The Invitation-Only Zone (28 page)

To atone for their sins of omission,
the media threw dozens of reporters at the story, every paper creating a permanent “abduction beat,” a position that still exists today, despite the lack of news to report. (News organizations fear that eliminating the position would offend the abductees.) The
Niigata Nippo
’s abduction correspondent, Shito Yokoyama, was the first reporter assigned to the beat. Her reporting has taken her to North
Korea, and won the praise of the abductees’ families, but in eight years on the beat, she has never interviewed any of the abductees themselves. “We aren’t allowed to interview the abductees,” she tells me.
⁸

Two days before the abductees returned to Japan, the heads of twenty-one major news organizations agreed to “exercise restraint” in reporting the story in their papers and magazines and on
television programs.
⁹
The agreement was an act of self-censorship, by which they abrogated their news judgment and deferred to a coalition of activists, abductees, and their families. Similar arrangements are common in Japan, where news organizations operate restrictive “
kisha
clubs” for their reporters, who in return for access, agree not to scoop one another or cover various ministries and corporations
too aggressively. The abduction
kisha
club took its instructions from Sato, whose years as a Communist organizer had trained him in the art of manipulating the narrative. The rules were as simple as they were strictly enforced: all requests for information or interviews had to go through Sato. The abductees could be interviewed only in groups, and the stories that emerged were required to be positive
in tone and substance. To ensure that the club’s reporters were too busy to snoop around on their own, Sato held several press conferences a week, whether or not there was any actual news. The smallest development would require the reporters to assemble at Sato’s feet. He was unforgiving and much feared by the press. “Given the choice, I’d rather negotiate with North Korea than with Sato,”
one reporter told me. Any publication that ran a negative or unapproved story lost access, as happened when a reporter for the
Asahi Weekly
magazine conducted an impromptu interview with Fukie and Yasushi Chimura after they returned home to Obama. The morning the article appeared, Sato charged into the magazine’s headquarters and demanded a meeting with the editor in chief. The magazine soon ran
an apology for breaking the rules.

It isn’t until I get a copy of the article that I understand the reason Sato was so enraged. Worse than violating the self-censorship agreement, the article threatened to undermine his carefully constructed narrative of Japanese victims imprisoned by an evil regime by providing an unscripted glimpse of the Chimuras’ pedestrian life in North Korea. When asked
about their relationship with their North Korean minder, Fukie replied simply, “He wasn’t really someone who watched us as much as he was a tutor who took care of us whenever we went out.” Yasushi added, “Sure, he watched us, but from our point of view, he was someone who would take us shopping. They were not bad people.” After this article, nobody was allowed to speak directly with the abductees.

*   *   *

While the Japanese were angry with North Korea, the most vicious attacks were reserved for the “enemies within,” the allegedly pro-North Korea Japanese intelligentsia. “I call for a reexamination of what remarks have been made by whom, when, and in what newspapers, magazines and other media,” critic and novelist Ayoko Sono wrote in the conservative
Sankei Shimbun
two days after the
Kim-Koizumi summit. “To glorify North Korea has been the trendy demeanor of the progressive cultural elite and the progressive media, but this attitude has also disrupted” the lives of the abductees.
¹⁰
Other conservative magazines encouraged the witch hunt. “The Death Throes of the North Korea Clique: Rip Out Their Double-Talking Tongues!”
¹¹
read one headline; “The Politicians, Bureaucrats, and
Debaters Who Have Stood By and Watched Eight Abductees Die: Apologize for Your Great Sins Through Death,” read another.
¹²
Shinzo Abe rode the abduction issue into the prime minister’s office, accusing anyone who opposed him on the subject of “siding with North Korea.” Hitoshi Tanaka, the diplomat who negotiated the abductees’ freedom, was labeled a “Class-A war criminal” and accused of being “soft”
on North Korea by the magazine
Shukan Bunshun
. One morning, a bomb was discovered in front of his home, accompanied by an envelope addressed to “Hitoshi Tanaka, traitor.” When asked what he thought of the attack, the conservative Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara said Tanaka “got what he deserved.” When asked whether the statement meant that he supported terrorism, Ishihara replied that he didn’t,
but that Tanaka still “deserved to die ten thousand deaths.” Even Shinzo Abe’s own party, the Liberal Democrats (LDP), was criticized. “What country are our government and our ruling party working for? Why doesn’t the LDP just put up a sign reading ‘The Korean Workers’ Party—Japan Branch Office’?” remarked one leading activist.

