The Reluctant Communist (20 page)

Not long after we moved into that apartment, my family and I went to dinner with a high cadre at a guesthouse in Pyongyang. He gave my wife $1000 and two Kim Il-sung pins, one for me and one for her. He told her to spend at least $300 in Korea on gifts for people back in Japan. We went out shopping as instructed. My wife got a perm and a new suit for $25. That was the suit she wore when she got off of the plane. She bought a flower vase for $48 and three watches, one for her father, one for her sister, and one for her brother-in-law. “I am sure that everybody in your family has watches,” I said. “And they sure don’t need any more Seikos,” which is what one of them was, “since they’re Japanese anyway.” She said, “I know, but there is nothing to buy in North Korea.”

When our chief of staff got a look at what we had bought, he was appalled. “This stuff is trash,” he said. “You can’t take this stuff to Japan. Let me take care of it.” So he came back a few days later, after getting permission to buy or take stuff from a Workers’ Party warehouse, supposedly one of the same places they get the gifts that Kim Jong-il gives to foreign dignitaries. I believe it, because he came back with some of the most amazing and beautiful goods I had ever seen in North Korea. He brought back three white vases and three black vases, three embroidered silk wall hangings (one of Kung Gang Mountain, which is a famous peak along the North-South border), seven different bolts of fabric, forty bottles of wine, and a bunch of other stuff. In all, it came out to be about seven boxes full of antiques and precious objects. He was under orders to find us suitable gifts, but I’d be willing to bet he got in trouble later for overdoing it.

On the morning of October 15, my wife got up and left early with a cadre to do an obligatory ritual: pay tribute with two low bows and an offering of flowers to the sixty-five-foot bronze statue of Kim Il-sung in central Pyongyang. My daughters and I took an 8:00 a.m. bus to the airport. At the airport we went to a waiting lounge upstairs while my wife went into a meeting room on the first floor where the Japanese Red Cross was. Later, a Mercedes Benz pulled up with the four other Japanese abductees all together. I noticed that they had very little luggage, and suddenly I felt self-conscious that my wife had seven boxes of loot with her. They came inside and went to the same meeting room my wife was already in.

Upstairs, when one of the cadres from North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs went fishing into his briefcase for some paperwork, I noticed he had a mess of cell phones in there. I asked him what they were for. He said they were for the Japanese. Each person would be issued a cell phone before leaving. Anytime they went anywhere, anytime they met someone, anytime they wanted to do something, they would have to call in to ask permission. “And what if they do nothing at all?” I asked. “They would still have to call in every twenty-four hours,” he replied. I found out later that the phones were never distributed. The Japanese government just said no way.

After about thirty more minutes of waiting, a man from the Japanese foreign ministry came into the room and introduced himself. He said he was Akitaka Saiki, deputy director general of the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s Asian and Oceanic Affairs Bureau. He sat and chatted with me for another thirty minutes or so. He was very nice and spoke excellent English. He asked me about how my wife and I had met, the sort of work I did in North Korea, and the education Mika and Brinda were getting. I was very reserved in my answers. I assumed the room was bugged, and there were cadres everywhere anyway, so I didn’t say anything that I didn’t want the North Koreans to hear, and I assume he did the same. As he got up to leave, however, he asked me, “Do you think you would like to live in Japan?” I thought about the best way to phrase my response that gave a hint at my true feelings yet wouldn’t get me in trouble. Finally, I said, “I think I would like Japan, but that would be impossible.” He smiled and said, “We shall see.”

Another Japanese, a woman, came in. Her name was Kyoko Nakayama, and she said she was a special adviser to the Japanese government and the head of the delegation. Looking at her the first time surprised the hell out of me. I had never seen an Asian with red hair before. No one in North Korea dyes their hair, and I didn’t yet know that this was a very common practice in Japan. I greeted her in Korean, but from the look I got, I took it she didn’t speak Korean, so I switched to English, which she could speak. We, too, talked about this and that. She told me not to worry and that she would take good care of my wife while she was gone.

