The Invitation-Only Zone (21 page)

Despite the fact that a quarter of Japan’s ethnic Koreans lived in Ishidaka’s hometown, Osaka, he knew almost nothing about the repatriation project that had transported ninety-three thousand of them to North Korea. Ishidaka was only eight years old when the program began
in 1959, and the news of Japan’s postwar economic success had pushed memories of the project aside. Ishidaka met with the defector, and his ears pricked up when he told him that half the repatriates had disappeared after they arrived in North Korea. What had happened to them? Ishidaka wondered.

Back in Japan, Ishidaka tracked down a former Chosen Soren official whose book,
Paradise Betrayed
,
criticized the repatriation project. Most of the author’s family had moved to the North in 1962, and he was unprepared for what he’d found when he visited them for the first time in 1980. His family was in tatters, with several in North Korea’s gulag and the rest living in poverty. “Why didn’t you grab my leg and hold me back when I was getting on the boat?” his eighty-year-old mother screamed at
him.

Ishidaka began interviewing dozens of Koreans throughout Japan, all of whom asked for anonymity to protect their families in the North. He learned of relatives whose minor infractions had sent them to labor camps, where they either starved or were executed. The brother of an Osaka native named Grace Park had a successful career as a radio announcer after repatriating. She listened to him
every night via shortwave radio, until the fall of 1980, when he was replaced, with no explanation. Grace Park never heard her brother’s voice again. Ishidaka’s documentary,
People Who Went Missing in Paradise
, aired in May 1994, and the reaction of the Japanese public was one of disbelief. Ishidaka received threatening phone calls, and Chosen Soren complained to his employer. It was a sad story,
of course, but he had to move on. He assumed it was the last North Korea story he’d produce.

Kenji Ishidaka
(Kenji Ishidaka)

Kenji Ishidaka originally wanted to become a novelist. Born in Osaka in 1951, the youngest of three children, he attended Tokyo’s prestigious Chuo University, where he was two years ahead of Kaoru Hasuike, the Japanese man who was abducted from a beach with his girlfriend in 1978. In the summer of 1972, Ishidaka hitchhiked through Europe and the Middle East. He
had never been abroad and was thrilled to encounter foreign people and places. He initially held the common Japanese prejudices against Africans and Arabs, but these were soon washed away by the fraternal feelings that emerge among young people, of all races, traveling the world on a budget. Where were the safe places to sleep? Which restaurants had the cheapest food? He picked up bits of French,
Arabic, and English, and funneled his newfound cosmopolitanism into his poetry. He published a book of poetry when he returned to Japan, but felt the pull of journalism. So he completed his undergraduate degree and took the entrance exam at the Asahi Broadcasting Company.

Japanese television news until the late sixties was a fairly primitive affair, consisting of little more than print journalists
reading their articles on air. In order to draw a larger audience, the Tokyo Broadcasting System began requiring journalists to study film techniques, and TV Asahi, its competitor, soon followed suit. Ishidaka was among the first of its journalists to undergo the training, although he considered himself first and foremost a writer and wasn’t sure how he felt about this emphasis on the visual.
He had never so much as touched a video camera when his boss put a 16 mm camera in his hand and told him to “figure it out.”

Large Japanese corporations employ a strictly hierarchical apprentice system, and Asahi was no different. During his first two years, Ishidaka carried heavy equipment—lenses, lighting, tripods—for more senior cameramen. In his third year, he was allowed to shoot some footage
of his own. Those in the senior ranks were loath to share their secrets, so when he’d ask a veteran cameraman how he got a particular shot, the man would just stare back at him silently. But Ishidaka was crafty, and he learned the techniques he needed by, essentially, spying on his colleagues. His natural talent was soon recognized, and he was sent for advanced training sessions at a Tokyo film
school, where he learned the basics of directing and producing. He immersed himself in the work of iconoclasts such as Eisenstein, Fellini, and Godard. He identified with the rebellious themes that ran through their movies and was particularly taken with Godard’s
Pierrot le Fou
, in which unhappily married Jean-Paul Belmondo is fired from his job at a TV company and runs off with his girlfriend.
Handsome, with tousled hair and a booming voice, Ishidaka developed a Belmondoesque swagger, and began wearing monogrammed collarless shirts. His documentaries were thoroughly researched and stylishly edited. He was never one to follow the crowd, and after a stint in Tokyo he returned to Osaka, where he could be a big fish in a somewhat smaller pond. He married and had two daughters, but he was
hungry, always on the lookout for a big story.

