That first interview served as the foundation of a five-page Time Magazine story that ran the next week. Already, that first day we talked, he mentioned the book he wanted to write. He said one of the Japanese foreign ministry people who helped him get from Jakarta to the Tokyo hospital had given him the idea. Before either he or the Japanese government realized that the U.S. Army would provide a free defense counsel, the Japanese bureaucrat suggested that writing a book would be one way to pay for a lawyer.
I stayed in touch with Jenkins after the story came out, and after the media furor died down, I followed up on his book idea. “If you really want to do that,” I said, “I would be happy to write it with you.” He agreed, we found a Japanese publisher, and I took two months off work in the summer of 2005 to move near his home on the tiny Japanese island of Sado. Every morning, five days a week, I would pedal three or four miles on my bike from my small waterfront rental to his house. I would interview him for eight hours straight, except when we broke for lunch, eating the food that Hitomi left us before she went to work at City Hall in the morning. I would then write most of the weekend. I have tried to retain in print the very simple and plainspoken way he has of speaking.
Those two months interviewing Robert were some of the most remarkable times of my life. It would be obvious at this point to say that there is no one in the world like him and knowing him is a consistently dumbfounding experience. He is, in many regards, a living, breathing Rip Van Winkle. As he is quick to point out, he did get some of the biggest world news over the years. He knew that a man had walked on the moon, he knew the space shuttle blew up, and, since the United States was always national enemy number one, he always had a pretty good idea who the president was. But the gaps in cultural knowledge were frequently strange. He arrived back in Japan not knowing what a Big Mac or Sixty Minutes was. When Capt. Culp first asked him which publication he’d like to tell his story to, he didn’t say Time but Life, a magazine that suspended weekly publication in 1972. When I arrived in Sado, I brought, as a small gift, a DVD of a movie I thought he’d like: Bonnie and Clyde. He had never heard of it. When he sings karaoke, he sticks to Elvis Presley songs, since they are just about the only ones in a standard karaoke repertoire he is familiar with.
As this memoir shows, some Western popular culture did slip through North Korea’s media blackout, but these limited doses have had an odd effect on him. Ever since a smuggled videotape of a 1980s Michael Jackson concert somehow made its way to him in the 1990s, for example, he’s been something of a Jackson fan. It always amused me that whatever was making the bulk of the entertainment headlines at the time in 2004 and 2005—whether Jennifer Lopez, The Sopranos, or the latest Spider-Man movie— Robert would be oblivious. But whenever a TV segment or newspaper story about Michael Jackson appeared (and this being the mid-2000s, it was always a story about his legal troubles), Robert would be sure to stop and watch or read it. “He does seem to be a lot weirder these days,” Robert once said to me after watching a CNN segment about some court appearance Jackson was involved in.
As we started to get down to work, I have to admit I felt some disappointment when I determined how, generally, the arc of his life and his time in North Korea was going to go. Before I began, I had two equal and opposite storytelling fantasies. On the one hand, I thought it would be ideal if he had lived a life of decadent privilege at the right hand of Kim Jong-il, if he had acted as a kind of senior advisor or even court jester in the Dear Leader’s inner circle. I would think less of him as a person, but what a great story that would have been. Or, I thought, it would have been just as compelling if Jenkins were forced to live a completely opposite life—if, for forty years, he had had to withstand the unending misery of prison, torture, and starvation. From a humanitarian point of view, of course, I would be sorry for any suffering he may have gone through, but if he had endured forty years starring in his own, real-life Deer Hunter, he would have been a true American hero, regardless of his original crimes.
In fact, Robert’s life was neither of these. His was a life of quiet desperation, of suffering an almost unbearably understated evil. He and his fellow Americans were considered special by the Organization—about that, there can be no doubt. They led lives significantly richer in material comforts than most North Koreans were able to. But it is also clear that the North Koreans never figured out what to do with these trophies, how best to put them to use. It’s another, admittedly perverse way in which much of the potential of Jenkins’s life was squandered, not just by himself but also by his overlords. They didn’t know what to do with him, so they let him do, effectively, nothing. Occasionally, I would ask him what he did between the years of, say, 1986 and 1990, and sometimes he would say exactly that. “Nothing. During that time I did nothing.”
