Savepaperandfollow@newyorkeronTwitter

DECEMBER 21, 2015

North Koreas Abduction Project

BY ROBERT S. BOYNTON

Kaoru Hasuike and Yukiko Okudo were kidnapped from

Japan by North Korean operatives in 1978.
KYODO / COURTESY FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX

n the evening of July 31, 1978, Kaoru

Hasuike and his girlfriend, Yukiko Okudo,
rode bikes to the summer fireworks festival at the
Kashiwazaki town beach. They whisked down the
winding lanes of their coastal farming village, a hundred and forty miles north of Tokyo.
Then they parked their bikes and made their way past a crowd of spectators to a remote
stretch of sand. As the first plumes rose in the sky, Kaoru noticed four men approaching.
Cigarette in hand, one of them asked him for a light. As he reached into his pocket, the
men attacked, gagging the couple, binding their hands and legs. Keep quiet and we
wont hurt you, one of the assailants said. Kaoru and Yukiko were thrown into separate
sacks and loaded onto an inflatable raft. Peering through the sacks netting, Kaoru saw
the warm, bright lights of Kashiwazaki City fading into the background.
An hour later, he was transferred to a ship idling offshore and forced to swallow several
pills: antibiotics to prevent his injuries from becoming infected, a sedative to put him to
sleep, and medicine to relieve seasickness. Two nights later, he arrived in Chongjin, North
Korea. Yukiko was nowhere in sight, and Kaorus captors told him that she had been left
behind in Japan.
Kaoru, who was twenty, had fashionably shaggy hair and a ready smile. Cocky and
intelligent, he was studying at Tokyos prestigious Chuo University. Still, like much of his
generation in Japan, he wasnt interested in politics, and knew almost nothing about
Korea, North or South. Yukiko, twenty-two, the daughter of a local rice farmer, was a
beautician for Kanebo, one of Japans leading cosmetics companies. She and Kaoru had
been dating for a year, and he planned to propose to her once he finished his law degree.
The overnight train from Chongjin to Pyongyang was bumpy, and by the time Kaoru
arrived the next morning he was furious. This is a violation of human rights and
international law!he shouted. You must return me to Japan immediately! His abductor
watched his tirade calmly. Kaoru, seeing that confrontation wasnt getting any response,
tried evoking sympathy. You have to understand that my parents are in ill health, he
explained. Their condition would worsen if they worried about him.
You know, his abductor said, if you want to die, this is a good way to do it. He told

You know, his abductor said, if you want to die, this is a good way to do it. He told
Kaoru that the reason he had been kidnapped was to help reunify the Korean Peninsula,
the sacred duty of every North Korean citizen. After all the pain his Japanese forefathers
had inflicted on Korea, the man continued, it was the least that Kaoru, who had
benefitted from his countrys rapacious colonial exploits, could do. Precisely how he
would hasten reunification was left ambiguous. The abductor hinted that he would train
Korean spies to pass as Japanese, and perhaps become a spy himself.
You see, once the Peninsula is unified under the command of General Kim Il-sung, a
beautiful new era will begin, he went on. North Korean socialism would spread
throughout Asia, including Japan. And when that glorious day comes, we Koreans will
live in peace. And when you go home at that time youll have an excellent position at the
top of the regime!
Kaoru was placed in an apartment in Pyongyang. Escape was virtually impossible; three
minders monitored him twenty-four hours a day, each taking an eight-hour shift.
Although he didnt have a religious background, he tried praying, placing his palms
together and pressing them to his eyes. This display of piety elicited ridicule from his
captors. In North Korean movies, the only characters who prayed were the cowardly
Japanese prisoners begging for mercy.

aoru was given access to a restricted library with Japanese-language books about
the history of North Korea. Japan demobilized the Korean Army in 1907, and
officially annexed Korea on August 29, 1910. The Japanese were careful to distinguish
between Korean leaders (inept, corrupt) and the Korean people (proto-Japanese, full of
potential), and predicted that Korea would thrive now that it was part of the Japanese
Empire. From the late thirties through 1945, Japan pushed Koreans to assimilate,
requiring them to speak Japanese, take Japanese names, and worship at Shinto shrines.
Men were forced to labor in Japanese factories and mines, and some women were
dragooned into sexual slavery. Roughly two hundred and thirteen thousand Koreans
fought in the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy.
By the end of the Second World War, four million Koreans were living outside Korea,
and more than seven hundred thousand Japanese civilians and troops were living inside
Korea. But the loss of the Japanese Empire meant that a new theory of Japanese identity
was required. In postwar Korea and Japan, a rhetoric of racial purity thrived. Within the
Korean Peninsula, the newly independent North and South competed to see which could
more thoroughly eradicate Japans influence, in an effort to become the Korean peoples
legitimate homeland.
In January, 1980, after eighteen months in North Korea, Kaoru was summoned to his
minders office. Several officials were waiting for him. They announced that Yukiko, his
girlfriend, was in North Korea after all. In fact, she was in the next room. It turned out
that the story about her being left behind in Japan had been a ruse designed to force

