The Invitation-Only Zone (29 page)

It is an uncommonly warm April afternoon when I meet Kaoru Hasuike. In 2002 he and his wife returned to Kashiwazaki, where they were joined by their son and daughter in 2004 after Prime Minister Koizumi made a second trip to Pyongyang. Kaoru’s shaggy haircut and taut, angular face make him appear a decade younger than he is. The only evidence of his time in North
Korea are his discolored, uneven teeth. In 2010 Kaoru completed his undergraduate degree at Chuo University via a correspondence course, and he is now working toward a graduate degree in Korean Studies at Niigata University. He recently informed the Japanese government that he no longer needs the stipend awarded the abductees to compensate them for their ordeal. He and Yukiko worked part-time at city
hall during the year and a half it took for their children to be freed, and Kaoru now makes a living translating from Korean and writing his own books. Yukiko is a cook in a local kindergarten; their daughter, Shigeyo, is a graduate student; and their son, Katsuya, earned a degree in computer science from Waseda University and is working at a bank in Seoul, South Korea.

Kaoru Hasuike today

I ask Kaoru how his children reacted upon learning their family secret. “For years we had to lie to our kids in order to protect them. If they were known to be different from other North Koreans, they would be in danger,” he tells me.
¹
They learned half the truth during the eighteen months it took for the Japanese government to negotiate their release. “Once the North Korean
authorities came to the conclusion that they would have to return the kids, they told them that they were Japanese and that their mother and father were in Japan, although they didn’t mention the abduction part. My children were cards in this game, and the regime couldn’t send them home upset or traumatized, or else they would lose their promotional value, and have hurt the North’s reputation,”
he tells me. After a night in Tokyo, the whole family went to Kashiwazaki. “They didn’t say much during the first few days we were home, but we just let time pass,” he says. Knowing that their Japanese was poor, Kaoru had purchased a few Korean DVDs for them to watch. “They looked sad and troubled, and were worried about their future in Japan.” Once they learned about the abductions, they knew the
lives they’d imagined for themselves in North Korea were impossible. “Anyone who is born and raised in the North knows that your identity within the society determines your fate. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or how hard you work. If your identity or public image or presentation isn’t correct, you’ll never marry well, you’ll never get the job you want, you will never succeed. They’d seen
this all their lives, they knew it in their bones,” he says. The fact that their parents had come to the North involuntarily didn’t upset them as much as Kaoru had feared it might. “You have to understand that in North Korea you are taught that the
result
is all that matters—whether it is winning the revolution or defeating the United States—and it doesn’t matter whether it is won through violence
or treachery. So I think it was fairly easy for them to understand that their parents had been stolen.” Now that the whole family is together in Japan, there are no more secrets. “Today, when I speak with my children, I never lie about anything. That is the rule. Once you open that door, you have to continue to speak truthfully and be completely open.”

Kaoru is polite but wary. The Japanese press
has sensationalized the story, he tells me, and he fears the abductees who remain in the North may be suffering the consequences. Among the conditions for our interview is that we not discuss the abductions. In addition, he asks for compensation, which is a common practice in Japanese journalism. The request makes me scrutinize my ethics. After all, if
anyone
deserves to be paid for his story
it is a man who spent half his life in North Korea. However, I explain, American journalists look askance at the practice. To my surprise, he agrees to talk anyway.

While Kaoru is reluctant to speak about the abduction, he has hardly kept a vow of silence since his return. Now a professional translator, he has published a dozen books in six years. The first trip he took abroad was to South Korea.
He blogged about his visit to Seoul—“The Seoul Tower has a toilet from which you can enjoy the view while doing your business,” he writes—and published a small book about the trip titled
Back to the Peninsula
. How did it feel to be around people so different from, yet so similar to, those who had abducted him? “I felt a sense of closeness to them. Five or ten minutes after I’d meet someone, they’d
be telling me their problems, bragging about their kids,” he says, smiling broadly at the memory. “I don’t know how to say this, but I had this amazing sense of family. I didn’t feel out of place. In fact, I felt strangely
not
out of place.”

I’m struck by the depth with which Kaoru alone among the returned abductees seems to have rooted himself in Korean culture. Throughout our conversation,
he notes how certain Korean characteristics augment Japanese deficiencies (and vice versa). “Japanese relationships are never black and white. They begin from the most neutral possible gray, and then dance around until we eventually agree on some common point,” he says. Korean culture is more direct. “In Korea, one guy is ‘white’ and one guy is ‘black.’ And from these opposite views they work toward
a compromise. And then, when they’re done, they shake hands and that’s that.”

Kaoru is evenhanded to a fault and seems determined not to offend either culture. Although our interview is officially restricted to the topic of translation, I decide to test the boundaries. It seems to me, I begin, that the best translators have deep connections to both the languages in which they work. Every language
is rooted in a culture, and every culture contains both good and bad elements, I continue. “So, how has your experience of all aspects of North Korean culture, both good and bad, helped you as a translator?” I ask. At this, he explodes. The
positive
side of North Korea? “I want to make sure you know that I was in
North
, not South Korea,” he lectures, dividing an invisible map with sharp hand gestures.
“I was
abducted
from Japan and
taken
to North Korea. You understand this, right?” My interpreter apologizes for the rudeness of my question. The conversation soon returns to normal. Kaoru’s outburst seems to free him up, and our conversation becomes less cautious.

