The Invitation-Only Zone (15 page)

The Hasuike and Chimura children led happy, even privileged lives. Both Kaoru and Yasushi’s daughters danced in the mass games, the synchronized
multimedia extravaganza performed in Kim Il-sung Stadium each fall. All was well until their eighth birthdays. Receiving an education so close to the Invitation-Only Zone posed a problem. Now that they were entering the kinds of friendships in which children compared the details of their family lives, the regime feared that information about the Invitation-Only Zones would spread, along with
curiosity about these special communities. The coast of North Korea is peppered with dozens of islands, many of which are too small for proper schools. For the children of those who inhabit the islands, the state set up a system of public boarding schools. So it was decided that the abductees’ children would attend a boarding school two hundred miles north of Pyongyang, where whatever they had gleaned
about the zone would be less meaningful. If none of the students knew precisely where, or with whom, their fellow students lived, any information they learned about them was useless. The abductees’ children would visit home for three months, during winter and summer holidays. There were no parents’ day visits or phone calls, and care packages took a month to arrive, if they were delivered at
all.

Like their parents, the children were passing as North Korean. Unlike their parents, however, they believed they
were
North Korean. As they got older, they began to question parts of their parents’ cover story. Doing so sometimes led to tension. Although they spoke only Korean in public, Fukie and Yasushi occasionally lapsed into Japanese at home. Hearing the language he had learned to associate
with colonial oppressors, their eight-year-old son turned on his mother. “You’re Japanese!” he shouted. Fukie couldn’t help herself. “Well, if I’m Japanese, then you’re Japanese, too!” she replied. He was taken aback by her irrefutable logic. The thought that he might not be pure North Korean upset him. “But I’m different … I’m not like
that
,” he stammered. “Maybe Dad is Korean.”

*   *   *

Perhaps the oddest aspect of the abduction project is how little the regime benefited from it. At first Kaoru taught Japanese language and customs to spies, but this came to an end in 1987, when a captured North Korean spy confessed to having been trained by a female Japanese abductee. From then on, their main job was to translate articles from Japanese into Korean, a task that could have been performed
by any one of the millions of North Koreans who had learned Japanese during the colonial era. At the start of every week, the Hasuikes and Chimuras would receive a huge stack of Japanese magazines and newspapers—
Asahi
,
Akahata
,
Yomiuri
,
Mainichi
,
Sankei
—with large sections blacked out by the censor and specific articles circled for translation. (The elite members of North Korean society were allowed
limited access to the foreign press through a government publication that aggregated approved international news for circulation.) Kaoru and Yasushi would translate, and Yukiko and Fukie would type the finished product on enormous manual typewriters. “I was able to hear more about the outside world than average North Koreans. I read Japanese and South Korean magazines, and there was a period
when I could listen to NHK and the Voice of America broadcasts on a shortwave radio. I had a general grasp of the major global developments, although I was always one beat behind,” says Kaoru.
³
And like all North Koreans, the abductees learned to read between the lines. In the run-up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the North did everything it could to detract from its rival’s success. As with Japan
in the 1964 Olympics, the 1988 Olympics symbolized the South’s arrival as a democratic world power. In a desperate attempt to upstage the South, the North blew up a Korean airliner the year before, killing everyone on board. Kaoru could tell from the vehemence and character of the denial that the North was guilty.

The newspapers were heavily redacted, but censors inevitably missed things; because
they weren’t aware of the top-secret abduction project, articles about the abductions weren’t always blacked out. One morning in 1997, Fukie came upon an article in
Asahi
about a new association created by the families of alleged abductees. At the top of the page was an old photograph of her. It wasn’t the most flattering picture, but it meant that someone in Japan knew what had happened to them.
She ran home to show Yasushi. She wanted to cut the article out and keep it, but he insisted she return it along with the other papers, so as not to arouse suspicion. All their friend Kaoru could think when he saw the photos was how much older his father looked. “I felt like I was suffocating,” he says. “I knew that my disappearance was the reason my father had aged so much.”
⁴

Like consumers
of news anywhere, the abductees followed each world event with one eye on its implications for their lives. The assassination of South Korean president Park Chung-hee (by the head of the South’s own intelligence agency) in October 1979 was immediately trumpeted over North Korean radio. The South was on the verge of collapse! Reunification was imminent! Kaoru wondered what reunification would mean
for him and the other abductees. Would they be freed? However, when nothing happened, the official media went silent on the subject.

