The Invitation-Only Zone (11 page)

Its influence growing, the Communist Party soon dominated
the labor unions, which took a more militant pose. In January 1947 the National Congress of Industrial Unions, Japan’s largest labor federation, announced its plans for a nationwide general strike. The honeymoon between the United States and the Communists was over. This was more democracy than MacArthur had anticipated, and he reversed course, banning the strike the day before it was to
begin. Whereas the Communists had once been wooed, they were now lumped in with the militarists and fascists as opponents of Japan’s new democracy. In 1950, MacArthur accused the party of having “cast off the mantle of pretended legitimacy and assumed instead the role of an avowed satellite of an international predatory force.” Twenty thousand Communists were fired from their jobs, and by 1952 the
party had lost all thirty-five of its seats in the legislature.

After Sato delivered his ship to San Francisco, he returned to Niigata to work for Kawasaki Kisen, one of Japan’s largest shipping companies. He had become active in the union movement and was stunned by the Americans’ about-face. “Why did MacArthur stop us from striking? We thought it was the highest expression of our faith in democracy,”
he says. Sato, too, was fired, which shattered any belief he had in America’s democratic ideals. MacArthur, he concluded, was no more trustworthy than the emperor.

The day he learned he’d been let go, Sato had just checked in to the Uchino hospital, a facility for tuberculosis patients. Diseases that had been widespread during the war had reached epidemic proportions in the postwar chaos and
poverty. With food and water in short supply, tens of thousands of cases of cholera, dysentery, smallpox, and polio broke out across Japan. In 1946 there were 20,000 reported cases of typhus. In 1947 more than 146,000 died from tuberculosis alone, with another million infected. The Red Cross found that 70 percent of Japanese under age thirty tested positive for the disease. Sato’s case appeared mild,
so he was treated and released within three months. With no job, he resolved to complete his education and enrolled at a high school with students nearly a decade younger than he was. Despite the revolution the nation had undergone, he was struck by how little had changed. The teachers who years before had taught him to “hail the emperor” now displayed the same uncritical devotion to an abstraction
called “democracy,” and Sato was disgusted by the ease with which they had traded one set of beliefs for another. “This wasn’t thinking for yourself,” he says. “These people were simply obeying the ruling system, whatever it was. If the emperor had been reinstated the next week, they’d have followed him again.”
⁴

Tuberculosis is a devious disease whose symptoms wax and wane without warning. The
month before Sato was to receive his high school diploma, his breathing problems returned. The bacillus had in fact never left his body and was now stronger and more resilient. Streptomycin, the first antibiotic capable of curing tuberculosis, was isolated in 1943 at Rutgers University but wasn’t widely available in Japan until the early 1950s. Sato spent a good portion of the next five years in
the hospital, getting discharged when his doctors thought they had rid his body of tuberculosis and then being readmitted when it returned.

Despite his condition, he continued to agitate, this time on behalf of his fellow patients. With the postwar economy in shambles, the hospital had furloughed a portion of the nursing staff, and Sato was outraged. “These men and women had sacrificed their
health for the sake of their country, and now Japan was turning its back on them,” he says. He formed a patients’ association and went from ward to ward lecturing. He discovered he had a talent for public speaking, holding forth on subjects large and small without losing the audience’s interest. His performances made an impression on a particularly beautiful girl named Tamiko Sakamoto, a doctor’s
daughter whose illness had confined her to the hospital for two years. While Sato wasn’t as handsome as the boys who usually pursued her, he spoke with a passion she had never before heard. Tamiko’s case was less severe than Sato’s, so she was released after a small part of one of her lungs was removed. Sato got to know her by sight—how could he not?—but was too shy to introduce himself. And anyway,
what kind of suitor could he be stuck in the hospital?
⁵

The war had destroyed Sato’s faith in the emperor and the military, and the American occupiers had let him down by undercutting the very democratic institutions they had claimed to value. The only positive experience he’d had during the past few years was with his union brothers. They’d all worked together, for one another—not for the emperor,
not for the military, and certainly not for the Americans. It was a sense of solidarity and friendship he’d never felt before.