Nothing, except to try to stay alive and sane in a country that’s effectively a giant prison. The curtain Robert draws back on the mundane, relentless, dehumanizing operation of the North Korean state—its wastes of money and labor on domestic spying rather than economic output, its language-debasing doublespeak, its interference in the most intimate details of its residents’ lives—helps demonstrate how insidious and debilitating, bizarre and oppressive the country is. The story of Robert’s life was more difficult to tell since it did not reach either extreme of the sensationalism spectrum. He is neither a villain nor a hero, just a man trying to cope with the guilt of a horrible mistake while eking out an existence in a country unimaginably strange and hostile. But I hope that this attention to the quotidian, this focus on the struggle of everyday life, has produced a more nuanced and valuable contribution to our understanding of North Korea.
What are some of my most prominent impressions of Robert, as I got to know him? First and foremost, he is a deeply saddened individual. One story I wrote about him for Time was entitled “The Long Mistake,” and I think that sums up well how he has had to come to terms with his life. Short of teenagers who dive into shallow pools of water, break their necks, and become paralyzed for life or drunk drivers who survive when their victims do not, I can’t think of too many people who have had to live so long with an error they couldn’t undo, and I can’t imagine how that presses on someone’s soul.
Another clear conviction: Robert tells the truth. There have been numerous times when Robert told me something that either sounded insane, trumped up, or nonsensical only to have my doubts shattered by the realization that he was—despite my suspicions or my frequently patronizing conclusion that, oh, he’s just gotten a little ahead of himself—absolutely correct. As we were working on the book, some of the back stories he gave me on how the Americans’ wives got to North Korea sounded a little farfetched. But, to use the most publicly vetted example, consider how almost everything he said about Larry Allen Abshier’s wife, Anocha, has turned out true. When Jenkins was finally allowed to leave North Korea in 2004, he says, North Korean officials went through all of his photos (some of which appear in this book) and confiscated any that included non–family members. But they missed a snapshot with a South Asian–looking woman in the far left of the frame, a woman Robert identified as Anocha. When CBS News ran a story online about whether Anocha might be the first confirmable non-Japanese North Korean abductee along with this photo in late 2005, the story winded back to Thailand, and Anocha’s brother came forward to identify her and corroborate virtually everything Robert said about her history.
That revelation proved a huge boost to Robert’s international credibility and started the hunt for more non-Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea, of whom Robert says there are many. It is a topic that newspapers throughout South Asia are taking very seriously. I doubt they will have much luck in getting the North Koreans to admit anything, considering how long it took the Japanese to make headway on the issue, but it’s a start. After the book was published in Japan, the mother of Jerry Wayne Parrish’s wife, Siham, also resurfaced, confirming Robert’s version of her story as well. After numerous similar occurrences, I
am inclined to take what he says about, for example, the identity of Seoul City Sue, whether fellow American James Dresnok habitually beat him to a pulp, and a host of other topics as truthful until proven otherwise. Although Dresnok recently denied to a documentary film crew in North Korea that he ever beat up Robert in anything more than a single fair fist fight, it seems to me such an odd thing to fabricate, and a thing that reflects poorly on Robert (what soldier would want to admit he couldn’t defend himself against another?), I can’t imagine why he would make a story like that up.
What else? I am impressed by Robert’s resilience, his tenacity, and his absolute refusal to quit. I am impressed by his desire to try to set things right, which I think comes from somewhere deep in his soul, and his willingness, at the first realistic chance he got, to risk, for all he knew, a life in a U.S. military prison so his daughters could have a better life. He’s a completely ordinary man who almost literally stumbled into history yet made amends for his heartbreaking, colossally tragic error with bravery and integrity.
