The Invitation-Only Zone

by Robert S. Boynton

  It wasn’t until the entire Hasuike family retreated to the hotel suite in the evening that the two brothers had an opportunity to talk. After twenty-four years apart, they were bound to find things awkward, but Kaoru appeared even stranger than Toru had feared he’d be. For one thing, he kept referring to himself as a “citizen of North Korea” and “a member of the North Korea delegation,” whose purpose in visiting Japan was to help normalize relations between the two countries. “We’re going back, so next time you must come visit me in North Korea,” Kaoru said, as if doing so were as easy as taking a trip to Hawaii.5 Again and again, Toru tried to draw his brother out with provocative questions, practically begging him to criticize the North. In response, Kaoru explained to Toru that North Korea, while a small country, was a great nation and would never be defeated by the Japanese or American imperialists. He not only avoided speaking ill of the North but also used the honorific title “Great Leader” or “Great Marshal” whenever he mentioned Kim Jong-il. “He’s been brainwashed and isn’t able to think for himself,” Toru thought to himself.

  That evening there was a second press conference so that the abductees’ family members could answer questions. Toru had been brooding over his brother’s strange behavior all day and could no longer keep silent. “Something is not right here. All he talks about is North Korea, as though he were a North Korean,” he announced to the assembled crowd of journalists and television cameras. Toru said he was repulsed by Kaoru’s behavior and didn’t recognize him anymore. “I want the little brother I lost twenty-four years ago. But he studied North Korea’s ideology for twenty-four years. I think this mind-set is ingrained in him.”6

  Kaoru sat in the suite a few floors above watching the press conference on television. He leaped from his chair the minute Toru entered the room. “What kind of bullshit is this? All I’ve been doing is telling you the truth! Who do you think you are to say things like that about me?” Kaoru yelled. Witnessing the argument, their mother started to cry. “Here you haven’t seen each other in twenty-four years, and you are already fighting!? I’m going to jump out the window and kill myself!” A panicked look came over Kaoru’s face and he immediately tried to console her, addressing her as Okaasan, “Mother.” Toru was aghast. “Obviously, as part of the mission, Kaoru was sent to Japan to honor his parents and convince them to visit him in North Korea. He wasn’t upset that he’d made her cry. He was upset because her crying threatened the success of his mission,” Toru tells me. The next evening, Toru invited a few of Kaoru’s childhood friends to visit them. Perhaps seeing faces from Kaoru’s past would bring him back? After chatting about old times for a while, one of the friends grew tired of Kaoru’s cautious statements and urged him to express his hatred of North Korea. “Look, I tried hard during the past twenty-four years,” Kaoru yelled at him. “You’re not telling me they were wasted, are you? Are you guys trying to brainwash me?”

  The terms Hitoshi Tanaka had negotiated required the abductees to return to the North after two weeks. But from the moment they arrived at Haneda, Toru tried to convince his brother to stay in Japan permanently. He was relentless, as if failing to convince him would be a personal and professional defeat. After all, how would it look for the brother of the leader of the abductee family association to return to the North? “Please consider living in Japan,” he begged. “Don’t you have feelings for this country?” After two days at the hotel, Toru saw small signs of the Kaoru he had once known. “I realized that Kaoru hadn’t been brainwashed; he was just wearing the psychological body armor he needed in order to survive for all these years,” he says. Toru concluded that the only way to get Kaoru to remove the armor was to bring him to his home town of Kashiwazaki and immerse him in the world he’d lost. Once there, Toru did everything he could think of to reconnect his brother to Japan. They went to city hall to add his marriage and the birth of his two children to their family registry. They got him a new driver’s license. At first Kaoru went through the motions, if only to avoid conflict. But he was bitter that his brother wasn’t taking his dilemma seriously. “How come you’re so cold to me?” he thought to himself. “Here I am trying to hold everything together. Don’t mess up my head. I have to return to North Korea for my kids. What about that do you not understand?”

