The Invitation-Only Zone (23 page)

*   *   *

In the best of times, North Korea is capable of producing roughly half its food. Traditionally
focused on heavy industry and mining, it is so mountainous that only 20 percent of the land can be cultivated, and its cold climate means growing seasons are short.
³
In the past, the shortfall was made up by the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, which, until the fall of communism, offered food, coal, oil, and steel at discounted “friendship” prices. As resources either disappeared or
became more expensive, the regime, desperate to negotiate with anyone who could help it survive, initiated a decade-long effort to normalize relations with Japan. South Korea had received billions of dollars in aid when it normalized relations with Japan in 1965. Perhaps the North could one day profit as well?

With fewer outside sources of food, farmers maximized output by using more pesticides
and fertilizers, which further depleted the soil. As existing fields fell barren, farmers, encouraged by the party’s “Let’s Find New Land!” campaign, cleared hillsides of brush. With fewer trees and shrubs holding the soil in place, the annual summer rains caused severe flooding, destroying fields and already harvested grain stored for future use. It is estimated that 20 percent of the country’s
total forest cover was lost between 1990 and 2000.
⁴
Coal was in short supply, so people cut down trees for firewood, which cleared more land.

During his trips into Pyongyang it seemed to Kaoru that fields were popping up everywhere. “It reminded me of the stories my mother told me about wartime Japan, when people used every square inch of land, and even schoolyards were filled with rows of sweet
potatoes,” he says.

Born twelve years after the end of the Second World War, Kaoru had never experienced hunger. He had heard stories from his mother and grandmother about the harsh food situation during the war, but these were little more than fairy tales to him. “In the early nineties, we began hearing stories about the amount of food decreasing, distribution days being delayed and finally
not taking place at all,” he recalls. The most faithful party stalwarts simply couldn’t imagine a world in which the Kim family didn’t take care of them, and were among the first to starve. Like the proverbial frog in the heating pot of water, they didn’t realize the extent of the famine until it was too late. City dwellers were hurt because they had no land to grow their own food and were completely
dependent on the public distribution system. “I saw families living in high-rise apartments raising chickens and pigs on their balconies, feeding them kitchen scraps and cooked corn flour,” says Kaoru. As people learned they couldn’t rely on the government, alternative foods appeared in markets. There was “synthetic meat,” made from soybean oil, which neither looked nor tasted like meat but achieved
a comparable texture when cooked. Porridge and noodles produced by grinding the roots of rice plants into a paste left people feeling full, if undernourished. Recipes circulated for reviving rotten pork by boiling it with baking soda. Pine tree bark was ground down and baked into cakes, with the side effect of severe constipation. The very young and the very old died first, and students were
mobilized to form body brigades to remove corpses from the streets. Rumors of cannibalism spread, and the number of those who crossed illegally into China for food soared. Border guards were so hungry a small bribe was all it took for them to look the other way.

The ongoing conflict with the United States made the regime reluctant to request food aid, for fear of showing any signs of weakness.
“If the U.S. imperialists know that we do not have rice for the military,” said Kim Jong-il in a secret December 1996 speech, “they would immediately invade us.”
⁵
The regime’s distrust of the outside world hampered aid efforts when it refused to allow nongovernmental organizations to oversee food distributions. Of the food that was allowed in, it is estimated that one-third was claimed by the
military and political elite.
⁶
Most disturbing is that as the humanitarian aid gradually increased, the regime
decreased
the amount of food it imported through commercial channels, effectively using the donations to improve the country’s balance of trade.
⁷
Military spending increased during the famine, with the regime purchasing forty MiG-21 fighters and eight military helicopters from Kazakhstan
in 1999.
⁸
The closest the regime came to economic reform was loosening restrictions on the size and number of the farmers’ markets, which had by then become a crucial source of food. Although the real figures may never be known, it is estimated that from 1995 to 2000, between one and three million North Koreans (5 to 10 percent of the population) starved to death. In addition, others were felled
by outbreaks of tuberculosis and cholera, along with hepatitis, malaria, dysentery, and other ailments that come from vitamin deficiency.
⁹
By 2001 the average life expectancy in North Korea had dropped to sixty.

The elite in Pyongyang were largely insulated from the hardship, as were the Japanese abductees. The size of the rations the abductees received held fairly steady, although the quality
varied and some items disappeared entirely. Kaoru feared most for the welfare of his children, whose school was in the remote northwestern region, where the famine was most severe. Twice a year, Kaoru’s son and daughter would return home skinny and drawn, bringing stories of death and starvation. One by one, their classmates grew listless and stopped coming to school, leaving row after row of empty
desks. Those who managed to survive stopped growing, their hair turning brittle and falling out. During one break, the Chimuras’ children returned home with fiery red rashes on their faces, the result of eating little other than corn-based porridge.
¹⁰
Whereas students were once fed white rice, fish, and even bits of meat, by the late 1990s a typical meal consisted of sour radish soup flavored
with salt. And if rice was served, it was mixed with so many pebbles and other grains that people had to roll it around in their mouths before swallowing. “You guys aren’t tough enough to make it out there,” Kaoru’s son told him. “You’re too used to eating rice every day.”
¹¹

Even if his children were unlikely to starve to death, Kaoru feared their growth would be stunted by prolonged malnutrition.
So in the weeks leading up to their visits, he and Yukiko set aside a portion of their food allotment. Once home, the children would stuff themselves with as much rice, meat, and vegetables as they could manage. In order to make sure they got enough protein at school, Kaoru sent them back with a five-kilo sackful of soybeans he’d roasted for them. (He’d calculated that if they ate five beans
a day, they’d receive the minimum requirement.) Kaoru and Yukiko prayed the children would grow even a little by the next time they came home. In the interim they sent food packages, most of which were intercepted by hungry postmen.

