim Il-sung perched on top. Amazed by the intensity of emotion around him, Kaoru forgot to cry. Fortunately, his minders were too overcome with emotion to notice.
North Korea is often described as a country where history has stopped, and now as the official period of mourning was extended to three full years, it became a funereal state, led forever by Kim Il-sung, who was designated its “Eternal President.” His son, Kim Jong-il, refrained from replacing his father for the duration of the mourning period. The list of forbidden activities grew to include weddings and funerals. When an officer whom Kaoru knew built a tombstone for his recently deceased mother, the man was punished with compulsory labor and a demotion. Fearing they’d get in trouble, farmers refrained from cultivating their fields that summer, further reducing a yield that had been declining since 1990.
* * *
In the best of times, North Korea is capable of producing roughly half its food. Traditionally focused on heavy industry and mining, it is so mountainous that only 20 percent of the land can be cultivated, and its cold climate means growing seasons are short.3 In the past, the shortfall was made up by the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, which, until the fall of communism, offered food, coal, oil, and steel at discounted “friendship” prices. As resources either disappeared or became more expensive, the regime, desperate to negotiate with anyone who could help it survive, initiated a decade-long effort to normalize relations with Japan. South Korea had received billions of dollars in aid when it normalized relations with Japan in 1965. Perhaps the North could one day profit as well?
With fewer outside sources of food, farmers maximized output by using more pesticides and fertilizers, which further depleted the soil. As existing fields fell barren, farmers, encouraged by the party’s “Let’s Find New Land!” campaign, cleared hillsides of brush. With fewer trees and shrubs holding the soil in place, the annual summer rains caused severe flooding, destroying fields and already harvested grain stored for future use. It is estimated that 20 percent of the country’s total forest cover was lost between 1990 and 2000.4 Coal was in short supply, so people cut down trees for firewood, which cleared more land.
During his trips into Pyongyang it seemed to Kaoru that fields were popping up everywhere. “It reminded me of the stories my mother told me about wartime Japan, when people used every square inch of land, and even schoolyards were filled with rows of sweet potatoes,” he says.
Born twelve years after the end of the Second World War, Kaoru had never experienced hunger. He had heard stories from his mother and grandmother about the harsh food situation during the war, but these were little more than fairy tales to him. “In the early nineties, we began hearing stories about the amount of food decreasing, distribution days being delayed and finally not taking place at all,” he recalls. The most faithful party stalwarts simply couldn’t imagine a world in which the Kim family didn’t take care of them, and were among the first to starve. Like the proverbial frog in the heating pot of water, they didn’t realize the extent of the famine until it was too late. City dwellers were hurt because they had no land to grow their own food and were completely dependent on the public distribution system. “I saw families living in high-rise apartments raising chickens and pigs on their balconies, feeding them kitchen scraps and cooked corn flour,” says Kaoru. As people learned they couldn’t rely on the government, alternative foods appeared in markets. There was “synthetic meat,” made from soybean oil, which neither looked nor tasted like meat but achieved a comparable texture when cooked. Porridge and noodles produced by grinding the roots of rice plants into a paste left people feeling full, if undernourished. Recipes circulated for reviving rotten pork by boiling it with baking soda. Pine tree bark was ground down and baked into cakes, with the side effect of severe constipation. The very young and the very old died first, and students were mobilized to form body brigades to remove corpses from the streets. Rumors of cannibalism spread, and the number of those who crossed illegally into China for food soared. Border guards were so hungry a small bribe was all it took for them to look the other way.
The ongoing conflict with the United States made the regime reluctant to request food aid, for fear of showing any signs of weakness. “If the U.S. imperialists know that we do not have rice for the military,” said Kim Jong-il in a secret December 1996 speech, “they would immediately invade us.”5 The regime’s distrust of the outside world hampered aid efforts when it refused to allow nongovernmental organizations to oversee food distributions. Of the food that was allowed in, it is estimated that one-third was claimed by the military and political elite.6 Most disturbing is that as the humanitarian aid gradually increased, the regime decreased the amount of food it imported through commercial channels, effectively using the donations to improve the country’s balance of trade.7 Military spending increased during the famine, with the regime purchasing forty MiG-21 fighters and eight military helicopters from Kazakhstan in 1999.8 The closest the regime came to economic reform was loosening restrictions on the size and number of the farmers’ markets, which had by then become a crucial source of food. Although the real figures may never be known, it is estimated that from 1995 to 2000, between one and three million North Koreans (5 to 10 percent of the population) starved to death. In addition, others were felled by outbreaks of tuberculosis and cholera, along with hepatitis, malaria, dysentery, and other ailments that come from vitamin deficiency.9 By 2001 the average life expectancy in North Korea had dropped to sixty.