One of the first actions Shinzo Abe took upon becoming prime minister
in 2006 was to establish the Headquarters for the Abduction Issue, a Cabinet-level office with an enormous budget to coordinate the government’s abduction-related efforts.
¹³
It broadened the public’s awareness of the abductions through films, comic books, and cartoons, publishing a two-volume graphic manga comic book about Megumi Yokota, which it translated into Korean, Chinese, Arabic, and English.
It also commissioned an animated cartoon version of Megumi’s story, which it put online.
¹⁴
Abe ordered NHK, the government-funded broadcaster, to increase its coverage of the abduction issue, even though it had already devoted one-third of its roughly two thousand North Korea–related broadcasts to it in the first nine months of 2006.
¹⁵
Abe used the abductions to advance the nationalist and militarist
sentiments that had been growing since the early 1980s. “I began to notice that the events I attended were no longer just about abductions. They were also about teaching the ‘proper version of history’ in schools, how the Rape of Nanking was a ‘gross exaggeration,’ and other standard, right wing causes,” says Eric Johnston, a
Japan Times
reporter who covered the issue.
¹⁶
Until recently, it was
taboo to question whether Japan’s U.S.-authored constitution should be revised to allow the Self-Defense Force to be used more widely. Under Abe, an argument raged over whether Japan should become a so-called normal nation, allowed to defend itself, and even take proactive measures, rather than depending on the United States. Japan’s legislature loosened restrictions on the military, allowing it
to support the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and combat “potential or actual” terrorist attacks at home. The Ministry of Defense was upgraded to a full Cabinet position for the first time since the end of the Second World War.

The Japanese government wasn’t the only organization considering a more robust international role. Since the government was plainly incapable of doing anything about the
plight of the abductees, Sato hatched a plan. Ahn Myung-jin was a North Korean spy who defected to the South in 1993. A graduate of the Wonsan Foreign Language Institute and the Kim Jong-il Military Academy (where the terrorist Kim Hyon-hui trained), Ahn had worked at the center of the regime’s intelligence operations. He claimed to have information about Japanese abductees, such as Megumi Yokota,
and had been meeting with Katsumi Sato and other abductee activists since the late 1990s. “He was a very important source of information to us,” says Toru Hasuike, who at one point went to Seoul to meet with Ahn. “I took a photograph of Kaoru with me and asked him whether he’d seen him in North Korea.” (He hadn’t.)
¹⁷

It became an article of faith among the activists that Kim Jong-il had lied
to Koizumi and was holding on to the other abductees because they knew too many secrets. To prove that they were alive, Sato needed someone to infiltrate the North and locate them. Perhaps he could even help them escape! “We paid Ahn one hundred thousand dollars to, at a minimum, provide photographic evidence that other abductees were alive,” Toru tells me. Half the money came from the family and
support organizations, and the other half from several Japanese politicians. The mission barely got off the ground. “Ahn was spotted when he got close to the North Korean coast,” says Toru. “I don’t think he even made it onto land. He wasn’t arrested, but he thought that he was about to be apprehended, so he headed back to South Korea.” Ahn didn’t return the money, according to Toru.