The Invitation-Only Zone wasn’t entirely untouched by the famine, as Kaoru heard about staff who were having difficulty supporting themselves and their families in
the provinces. The wife of one of the drivers had recently given birth to a baby boy, but she was so starved for food that she couldn’t produce milk. Kaoru, whose life revolved around his children, felt so sorry for the man that he gave him a few kilos of rice. The driver then cooked the rice, adding salt, water, and sugar to create a paste the infant could swallow in lieu of breast milk.

Vegetables
from the small garden Kaoru had tended since coming to the Invitation-Only Zone began disappearing, most likely stolen by neighbors or guards. As the famine intensified, intruders from outside the zone scaled the fences to steal produce and household goods. Kaoru got a dog to deter thieves, but he had trouble feeding it. He began hunting small birds and pheasants, using a slingshot and a clumsily
fashioned bow and arrow. Neither yielded more than a few stunned pigeons. He had more success when a neighbor taught him how to catch pheasant using soybeans laced with cyanide (the trick was to disembowel the bird before the poison spread).

The desperation induced by the threat of famine took forms that were by turns savage and absurd. One afternoon, while fishing at his favorite pond, Kaoru
spotted a neatly dressed man wading hip-deep in the water. Lacking a rod, the man was trying to catch fish with the kind of net one uses with fish tanks. “One by one he would catch these tiny fish in the net and put them into his jacket pocket,” says Kaoru. It was a scene that in better times would have made him smile, but the knowledge that this was the best the man could do to support his starving
family made Kaoru look away with shame and sadness.
¹²

17

NEGOTIATING WITH MR. X

When the terrorist Kim Hyon-hui confessed to bombing Korean Air Flight 858, she set into motion a series of events that would eventually unravel the entire abduction project. Once the Japanese government learned that she had received language training from a Japanese, it was forced to raise the abduction issue with the North. The problem was that whenever Japanese
diplomats uttered the word
abduction
, their North Korean counterparts would stand up and leave the room in protest. What’s more, the North Koreans turned the tables on them. Hadn’t the
Japanese
abducted hundreds of thousands of
Koreans
during the colonial and wartime era, using the men as slave labor and the women as sex slaves? When former Japanese prime minister Murayama raised the issue during
a visit to North Korea, his host exploded: “Why do you Japanese always talk to us of abductions!? What about the case of the political leader kidnapped by the South? Do you use the word ‘abduction’ in that case, too?”
¹

Of the many oddities regarding the abduction issue, the case the North Korean diplomat referred to was perhaps the oddest. The fact is that the only verified case of abduction
in Japan at the time was of a leftist South Korean politician kidnapped by the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). On August 8, 1973, the South Korean dissident (later president) Kim Dae-jung was having lunch with supporters in his room at Tokyo’s Hotel Grand Palace. Shortly after they left, Kim was jumped by KCIA agents, who knocked him out with chloroform. By the time the American ambassador
to South Korea learned of the abduction, Kim was at sea, bound to a plank of wood with weights attached to it. Only a last-minute intervention by the CIA station chief in Seoul saved him. North Korea was not involved in any way. After this incident, most members of the Japanese government and media suspected that the stories about North Korean abductions were KCIA-generated disinformation
designed to discredit the North.

It was not until a 1997 meeting, when Japanese negotiators substituted the phrase “missing people” for “abductees,” that the North agreed to investigate their whereabouts. In 1998, soon-to-become prime minister Yoshiro Mori made an ingenious, face-saving proposal while visiting Pyongyang with a government delegation. What if North Korea moved any “missing persons”
to cities such as Beijing, Paris, or Bangkok? Then they could come forward and claim they had been living there all along.
²
The North Koreans were intrigued. This was a man they could do business with.

Mori became prime minister in April 2000 and sent Kim Jong-il a personal letter that initiated the secret negotiations. However, Mori’s low popularity level forced him to resign in April 2001.
Soon after Junichiro Koizumi replaced him as prime minister, the North repeated Mori’s offer, and Hitoshi Tanaka was given the greatest challenge of his diplomatic career.

Hitoshi Tanaka
(Associated Press)

Tanaka had been groomed to achieve great things. His father had twice nearly been killed during World War II, and later grew wealthy as chairman of a major trading company. His travels through New Delhi, London, and Lima had given him a cosmopolitan perspective, and he hoped his son would become a diplomat. Tanaka led a privileged childhood, followed by law
school at elite Kyoto University.
³

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent the junior diplomat to Oxford for language training, where he became an Anglophile, pleased to learn the British version of English, rather than the American variant taught in Japan. He discovered that the socially reticent Japanese and British had much in common. Both were former world powers living in the shadow of the
United States. Tanaka admired the way Britain had learned to navigate this new terrain, leveraging its remaining strengths through diplomatic prowess, while remaining aloof from its continental neighbors. Tanaka concluded that Japan, too, should rely more on its wits than its power.
⁴