Given the communicable nature of tuberculosis, a hospital visit from someone other than a family member was rare. The only people who visited Sato were union brothers from the shipyards. Sato was familiar with the basic ideas of communism, but he now delved into them
deeply, reading Marx and Lenin from morning to night. He wasn’t the only patient undergoing an ideological conversion. In fact, the Communist Party sent tutors with a selection of leftist books and magazines to the hospital. Sato also received a real-life lesson in dialectical materialism. Although streptomycin was now available in Japan, it was so expensive—thirty thousand yen, or eighty dollars
back then, for twelve ampules—that it was out of the reach of most patients. “Those who could afford the medicine were cured, and those who couldn’t afford it died,” Sato says. “I saw one or two people die every day. It couldn’t have been a more concrete lesson: in the capitalist society, those with money live, and those without money die.”

Sato’s parents somehow came up with the money, and he
was cured—once again beating the odds. Never having held a steady job, he didn’t have a lot of options and settled for working in a bookstore that rented titles to people who couldn’t afford to buy them. Now that he was out of the hospital and supporting himself, his mind turned toward Tamiko. He found her address and wrote her a note, inviting her to visit him at the bookstore. She was intrigued
and began visiting him regularly. The final note she received contained a marriage proposal, which laid out the reasons they should be together. Sato and Tamiko married one year after they met, and he left the bookstore and helped her run her family’s cosmetics shop. Next to their shop was a Communist bookstore run by a young man named Harunori Kojima, whose life story was nearly identical to Sato’s.
Sons of poor Niigata rice farmers, both had joined the military in the final days of the war. The two became best friends and spent hours discussing the fine points of Marxist theory, and it wasn’t long before Sato joined the Communist Party himself. The two men had witnessed a world turned upside down. Perhaps communism could set it right again.

8

DEVELOPING A COVER STORY

North Korea is a country where everyone knows his place. In 1957 the central government created a caste system that classified every citizen according to his family’s political reliability, dividing the country into three groups: the trustworthy “core” class (descendants of anti-Japanese guerrillas, Korean War heroes, laborers, and farmers), a suspect “wavering”
class (merchants, professionals, and families originally from the South), and a “hostile” class (Christians, landowners, prostitutes, and wealthy businessmen). Individuals in these three groups were further classified into fifty-one subcategories, and the life prospects of every North Korean are still determined largely by one’s caste. While the core class and their children comprise the country’s
hereditary elite, the hostile class and their progeny are essentially “untouchables,” forbidden from living in major cities, attending the best schools, or serving in the military. As a member of the Japanese bourgeoisie, Kaoru Hasuike didn’t fit neatly into any of these categories, which made his prospect of successfully passing as North Korean unlikely.

With all the limitations of his situation
came a few odd advantages, and Kaoru learned to make the most of his liminal status by gaming the system whenever he had the chance. North Korea is one of the few parts of the globe that remains untouched by multiculturalism of any kind, and one consequence of its homogeneity and rigid social hierarchy is that its citizens receive no training in how to deal with the unexpected or foreign. The
Invitation-Only Zone’s rules were designed to minimize the possibility that its residents—who had access to privileged information or, in Kaoru’s case, were themselves state secrets—would come into contact with ordinary people living outside its confines. One rule was that the abductees were not supposed to leave the zone unless accompanied by a minder. However, Kaoru noticed that the more he and
Yukiko settled into their lives in the zone, the less their minder checked up on them. When their minder started taking most Saturdays and Sundays off, Kaoru began making unauthorized trips outside the zone, nodding confidently to the guards as he left, if only to experience the thrill of breaking the rules. For someone with no freedom, even the smallest taste of liberty was intoxicating. His short
trips got longer, and soon Kaoru would take his fishing rods an hour or so from the zone to a pond that he’d heard brimmed with carp and perch. Once there, he’d set his bait and spend hours enjoying nature, fishing by moonlight on warm summer evenings. Owned by a nearby school, the pond was officially off-limits, which made the transgression all the more satisfying.
¹

One Saturday morning, Kaoru
made the pilgrimage accompanied by an acquaintance from the zone. As the two men arrived at the pond, they nodded to the fishermen already there, dropped their lines, and waited for a nibble. Just then, several security officers appeared. “What are you doing here? Don’t you know that fishing is prohibited in this pond!” they shouted. North Korea is filled with petty officials either looking for
bribes or rousting intruders to make a point, but their tone struck Kaoru as unnecessarily aggressive. An officer whose armband identified him as a second lieutenant grabbed at Kaoru’s rod. “How dare you steal fish from the Department of Safety and Security!” he screamed.

