The Invitation-Only Zone (8 page)

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Having grown
up in the peaceful Japan of the 1970s, Kaoru was shocked by how common talk of war was in North Korea. War had always been an abstraction to him. As a young boy, he’d watched televised coverage of the Vietnam War and feared the fighting might spread to Japan. While his parents had experienced war, and the students in the sixties protested against it, Kaoru’s generation shunned the topic altogether.
Largely apolitical and apathetic, they adhered to what was known as the “Three Nos” (
san mu shugi
): no vigor, no interest, no responsibility. Passivity and pacifism dominated the day. “Our lives were growing wealthier day by day, and I became a person who took an interest only in things like music and fashion,” he says.
⁶

In North Korea, however, the assumption was that war was inevitable. Every
spring, during the United States and South Korea’s joint military drills, a sense of crisis descended over the country, with nightly blackouts and daily evacuation drills. Kaoru could have handled these periods if they’d been isolated, but they merely accentuated the everyday military culture that permeated the North. Even today war metaphors are everywhere: in factories, workers “battle” to meet
production goals; students solve math problems framed in military terms (“If the brave uncles of Korean People’s Army killed 265 American Imperial bastards in the first battle…”); the famine that killed more than a million people in the 1990s is referred to as the Arduous March.
⁷
War dominates North Korean popular culture, too, in popular movies such as
Sea of Blood
,
Flames Spreading over the Land
, and
Righteous War
. Every evening, the state-run television screens movies about the Korean War and Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese campaigns. Those with family ties to the Korean War, no matter how tenuous, held an elevated social rank. All North Korean men served up to a decade in the military, so Kaoru was surrounded by people eager to hold forth on the topic. A Korean War veteran described
his friend’s internal organs splattered into a tree by an exploding shell. Another told him of a U.S. pilot who parachuted to safety when his plane was shot down. Although prisoners of war were supposed to be taken into custody, the North Korean soldiers executed him on the spot. The sounds of military drills, planes, tanks, and gunshots became familiar to Kaoru. It was a question not of whether
war would come, but when. “We will definitely have to fight the U.S. one more time,” a female guide at the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum told Kaoru. “Let’s get ready for that day!”

The story of North Korea is, essentially, a military story—the story of a never-ending battle waged by General Kim Il-sung, its founder, protector, and “eternal president.” It has deep roots. According
to the state’s hagiography, in 1866 Kim’s great-grandfather helped burn the
General Sherman
, the armed side-wheeled steamer that attempted to open Korea to trade; and Kim’s father and grandfather are reputed to have been brave anti-Japanese fighters. Born southwest of Pyongyang on April 15, 1912, Kim Il-sung was the eldest of three sons in a tight-knit Christian family. Pyongyang was known as
the Jerusalem of the East for its concentration of churches, and its Christian community fought the Japanese colonizers fiercely, their resistance fueled by faith. Kim’s uncle, a preacher, was arrested for anti-Japanese activities and died in prison. In 1919, when Kim was seven, the family immigrated to Manchuria, where he spent most of the next twenty-one years. In 1929, Kim, then seventeen, was
arrested for taking part in a Communist youth protest and expelled from school, serving a short prison sentence. In 1935, he joined the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, a partisan group under the auspices of the Communist Party of China, fighting the Japanese in their puppet state Manchuria. Having lived much of his life there, Kim’s Chinese fluency accelerated his rise. He is said to have fought
with distinction, and was eventually given command over a unit of three hundred Korean soldiers.

Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-suk, 1935
(Associated Press)

Bound together by their love of Korea and hatred of the Japanese, the guerrillas became Kim’s new family, a cadre of insiders who later helped him consolidate, and maintain, power in North Korea. Their small numbers made direct engagement with the larger and better-equipped Japanese military suicidal, so Kim’s group ran hit-and-run operations,
“liberating” money and supplies from villages, and forcing young men to join its ranks. Kim would regale new recruits with stories about the grandeur of communism, and he vowed one day to liberate all of Korea.
⁸
The Japanese used a two-pronged strategy against the insurgents, hunting down the leaders with single-minded intensity, while giving amnesty to soldiers in exchange for intelligence. The
resulting paranoia and suspicion nearly tore the guerrillas apart, and Kim became known for his ruthlessness with alleged collaborators.
⁹

The group’s most famous exploit was the June 4, 1937, attack on a Japanese police station in the Korean town of Pochonbo, which killed seven officers, including the chief, and left the station in flames. Kim had become enough of a nuisance that the Japanese
put a ten-thousand-yen bounty on his head, and in August 1940 he and his compatriots fled to the Soviet Union, where he married Kim Jong-suk, a cook in the guerrilla force, who gave birth to Kim Jong-il in 1941. Kim Il-sung received his first formal military training while serving as an officer of the Red Army. He also used the time to study Stalin’s leadership methods: purging enemies, developing
a cult of personality, and building a modern industrial nation. North Korean children are taught that Kim’s Korean guerrillas single-handedly defeated the Japanese—neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki is mentioned. In reality, Kim arrived in Pyongyang, resplendent in a Soviet officer’s uniform, on September 19, 1945, a month after the Japanese surrendered to the United States. Stalin appointed Kim, then
thirty-three, the country’s “supreme leader,” a position he held for fifty years. The cult of personality began immediately, with the
Pyongyang Times
describing Kim as “the incomparable patriot, national hero, the ever victorious, brilliant field commander with a will of iron … the greatest leader that our people have known for the last several thousand years.”
¹⁰