*   *   *

In the summer of 1996, Ishidaka received a call from Grace Park, one of the Osaka-based ethnic Koreans he had interviewed for his repatriation documentary. She and her family were loyal members of Chosen Soren, and most of the family, including her brother, had moved to North Korea in 1964. Park, who had stayed behind in Tokyo to run the
family’s barbecue restaurant, asked about her brother’s disappearance in 1987, when she visited her family in North Korea. They were too scared to discuss him, but her sister-in-law later pulled Grace aside and told her that he had been charged with espionage and executed in 1985.

In 1992, when Grace Park first shared the story of her brother with Ishidaka for his documentary, she claimed she
had no idea why her brother had been executed. But she was racked with guilt and in 1996 she confessed the truth. “I lied to you in our interview because I was so ashamed. I
do
know the reason my brother was arrested and executed,” she said. “It was all my fault. He was killed because I fell in love with a North Korean spy!”

Grace Park met a North Korean spy named Shin Kwang-soo in 1973. She
was separated from her husband and having difficulty supporting herself and her son and two daughters. Shin was handsome, charming, and generous. He swept Grace off her feet and moved in, supporting the family and treating her children as if they were his own. Grace was so happy, she didn’t mind that he was so often away on “business” or that he wouldn’t tell her anything about his work. Soon after
he moved in, he gave her four million yen (thirteen thousand dollars), and told her to “take care of it.” She knew better than to ask any questions.

In the fall of 1976, Shin told Grace he had to go abroad on a long trip and didn’t know when he’d return. A month later, she received a letter from him postmarked Pyongyang. With no pleasantries or explanations for his absence, Shin got right to
the point. “Do you remember the four million yen I loaned you? I need it back now. Go to Yokohama and give it to a business associate of mine,” he instructed. With no indication of when, or whether, Shin was returning, Grace was devastated. What’s more, the money was gone. She’d used it to supplement her meager income. She thought it would be rude to deliver the bad news to him by letter, so she wrote
to her brother in Pyongyang and asked him to visit Shin and explain the awkward situation she found herself in.

When Park’s brother visited the Pyongyang address his sister gave him, the man who answered the door was clearly not pleased a stranger was asking after Mr. Shin. He warned the brother never to return, and within days, he noticed he was being followed to and from his job at the radio
station. Soon after, he was under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance, with one car parked outside his apartment and another outside his office. “What kind of trouble have you got me into!?” he wrote to his sister. And that’s when he disappeared.

It turns out that Shin was in the “business” of abducting Japanese people to North Korea. An ethnic Korean born in Japan in 1929, Shin immigrated to
North Korea at the end of the Second World War and trained to be a spy. He infiltrated Japan in 1973, and in 1980 he was ordered to abduct a Japanese man whose identity he would assume. One of Shin’s contacts, the owner of an Osaka restaurant, had the perfect candidate: Tadaaki Hara, a forty-three-year-old chef. Hara had such a minimal public profile (deceased parents; no wife or children; no passport,
criminal record, or bank account) he’d never be missed.

The North Korean intelligence agency communicates with its spies through coded messages broadcast via shortwave. What to the average listener sounds like a jumble of numbers holds instructions for its spies. In June 1980, Radio Pyongyang broadcast a five-digit number (29627) over and over again. It was the signal for Shin—June 27, 1929,
was his birthday—to abduct Hara, to whom Shin had offered a job in a fictitious Beijing-based trading company a few weeks earlier. Hara had already accepted the position when Shin told him the company needed him immediately. The two men celebrated over dinner at an elegant restaurant near Osaka station, and the next day the unsuspecting Hara boarded a ship that took him not to China but to North Korea.

