The Japanese government wasn’t the only organization considering a more robust international role. Since the government was plainly incapable of doing anything about the plight of the abductees, Sato hatched a plan. Ahn Myung-jin was a North Korean spy who defected to the South in 1993. A graduate of the Wonsan Foreign Language Institute and the Kim Jong-il Military Academy (where the terrorist Kim Hyon-hui trained), Ahn had worked at the center of the regime’s intelligence operations. He claimed to have information about Japanese abductees, such as Megumi Yokota, and had been meeting with Katsumi Sato and other abductee activists since the late 1990s. “He was a very important source of information to us,” says Toru Hasuike, who at one point went to Seoul to meet with Ahn. “I took a photograph of Kaoru with me and asked him whether he’d seen him in North Korea.” (He hadn’t.)17
It became an article of faith among the activists that Kim Jong-il had lied to Koizumi and was holding on to the other abductees because they knew too many secrets. To prove that they were alive, Sato needed someone to infiltrate the North and locate them. Perhaps he could even help them escape! “We paid Ahn one hundred thousand dollars to, at a minimum, provide photographic evidence that other abductees were alive,” Toru tells me. Half the money came from the family and support organizations, and the other half from several Japanese politicians. The mission barely got off the ground. “Ahn was spotted when he got close to the North Korean coast,” says Toru. “I don’t think he even made it onto land. He wasn’t arrested, but he thought that he was about to be apprehended, so he headed back to South Korea.” Ahn didn’t return the money, according to Toru.
* * *
While Sato was busy with press conferences and reconnaissance missions, Kazuhiro Araki was manning the phones at Modern Korea.18 He was troubled that so much attention was being directed at the returned abductees when there was mounting evidence that there were many abductees who were still unaccounted for. Since September 17 he had fielded dozens of calls from families whose relatives had gone missing. “I’d answer the phone, and an old woman would say, ‘My child vanished years ago, and I’ve looked and looked for him, and can’t find a reason why he left. Is it possible he, too, was abducted and taken to North Korea?’”19
Their suspicions found substance in the troubling case of Hitomi Soga. Her name had never appeared on any of the lists of missing Japanese, official or otherwise. Had the North Koreans not included hers with the names of the Hasuikes and Chimuras, Soga might very well still be in the North. If this one woman who had disappeared without anyone’s knowledge had shown up in North Korea, perhaps others were there as well? Araki asked each caller to draft a statement detailing the circumstances of his or her loved one’s disappearance. As the statements began to arrive, Araki noticed patterns emerging. “Soga was a nurse, and it turns out there were a bunch of other nurses who vanished. Also, there were a lot of engravers, who would have been useful when the North printed fake U.S. currency. I noticed that people are more likely to be taken from certain parts of Japan than others, and people tended to be abducted at certain times of day, and under certain weather conditions,” he says. Once Araki compared the factors, he was convinced that some of those he was receiving calls about had been abducted. “At a certain point, you have to admit that these can’t be accidental or coincidences, that these patterns are meaningful,” he says.20 With hundreds of names in hand, Araki decided that the officially recognized abductees needed him less than those still languishing in North Korea, and he left Sato’s group to found the Investigation Commission on Missing Japanese Probably Related to North Korea.
Today Araki’s organization is on the third floor of a threadbare apartment building a few blocks from Tokyo’s bustling Iidabashi railway station. When I enter the office, I spot him in a makeshift plywood sound studio, conveying the news of recent nuclear arms negotiations into a microphone. Posters with photos of the hundreds of Japanese whom Araki believes were abducted are plastered all over the office. Leaning against one wall is a contraption that looks like a torpedo, on top of which someone has affixed handlebars and a seat. It is a replica of one of the military Jet Skis North Korean spies used to infiltrate Japan’s waters. Seated beside it is a mannequin wearing a wet suit and swim goggles. An identification card hanging from its neck identifies him as a “Shiokaze Staff” member.
Shiokaze is the twice-a-day shortwave broadcast Araki began beaming into North Korea in 2005. The broadcast begins with a message telling the abductees to keep the faith, because “it will not be long until we rescue you.” Soothing piano music plays in the background. Each segment includes some international news items and messages to individual abductees, often read by friends and relatives. The broadcasts are in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean, due to the international nature of the abduction phenomenon.
Araki finishes up the Korean-language portion of the broadcast, exits the studio, and joins me for tea at a worn conference table. He says he believes the North has kidnapped more than two hundred fifty Japanese and that the kidnappings continue to this day. “At first, we only read the names of the missing Japanese, along with their dates of birth and the places they were taken,” he says. North Korea didn’t jam the signal until he included news about the outside world. Since then, Shiokaze has switched frequencies regularly, but the North Korean regime quickly locates and jams the new one. The project is a pure act of faith: a show whose broadcast signal is jammed, directed at a country where radios are illegal and electricity scarce, to be heard by abductees who may not exist. Is there any evidence that anyone in North Korea has ever heard the broadcast? Araki and his producer consult with each other. They cite a passage from Charles Jenkins’s memoir in which he says he listened to shortwave radio, but they concede that this took place years before Shiokaze began. “Well, we once heard about a junior high school student who was able to pick up the program in Pyongyang, but we’re not sure about that,” he says. After more tea, Araki excuses himself and returns to the sound booth. It is almost twelve, and he needs to finish a segment before the program is beamed into North Korea that afternoon.