that the story about her being left behind in Japan had been a ruse designed to force
Kaoru to cut all emotional ties to Japan. The couple had been undergoing the same
pedagogical routine: learning Korean, studying the regimes ideology, wondering whether
they could survive in this strange country. Like much else in North Korea, their isolation
had been staged.
Kaoru and Yukiko married three days after they were reunited. I would have done it that
morning, Kaoru said. I didnt want to wait. The groom received a haircut and was
outfitted with a new white shirt and a necktie; the bride wore a simple flower-patterned
dress. The ceremony was officiated by the most senior official present, who opened by
invoking the blessings of the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung.
The most important wedding present a North Korean newlywed couple can receive is a
home in which to start their new life. (Because there is virtually no private property, the
gift is from the state, and can be withdrawn at any time.) Hasuikes first home was a
traditional one-story cinder-block house an hour south of Pyongyang. Painted white, it
had a wooden roof with ceramic tile shingles and five rooms: a kitchen, two bedrooms, a
living room, and a bathroom. In the back was a small garden where Kaoru grew
vegetables. He got seed and fertilizer by trading cigarettes with farmers from a nearby
food coperative, and arranged for a cow to till the field at the beginning of the growing
season. He became fond of kimchi, and started making it for himself in the traditional
manner, stuffing cabbage and hot red peppers into clay pots and burying them in the
yard to ferment.
Their house was situated in one of the many guarded invitation-only zones that dot
suburban Pyongyang. The area, a square mile, limited its inhabitants freedom while
warning outsiders that only those invited to enter were welcome. All North Koreans
develop a heightened sensitivity to coded language, and they knew well enough to avoid
it. The development was a well-tended prison inside the secretive state. Still, the housing
and food were better than what most North Koreans had. Kaoru saw the place as a gilded
cage.
Hasuikes neighbors were an odd assortment: other abductees, North Korean spies,
foreign-language expertsanyone whose access to outside information made them a
threat to the regimes carefully crafted official narrative. With small clusters of houses
fanning out from a central building, each separated from the others by densely wooded,
artificial hills, the invitation-only zone was designed to discourage private contact among
residents. At its center, the roads converged on a large guest house, which had spaces for
meetings and classes. As part of the governments attempt to control the flow of
information into the country, the North grants few long-term visas to foreign visitors, so
this cluster of Japanese abductees provided a rare educational opportunity for spies, many
of whom would be sent to infiltrate Japan.
The Hasuikes were given jobs translating articles from Japanese into Korean. (The task,

The Hasuikes were given jobs translating articles from Japanese into Korean. (The task,
oddly, could have been performed by any one of the millions of North Koreans who had
been forced to learn Japanese during the colonial era.) At the start of every week, they
would receive a stack of Japanese magazines and newspapers, with sections blacked out
by a censor and specific articles circled for translation.
The newlyweds fell into a routine. Each morning, after being woken up by an
announcement from the radio loudspeaker that is installed in every North Korean house
and workplace, Yukiko would prepare a traditional Korean breakfast of rice, eggs, and
kimchi. Afterwards, Kaoru would go for a run, taking a route past identical small white
cottages, down paths that cut through the hills and trees. After a few thousand yards, he
would see barbed-wire fence peeking above the trees.
Kaoru did what he could to make their house feel like a home. In the same way that, as a
child, I made up games without toys or playmates, I found time to play by myself in the
invitation zone, he wrote. He carved a mahjong set out of wood and taught his wife to
play. Although he hadnt played golf in Japan, he spent several weeks clearing a nearby
area to create a five-hole golf course. He drew on his memories of watching the game on
television to come up with something approximating the rules, and played obsessively,
using balls made by sticking cotton swabs together. As idiotic as it may seem, he wrote,
as someone starved of play this course was great fun.

im Il-sung, in his 1946 decree On Transporting Intellectuals from South Korea,

explained his desire to bring five hundred thousand people to the North to
compensate for the mass exodus in the years leading up to the war. He envisioned an
ambitious abduction project that would serve his regime while destabilizing other
countries. It began with the South. An estimated eighty-four thousand South Koreans
were kidnapped during the Korean War. For the first two decades after the 1953
armistice, the abductees were primarily South Korean fishermen whose boats had drifted
too far up the coast. South Korea has confirmed that just under five hundred of its
citizens are still held in the North.
Kim Jong-il, who would go on to take over his fathers position, expanded the program
outside the Koreas. He diversified and expanded intelligence operations, abducting native
teachers to train North Korean spies to navigate the languages and cultures of Malaysia,
Thailand, Romania, Lebanon, France, and Holland. Japanese nationals were especially
sought after, because their identities could be used to create fake passports. The Japanese
government officially recognizes seventeen abductees, but estimates of their numbers run
from a few dozen to several hundred. The targets tended either to be unmarried men of
low social status who lived far from their families, and wouldnt be missed, or young
couples. Japans traditional family-registration system (koseki) had yet to be fully
centralized in the nineteen-seventies, when the first Japanese people were abducted, so
there was no reliable national database against which a forged passport could be

there was no reliable national database against which a forged passport could be
compared. And a Japanese passport granted the holder access to virtually any country on
Earth.
People began to disappear from Japan in 1977. A security guard vacationing at a seaside
resort two hundred miles northwest of Tokyo vanished in mid-September. A thirteenyear-old girl named Megumi Yokota, walking home from badminton practice in the port
city of Niigata, was last seen eight hundred feet from her familys front door. Dozens
more went missing from other parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. A
Thai woman living in Macau was grabbed on her way to a beauty salon. Four Lebanese
women were brought from Beirut. A Romanian artist, having been promised an
exhibition, was abducted. Some were lured onto airplanes by the prospect of jobs abroad;
others were simply gagged, thrown into bags, and transported by boat to North Korea.
Their families spent years searching for the missing, checking mortuaries, hiring private
detectives and soothsayers. Only five of the Japanese abductees were ever seen again.