Shin spared no details in assuming Hara’s identity. He took a cooking course so he could pass as a chef. He used Hara’s name to obtain a driver’s license and passport, with which he traveled through France, Switzerland, and Thailand. His ruse wasn’t good enough to fool South Korean intelligence, however, and he was arrested in April 1985 when he tried to enter the country using Hara’s passport.
Back in Pyongyang, North Korean intelligence suspected that Grace Park’s brother had blown Shin’s cover. After all, he had made that odd visit to Shin’s home and was already a dubious character, being a member of the group that had repatriated from Japan. Grace Park’s brother was executed two months after Shin’s arrest. Shin was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death but was granted amnesty
by South Korean president Kim Dae-jung in 1999, as part of the conciliatory “Sunshine Policy” designed to coax North Korea to the negotiating table. In September 2000, Shin returned to North Korea, where he received a hero’s welcome and was awarded the National Reunification Prize for his service. He is thought to be living in Pyongyang today.

The story was so full of skulduggery and intrigue
that Ishidaka had trouble believing it was true. It sounded more like the plot of a James Bond movie than anything the news division of
Asahi
would air. He found a June 1985 newspaper article about Shin’s arrest that mentioned that Shin was wanted in Japan concerning the disappearance of Tadaaki Hara. But Ishidaka was still skeptical. The article’s main source was a South Korean intelligence agent,
and Ishidaka knew that South Korea’s national intelligence service often fabricated stories to make the North look bad. Ishidaka needed more proof. He got the transcript of Shin’s trial, but too much had been redacted by the South Korean government to be of use. He asked to interview Shin in jail, but his request was denied. As a consolation prize, a South Korean agent Ishidaka was friendly
with gave him a list of Shin’s associates in Japan. It turned out that Shin had been arrested along with a man named Ahn Young Kyu, who had confessed to helping Shin abduct Hara. Ahn Young Kyu had been released from jail in 1990. If Ishidaka could get him to confirm that he and Shin had abducted Hara, he would have enough evidence to run the story.

In February 1995, Ishidaka got a lucky break.
With the aid of one of his sources, Jung Yon, a Chosen Soren member, Ishidaka learned that Ahn Young Kyu was living on Jeju Island, South Korea. Jung Yon had been friends with Ahn and offered to visit him with Ishidaka. The day after Ishidaka and Jung Yon got to Jeju, Jung invited his old friend to meet at their hotel’s coffee shop at seven that evening. Ishidaka prepared for the meeting with military
precision, hiding a microphone in a flower vase and positioning a video camera behind some curtains. He even convinced the proprietor to turn the music down to improve the sound quality.

At 6:50 the proprietor told Jung that there was a call for him. It was Ahn. “You are with someone I don’t know,” he said. “So I’m not going to meet you.” The North Koreans had trained him well. A friend from
his past appears out of nowhere, accompanied by a stranger? Too suspicious. That night, Ishidaka went to Ahn’s house and explained that he wanted to know what had happened to Hara. The two spoke through the intercom. “I don’t know, either. I only worked for Shin Kwang-soo. He is the only one who knows what happened to Hara,” he replied. With that statement, Ahn had unwittingly confirmed to Ishidaka
the fact that he knew, and had collaborated with, Shin Kwang-soo. One piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Still, if he wanted to be absolutely certain, Ishidaka had to confront Ahn face-to-face. At 5:00 a.m. the next day, Ishidaka and a camera crew staked out Ahn’s house, hiding in a park across the street. It was Ishidaka’s forty-fifth birthday, and as he waited in the freezing morning air,
he wondered if this was the best way to celebrate it. Ahn left his house at 7:00 a.m., checked the street, and, confident the coast was clear, started toward the bus stop. Ishidaka waited until Ahn was past the point where he could easily return to the house, then ambushed him, microphone in hand. The scene was captured on film, and resembles a prolonged mugging more than an act of investigative
journalism. For twenty minutes, Ishidaka shouts questions at Ahn, chasing him up and down the block in the early morning light. “I know nothing! I know nothing!” Ahn screams, before collapsing to his knees and weeping. Ahn’s confession tumbles out between sobs. He was used by Shin to trick Hara, but he had never meant to hurt anyone. He confirmed everything. “I did a
terrible, terrible
thing to
Hara,” Ahn moaned. Finally, Ishidaka had proof that the crazy abduction stories were true.