As we finished talking, I noticed that she also said something about me going to Japan, which I took as another meaningful hint: “We would like you to come and visit.” I couldn’t think of anything safe to say, so I said, “I visited Japan before, a couple of times in 1960 and 1961 during my first tour of South Korea.” She asked me where I had been, and I said, “Yokohama.” Before she left, she said they had a souvenir for the girls. It was, she said, small, a trifle, a wooden Japanese doll, and she only had one, so the girls would have to share. I told her that was okay, and I thanked her.

The only other person around that day besides government people from the two countries, the abductees themselves, and my family was Kim Hae-gyun, the fifteen-year-old daughter of Megumi Yokota. I had never met her before and didn’t talk to her much that day, except to exchange hellos.

Around noon, somebody announced that it was time to go, so the girls and I went downstairs to say a final goodbye to my wife. I said, “Kata-ora,” which is a traditional Korean farewell, meaning, “Go and come back.” I told her to say hello to everyone in her family for me and to take care of herself. The last thing my wife said to me was, “Wait for me.” I said, “I don’t have any women on the side. You know that. And I wouldn’t get one even if I could.” She said, “No, no. I mean, wait for me to have your next drink.” She knew I was prone to overdrinking, but if she was around, she could always control me. She was partly making a joke and partly dead serious.

As she boarded the plane, the girls and I went out to the viewing deck on the tarmac to watch the plane take off. As I stood there and watched the chartered Japanese 767 fire up and taxi around the runway, despite all we had talked about and despite my confidence both before and after, I had a strong but momentary feeling that my wife would never return. My daughters and I stood there for a few minutes not saying a word, watching the plane leave, and then we turned around and headed inside.

On the way home, one of my leaders declared, “Let’s have some wine!” I replied, “But my wife just told me to wait.” He said, “Never mind that. Let’s get ten bottles! One for every day she is gone!” Well, we went to the store and I bought three bottles, not ten. We had lunch, and the driver asked, “What are you going to do if your wife doesn’t come back?” I said, “Well, I guess I’ll go to Japan.” We just laughed and laughed, because at that time it was so impossible to contemplate that it was received as a joke.

During those first ten to fifteen days, the girls and I were just in a holding pattern, waiting for Hitomi to come back. And we really did think she was coming back. I would take the dog for long walks. The girls would go to school. Around this time, high-level diplomats from Japan and North Korea had a series of meetings in Malaysia, and the meetings were a bust. Japan offered to normalize relations if the North Koreans would answer all remaining questions about the abductees. The North Koreans said they had offered everything they knew, there was nothing more to say, and they thought the issue should be considered closed. That led to a stalemate.

My leader came to visit me one morning and told me to sit down. He said, “Twenty-two years of living together is a very long time, and to have it end like this.” “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. He said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I don’t think that your wife is ever coming back.” “She said that?” I asked. “No,” he responded, “but there was a meeting in Malaysia that did not go well. Japan is refusing to let any of the visitors return. Even though Hitomi wants to come back, Japan will not hand her over.” “But they said she would be sent back no matter what,” I yelled. “They guaranteed it!” “I know. I know,” he said, “but they are not doing it now.”

When I heard that news from my leader, it was like my world had ended. It hit me so suddenly: My wife and I, and our children, would be separated forever. Whether I had been naive up to now I don’t know, but this development was actually quite unexpected, so it flattened me.

That is when I entered what was probably the darkest time of my life. I grew depressed, and I started drinking heavily. Throughout most of my time in North Korea, alcohol was scarce. If it was there, I would drink it, but on a day-to-day basis, there was usually less rather than more booze around. I, like many North Koreans, would supplement the sometimes scarce availability of the store-bought stuff with some moonshine others would make. I could trade two pounds of corn I had grown for a liter of moonshine. But here I often ran into the same economic issues: There was only so much corn, so there was only so much moonshine.

When my wife was gone, however, the cadres were interested in making sure I was “happy,” so I could now get as much booze as I wanted. For the first few months of that separation, however, I still couldn’t drink as much as I wanted. While I was living in the Pyongyang apartment building, Mika and Brinda were living with me and commuting to the Foreign Language College rather than staying in the dormitories. They limited my drinking almost as strictly as my wife did, so I could never really tear it loose when they were around. I had to at least function like a somewhat normal person in their presence.