The elite in Pyongyang were largely insulated from the hardship, as were the Japanese abductees. The size of the rations the abductees received held fairly steady, although the quality varied and some items disappeared entirely. Kaoru feared most for the welfare of his children, whose school was in the remote northwestern region, where the famine was most severe. Twice a year, Kaoru’s son and daughter would return home skinny and drawn, bringing stories of death and starvation. One by one, their classmates grew listless and stopped coming to school, leaving row after row of empty desks. Those who managed to survive stopped growing, their hair turning brittle and falling out. During one break, the Chimuras’ children returned home with fiery red rashes on their faces, the result of eating little other than corn-based porridge.10 Whereas students were once fed white rice, fish, and even bits of meat, by the late 1990s a typical meal consisted of sour radish soup flavored with
salt. And if rice was served, it was mixed with so many pebbles and other grains that people had to roll it around in their mouths before swallowing. “You guys aren’t tough enough to make it out there,” Kaoru’s son told him. “You’re too used to eating rice every day.”11
Even if his children were unlikely to starve to death, Kaoru feared their growth would be stunted by prolonged malnutrition. So in the weeks leading up to their visits, he and Yukiko set aside a portion of their food allotment. Once home, the children would stuff themselves with as much rice, meat, and vegetables as they could manage. In order to make sure they got enough protein at school, Kaoru sent them back with a five-kilo sackful of soybeans he’d roasted for them. (He’d calculated that if they ate five beans a day, they’d receive the minimum requirement.) Kaoru and Yukiko prayed the children would grow even a little by the next time they came home. In the interim they sent food packages, most of which were intercepted by hungry postmen.
The Invitation-Only Zone wasn’t entirely untouched by the famine, as Kaoru heard about staff who were having difficulty supporting themselves and their families in the provinces. The wife of one of the drivers had recently given birth to a baby boy, but she was so starved for food that she couldn’t produce milk. Kaoru, whose life revolved around his children, felt so sorry for the man that he gave him a few kilos of rice. The driver then cooked the rice, adding salt, water, and sugar to create a paste the infant could swallow in lieu of breast milk.
Vegetables from the small garden Kaoru had tended since coming to the Invitation-Only Zone began disappearing, most likely stolen by neighbors or guards. As the famine intensified, intruders from outside the zone scaled the fences to steal produce and household goods. Kaoru got a dog to deter thieves, but he had trouble feeding it. He began hunting small birds and pheasants, using a slingshot and a clumsily fashioned bow and arrow. Neither yielded more than a few stunned pigeons. He had more success when a neighbor taught him how to catch pheasant using soybeans laced with cyanide (the trick was to disembowel the bird before the poison spread).
The desperation induced by the threat of famine took forms that were by turns savage and absurd. One afternoon, while fishing at his favorite pond, Kaoru spotted a neatly dressed man wading hip-deep in the water. Lacking a rod, the man was trying to catch fish with the kind of net one uses with fish tanks. “One by one he would catch these tiny fish in the net and put them into his jacket pocket,” says Kaoru. It was a scene that in better times would have made him smile, but the knowledge that this was the best the man could do to support his starving family made Kaoru look away with shame and sadness.12
17
NEGOTIATING WITH MR. X
When the terrorist Kim Hyon-hui confessed to bombing Korean Air Flight 858, she set into motion a series of events that would eventually unravel the entire abduction project. Once the Japanese government learned that she had received language training from a Japanese, it was forced to raise the abduction issue with the North. The problem was that whenever Japanese diplomats uttered the word abduction, their North Korean counterparts would stand up and leave the room in protest. What’s more, the North Koreans turned the tables on them. Hadn’t the Japanese abducted hundreds of thousands of Koreans during the colonial and wartime era, using the men as slave labor and the women as sex slaves? When former Japanese prime minister Murayama raised the issue during a visit to North Korea, his host exploded: “Why do you Japanese always talk to us of abductions!? What about the case of the political leader kidnapped by the South? Do you use the word ‘abduction’ in that case, too?”1
Of the many oddities regarding the abduction issue, the case the North Korean diplomat referred to was perhaps the oddest. The fact is that the only verified case of abduction in Japan at the time was of a leftist South Korean politician kidnapped by the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). On August 8, 1973, the South Korean dissident (later president) Kim Dae-jung was having lunch with supporters in his room at Tokyo’s Hotel Grand Palace. Shortly after they left, Kim was jumped by KCIA agents, who knocked him out with chloroform. By the time the American ambassador to South Korea learned of the abduction, Kim was at sea, bound to a plank of wood with weights attached to it. Only a last-minute intervention by the CIA station chief in Seoul saved him. North Korea was not involved in any way. After this incident, most members of the Japanese government and media suspected that the stories about North Korean abductions were KCIA-generated disinformation designed to discredit the North.