  With only days to go before the abductees were scheduled to return to North Korea, Toru booked rooms for the whole family at a resort one hour inland from Kashiwazaki, where they used to ski as children. After a day on the mountain, the brothers soaked in the naturally heated therapeutic waters. Toru took another tack, concentrating not on why Kaoru should stay in Japan but on why he couldn’t return to the North. The political situation had intensified in recent weeks. On October 16, the day after Kaoru and the others returned to Japan, North Korea had admitted it had secretly restarted its nuclear weapons program. “Now it’s no longer just about the abductions. The nuclear issue is back, and relations are going to get really complicated,” Toru explained. Kaoru had to understand that the army of photographers at Haneda two weeks earlier had beamed the story of his abduction all over the world. Even ordinary North Koreans had learned the truth, so the life Kaoru intended to return to was impossible. By now, everyone would know that he, his wife, and his children were Japanese. The conversation evidently made an impression on Kaoru, who crept into his brother’s room the next morning and woke him up. “I’ve decided to stay in Japan,” he said. “But you must promise to get my children back.” Toru couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and he made Kaoru repeat it, just to make sure. Toru immediately called his contact at Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs before Kaoru could change his mind.

  Yukiko became frantic when Kaoru told her he wanted to remain in Japan. “What the hell are you talking about? What about the kids?” she cried. Kaoru had never seen such a pained expression on her face. “Listen, this is for the children’s sake. There is no other option but to live in Japan. They’ll never have a normal life in the North now that everyone knows about the abductions,” he said “The Japanese government said they will get them back to us. We have to trust them.” Yukiko was not the only one desperate to return to the North. For days, Hitomi Soga had been begging the government to allow her to go back, convinced that it was the only way she’d see her husband and daughters again.

  The members of Koizumi’s Cabinet were divided over whether to return the abductees to North Korea, as the Japanese government had agreed to do. Both options held risks. If the Japanese government sent the five back and no progress was made, or the abductees weren’t allowed to leave the North with their children, Koizumi’s government would fall and the public would never forgive him. However, keeping them in Japan violated the agreement Tanaka had negotiated with Mr. X, which stipulated that their stay in Japan be a “temporary return.” Finally, Cabinet Undersecretary Shinzo Abe broke the logjam, insisting that the abductees decide for themselves. Two days before they were scheduled to return, the Japanese government announced that the visit was being “extended,” which for all intents and purposes meant they would remain. In addition, it requested that the North allow their children and other family members to join them. It would take eighteen months of negotiation, a second Koizumi visit to Pyongyang, and 250,000 tons of rice to release the children, who finally joined their parents in May 2004.7 The Japanese media described the children as “returning” to Japan, no matter that they had spent their entire lives in North Korea and spoke little or no Japanese.

  21

  ABDUCTION, INC.

  Abductee activist Katsumi Sato divided the day of September 17, 2002, between watching the televised coverage of the Pyongyang summit and answering questions from the reporters lined up outside the offices of Modern Korea. “Where the hell have you been for the past twenty years?” he thought to himself.1 At seventy-three, he’d traveled a long road, in thrall first to the emperor of Japan and then to North Korea’s Communist experiment. The message that he’d preached during the last half of his lif
e, that the North was a tyranny, capable of anything, had been ignored by the liberal Japanese media and government. Until now, the notion that North Korea had been kidnapping Japanese since the 1970s received only slightly more credulity than reports of alien abductions.

  Yet this afternoon, none other than Kim Jong-il himself had confessed. From the comfort of his office, Sato sensed Japanese public opinion turning a full 180 degrees. Not only had the Japanese government failed to protect its people, but it emerged that it had been aware of the abduction project almost from the start, and that the government and media had dismissed reports of abductions publicly long after they suspected they were true.2 And now Koizumi had the nerve to normalize relations with the rogue regime? Within a week, public support of Koizumi’s government plunged from 81 percent to 44 percent. “You’ve heard of the eye of a hurricane? Well, it was very still where we were sitting. But the whole world was spinning out of control around us,” Sato tells me. Japan became obsessed over Kim Jong-il and North Korea, much as the United States had fixated on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda one year before. A nation that had cared little about North Korea could now think of hardly anything else.3 And nobody had more and better stories than Sato. “Mr. Sato, you have defeated the entire Japanese communications industry,” one reporter told him. “Everything is precisely as you said. The win goes to you.” All eyes were on Sato, the man proved right—morally and politically, on national television—when everyone else had been wrong.

