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  Japan renews effort to free abuctees |
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 | Reported by guardian.co.uk
on Wednesday, 28 October 2009
(3 weeks ago) |
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Hatoyama ministers say long captivity of victims snatched by Pyongyang secret agents is bar to thaw with Kim Jong-ilOn the evening of 7 July 1978, Yasushi Chimura and his fiancée, Fukie Hamamoto, drove in a small truck to a lookout point above the craggy coast that marks the city of Obama's meeting with the Sea of Japan.
The waters were placid, and the couple were excited about their wedding in November.They were not alone.
Agents from North Korea were on the hillside.
They overpowered the couple, took them to a waiting boat on Wakasa Bay and transported them nearly 500 miles to the Communist country where they were to spend the next quarter of a century.The disappearance of the couple was a local mystery and might well have remained so had it not been for a seemingly unrelated event thousands of miles away in the Middle East.Nearly a decade after the Chimura abduction, two North Korean agents stepped on to a Korean Air flight in Baghdad bound for Bangkok.
In Bahrain the agents disembarked, leaving a bomb on board.
The Boeing 707 took off again, exploded in flight, and 104 passengers and 11 crew were killed.
The agents were subsequently arrested while trying to leave the country.
One, a 70-year-old, killed himself with a poison capsule.
The other, 26-year-old Kim Hyon Hui, attempted suicide in the same fashion but was stopped.Kim was later flown to Seoul where a trial revealed a fact that would cause diplomatic reverberations: North Korea had been regularly abducting Japanese citizens to help train special agents.
Those agents would then pass themselves off as citizens from Japan, take part in terrorist plots and blacken the name of that nation.North Korea's antipathy towards Japan was ingrained after years of, at times, brutal colonisation from the 1900s to the end of the second world war.For Japan the news was the piece of a jigsaw that went towards solving the puzzle of numerous unexplained disappearances.Concrete confirmation came in July 2002 when North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-il, admitted that "over-zealous" special forces had abducted a least a dozen Japanese citizens - men, women and children between the ages of 13 and 46.
Eight had since died."It was regretful and I want to frankly apologise," said Kim.Chimura was one of those who survived, along with Fukie.
They returned to Japan three months after Kim's admission, and after diplomatic wranglings were joined by their three children, who had been born in Pyongyang.Today, the family lives in Obama.
But beyond these lives hopefully returning to normal, the anger of the Japanese government is plain to see.
Last week Yukio Hatoyama's recently-elected government said it was launching an investigation into the abductions, an inquiry that would potentially identify scores more victims.Officially, 17 Japanese have been identified as abductees, although private groups put the number in the scores.
Five have returned but the Japanese government contends that Pyongyang holds the remaining 12.
Accounts of the eight deaths tell of some dying, remarkably young, from heart attacks, others suffering gas incidents, another killed in a road accident.Hiroshi Nakai, a cabinet member and minister of state for the abduction issue, said previous administrations had not been bold enough in their efforts.
"We are trying to start a new investigation with a new perspective on this issue.
We think if we make further thorough investigations there would be more people who could be confirmed as abductees."At stake is not just the concern of the families but the delicate balance of diplomacy.
Since North Korea carried out its first nuclear test the international community has been desperate to contain its proliferation.Six-party talks, including Japan, the US and China, have made arguably little progress.
But in the latter days of the Bush administration and at the start of the Obama tenure, the US signalled a willingness to deal with Kim Jong-il directly.
In August Bill Clinton became the highest-profile US visitor to Pyongyang when he secured the release of two American journalists captured while in a border area.
There have also been face-to-face talks between diplomats as recently as last week in New York.Japan has viewed a thawing of relations between Kim Jong-il and the US with some concern and is determined the abduction issue will not be sidelined.
"Japan will never work on the normalisation of relations with North Korea without the resolution of the abduction issue," said Nakai.
"It doesn't matter to Japan if the US normalises the relationship.
The abduction issue is a roadblock … to normalisation for Japan."Meanwhile the Japanese government explores other avenues to keep the issue alive.
It invites the media to visit the abduction sites - the Guardian took part in one for this article - and produces comic books and DVDs.
It also broadcasts a daily three-hour shortwave radio programme to North Korea with taped messages from relatives and news from the homeland.Shigeo Iizuke has taken advantage of this to try to reach his missing sister, who vanished more than 30 years ago.
In June 1978, Yaeko Taguchi, who was 22 and a bar worker, dropped her two children, aged one and two, at a daycare centre before going to work at the Hollywood cabaret in Tokyo's Ikebukuro district.
She never arrived.Iizuke filed a report with the police and waited.
Months turned to years.
He and his wife adopted Taguchi's son, one-year-old Koichiro.
Another sister took on the responsibility of raising the other child.
Nothing was heard of Taguchi until the court testimony from Kim Hyon Hui, the Korean airline bomber.
She confessed to being trained by a Japanese abductee for nearly two years prior to her terror mission.
Subsequent investigations by Japanese authorities confirmed the teacher had been Taguchi.It also confirmed one of the key motives of the abductions.
North Korea, sealed off from the world in a hermit-like state, needed its agents trained in the ways of foreign societies to be able to assimilate with those societies and pass unnoticed."My sister was a perfect candidate," says Iizuke.
"She had experienced married life, and children, was knowledgeable about fashions and trends and songs of young Japanese women.
She was quite suitable to be a teacher of life to North Koreans."Now 71, with thinning, swept back hair, Iizuke clutches a picture of Taguchi, a laminated image of a woman with eyes closed in laughter, a broad smile spreading across a grainy face.
He says he knows she is not dead, despite the insistence of North Korea.
He has also since garnered more information about her desperate struggle against her abduction."It seems she was deceived and taken somewhere, maybe under the influence of a sleeping pill," said Iizuke.
"She was taken to a beach and although her route is sill not clear … she was taken to North Korea that way.
When she came to, she was wrapped in a black bag.
She begged the agent; she had left two small children behind."Iizuke, founding member of the Association of the Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea, firmly believes Japan now has to press harder for his sister's return.And he points to his adopted son as evidence for that.
"The boy my sister left behind in Japan was one year old.
He's now 31.
He does not remember anything about his mother.
He does not remember her voice, he does not remember the warmth of her skin.
Her son desperately wants to know of the reality of his mother."The disappearedMegumi Yokota The youngest, she was just 13 when taken in November 1977.
Some believe she was a mistaken target, having witnessed agents in action.
DNA analysis of ashes returned to her family proved it was not her.Yaeko Taguchi Abducted in June 1978.
She was taken to North Korea and forced to teach Japanese etiquette to an agent who helped explode a bomb on a Korean Air flight in 1987.Keiko Arimoto While studying in London, she was lured to Copenhagen on the pretence of a job interview in July 1983.
She has not been seen since.
North Korea claimed she died in a gas poisoning incident.
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