It was not until a 1997 meeting, when Japanese negotiators substituted the phrase “missing people” for “abductees,” that the North agreed to investigate their whereabouts. In 1998, soon-to-become prime minister Yoshiro Mori made an ingenious, face-saving proposal while visiting Pyongyang with a government delegation. What if North Korea moved any “missing persons” to cities such as Beijing, Paris, or Bangkok? Then they could come forward and claim they had been living there all along.2 The North Koreans were intrigued. This was a man they could do business with.
Mori became prime minister in April 2000 and sent Kim Jong-il a personal letter that initiated the secret negotiations. However, Mori’s low popularity level forced him to resign in April 2001. Soon after Junichiro Koizumi replaced him as prime minister, the North repeated Mori’s offer, and Hitoshi Tanaka was given the greatest challenge of his diplomatic career.
Hitoshi Tanaka (Associated Press)
Tanaka had been groomed to achieve great things. His father had twice nearly been killed during World War II, and later grew wealthy as chairman of a major trading company. His travels through New Delhi, London, and Lima had given him a cosmopolitan perspective, and he hoped his son would become a diplomat. Tanaka led a privileged childhood, followed by law school at elite Kyoto University.3
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent the junior diplomat to Oxford for language training, where he became an Anglophile, pleased to learn the British version of English, rather than the American variant taught in Japan. He discovered that the socially reticent Japanese and British had much in common. Both were former world powers living in the shadow of the United States. Tanaka admired the way Britain had learned to navigate this new terrain, leveraging its remaining strengths through diplomatic prowess, while remaining aloof from its continental neighbors. Tanaka concluded that Japan, too, should rely more on its wits than its power.4
Tanaka’s most significant experience at Oxford had little to do with academics. During his second year, he fell in love with a Polish student from Warsaw. They spent weekends in the Sussex countryside and traveled throughout Europe. He was moved when their train passed through Germany and she began shaking uncontrollably, a response to her country’s wartime victimization. She told him she feared returning to Poland, where family members and friends spied on one another. They planned to marry, but when Tanaka consulted with the Japanese ambassador, he was told that doing so might hurt his career, as some would think his wife was a Communist spy. Offended, he considered quitting the foreign service. His first post after Oxford was Jakarta, which he suspects was part of the Japanese government’s plan to thwart his relationship by putting as much distance as possible between him and his girlfriend. Indonesia refused to grant her a visa to join him, and she eventually returned to Poland.
The 1950s and ’60s were the years Japan proved to the world that its wartime behavior had been an aberration. It joined the United Nations in 1956, hosted the 1964 Olympics, and normalized relations with South Korea in 1965. Tanaka was a rising star when he returned to Japan in 1974, moving swiftly through the ranks of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, helping Japan craft a new role for itself on the world stage. He developed a reputation as a lone wolf in a culture that prizes consensus and cooperation. He was handsome, fiercely intelligent, and wore exquisitely tailored English suits. These qualities served him well during the decade he worked in the United States overseeing Japan’s North American affairs, and during the fraught trade negotiations of the 1980s. T
anaka valued Japan’s strong alliance with the United States, but lamented its unintended effects, especially the way it enabled Japan to avoid uncomfortable facts. “Japan has lived in a rather peaceful world since the end of the war. The United States guaranteed Japanese security, so anything to do with military action was quite remote. Although there was a clear threat from a country like North Korea, we tried not to see it, because of Japan’s history,” he tells me.5
Having excelled in the United States, Tanaka was given his choice of jobs. The head of the Bureau for Northeast Asian Affairs wasn’t a particularly coveted position. With a military regime in the South, a Stalinist autarky in the North, and Japan’s hands tied by the limitations of the Cold War, it was considered a career-ender. But Tanaka chose it because the Korean Peninsula was central to his worldview. Given Japan’s long and intimate history with Korea, he believed the peninsula was the route through which Japan could mend its relations with the rest of Asia. He thought it was disgraceful Japan had taken so long to normalize relations with the South, and that a similar resolution with the North was long overdue. “We colonized Korea, so the least we can do is help create a peaceful peninsula. Peace in Japan is threatened by instability on the Korean Peninsula,” he says. As head of the bureau, Tanaka was determined to address the two countries’ unequal relationship. “Korean diplomats speak excellent Japanese, so we normally worked in our language. I didn’t think that was fair, and insisted that we do business in a third language, English,” he explains. In addition, Tanaka challenged the cultural assumption that Japan’s northeast neighbors were too “emotional” to negotiate with rationally. “One of my senior colleagues, a China specialist, advised me to use heart when dealing with Korea, because they are so emotional.” The colleague believed that the only way to get diplomatic work done was for officials to visit the sauna together, and then to drink and sing. “I told him I had no intention of doing that. I want to conduct crisp business in English, and thought it was a mistake to appeal too much to emotions. I wanted our negotiations to be rational.”6
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