The Invitation-Only Zone (17 page)

Determined to make up for the lost years, Tomoe began visiting Takeshi once or twice a year, bringing as many clothes and electric appliances
as her small budget allowed. In between visits, she would send money, concealing Japanese yen in pickled plum jars or sewing bills into neckties and overcoats to keep them from being stolen. When she received a letter thanking her for the delicious plums, she knew Takeshi had received the money.

What Takeshi’s wife didn’t anticipate was that her husband’s new status as a Japanese-born North Korean
who claimed he was living happily in his adopted home would overnight make him more valuable to the regime and thereby elevate his place in society. He was promoted to a position as the assistant director of the steelworkers’ union, and the family moved to Pyongyang permanently, living in a floor-through apartment in a modern, twenty-six-story building. With eight rooms and two bathrooms (one
Western and one Japanese), it was located in fashionable central Pyongyang.

Tomoe’s emotions wavered over the years, and at one point she was persuaded to add Takeshi’s name to the official list of abductees. “Mother, is it your intention to cut relations with me forever?” he wrote. Takeshi insisted he had been rescued, not abducted, and explained that her saying otherwise would have unpleasant
consequences for him. She quickly begged the Japanese government to remove his name, which it did.

I ask Tomoe what she thinks really happened that night in 1963, and she looks away. “Well, he certainly didn’t
walk
to North Korea; I know that much,” she says with a sigh. “There are many complaints I want to make to North Korea. There also are many complaints I want to make to the Japanese government.
But I never speak up. This is not a matter between two countries. This is a matter between a mother and her son.” I ask whether she feels a connection between herself and Sakie Yokota. Their stories of loss are similar, but Tomoe has been given the opportunity to establish a relationship, strained though it is, with her long-lost child. The two women have met, and Tomoe was for a time a member
of the association of families with abducted children that the Yokotas helped found. “I think that in our hearts we support each other as mothers who lost their children at age thirteen,” Tomoe replies. “However, the two mothers are now walking separate roads.”

12

AN AMERICAN IN PYONGYANG

The one-hundred-sixty-mile-long, two-and-a-half-mile-wide demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea is the most heavily fortified border in the world. Thirty-five miles from Seoul (population ten million), it is an untouched stretch of nature, home to several endangered species—the red-crowned crane, the Amur leopard, the Asiatic black bear—and one
million land mines. A combination of U.S. and South Korean troops, operating under the aegis of the United Nations, has patrolled the DMZ since an armistice agreement brought fighting to an end on July 27, 1953.

On the evening of January 4, 1965, Sgt. Charles Robert Jenkins drank a six-pack of beer and set out on his nightly patrol of the DMZ. Jenkins had been in the military since dropping out
of school at age fifteen and talking his way into the National Guard. Born on February 18, 1940, in the tiny town of Rich Square, North Carolina, he had a simple motivation for joining. “I didn’t have nothing else to do, and in the National Guard I got one day’s worth of army pay for doing just two hours of work a week,” he tells me.
¹
He joined the army’s First Cavalry Division when he turned
eighteen, and served at Fort Dix and Fort Hood before volunteering to go to Korea, which earned him a promotion to sergeant. After easy tours in South Korea and Germany, he was posted to Camp Clinch, right on the DMZ, and assigned to a four-man “hunter-killer” team, tasked with drawing fire from North Korean troops during nightly patrols.

Sergeant Jenkins
(Associated Press)

If providing target practice for the enemy wasn’t bad enough, there were rumors that his division was going to be sent to Vietnam. Jenkins grew depressed, drank heavily, and came up with a plan. “I would walk north across the DMZ and into North Korea. Once there, I would ask to be handed over to the Russians, and request a diplomatic exchange for passage back
to the United States,” he writes in his memoir,
The Reluctant Communist
.
²
At 2:30 a.m., Jenkins informed his squad that he was going to check the road, but instead he tied a white T-shirt to his M-14 rifle and crossed into the DMZ, taking “high, slow, deliberate steps to avoid trip wires that would set off a mine,” he writes. “It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” he tells me matter-of-factly.
Three weeks later, one of the North’s propaganda loudspeakers announced the news of his arrival. “The Republic that is the Eternal Paradise will protect with hospitality the brave Sergeant Jenkins!”

The U.S. military tried to keep Jenkins’s defection quiet, for fear that more soldiers might follow. He was not the first. A month earlier, Jerry Wayne Parrish, also of the First Cavalry, had defected,
and two other soldiers, Larry Abshier and James Dresnok, had defected three years before. None were motivated by ideological conviction. Abshier was being court-martialed for intoxication and dereliction of duty. Dresnok, described in an army report as “a chronic complainer, lazy … belligerent, defiant to authority,” was facing court-martial for forging signatures on documents that granted him
extra leave.

