In the meantime, the Organization still had to find wives for Abshier and Dresnok. Dresnok’s wife wound up being a Romanian woman named Dona. When I first met her in early 1981, she was about twenty-eight years old. According to Dona, she was the daughter of a Russian woman and a Romanian army colonel. Her father molested her throughout her childhood, so she couldn’t get out of the house fast enough. When she was in her early twenties, she met and married an Italian and moved to Italy. She got pregnant but had a miscarriage one night after she went out dancing. Dona was doing some hard living—drinking, drugs—that her husband did not approve of, so he ultimately divorced her. With some of the settlement money, Dona went to art school in Italy. She was one hell of an artist. I will give her that. She could draw like she knew what she was doing.
One night, she was in a bar in Italy, and she met an Italian man who asked her about her background, what she was doing in town, things like that. She told him she was an artist, and he asked her if she would like to go on an art tour. He was acting like an art dealer or agent or some sort of big shot but was, in retrospect, a North Korean sympathizer or paid agent. “How about Hong Kong?” he asked her. “There are a lot of interesting things going on in the art business in Hong Kong right now.” She didn’t have either a Romanian or an Italian passport at this time, for some reason, so he fixed her up with a North Korean one, and off they went. They traveled through Russia, no problem, and they stopped in North Korea before Hong Kong. And in Pyongyang the North Koreans stopped her, claiming her passport was a fake, which obviously it was. But in her panic and under interrogation, they coaxed a confession out of her that she was a spy. And so now they had her, and she wasn’t going anywhere. She was stuck there for good.
Abshier wound up marrying a Thai woman named Anocha. The story of Anocha, who was a few years younger than Dona, is far more simple. After growing up in Thailand and becoming a prostitute, she moved to Macau in her late teens to work in a (nonsexual) bathhouse to try to make a better life for herself. One night, on her way home from work, she was jumped in an alley by two men, forced onto a boat, and taken against her will to North Korea. That was just a few months before meeting Parrish. She said there were two more kidnapped Asian women from Macau on her boat on the way over, but she was not allowed to talk to them, and she never saw them again. When the men all returned from Pyongyang with their new wives, Abshier moved in to Dresnok’s old house, the one near mine in Li Suk, while Parrish and Dresnok took the two houses in the nearby town.
I am certain that there are many people from many nationalities who have been kidnapped from their own countries or who were tricked into coming to North Korea and are now being held against their will. I saw many people from Hong Kong and Southeast Asia who I am sure had been snatched, and many of the Europeans and Middle Easterners I knew, saw, or met in North Korea were, for one reason or another, unable to leave the country due to obstacles that the North Koreans purposely constructed to keep them there. So ever since arriving in Japan, there is one thing that I have never been able to understand: Why is Japan the only country that is—rightfully—making the return of abducted citizens or citizens who are being held against their will in North Korea a large part of their diplomatic dealings with that country? It is a tragedy, in my opinion, that more countries don’t investigate further or take the stand that Japan has, because this should not just be Japan’s issue to fight alone. I am certain there are abductees from all over the world in North Korea.
While the other three Americans were off being given their new wives in Pyongyang, I was left alone to deal with my new cook, Go Chung-mi. She arrived less than a week after Lee left, and, no matter how poorly Lee and I got along, it was only after Go arrived that I realized how good I had had it. Go was nicer than Lee, perhaps, but she was impossible to live with because she suffered from seizures. Violent, table-overturning, body-shaking, tongue-biting, rolling-on-the-floor seizures. She suffered from at least one large one and a number of small ones every day. Go’s explanation for her condition was that during an operation years ago, they had taken too much blood, and she fell into a coma for three months. When she came out of it, she suffered from these seizures ever since. That explanation didn’t explain a whole lot in my book, but at a real level, it didn’t matter what the root was. All that mattered was that she couldn’t really live a normal life. Whether the seizures were a symptom or the cause, Go was certifiably crazy, too. She would wear the same apron all the time. I don’t mean she was just kind of grubby. She wouldn’t take it off for weeks. She would go out and plant or pick corn and then come in and cook, with her hands and clothes still covered in mud. If she spilled a bowl of soup, she would mop it up with the apron and wring it out, then mop up some more and wring it out again, and never change the apron. Sometimes, she would crawl around on the floor, giggling and scrutinizing the floor, looking for fleasized bugs that weren’t there. That didn’t stop her from “catching” them, picking them up, and admiring them. I begged the cadres to take her away. I told them that I simply couldn’t live like this. Finally, on January 15, 1980, they sent her to a textile mill where they stashed the insane, the retarded, and the socially unfit. I felt bad for her, but she shouldn’t have been assigned to be a cook in the first place.