Jim Frederick October 2007
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following people for all of their help and support:
My wife, Hitomi, and my daughters, Mika and Brinda
My family back in the United States, especially my mother, Pattie, my sisters Pat and Brenda, and my brothers-in-law Lee and Reggie
The people and the government of Japan, especially former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, Kyoko Nakayama, Akitaka Saiki, and Takashi Okada
The people and government of Sado Island, especially Mayor Koichiro Takano and Keigo Honma (also known as Kakuhonsan), as well as Toshiaki Wakabayashi, Tatsuya Ando, Mayumi Oda, Katsue Hamada
The administration and officers of the Niigata Prefecture Police Department
Yoichiro and Midori Doumae, who have been kind enough to host Brinda and Mika while they go to school in Niigata
James D. Culp
Maj. Gen. Elbert N. Perkins, commanding general of Camp Zama
All the soldiers, officers, staff, and their families at Camp Zama, especially those who were at Headquarters and Headquarters Company in late 2004, including Maj. Dave Watson, 1st Sgt. Eugene Moses, Sgt. 1st class Andrew Rogerson, Capt. Valerie Manuel, Japan Self-Defense Forces Sgt. 1st Class Masuhiro Ogata and everybody who worked with me in the orderly room; Maj. Steven Smyth and his wife, Emily; Lt. Col. Jack Amberg; and Toma Rusk
Former U.S. ambassador to Japan Howard Baker and the U.S. embassy staff, especially translator Yoko Yamamoto
The U.S. Army, the people, and the government of the United States of America
The doctors, nurses, and staff of the Tokyo Women’s Medical University Hospital
Satoshi Gunji and Tetsuya Sugahara of Kadokawa Shoten, Hamish Macaskill and Junzo Sawa of the English Agency, and Neeti Madan of Sterling Lord Literistic
Reed Malcolm, Kate Warne, and Jimmée Greco of the University of California Press
Prelude
When Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi came to North Korea for his first, big, one-day summit with Kim Jongil on September 17, 2002, we didn’t know about it until he had already left. My wife, Hitomi, and I were watching TV that night and the announcer on the state-run news program (the only kind of news available in North Korea) said that Koizumi had been to Pyongyang for a visit, and that “repatriating Japanese who were living in North Korea” was one of their topics of discussion. The news made it sound like the two leaders talked about the fates of families with Japanese roots who, for various political and diplomatic reasons, had been stuck in North Korea since the chaotic aftermaths of World War II or the Korean War.
The show didn’t include anything about the Japanese citizens, possibly numbering in the dozens, that North Korea had kidnapped from Japanese soil in the 1970s and 1980s and forced to teach at its spy schools. The show did not even mention the word “abductee,” but I turned to Hitomi and said, “This has got something to do with you.” She waved me off, saying, “No way.”
I ran into the closet and pried up some of the floorboards under which I hid my radio. It was a little portable job that a friend of mine bought years ago from some Syrian medical students who were studying at the No. 11 Hospital in downtown Pyongyang. I couldn’t get NHK (Japan’s public TV and radio broadcaster) right away, but I did get Voice of America. The lead story: Koizumi confronts Kim over abductees at historic summit. I said, “God damn! I knew it!” Hitomi’s English isn’t so great, so I gave her one side of the earphones and translated the newscast as it was broadcast. We were stunned. Kim confirmed for the first time that North Korea had systematically stolen Japanese people for decades, and he revealed that some of these abductees, including my wife, were still alive in North Korea.
The Japanese government and media were totally surprised that someone named Hitomi Soga was one of the abducted that North Korea admitted to having still. She was not on the roster of suspected abductees that the Japanese government had submitted ahead of the meeting, and you could hear the newscasters that night scramble for details on this unknown woman. “Who is she? Where did she come from? Why didn’t the Japanese know about her before? We will bring you details as we uncover them.”