*   *   *

While Sato was busy with press conferences and reconnaissance missions, Kazuhiro Araki was manning the phones at
Modern Korea
.
¹⁸
He was troubled that so much attention was being directed at the returned abductees when there was mounting evidence that there were many abductees who were still unaccounted for. Since September 17 he had fielded dozens of calls from families whose relatives had gone
missing. “I’d answer the phone, and an old woman would say, ‘My child vanished years ago, and I’ve looked and looked for him, and can’t find a reason why he left. Is it possible he, too, was abducted and taken to North Korea?’”
¹⁹

Their suspicions found substance in the troubling case of Hitomi Soga. Her name had never appeared on any of the lists of missing Japanese, official or otherwise. Had
the North Koreans not included hers with the names of the Hasuikes and Chimuras, Soga might very well still be in the North. If this one woman who had disappeared without anyone’s knowledge had shown up in North Korea, perhaps others were there as well? Araki asked each caller to draft a statement detailing the circumstances of his or her loved one’s disappearance. As the statements began to arrive,
Araki noticed patterns emerging. “Soga was a nurse, and it turns out there were a bunch of other nurses who vanished. Also, there were a lot of engravers, who would have been useful when the North printed fake U.S. currency. I noticed that people are more likely to be taken from certain parts of Japan than others, and people tended to be abducted at certain times of day, and under certain weather
conditions,” he says. Once Araki compared the factors, he was convinced that some of those he was receiving calls about had been abducted. “At a certain point, you have to admit that these can’t be accidental or coincidences, that these patterns are meaningful,” he says.
²⁰
With hundreds of names in hand, Araki decided that the officially recognized abductees needed him less than those still languishing
in North Korea, and he left Sato’s group to found the Investigation Commission on Missing Japanese Probably Related to North Korea.

Today Araki’s organization is on the third floor of a threadbare apartment building a few blocks from Tokyo’s bustling Iidabashi railway station. When I enter the office, I spot him in a makeshift plywood sound studio, conveying the news of recent nuclear arms negotiations
into a microphone. Posters with photos of the hundreds of Japanese whom Araki believes were abducted are plastered all over the office. Leaning against one wall is a contraption that looks like a torpedo, on top of which someone has affixed handlebars and a seat. It is a replica of one of the military Jet Skis North Korean spies used to infiltrate Japan’s waters. Seated beside it is a mannequin
wearing a wet suit and swim goggles. An identification card hanging from its neck identifies him as a “Shiokaze Staff” member.

Shiokaze
is the twice-a-day shortwave broadcast Araki began beaming into North Korea in 2005. The broadcast begins with a message telling the abductees to keep the faith, because “it will not be long until we rescue you.” Soothing piano music plays in the background.
Each segment includes some international news items and messages to individual abductees, often read by friends and relatives. The broadcasts are in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean, due to the international nature of the abduction phenomenon.

Araki finishes up the Korean-language portion of the broadcast, exits the studio, and joins me for tea at a worn conference table. He says he believes
the North has kidnapped more than two hundred fifty Japanese and that the kidnappings continue to this day. “At first, we only read the names of the missing Japanese, along with their dates of birth and the places they were taken,” he says. North Korea didn’t jam the signal until he included news about the outside world. Since then,
Shiokaze
has switched frequencies regularly, but the North Korean
regime quickly locates and jams the new one. The project is a pure act of faith: a show whose broadcast signal is jammed, directed at a country where radios are illegal and electricity scarce, to be heard by abductees who may not exist. Is there any evidence that anyone in North Korea has ever heard the broadcast? Araki and his producer consult with each other. They cite a passage from Charles
Jenkins’s memoir in which he says he listened to shortwave radio, but they concede that this took place years before
Shiokaze
began. “Well, we once heard about a junior high school student who was able to pick up the program in Pyongyang, but we’re not sure about that,” he says. After more tea, Araki excuses himself and returns to the sound booth. It is almost twelve, and he needs to finish a
segment before the program is beamed into North Korea that afternoon.

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KAORU HASUIKE AT HOME