5 | Soga-san
Soon after Go Chung-mi left, my leaders told me that there would be another woman coming soon. But she was not a cook, and she was not even Korean, though they called her by a Korean name, Min Hae-gyun. They did not tell me she was Japanese at the time, only that she was Asian and that they wanted me to teach her English. Though they first told me about her very soon after Go Chung-mi’s departure, her actual arrival did not come until months later. And even on the day she was finally to appear, she was still very late. That’s because of the heavy rains that were coming down that made travel nearly impossible. The little bridge closest to my house had washed out, so they had to hook the 280 Mercedes they were driving to a bulldozer and pull it through the thirty-foot-wide river. I found out later that the car had waited six or seven hours for the bulldozer to arrive. Once they were crossing the river, the water came rushing into the car so high that the girl had to pull her feet up onto the seat and perch there like a bird. When they got to the top of the hill, they decided they could not chance driving down the steep, muddy lane that led to my house and chose to walk. But the girl was wearing high heels, so the leader ran ahead to my house to see if they could borrow a pair of my boots. He took a spare pair of leather boots I’d had for years and ran back up the hill to give them to her so she could come down safely.
Finally, on June 30, 1980, at about 10:00 p.m., there was a knock on my door. When I opened the door and Hitomi Soga walked in, my heart stopped. I didn’t even notice the driver and the leader she was flanked by. I had never seen anybody so beautiful in my life. Just twenty-one years old, she was wearing a white blouse, a white skirt, and white high-heel shoes. In those grubby, old surroundings, it was like she was from a dream or an entirely different planet.
She walked in and sat down with my leader and her leader. The four of us had a toast, including the always-required words of praise to Kim Il-sung, and we started talking. We were guarded, and it was awkward. She was especially spooked since they did not tell her that she was going to a foreigner’s house until she was at the top of the hill. She figured she was going to live with another Japanese woman or at least a Japanese man. And this was North Korea, after all, where you learn early not to trust anyone right off the bat. I didn’t know much about the abductees; I had heard only rumors, so I figured even if she were Japanese, which she said within the first few minutes, she could be a true believer. She must have come there by her own choice or her family’s choice, to study Juche or something. The leaders left at 11:30 p.m., although I am sure one of them stayed up listening to us. Her Korean was good, a lot better than mine and better even than Dresnok’s, who had the best Korean out of all of us Americans. How good her Korean was also made m
e a little suspicious. At that point, who knew who she could have been? She could have been a spy herself.
That first night we stayed up until 3:00 a.m. talking. Mostly it was small talk about how difficult her trip in the rain had been, where she had traveled from, things like that. As the hours passed and it grew late, I noticed that she was yawning frequently. I asked her if she was tired. She said yes, but she didn’t make a move to lie down, even though she was sitting on my bed. I could tell that she was scared that I was going to try to take advantage of her. I tried to reassure her by showing her the extra bedding I had laid down in the corner of the other room. I told her that I would be sleeping in there from now on and that the bed was hers. She must have been exhausted and relieved, because when she heard that, her head hit the pillow, and she was deeply asleep within minutes.