The dynamics of Kim Il-sung’s
guerrilla campaign—concentrated military leadership, tight internal security, a political system based on personal loyalty—set the terms for the North Korean state.
¹¹
By the mid-sixties, anyone who wasn’t part of Kim’s guerrilla army had been purged from leadership positions. Kim’s regime maintained a permanent state of high alert, its million-man army waging a hot war from 1950 to 1953, and a
cold one that continues to this day. Kim modeled the structure of his new state on the Soviet Union, but his cult of personality was inspired by the figure who dominated the consciousness of every Japanese and Korean citizen between 1910 and 1945: In many respects, the role Kim fashioned for himself was essentially a Korean version of the Japanese emperor.
¹²
Both were godlike figures, with a pure
racial lineage, who maintained a direct relationship with every one of their subjects. Like that of the emperor, Kim’s cult was both political and spiritual,
¹³
and to this day it permeates every aspect of life in North Korea. Its citizens swear allegiance to Kim, not to the state. An official portrait of the “Dear Leader” hangs in every house and office. All citizens over age sixteen must wear
a Kim badge over their heart. It is estimated that there are thirty-four thousand statues of Kim throughout North Korea, the largest of which stands seventy-two feet high and was originally clad in gold. When Kim’s name appears in print it is boldfaced, much like Jesus’s words in some editions of the Bible.

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The scenario for the final war against the United States, familiar to all North
Koreans, is cast in apocalyptic terms. It will begin with a surprise attack by the United States at the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. The North will repel the invaders and inundate Seoul with rockets, before dispatching its special forces to meet up with the thousands of North Korean “sleeper” spies in the South, and destroy its infrastructure. With the Americans on the run, the North will take Seoul
in days, and unify the peninsula in weeks.

Kaoru suspected that this scenario was a fantasy, but it was the North’s contingency plans that terrified him. If the North was overrun, every citizen was supposed to repair to the system of underground tunnels and mountains to continue the fight in a Kim Il-sung–style guerrilla campaign. In preparation for evacuation, Kaoru kept a backpack filled with
candles, matches, and food. Once in the mountains, he’d face a choice. Desert, and risk being shot by the North Koreans. Or try surrendering to the invading U.S. forces, but likely be mistaken for a guerrilla and shot. “As if being abducted weren’t bad enough, now I’m going to be dragged into a war?” he thought to himself. To prepare for his encounter with the U.S. military, he memorized one English
phrase: “We are abducted Japanese. Please help us!”
¹⁴

6

ABDUCTION AS STATECRAFT

Why did North Korea go to the trouble of snatching ordinary Japanese people from beaches and small towns? The question obsessed me for years, and I was hardly alone. Speculating about North Korea’s inner workings has become something of a parlor game among Pyongyang watchers in Tokyo, Seoul, and Washington, DC. Probably no other country has been as thoroughly surveilled
and parsed. However, none of the explanations for the abductions I heard from scholars, journalists, or spies was entirely convincing. I concluded that, ultimately, there was no single motivation. The most plausible explanation is that the abductions were a small part of a larger plan to unify the two Koreas, spread Kim Il-sung’s ideology throughout Asia, and humiliate Japan. “The apparently
senseless campaign of kidnappings becomes slightly more comprehensible if it is seen, not so much as a bizarre method for obtaining language teachers, but rather as linked to dreams of destabilizing Japan (and possibly other Asian countries) via revolutionary cells, composed either of kidnap victims themselves or of North Korean agents,” writes the historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki. “The idea that
Japanese society could be propelled into chaos through the actions of North Korean trained revolutionaries may have seemed marginally less far-fetched than it does today.”
¹

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On the evening of August 15, 1974, South Korean president Park Chung-hee took the dais at Seoul’s National Theater to address an audience of government dignitaries and foreign diplomats on the twenty-ninth anniversary
of the end of Japanese rule. It is a measure of the psychological and linguistic distance separating Japan and Korea that the former refers to August 15, 1945, the day it surrendered, as “The Day to Commemorate the End of the War” (
Shusen kinenbi
), while that date is known in Korea as “Restoration of Light Day” (
Gwangbokjeol
). Soon after Park began to speak, a young man bounded down the aisle
firing a gun. The six men sitting beside Park leaped from their seats, while others subdued the attacker. In the midst of the commotion, Park’s wife tilted over in her chair, a bullet having hit her head. Once the assassin was apprehended, and Park’s wife was taken to the hospital, Park insisted on finishing the speech. His wife died later that night.

A twenty-two-year-old Japan-born ethnic Korean,
the assassin was a member of the Chosen Soren, an organization that acts as North Korea’s de facto embassy in Japan. He had entered the South legally, carrying a revolver he stole from a police station in Osaka, his hometown. The attack, the North’s second attempt on Park’s life, was the last straw. The South upgraded its already formidable security apparatus and conducted more thorough background
checks on ethnic Koreans from Japan. The incident strained Japan’s relations with South Korea, which accused it of neglecting the Communist threat posed by Chosen Soren.

The South had already cracked down on North Korean spies posing as South Koreans, so the new focus on Japan-born ethnic Koreans presented a serious problem for the North. If its agents could no longer use South Korean identities
or Japanese Korean proxies, how could it infiltrate and undermine its southern foe? The idea of using Japanese nationals to infiltrate South Korea had a kind of cockeyed brilliance to it. Japan circa 1977 looked more favorably on Kim Il-sung’s regime than on Park Chung-hee’s oppressive military dictatorship. And still atoning for the pain Japan had inflicted on Korea in colonial times, its left-leaning
media, intellectuals, and politicians were loath to criticize anything Korea-related. As a result, when rumors about the abductions occasionally arose, they were dismissed as products of anti-Korean prejudice. Any newspaper reporter with the temerity to write critically about North Korea received angry phone calls and letters. “It simply wasn’t worth the hassle, so it became a taboo to write
about the North,” a reporter told me.