Having spent fully half his life as a Korean among Koreans, it would be odd if he were able to shed his experience as easily as one
gets rid of a winter coat at the first sign of spring. Critics have portrayed him as a kind of “tragic mulatto”—a man caught between two cultures, unable to choose—or, worse, as a “sleeper” spy waiting for instructions from Pyongyang. Japanese culture has difficulty with elements that don’t fit precise categories. The suspicion that Kaoru was ambivalent about returning to Japan, that he was somehow
Korean
and
Japanese, drove people crazy. But Kaoru strikes me more as a man who survived his ordeal by living as normally as possible—a life with more than its share of oppression, fear, and misery, of course, but a life nonetheless. He married, had children and, one presumes, friends. What was the alternative? He could have raged about his predicament for twenty-four years, I guess. But this
surely is the way of madness, perhaps even suicide.

The fact that “translation” is the official topic of our interview turns out to be a blessing in disguise. As we talk, I begin to understand the degree to which it has become a metaphor for his life. Mediating between two different cultures is an act of perpetual translation. So how
does
one translate between such different sensibilities? I
ask. Japanese and Korean literary aesthetics are completely different, Kaoru explains, and when translating, he must take those differences into consideration. Expressing emotion in Japanese literature, for example, is an exercise in withholding. “The whole point is the
suppression
of emotion, of not showing it on the outside. Rather, for the Japanese, emotion is conveyed through the subtle gesture,
the passing comment. The Japanese interpret this as beautiful and profound,” he says.

He must keep his readers’ sensibilities in mind. He cites a common Korean expression of fondness that he had trouble translating in a novel. “A Korean who loves someone might say, ‘I’ll wait for you for ten years, for a hundred years, for
a thousand years
!’ And to a Korean reader this would be absolutely normal.”
But translating the phrase literally would perplex the Japanese reader. “‘A
hundred years
?’ he’d wonder. ‘But I’ll be
dead
by then!’”

So where does he fit in? “Right in the middle,” he says with a sigh. “When I was in North Korea, I was told a lot of unpleasant things about Japan. ‘Your grandfather killed our ancestors, they took them off to labor camps’—I heard that every day,” he says. Despite
the fact that he was a victim of North Korea, he felt awful about Japan’s past. “Of course I wasn’t ignorant of the history. But how could I live bearing the sins of all my ancestors? I was right in the middle of the gears grinding between Japan and Korea.”

In the spring of 2011, over dinner with Kaoru, I asked him the question I’d hesitated to pose earlier. “Why,
really
, do you think you were
abducted?” I ask. He flashes me an odd smile. “I’ve thought about that a lot,” he says. It wasn’t until the last second that he and his girlfriend decided to visit the beach that fateful July evening, and he has since been told that the tide that night was unusually high, making it one of the rare occasions when a midsize North Korean boat could get so close to the shore. What he seems to be telling
me is that a dozen unrelated circumstances lined up that night in such a way that he was sucked into a cosmic wormhole. “The whole thing is still a paradox to me,” he says. “There was no real reason for our abductions, or at least no reason that makes any sense. We were taken in order to be used as a chit in some future negotiations. That is the only conclusion I have come to,” he says.

EPILOGUE

On the morning of October 16, 2002, I came across a photograph on page A-3 of the
New York Times
. In it, five middle-aged Japanese—two couples and a single woman, all wearing boxy 1950s-era suits, ties, and skirts—descend from a Boeing 767 at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. “Tears and Hugs as 5 Abducted Japanese Go Home to Visit,” read the headline.

As I stared at the photograph, my mind
reeled with questions. Who were these people who had spent half their lives in the least-accessible nation on earth? Why had they been abducted? What could they tell us about that secretive nation? Having divided their lives between Japan and North Korea, with which country did they identify? Had they been brainwashed? How many others had been abducted? Were any of
them
still alive?

One year
before, the events of September 11, 2001, had shaken me. Standing on the roof of my Brooklyn brownstone, I saw the twin towers fall. Although lucky enough not to have lost anyone close to me in the disaster, I recoiled at the nationalistic feelings that swept through the country afterward. I watched in dismay as many of my colleagues transformed themselves into de facto “war correspondents” in an
attempt to remain relevant by covering the story that was “changing everything.” The next decade produced some extraordinary journalism and gave many reporters a new sense of purpose. I was not one of them. I didn’t want to write about the war or about radical Islam, and I was appalled by the way the terrorist attacks had tricked America into curtailing the very freedoms that made it a great nation.
In an odd way, my fascination with Japan’s abductions helped me deal with America’s nervous breakdown.

The abductions came to light in 2002, when Japan was struggling to define its postwar national character. Its economy in decline, its birthrate in free fall, it was experiencing a crisis of faith. Was it the militarist aggressor that had colonized Asia and attacked the United States, or the
pacifist nation victimized by the atomic bomb and, now, the abduction of its citizens? My Japanese friends sometimes referred to the abductions as Japan’s 9/11, much as the Al Qaeda bombings in Madrid (2004) and London (2005) that scarred Spain and the United Kingdom were memorialized there. This puzzled me at first, as Japan is one of the safest places on earth. But as I witnessed the country redoubling
its counterterrorism strategy and immigration controls, I began to understand that “Japan’s 9/11” was less an event than a state of mind. Like the United States, Japan was traumatized by the sudden realization that the world was more dangerous than it had thought, a place where even the most prosperous and powerful nations are ultimately incapable of protecting themselves, whether from Al
Qaeda or North Korea. “The Japanese people have been living in a greenhouse since the American occupation ended in 1952,” Tsutomu Watanabe, the
Asahi
’s political editor, tells me over coffee one afternoon. “And in 2002 they realized that the outside world was actually cold and hostile.”
¹
And with trauma, of course, came the seduction of victimhood, a status neither Japan nor the United States
heretofore had much claim to. The 2011 earthquake and subsequent meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant only deepened Japan’s sense of distress.