On Nov. 15, 1977, Shigeru Yokota’s 13-year-old daughter Megumi went missing after being let out of school in her seaside village. She was the very youngest of 13 Japanese youths that the North Korean government admitted to having abducted.
NORTH KOREA HAS A HABIT OF ABDUCTING FOREIGN NATIONALS ON THEIR OWN SOIL
Shigeru Yokota, an important activist in Japan, died at the age of 87 on Friday. Yokota was the leading figure in a scattered but influential movement advancing the cause of family members of Japanese citizens kidnapped from Japan by North Korean agents. I know that is a laborious sentence, but the North Korean habit of abducting foreign nationals on their own soil, or occasionally in some third country, is not very well known or much taught in the West. Even in Japan there are political factors making it difficult to discuss, which is why abductee- family groups had to be founded by people like Yokota in the first place.
On Nov. 15, 1977, Yokota’s 13- year- old daughter Megumi went missing after being let out of school in her seaside village. She was the very youngest of 13 Japanese youths that the North Korean government admitted, during a political summit in 2002, to having abducted. Kim Jong- il, then the supreme leader of North Korea, chalked the abductions up to contrived “heroism and adventurism” on the part of his spy service.
( No doubt there is some smidgen of truth in that non- excuse, but Kim Jr.’s personal role in encouraging abductions is not in any doubt. While his father was still alive and in power, he was the creepy cinema obsessive who arranged the dual kidnapping of the most famous married couple in South Korea’s movie industry — the actress Choi Eun- Hee and the director Shin Sang- Ok. Suspected North Korean abductions from South Korea number in the thousands since 1953, but with those two states still formally at war, there has been no North Korean admission or accounting of that activity.)
When Kim Jong- il made his surprising confession, he reported that eight of the Japanese abductees had died, including Megumi Yokota, and presented concocted death certificates for them. ( That the certificates had been prepared immediately before the summit was obvious, but North Korea fessed up to that a little later anyway.) The five acknowledged survivors were allowed to visit Japan on a promise that they would return. None did. They could not be forced to go back, but their failure to return choked off further discussion of the abductee issue between the two regimes.
The Yokotas were told that their daughter had committed suicide in 1994 and were given a container of ashes. DNA tests on these proved contentious and inconclusive. Shigeru Yokota believed, until the day of his death, that his daughter is still alive. But he had been left with no other choice but to act on that premise.
Before Kim’s confession, there was a great deal of doubt in Japanese society about the particular string of youth disappearances ( running from 1977 to 1983) now known to have been communist kidnappings. Even Western societies haven’t really grappled with the “teenage runaway” issues that the developed world encountered in the 1970s. Abductee families were widely dismissed as having bought a conspiracy theory, not least by the Socialist Party of Japan. And constitutionally pacifist Japan was in no position to make the kidnappings a casus belli.
Nowadays the topic is sensitive in Japan because it is mostly conservative politicians who feel strongly about it. This naturally leads to accusations of political “exploitation” of a sickening crime ( exploitation that takes the form of remembering it and demanding redress). As a matter of fact, it is an issue that obviously can be exploited, appropriately, as an argument against a wholly demilitarized nation. It would have been easier for Japan not to talk about it at all if it weren’t for the mothers and fathers of the missing.
The swelling throng of pro- communist revisionists in the English- speaking world can always dismiss North Korea’s habit of abducting South Koreans and the occasional foreigner as a regional quirk, a particular madness confined to one peninsula. But the North Korean government’s propensity for snatching southerners began during the war, as a matter of classical communist doctrine.
It was originally focused on capturing a sufficient quantity of the labour of the national “intelligentsia” to build the foundations of the new state. Successful professionals, left to vote with their feet, mostly did not want anything to do with communism. So the North kidnapped them, in great numbers. It is a natural extension of the principle whereupon communist countries prevent their own citizens from leaving. Doesn’t their labour belong to the people? Can’t it be justly confiscated in the name of revolution?
In time, unlike most communist states, the North Koreans proceeded to find it useful to take a few others from outside Korea when the opportunity presented itself. The Japanese abductees, in particular, seem to have been used as language and culture trainers for spy schools. In the communist imagination, this is, like a standard assassination, easily justified as a matter of national self- defence. Within the party, or any analogous institution, its inhumanity would only make it more praiseworthy.
SHIGERU YOKOTA BELIEVED ... THAT HIS DAUGHTER IS STILL ALIVE.