The fall of the Soviet Union was the most difficult story to comprehend. Kaoru deduced that the North Korean regime was feeling threatened from the fact that the censors were blacking out more material than ever. In 1985 he had interpreted Gorbachev’s policy of
perestroika as portending socialism’s rebirth. He was therefore shocked four years later when the Communist leaders of East Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary were ousted. And not only were North Korea’s friends falling from power, but those who survived, such as Russia and China, were normalizing relations with South Korea. Reading between the lines, Kaoru felt it was clear that nothing was going
to change and that, in the future, the North was going to be more isolated than ever.

11

STOLEN CHILDHOODS: MEGUMI AND TAKESHI

The two-hour bullet train from Tokyo to Niigata traverses a seemingly endless patchwork of rice fields. Intersected by two rivers, and hard by the Sea of Japan, Niigata is known as the “city of water,” receiving more than one hundred fifty days of rain a year, the source of its prized sweet rice and sake. There is another sense in which it owes its
existence to its climate. One of five cities the United States considered for the 1945 atomic bombing, Niigata was judged too cloudy for an accurate shot, so Nagasaki was obliterated instead.

Through wars hot and cold, the city has linked Japan to the outside world. In 1869 its ports were opened for trade by the Japan-U.S. Treaty of Amity and Commerce. During colonial times, many of Japan’s military
incursions into Asia were launched from here. In the sixties and seventies it was the organizational hub for the ninety-three thousand ethnic Koreans who left Japan for North Korea. In the 1970s Niigata’s proximity to the North made it a natural destination for Kim Jong-il’s spies. As recently as 2006, it was the destination of a regular ferry route between Japan and North Korea. Kaoru and
Yukiko Hasuike were taken from a beach forty-five miles south of here; and the most famous abductee, Megumi Yokota, was snatched off a residential Niigata street, barely a hundred yards from her home.

I make a pilgrimage to Niigata whenever I’m in Japan, and have come to think of the city as psychologically divided into two neighborhoods: “Abduction-land” and “Repatriation-ville,” both tied to
the Korean Peninsula. Hop a cab at the central railway station and head west toward the ocean on Route 7. When you come to the Shinano River, you have a choice, much like the choice facing modern Japan. Cross the river and you’re in Abduction-land, the neighborhood where a thirteen-year-old girl named Megumi Yokota was abducted in 1977. But if you turn right at the river and drive down Route 113
to the port, you’re in Repatriation-ville, the staging ground where ninety-three thousand Japanese-born Koreans and their spouses set out for new lives in North Korea.