Although I was supposed to be teaching her English, both Hitomi and I knew that the Organization wanted us to get married. A man and a woman didn’t get thrown together like that unless marriage was part of the plan. Even though our entire courtship wound up taking only a few weeks, the Organization did not force this marriage like they had routinely forced marriages between foreigners (and North Koreans, for that matter) in the past. I don’t know why, exactly, but I imagine it’s because they figured there was no way they could make a young, beautiful woman like Hitomi be with a forty-year-old coot like me unless she really wanted to.
They told us to take a few weeks to get to know each other before starting our lessons, and that’s what we did. I told the cadres to just leave us alone. To be honest, more than one of the leaders told me to simply claim her as my own. By that, they meant rape her, and usually they used language far more graphic. I told them to go to hell, that I could never do that to anyone, let alone this poor innocent girl. If we were meant to be together, I said, we would wind up that way, and it would be by her choice as much as mine. The worst thing the leaders could do, I told them, was to try to pressure us. For once, finally, the leaders listened to me, and after a while, they kept to the background for the most part.
That first week, Hitomi barely came out of her room. She was very shy. In retrospect, she was probably very scared, too. I didn’t have a cook anymore, so while she was at her most shy, I did most of the cooking. One day I would bring her cabbage soup and rice. The next day, I would bring her rice and cabbage soup. “The same thing, every meal!” she soon started to exclaim. It was true. I’m not much of a cook now, and I was even less of one then. Cabbage soup was about all I could make. One thing I did learn to make over the years, though, was kimchi: I can make the best kimchi you have ever eaten.
At the time, one of my regular tasks was to transcribe Englishlanguage radio broadcasts into Korean for the cadres, so I had a Korean-made Horse That Leaps 1,000 Ri–brand radio (a ri is a unit of measurement that’s about a quarter of a mile) and a tape recorder in my bedroom that I didn’t even have to hide. One day that first week, I went into the bedroom and turned on NHK for her. Her eyes got big as headlights, and she started shaking. “You can’t do that,” she said. “They’re gonna kill us! They will cut our heads off!” I said to her that this was my house, and even in North Korea, I would do as I pleased. I told her she could listen to the radio as much as she wanted here. But she never really believed me. She turned the radio off as soon as I walked out of the room, and she never touched it again.
In as many ways as I could think of, I tried to make her as comfortable as possible. I would bring her cider and small sweets when she was studying in her room alone. Another thing I would do was spend a few minutes killing as many mosquitoes as I could in her room before she turned in for the night. The mosquitoes are so big and nasty there, they will practically carry you away. With her permission, I would come into the room after she had turned out the lights. I would sit in the corner with a flashlight pointed toward the floor. Between the light and my scent, many of the mosquitoes that would have been bothering her came over toward me. I would swat as many as I could see for as long as it took, so that she could have a more undisturbed rest. And then I would creep out of the room. Usually, she was already asleep by the time I left.
Soon we started playing cards. Blackjack was the only game I knew how to play well, so we played endless games of blackjack. And we smoked. A lot. In that first month, we must have gone through ninety packs of cigarettes. Other times we played a game that the leaders taught us that was a lot like gin. One time, while we were playing cards alone, I said to her that I had heard that a number of Japanese had been kidnapped and brought here against their will. Without saying a word, she pointed to her nose to indicate: “I am one of them.” Before long, she had told me her whole story, which I still cannot believe. It makes me so sad.
On August 12, 1978, Hitomi and her mother, Miyoshi, went shopping at a small grocery shop and general store down the street from their house. They lived in a town called Mano on Sado Island, a small island off the west coast of the biggest of the four main islands of Japan. It is a very beautiful place but very isolated, so much so that in feudal times political prisoners were frequently banished there. For centuries, fishing, farming, and gold mining were the main, if not only, industries. Hitomi, the oldest of two daughters, was studying to be a nurse. On that day, around dusk, the mother and daughter had bought ice cream, among other items, and were walking home. They were just a few hundred yards from home when three men jumped them from behind. That was the last time Hitomi ever saw her mother. To this day, nobody knows what happened to her. (Of course, somebody in North Korea knows, but the government there continues to lie, saying it doesn’t know anything about Miyoshi.) I know Hitomi holds out hope that her mother is still alive in North Korea somewhere and that someday they will be reunited.