Growing up in Japan, where indirection and understatement were the rule, Kaoru knew how to keep his thoughts to himself. And
if North Korea had taught him nothing else, it was the wisdom of this practice. For all its bellicosity, there was very little crime here, and Kaoru had not been an object of violence since the night he and Yukiko were abducted. Yet now he felt the resentment that had been burning inside him for years suddenly burst forth. Turning to his companion, Kaoru began shouting in Japanese. “Who is this
man? Why is he behaving so violently?” he asked. The officer fell silent, bewildered by the foreign language coming from Kaoru’s mouth. Sensing a shift in the balance of power, Kaoru seized his own lapel, dramatizing the encounter while pointing to the officer. “He grabbed my jacket like this!” he said in Japanese. “What is going on?” At this, the officer was completely flummoxed. “I did no such
thing!” he protested, pleading his innocence. Kaoru’s companion caught on to the ruse and quickly assumed the role of the voice of reason. “You see, this man is a guest from a foreign country,” he told the officer in Korean. “He came here to take a break and do some fishing. If you confiscate his gear, it will cause a lot of trouble for
everyone
.” In North Korea, getting mixed up in the affairs
of foreigners, regardless of the circumstances, is dangerous, and the officer dropped Kaoru’s rod and gestured for them to leave. Kaoru hadn’t won the argument, but he took satisfaction in having rattled the official.

Kaoru and Yukiko were allowed to take a long trip every two years or so—far more frequently than a typical North Korean, who would feel blessed if allowed to visit Pyongyang or
Mount Kumgang even once in his life. Like all “leisure” activities in the North, travel had a revolutionary purpose, and a typical trip consisted of stops at historical sites such as Kim Il-sung’s birthplace; the holy Mount Paektu, where it is alleged that Kim Jong-il was born; and the various battlefields where Kim Il-sung and his guerrilla army were said to have vanquished the Japanese. But for
Kaoru, these trips stirred feelings other than North Korean patriotism, reminding him that he would never fit in.

In the summer of 1981, Kaoru and Yukiko drove 125 miles to the port city of Wonsan. It was the first time Kaoru had seen the Sea of Japan since being abducted, and he could barely contain his emotions. The ocean’s aroma made him long for home. It was all he could do to stop himself
from leaping into the waves. “If I just swam and swam, maybe I could make it back,” he thought to himself. During a trip to Mount Paektu, Kaoru’s minder took him and Yukiko to the banks of the Tumen River to view the Chinese towns on the other side. The border was open there, with no fences or guards. On the Korean side, women washed their clothes on stones, while their children frolicked naked
in the water. On the Chinese side, a billboard read “Time Is Money,” a slogan for the economic reforms spreading through the Communist country. Kaoru wondered if he and Yukiko could dash across and make their way to a Japanese consulate.

The only trip Kaoru enjoyed was to Mount Myohyang, known as the “Mysterious Fragrant Mountain”; its deep ravines, pristine waterfalls, and densely wooded forests
soothed him. According to ancient legend, it was the home of Tangun, the mythical forefather of the Korean people. The area around the mountain is dotted with abandoned temples, but the modern attraction is the enormous museum exhibiting the gifts that foreign dignitaries gave Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. While Kaoru came for the nature, his minders looked forward to the banquet at which they
would drink copious amounts of
soju
(Korean vodka) and sing. Every night, his minders would press Kaoru to get drunk and sing with them. He would sip
soju
, and when his minders were inebriated, he would sneak out and explore the paths and bathe in the ravines. By tradition, one was allowed to wash only one’s hands in the water, so Kaoru positioned himself behind a rock, away from the path.