Something between a heavy mist and a light drizzle falls as my cab navigates its way over the Shinano River and through the narrow streets of western Niigata. The driver is puzzled that I want to visit the beach on such a miserable
day, but when I explain that I’m investigating the disappearance of Megumi Yokota, he tells me he had just started driving his cab in 1977 and remembers the events of that fall well. “People were searching for her everywhere, on the beaches, on the streets,” he says. We arrive at the ocean and he gestures at the desolate seascape. “See how open it is here? There’s no protection for us. Anyone
could come here without being noticed.” Using a map, I walk down Megumi’s street, searching for her house. I spot a mother and daughter, huddled beneath umbrellas, and ask if they know which house is Megumi’s. The mother doesn’t, but her daughter—a vision in neon, wearing a yellow raincoat and pink boots—perks up and tells me brightly that she knows exactly where it is. We make an odd trio: a little
girl leading her mother leading a journalist. A few blocks on, the girl stops and points proudly to a well-tended stucco house behind an impressive latticed gate. Soon after I arrive, the next-door neighbor emerges from his house. Once he confirms I’m not a burglar, he introduces himself as Susumu Yamashita, an interior designer born and bred in Niigata. The house I’ve been led to isn’t Megumi’s,
he tells me. Rather, it was used as the backdrop for a television movie about her, which is why the little girl recognized it. For her, Megumi is a television character. “The Yokotas’ house was torn down several years ago,” he says as we walk down the street, toward a cluster of smaller, more modern homes where Megumi’s once stood. “After the Yokotas moved, everyone in the neighborhood kept the
house in pristine condition, not changing a thing, so that Megumi would recognize it if she came home. Even after the house came down, they took great care to preserve the gate in front of it. But they eventually took that down, too.”

Megumi Yokota
(Getty)

The interior designer offers to show me around Niigata, and we hop into his car to trace Megumi’s last steps on Japanese soil. We pass by her elementary school, which he also attended. “The assumption is that she left through this gate and then made a right turn down the road. The dogs followed her steps until this point,” he says, gesturing to the intersection at which
it is believed she was forced into a car. Over a thousand police from all across Niigata prefecture were called in to search for Megumi in the days after her disappearance, setting up roadblocks and stopping every car. “When she vanished, nobody used the word
abduction
. Nobody imagined her disappearance had anything to do with North Korea. From what I heard, the family was worried that a pedophile
in town had taken her. The whole city was seized by a kind of moral panic,” he says.

At six o’clock on the evening of November 15, 1977, Megumi Yokota was walking home from badminton practice with two friends. They parted company three blocks from the Yorii Junior High School, and the friends’ last glimpse of Megumi was of her pausing at a traffic light, her badminton racquet stuffed in a white
bag, a black book bag in her hand. Megumi was never late, so at seven o’clock her mother, Sakie, panicked.
¹
Shigeru, Megumi’s father, called the police when he got home from his job at the Bank of Japan, and the parents and officers spent a good part of the night searching the neighborhood. The following morning, the police moved a special kidnapping unit to the Yokotas’ house to trace any calls.
For the next week, the police, lined up ten abreast, combed the shore, prodding the ground with metal sticks. A helicopter looked several miles to the north and south. Divers scoured the harbor, and coast guard boats crisscrossed the sea beyond.
²

The Yokotas put their lives on hold, making sure that one of them was always at home in case Megumi returned. They stopped taking family trips with
Megumi’s younger twin brothers, and they replaced the light on the gate with a brighter model, which they kept on day and night. Every morning, Shigeru walked along the shore, examining the objects brought in by the tide. During the day, Sakie circled the town on her bicycle, checking train and bus stations. Whenever a car idled in front of the house, Sakie would look out to see if her daughter was
in it. She watched the movies Megumi had seen during summer vacation, hoping to find a clue as to whether she might have run away. Sakie and Shigeru appeared on several morning television shows with segments during which the families of missing people publicize their plights. Most guests received at least a few calls with information, but the Yokotas’ phone sat silent. For the next few months, if
Sakie spotted a girl on the street with a round face and short, straight hair, she would rush over to her to see if it was her daughter. Once, when she saw a newspaper photo of a little girl who looked like Megumi, she contacted the newspaper, which sent her enlarged versions of the original. Over the years, Sakie took note of women who looked the way she imagined Megumi would appear at various
points in her life, whether as a teenager in high school or a young professional in her twenties. Shigeru scolded Sakie for her obsession, but when they both saw a portrait of a young woman in an art gallery, even he was struck by the resemblance. Perhaps Megumi had amnesia and was working as an artist’s model? They contacted the artist, but it turned out the model was a friend of hers.