  Katsumi Sato and Sakie Yokota (Associated Press)

  An ex-Communist with an elementary school education, Sato was promoted to the level of “statesman.” His small magazine, Modern Korea, had given him a small audience of North Korea–watchers, but his leadership role in the abductee movement increased his visibility. But now his every utterance was noted, and politicians and industrialists scrambled to kiss his ring. “We’d make a statement in the morning and receive an official government response by the end of the day,” he says.4 After years of indifference, the abductees’ families became sacrosanct objects of sympathy and compassion. Even the North Koreans understood who was actually running Japan’s foreign policy. “The ones wielding power in Japan are not the government or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” a North Korean negotiator confided to a Japanese politician. “They’re always overturned if the abductees’ family organization voices opposition.”5

  The abductee activists had been working on a shoestring for years, always in debt, surviving on small donations collected at demonstrations and events. With the entire nation reeling from the revelations, money started to pour in. Kazuhiro Araki, Sato’s right-hand man, took responsibility for keeping track of it.6 A Korea specialist, Araki had begun writing articles for Modern Korea in the 1980s and was soon after hired as an editor. Sato became his mentor, introducing Araki to the woman who would become Araki’s wife. In Japan, when one sends money via a wire transfer, it is confirmed by a receipt, delivered by mail, Araki explains to me. “Every day, we would get dozens of receipts, stacked two or three inches thick,” he says, spreading his thumb and forefinger in an imaginary wedge. “Our financial problems disappeared in three months. It was a full-time job just keeping track of the money. Some of the donations were for ten dollars, but others were for several thousand.”7

  To atone for their sins of omission, the media threw dozens of reporters at the story, every paper creating a permanent “abduction beat,” a position that still exists today, despite the lack of news to report. (News organizations fear that eliminating the position would offend the abductees.) The Niigata Nippo’s abduction correspondent, Shito Yokoyama, was the first reporter assigned to the beat. Her reporting has taken her to North Korea, and won the praise of the abductees’ families, but in eight years on the beat, she has never interviewed any of the abductees themselves. “We aren’t allowed to interview the abductees,” she tells me.8

  Two days before the abductees returned to Japan, the heads of twenty-one major news organizations agreed to “exercise restraint” in reporting the story in their papers and magazines and on television programs.9 The agreement was an act of self-censorship, by which they abrogated their news judgment and deferred to a coalition of activists, abductees, and their families. Similar arrangements are common in Japan, where news organizations operate restrictive “kisha clubs” for their reporters, who in return for access, agree not to scoop one another or cover various ministries and corporations too aggressively. The abduction kisha club took its instructions from Sato, whose years as a Communist organizer had trained him in the art of manipulating the narrative. The rules were as simple as they were strictly enforced: all requests for information or interviews had to go through Sato. The abductees could be interviewed only in groups, and the stories that emerged were required to be positive in tone and substance. To ensure that the club’s reporters were too busy to snoop around on their own, Sato held several press conferences a week, whether or not there was any actual news. The smallest development would require the reporters to assemble at Sato’s feet. He was unforgiving and much feared by the press. “Given the choice, I’d rather negotiate with North Korea than with Sato,” one reporter told me. Any publication that ran a negative or unapproved story lost access, as happened when a reporter for the Asahi Weekly magazine conducted an impromptu interview with Fukie and Yasushi Chimura after they returned home to Obama. The morning the article appeared, Sato charged into the magazine’s headquarters and demanded a meeting with the editor in chief. The magazine soon ran an apology for breaking the rules.