In November, the cadres told me they wanted me to give an interview to a couple of Japanese journalists. A few days later, I met with two people from the Japanese magazine Friday. I was so mad that I ripped into the Japanese government fiercely. I blamed it for not living up to its end of the bargain. I said that the Japanese diplomat Saiki was a liar and did not follow through on the agreement he had made to send my wife back to North Korea.

Even so, my nerves were shot, and I was having frequent panic attacks, a condition I still suffer from but which was then at its peak. During the first week of December, I went back to Li Suk for a couple of days. I was having dinner at Siham’s house when I started to hyperventilate. I felt a tightness in my chest, and my arms started to shake. Siham told me to go to the hospital, but I said, “No. I just need to go to bed.” So I went to my house and tried to sleep, but I don’t think I closed my eyes all night. In the morning, I told my leader, “I need to go to the hospital.” I was admitted to the Foreigners’ Hospital in the morning. They said I had had a nervous breakdown. I wound up staying in the hospital fifteen days. In the hospital, I had another press conference. The room was packed full this time, filled with Japanese TV crews. I hit the same theme again, practically shaking: “Why has Japan not lived up to its end of the deal!?” I asked. At one point, one of the journalists asked me if I wanted to go to Japan for treatment. I yelled, “You know damn well I cannot go to Japan!”

The day I was released, the chief of staff had a box with him that my wife had mailed me. Hitomi had given a parcel to the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo, who passed it on to the Japanese embassy in Beijing, who transferred it to the North Korean embassy in Beijing, who then sent it to Pyongyang. Inside the box was a coat and a sweater each for me, Mika, and Brinda and two letters. The first letter was written in late October. In it, Hitomi said she was frustrated by the lack of progress in finding a way that we could all be reunited, frustrated that her visit to Japan had stretched from ten to fifteen days to now being open-ended, and frustrated that sometimes it seemed like we might be separated permanently. The second letter was written twenty days later, and it mostly concerned my mother. Hitomi said she hadn’t had any personal contact with my mother, but she had seen her on the news and it looked like she was well and that she hoped that I would be able to see her someday. She wrote that if she could do something to make that happen, she would. I broke down when I read those letters.

I quickly wrote a letter back to her in which I told her I missed her, and I brought her up-to-date on some of the things that had been going on, including my spell in the hospital. I gave the letter to the leader to send through the Foreign Ministry. The next day, my leader came back and said the foreign minister wouldn’t send the letter because it included the sentence “Give my regards to Saiki.” That sentence, the minister said, indicated too much identification and affection for the Japanese enemies. So I rewrote the whole letter without the offending line and gave it back in a huff.

I said, “Fuck this.” I went home and dug out our old marriage license, which happened to have our home addresses on it. I wrote her another letter a little while later addressed directly to her on Sado Island, and I went down to the international post office in Pyongyang, one of only two post offices in all of North Korea that handle international mail, and posted it direct. I made sure to include the address of the apartment building in Pyongyang where I was living temporarily so she could try to mail me back directly as well. Well, I am still sort of amazed by this, but that letter got through to her no problem. After that first time, however, the Organization was on to that trick, and agents intercepted every letter I tried to send straight through the international post office.

I received the next letter from Hitomi in March, addressed directly to me at the apartment building in Pyongyang. She said she got the one from me through government channels on December 31 and the one I sent direct on February 13. She asked after my health and my heart. She mentioned that she was writing from the hospital herself where she had just undergone an operation to remove a spot of lung cancer doctors found. She said that it was small and that the doctors were confident they had licked it early, but she wanted to tell and reassure me herself so that I wouldn’t be worried if I heard it from another place. She asked after the leaders, and she said she longed to see her family again. She mentioned that she was working with the Japanese government on appealing to the U.S. government to get me a pardon and to see if there wasn’t some way that I could live in Japan. “I am very sorry that I cannot be there with you,” she wrote. Between diplomatic channels, directly mailing each other on the sly, registered mail we received permission to send, and slipping letters to trusted people to hand-deliver, my wife and I estimate we each sent the other approximately thirty letters in the eighteen months we were separated. In all, we each received about seven or eight of those letters.