One of the men wrestled Hitomi to the ground, tied her hands, gagged her, and stuffed her in a black body bag. Hitomi was so stunned and scared that she wasn’t even able to scream. The man who grabbed her threw her over his shoulder like a sack of coal and carried her to a small skiff with a motor that was under a bridge spanning a small inlet. The small boat chugged about an hour out to sea, where Hitomi was picked up and carried onto a larger boat and put down in the hold. The next morning, they let her out onto the deck, but there was nothing to see, just an open sea and a virtually empty ship. Whenever another boat appeared on the horizon, they made her go down below again.
They sailed the whole rest of the day and landed in Chongjin, North Korea, on the evening of the thirteenth. The next morning, they gave her breakfast and took her to the beach to look for clams. That is typical of how strange the North Korean cadres are, how out of touch they are with the emotions normal people have. Here they have just kidnapped you and your mother and separated you, they have ripped you from your home street in your own country without any explanation or any idea of what is going to become of you, and they are so out of touch with what they have just put you through and how much you might hate them and fear them at that moment that they see nothing weird in saying, “Now that we have a few moments, maybe it would be fun for you to go to the beach to look for some clams?” They are that crazy. By the end of the morning, a car came to take them to the train station, and Hitomi was on her way to Pyongyang. It was an overnight train. She showed up in Pyongyang at 7:30, the morning of August 15. That day, which marks the end of World War II in the Pacific, is, of course, a holiday in both Japan and Korea, but for very different reasons.
One of the saddest parts of Hitomi’s story, in my opinion, is that she and her mother were never considered potential abductees by Japan until North Korea confessed in late 2002 that it had kidnapped her. The announcement by the North Koreans that Hitomi was one of the living abductees took everyone, including the Japanese government, totally by surprise. The Japanese government didn’t do anything wrong—I am not saying that. There are too many missing persons to keep track of and too many suspicious disappearances to investigate to think that the Japanese government could be on top of them a
ll. No, the part that makes me sad is the thought of being missing and wanting to be home and yet having no one looking for you. It is like you no longer exist, even though you do.
Hitomi’s father was a heavy drinker, so the rumor around Sado was that Hitomi and her mother ran away. For days, townspeople checked all the ferryboat registers and passenger lists on trains on the mainland. Some thought they had committed suicide. I feel very sorry for her father and younger sister, not only because they were left behind like that but also because of the cloud of doubt and the rumors that followed them around for years. Hitomi’s father did live long enough to be reunited with his daughter before he died in February of 2005, and that is something to be thankful for.
Here on Sado, where I now live, at least a few times a week I pass by the store where Hitomi and her mother were shopping, the point where they were jumped by the North Koreans, and the bridge under which she was hustled into a boat that whisked her off to sea. And every time I do, I feel an intense sadness for everything my wife has suffered and lost. If fate threw us together, I hope that I have been a good enough husband to at least partially make up for all of the other suffering she has experienced.
After a few weeks of getting thrown in and out of different guesthouses, Hitomi was finally placed with Megumi Yokota. Yokota is the Japanese abductee who was snatched by North Koreans on her way home from badminton practice from her home city of Niigata in late 1977, when she was only thirteen. Today, she is probably the most famous of all the abductees and the strongest symbol for those in Japan working for more information about those still missing. There is much speculation and controversy to this day about whether she is alive or killed herself in the early nineties like the North Koreans say and whether the remains they sent back in 2004 really are hers.
The Reluctant Communist Page 10