22
KAORU HASUIKE AT HOME
It is an uncommonly warm April afternoon when I meet Kaoru Hasuike. In 2002 he and his wife returned to Kashiwazaki, where they were joined by their son and daughter in 2004 after Prime Minister Koizumi made a second trip to Pyongyang. Kaoru’s shaggy haircut and taut, angular face make him appear a decade younger than he is. The only evidence of his time in North Korea are his discolored, uneven teeth. In 2010 Kaoru completed his undergraduate degree at Chuo University via a correspondence course, and he is now working toward a graduate degree in Korean Studies at Niigata University. He recently informed the Japanese government that he no longer needs the stipend awarded the abductees to compensate them for their ordeal. He and Yukiko worked part-time at city hall during the year and a half it took for their children to be freed, and Kaoru now makes a living translating from Korean and writing his own books. Yukiko is a cook in a local kindergarten; their daughter, Shigeyo, is a graduate student; and their son, Katsuya, earned a degree in computer science from Waseda University and is working at a bank in Seoul, South Korea.
Kaoru Hasuike today
I ask Kaoru how his children reacted upon learning their family secret. “For years we had to lie to our kids in order to protect them. If they were known to be different from other North Koreans, they would be in danger,” he tells me.1 They learned half the truth during the eighteen months it took for the Japanese government to negotiate their release. “Once the North Korean authorities came to the conclusion that they would have to return the kids, they told them that they were Japanese and that their mother and father were in Japan, although they didn’t mention the abduction part. My children were cards in this game, and the regime couldn’t send them home upset or traumatized, or else they would lose their promotional value, and have hurt the North’s reputation,” he tells me. After a night in Tokyo, the whole family
went to Kashiwazaki. “They didn’t say much during the first few days we were home, but we just let time pass,” he says. Knowing that their Japanese was poor, Kaoru had purchased a few Korean DVDs for them to watch. “They looked sad and troubled, and were worried about their future in Japan.” Once they learned about the abductions, they knew the lives they’d imagined for themselves in North Korea were impossible. “Anyone who is born and raised in the North knows that your identity within the society determines your fate. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or how hard you work. If your identity or public image or presentation isn’t correct, you’ll never marry well, you’ll never get the job you want, you will never succeed. They’d seen this all their lives, they knew it in their bones,” he says. The fact that their parents had come to the North involuntarily didn’t upset them as much as Kaoru had feared it might. “You have to understand that in North Korea you are taught that the result is all that matters—whether it is winning the revolution or defeating the United States—and it doesn’t matter whether it is won through violence or treachery. So I think it was fairly easy for them to understand that their parents had been stolen.” Now that the whole family is together in Japan, there are no more secrets. “Today, when I speak with my children, I never lie about anything. That is the rule. Once you open that door, you have to continue to speak truthfully and be completely open.”
Kaoru is polite but wary. The Japanese press has sensationalized the story, he tells me, and he fears the abductees who remain in the North may be suffering the consequences. Among the conditions for our interview is that we not discuss the abductions. In addition, he asks for compensation, which is a common practice in Japanese journalism. The request makes me scrutinize my ethics. After all, if anyone deserves to be paid for his story it is a man who spent half his life in North Korea. However, I explain, American journalists look askance at the practice. To my surprise, he agrees to talk anyway.
While Kaoru is reluctant to speak about the abduction, he has hardly kept a vow of silence since his return. Now a professional translator, he has published a dozen books in six years. The first trip he took abroad was to South Korea. He blogged about his visit to Seoul—“The Seoul Tower has a toilet from which you can enjoy the view while doing your business,” he writes—and published a small book about the trip titled Back to the Peninsula. How did it feel to be around people so different from, yet so similar to, those who had abducted him? “I felt a sense of closeness to them. Five or ten minutes after I’d meet someone, they’d be telling me their problems, bragging about their kids,” he says, smiling broadly at the memory. “I don’t know how to say this, but I had this amazing sense of family. I didn’t feel out of place. In fact, I felt strangely not out of place.”
I’m struck by the depth with which Kaoru alone among the returned abductees seems to have rooted himself in Korean culture. Throughout our conversation, he notes how certain Korean characteristics augment Japanese deficiencies (and vice versa). “Japanese relationships are never black and white. They begin from the most neutral possible gray, and then dance around until we eventually agree on some common point,” he says. Korean culture is more direct. “In Korea, one guy is ‘white’ and one guy is ‘black.’ And from these opposite views they work toward a compromise. And then, when they’re done, they shake hands and that’s that.”