By the afternoon of the next day, the radio networks had started to piece it all together, and by the time I tuned into NHK that evening, they had almost the whole story. They knew not just the details of Hitomi’s abduction in 1978 from her hometown on Sado Island, but that she was now married to me, Sgt. Charles Robert Jenkins, a mysterious American who, for reasons unknown, was thought to have walked across the DMZ and into the communist dictatorship on a cold January morning in 1965.
As we finished listening to the news that second night, we didn’t know what it all meant or what was going to happen to us, but we did know that some people from the Organization would be coming for us soon.
And the next morning, they did.
1 | Super Jenkins
My first memories are of World War II. One day, late in the summer I was five years old, the fire engine in our town was running up and down the main street with its lights flashing and sirens blaring. Rich Square, North Carolina, where I was born, was a small, poor town, so the main drag was only a few blocks long and had only a single stoplight. But when the engine got to the end of the street it would turn around and come back the other way, clanging and making a racket, over and over again. I asked my mother why the fire truck was doing that, and she said it was celebrating because the war was over.
The winter before that, I remember my mother would go to a little shed in a cotton patch on the edge of town in the middle of the night a couple of times a week. She was part of a rotation with others from town pulling watch for the German air raids that everybody feared but that never came. I spent many nights in that little shack there with her, playing with whatever little wooden or tin toy I brought, while she scanned the skies.
My father never pulled air-raid watch. He was too busy working. He worked down at the ice plant only a couple hundred yards from my house, and he was working all the time. For days at a time, I would rarely see him. He was the foreman, though the plant was small. Usually he oversaw two other men at a time. He often said that the plant never took a break, so neither could he. He would come in to the house at, say, 4:00 a.m. and get two or three hours of sleep. Then he would head back to the plant, work until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., come home and have dinner, get a few more hours sleep, and then head back out to the plant before dawn. That was typical. My father was drafted into World War II, but he never served. The doctor from our town wrote the draft board to get him out of going, not for any medical reason but because, the doctor wrote, “the town’s gotta have ice.”
My father was a big man, not like me. At a different plant he worked at in a nearby town called Rocky Mount we moved to for a few years, there was an elevator that would carry the fivehundred-pound blocks of ice up to the freight train cars for loading, but it broke a lot. When it did, my fath
er would grab the blocks one by one with a giant set of tongs and drag them up a ramp to the train all by himself. At times like these it seemed like there was nothing he couldn’t do.
Drinking was his weakness. He liked his alcohol, and Three Bears Whiskey was his favorite drink. When he wasn’t drunk, he was all right, but drinking got him into trouble a lot. His name was Clifton Rose Jenkins, but he hated his middle name—and he was none too fond of his first name, either, to be honest. One day, one of the black men who worked for him came into the office and said, “Hiya, Clifton.” This was a time when open racism was still a regular part of American life, especially in the South. We called blacks “negroes” or even “niggers” back then and didn’t think twice about it. Blacks were forced to use different water fountains and different bathrooms, and when they came to a white person’s house, they had to use the back door. And when a black man talked to any white man, especially his boss, like this one was doing, he was supposed to address his boss formally— as in “Mr. Jenkins”—not use his first name. So my father, who was drunk at the time, picked a pistol out of the desk drawer and fired it at the man, missing him by only a couple of inches. A few days later, Mr. Boomer, who owned the ice plant, came down to the plant to see my father and give him hell for what he’d done. Even though it was a Sunday morning when Mr. Boomer came by, my father was drunk again, and you could hear them fighting from halfway down the street. Things got so heated that my father said, “to hell with it,” and climbed the electrical pole outside the plant. Usually you need spikes to climb a pole, but my father scampered up it like a big old bear, pulled the switch, and cut all the electricity to the plant. “Let your damn ice melt!” my father yelled. Mr. Boomer later told my mother that my father was the best worker he had ever seen, but he could hardly bear all the bad behavior that came with him.
The Reluctant Communist Page 3