After being debriefed by the North Koreans, Jenkins was assigned to live with the other three men in a two-room house, where they took turns sleeping on the floor. Compared to the bleak existence for most North Koreans, Jenkins lived well, carousing like a drunken frat boy with the three other Americans. “We were Cold War trophies, which is why we were never treated like POWs. Our
pictures were in propaganda pamphlets and movies, so they had to keep us looking healthy,” he says.
³

The American defectors worked primarily as English teachers. In the seventies, Jenkins taught at a military school. “If my students made mistakes, sometimes I corrected them and sometimes I didn’t,” he tells me. They also worked as actors whenever a North Korean film or television show called
for Western villains. The most popular was
Unsung Heroes
, a twenty-episode series featuring Jenkins as “Dr. Kelton,” the head of the U.S. Korean War operations. Among the oddest jobs Jenkins had was translating English-language films for Kim Jong-il. Even this seemingly innocuous assignment was cloaked in secrecy, as Jenkins could listen to, but not view, the films he was working on. In addition,
each movie was spliced into segments and mixed up with segments from other movies. “We really were just translating strings of words rather than anything that made sense, not enjoying a story,” he writes. Still, he gleaned enough to identify
Kramer vs. Kramer
and
Mary Poppins
. At night, the Americans would watch Western movies, tapes of which Jenkins was able to get from members of Pyongyang’s
small diplomatic community. The most reliable was an Ethiopian named Sammy, a composition student at the Pyongyang music college. He and Jenkins established a routine in which they’d meet in a downtown Pyongyang restaurant with floor-length drapes in the windows. Sammy would hide the tapes behind the curtains, stroll by Jenkins’s table, and tell him things were “in position.” At night, the defectors
watched the movies with the curtains drawn and the volume low. Jenkins later developed a particular fascination with Michael Jackson after watching his
Thriller
video. In 1972, Jenkins was informed that, thanks to the benevolence of Kim Il-sung, he had been granted North Korean citizenship. “What if we don’t take it?” he asked. “Then you won’t be here tomorrow,” the cadre replied.

In 1978 the
regime began pairing the defectors with women who had been abducted from a variety of countries. Parrish married a Lebanese woman named Siham Shrieteh, who had been lured to North Korea with three other women with the promise of secretarial jobs that paid a thousand dollars a month. The parents of one of the women had connections to the Lebanese government, which was able to free all four of them.
But when Siham arrived home pregnant, her family sent her back to North Korea to live with her husband, Parrish. Abshier married a Thai woman named Anocha Panjoy, who was working as a masseuse in Macau when she was abducted. Dresnok married Doina Bumbea, a Romanian artist who had been lured from Italy with the promise of an art show.

*   *   *

In the spring of 1980, Jenkins was told the regime
wanted him to teach English to a woman, to whom he would be introduced. He’d previously been assigned a series of cooks, with whom he’d been sexually involved, but this was the first time he was formally introduced to someone. At 10:00 p.m. on June 30, there was a knock at Jenkins’s door. He gasped when he opened it, for standing in front of him was a twenty-one-year-old woman wearing a white blouse,
a white skirt, and high-heeled shoes. “I had never seen anyone so beautiful in my life,” he writes. “It was like she was from a dream, or from an entirely different planet.”

Hitomi Soga
(Kyodo)

The woman’s Korean was so good that Jenkins initially suspected she was a spy sent to watch him. Their courtship lasted several months, during which they would smoke, talk, and play cards. When she told him she was Japanese, he assumed she was a student of
juche
who had come to North Korea voluntarily and then not been allowed to leave. One night while playing cards, Jenkins
ventured that he had heard of a number of Japanese people who had been brought to the North against their will. The woman looked frightened. She remained silent but pointed to her nose to indicate that she was one of them.

Late on the afternoon of August 12, 1978, the nineteen-year-old Hitomi Soga and her mother, Miyoshi, had gone shopping at the general store near their home on Sado Island.
Sado is an isolated isle of rice paddies and verdant, looming mountains twenty-five miles off the coast of Niigata. Hitomi was studying at a nursing college and was looking forward to receiving her degree the following week. It was nearly dusk when mother and daughter bought ice-cream cones to relieve the late-summer heat during their walk home. Suddenly, three men leaped from behind a tree. Bound
and gagged, the two women were carried a few hundred feet down the road to the Kono River, where a small skiff was hidden beneath a bridge. When Hitomi Soga arrived in North Korea, her mother was gone.

For her first eighteen months in North Korea, Hitomi shared a Pyongyang apartment with Megumi Yokota. She says that Megumi cried all the time, longing to return home and see her parents. Only a
few years older than Megumi, Hitomi became a sister figure. Years later, Megumi gave her daughter a version of Hitomi’s Korean name, Hae-gyun. When Hitomi moved in with Jenkins, Megumi gave her the badminton bag she’d been carrying when she was abducted, as a keepsake. Hitomi didn’t see Megumi again until 1985. She and Jenkins were shopping in the food section of the Rakwon Dollar Store in Pyongyang
when Megumi and her minder entered. The two women recognized each other instantly, and Megumi asked Jenkins if he spoke Japanese. He didn’t, so Megumi addressed him in Korean. “Your wife and I are very good friends,” she said. “I know that,” he replied. “I’ve heard a lot of nice things about you.” Jenkins stepped away to let them talk privately, and never saw Megumi again.

One of the few minders
Jenkins was fond of urged him to marry Hitomi. “You and she don’t seem alike, but you are actually the same. You both have nothing here. Together, you would each at least have something,” he said. After that conversation, Jenkins proposed every day. His entreaties were well intentioned, if clumsy. “I know that you do not love me. How could you so soon? And I must honestly admit that I do not love
you, though I think that I could,” he said. After several weeks of this, she relented, and they were married on August 8, 1980. They had two daughters, Mika in 1983 and Brinda in 1985.