Kaoru is evenhanded to a fault and seems determined not to offend either culture. Although our interview is officially restricted to the topic of translation, I decide to test the boundaries. It seems to me, I begin, that the best translators have deep connections to both the languages in which they work. Every language is rooted in a culture, and every culture contains both good and bad elements, I continue. “So, how has your experience of all aspects of North Korean culture, both good and bad, helped you as a translator?” I ask. At this, he explodes. The positive side of North Korea? “I want to make sure you know that I was in North, not South Korea,” he lectures, dividing an invisible map with sharp hand gestures. “I was abducted from Japan and taken to North Korea. You understand this, right?” My interpreter apologizes for the rudeness of my question. The conversation soon returns to normal. Kaoru’s outburst seems to free him up, and our conversation becomes less cautious.
Having spent fully half his life as a Korean among Koreans, it would be odd if he were able to shed his experience as easily as one gets rid of a winter coat at the first sign of spring. Critics have portrayed him as a kind of “tragic mulatto”—a man caught between two cultures, unable to choose—or, worse, as a “sleeper” spy waiting for instructions from Pyongyang. Japanese culture has difficulty with elements that don’t fit precise categories. The suspicion that Kaoru was ambivalent about returning to Japan, that he was somehow Korean and Japanese, drove people crazy. But Kaoru strikes me more as a man who survived his ordeal by living as normally as possible—a life with more than its share of oppression, fear, and misery, of course, but a life nonetheless. He married, had children and, one presumes, friends. What was the alternative? He could have raged about his predicament for twenty-four years, I guess. But this surely is the way of madness, perhaps even suicide.
The fact that “translation” is the official topic of our interview turns out to be a blessing in disguise. As we talk, I begin to understand the degree to which it has become a metaphor for his life. Mediating between two different cultures is an act of perpetual translation. So how does one translate between such different sensibilities? I ask. Japanese and Korean literary aesthetics are completely different, Kaoru explains, and when translating, he must take those differences into consideration. Expressing emotion in Japanese literature, for example, is an exercise in withholding. “The whole point is the suppression of emotion, of not showing it on the outside. Rather, for the Japanese, emotion is conveyed through the subtle gesture, the passing comment. The Japanese interpret this as beautiful and profound,” he says.
He must keep his readers’ sensibilities in mind. He cites a common Korean expression of fondness that he had trouble translating in a novel. “A Korean who loves someone might say, ‘I’ll wait for you for ten years, for a hundred years, for a thousand years!’ And to a Korean reader this would be absolutely normal.” But translating the phrase literally would perplex the Japanese reader. “‘A hundred years?’ he’d wonder. ‘But I’ll be dead by then!’”
So where does he fit in? “Right in the middle,” he says with a sigh. “When I was in North Korea, I was told a lot of unpleasant things about Japan. ‘Your grandfather killed our ancestors, they took them off to labor camps’—I heard that every day,” he says. Despite the fact that he was a victim of North Korea, he felt awful about Japan’s past. “Of course I wasn’t ignorant of the history. But how could I live bearing the sins of all my ancestors? I was right in the middle of the gears grinding between Japan and Korea.”
In the spring of 2011, over dinner with Kaoru, I asked him the question I’d hesitated to pose earlier. “Why, really, do you think you were abducted?” I ask. He flashes me an odd smile. “I’ve thought about that a lot,” he says. It wasn’t until the last second that he and his girlfriend decided to visit the beach that fateful July evening, and he has since been told that the tide that night was unusually high, making it one of the rare occasions when a midsize North Korean boat could get so close to the shore. What he seems to be telling me is that a dozen unrelated circumstances lined up that night in such a way that he was sucked into a cosmic wormhole. “The whole thing is still a paradox to me,” he says. “There was no real reason for our abductions, or at least no reason that makes any sense. We were taken in order to be used as a chit in some future negotiations. That is the only conclusion I have come to,” he says.
EPILOGUE
On the morning of October 16, 2002, I came across a photograph on page A-3 of the New York Times. In it, five middle-aged Japanese—two couples and a single woman, all wearing boxy 1950s-era suits, ties, and skirts—descend from a Boeing 767 at Tokyo’
s Haneda Airport. “Tears and Hugs as 5 Abducted Japanese Go Home to Visit,” read the headline.
As I stared at the photograph, my mind reeled with questions. Who were these people who had spent half their lives in the least-accessible nation on earth? Why had they been abducted? What could they tell us about that secretive nation? Having divided their lives between Japan and North Korea, with which country did they identify? Had they been brainwashed? How many others had been abducted? Were any of them still alive?
One year before, the events of September 11, 2001, had shaken me. Standing on the roof of my Brooklyn brownstone, I saw the twin towers fall. Although lucky enough not to have lost anyone close to me in the disaster, I recoiled at the nationalistic feelings that swept through the country afterward. I watched in dismay as many of my colleagues transformed themselves into de facto “war correspondents” in an attempt to remain relevant by covering the story that was “changing everything.” The next decade produced some extraordinary journalism and gave many reporters a new sense of purpose. I was not one of them. I didn’t want to write about the war or about radical Islam, and I was appalled by the way the terrorist attacks had tricked America into curtailing the very freedoms that made it a great nation. In an odd way, my fascination with Japan’s abductions helped me deal with America’s nervous breakdown.
The Invitation-Only Zone Page 20