  It isn’t until I get a copy of the article that I understand the reason Sato was so enraged. Worse than violating the self-censorship agreement, the article threatened to undermine his carefully constructed narrative of Japanese victims imprisoned by an evil regime by providing an unscripted glimpse of the Chimuras’ pedestrian life in North Korea. When asked about their relationship with their North Korean minder, Fukie replied simply, “He wasn’t really someone who watched us as much as he was a tutor who took care of us whenever we went out.” Yasushi added, “Sure, he watched us, but from our point of view, he was someone who would take us shopping. They were not bad people.” After this article, nobody was allowed to speak directly with the abductees.

  * * *

  While the Japanese were angry with North Korea, the most vicious attacks were reserved for the “enemies within,” the allegedly pro-North Korea Japanese intelligentsia. “I call for a reexamination of what remarks have been made by whom, when, and in what newspapers, magazines and other media,” critic and novelist Ayoko Sono wrote in the conservative Sankei Shimbun two days after the Kim-Koizumi summit. “To glorify North Korea has been the trendy demeanor of the progressive cultural elite and the progressive media, but this attitude has also disrupted” the lives of the abductees.10 Other conservative magazines encouraged the witch hunt. “The Death Throes of the North Korea Clique: Rip Out Their Double-Talking Tongues!”11 read one headline; “The Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Debaters Who Have Stood By and Watched Eight Abductees Die: Apologize for Your Great Sins Through Death,” read another.12 Shinzo Abe rode the abduction issue into the prime minister’s office, accusing anyone who opposed him on the subject of “siding with North Korea.” Hitoshi Tanaka, the diplomat who negotiated the abductees’ freedom, was labeled a “Class-A war criminal” and accused of being “soft” on North Korea by the magazine Shukan Bunshun. One morning, a bomb was discovered in front of his home, accompanied by an envelope addressed to “Hitoshi Tanaka, traitor.” When asked what he thought of the attack, the conservative Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara said Tanaka “got what he deserved.” When asked whether the statement meant that he supported terrorism, Ishihara replied that he didn’t, but that Tanaka still “deserved to die ten thousand deaths.” Even Shinzo Abe’s own party, the Liberal Democrats (LDP), was criticized. “What country are our government and our ruling party working for? Why doesn’t the LDP just put up a sign reading ‘The Korean Workers�
� Party—Japan Branch Office’?” remarked one leading activist.

  One of the first actions Shinzo Abe took upon becoming prime minister in 2006 was to establish the Headquarters for the Abduction Issue, a Cabinet-level office with an enormous budget to coordinate the government’s abduction-related efforts.13 It broadened the public’s awareness of the abductions through films, comic books, and cartoons, publishing a two-volume graphic manga comic book about Megumi Yokota, which it translated into Korean, Chinese, Arabic, and English. It also commissioned an animated cartoon version of Megumi’s story, which it put online.14 Abe ordered NHK, the government-funded broadcaster, to increase its coverage of the abduction issue, even though it had already devoted one-third of its roughly two thousand North Korea–related broadcasts to it in the first nine months of 2006.15 Abe used the abductions to advance the nationalist and militarist sentiments that had been growing since the early 1980s. “I began to notice that the events I attended were no longer just about abductions. They were also about teaching the ‘proper version of history’ in schools, how the Rape of Nanking was a ‘gross exaggeration,’ and other standard, right wing causes,” says Eric Johnston, a Japan Times reporter who covered the issue.16 Until recently, it was taboo to question whether Japan’s U.S.-authored constitution should be revised to allow the Self-Defense Force to be used more widely. Under Abe, an argument raged over whether Japan should become a so-called normal nation, allowed to defend itself, and even take proactive measures, rather than depending on the United States. Japan’s legislature loosened restrictions on the military, allowing it to support the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and combat “potential or actual” terrorist attacks at home. The Ministry of Defense was upgraded to a full Cabinet position for the first time since the end of the Second World War.