eyond the wedding arrangements for Kaoru Hasuike and Yukiko Okudo, the
North Korean government systematically did more matchmaking. Enter the
American Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins, who, in January, 1965, was stationed at the
demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Part of a four-man hunter-killer
team, Jenkins was tasked with drawing fire from North Korean troops during daytime
patrols. He had grown depressed and drank heavily, and he concocted an escape plan. I
was going to walk north across the DMZ and into North Korea, he wrote in his
memoir, The Reluctant Communist (2008). Once there, I would ask to be handed over
to the Russians, and request a diplomatic exchange for passage back to the United
States. In the early hours one morning, Jenkins informed his squad that he was going to
check the road, but instead he tied a white T-shirt to his M-14 rifle and crossed into the
D.M.Z., taking high, slow, deliberate steps to avoid trip wires that would set off a mine,
he recalled. It was the stupidest thing Ive ever done, he told me. Three weeks later, one
of the Norths propaganda loudspeakers announced the news of his arrival. The
Republic that is the Eternal Paradise will protect with hospitality the brave Sergeant
Jenkins!
The U.S. military tried to keep Jenkinss defection quiet, for fear that more soldiers might
follow. A few others had done so already, under similarly hapless circumstances. After
being debriefed by the North Koreans, Jenkins was assigned to live with them in a tiny
house, where they slept on mats on the floor. We four who willingly walked across the
DMZ were Cold War trophies, which is why I think we were never treated like POWs.
As the stars of several propaganda pamphletsand later movieswe had to look like we
were happy, or at least healthy, he wrote. They were cast whenever a North Korean film
or television show called for Western villains. But their primary job was to teach English.
He said, We just wouldnt correct the students mistakes, or wed purposely teach them
nonsense words.
In 1965, Charles Jenkins crossed the D.M.Z. into North

In 1965, Charles Jenkins crossed the D.M.Z. into North

Korea. It was the stupidest thing Ive ever done, he
said.
AP / COURTESY FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX

The regime began pairing the defectors with women

who had been abducted from foreign countries. In
the summer of 1980, Jenkins was introduced to a
woman who the regime wanted to learn English.
Her name was Hitomi Soga, and she was from
Japan. I had never seen anybody so beautiful in my
life, he wrote. For several months, they would
smoke, talk, and play cards. One night, Jenkins
ventured that he had heard of a number of Japanese
people who had been brought to North Korea
against their will. She looked frightened and remained silent, but pointed to her nose to
indicate that she was one of them. At dusk on August 12, 1978, Soga had gone shopping
with her mother, Miyoshi, at the general store near their home on Sado Island. Three
men followed them, and on a quiet stretch of road pulled them behind a tree and bound
and gagged them. They dragged them a few hundred feet down the road to the Kono
River, where a small skiff was hidden beneath a bridge. When Soga arrived in North
Korea, her mother was gone.
A minder urged Jenkins to marry her. You and she dont seem like it, but you are actually
the same. You both have nothing here. Together, you would each at least have
something, he said. Jenkins soon started proposing almost every day. After several weeks,
she relented, and they were married on August 8, 1980. They had two daughters, Mika,
in 1983, and Brinda, in 1985.
Perhaps the most significant instances of the North Korean regime acting as a romantic
facilitator involved the Red Army Faction, a group of young radicals from Japan who
hijacked an airplane in 1970 to receive combat training in North Korea. Once inside the
country, the men were schooled in juche, North Koreas official philosophy, commonly
translated as self-reliance, and guided by the collective unconscious embodied in Kim
Il-sung. When Kim judged that the group had been successfully reducated, he called a
press conference. Their ideological state seems to have improved, he said, as the
members of the Red Army sat stiffly at a conference table. He took to calling the men his
golden eggs, and planned to use them to spread North Koreas revolutionary ideas
around the world. The only problem was that there werent enough of them.
It was decided that the members of the Red Army needed wives. Because North Korean
law forbids marriage between its citizens and foreigners, the groups North Korean
overseers suggested that spies recruit suitable Japanese women from Europe and Japan
and bring them to North Korea to serve as brides. It is unclear exactly how all the wives
got to North Korea, or whether they were aware of the reason for their recruitment. One

got to North Korea, or whether they were aware of the reason for their recruitment. One
of them was told that she would be going to study in North Korea but had to keep it a
secret; she was directed to tell her parents that she was going to Europe, and the day
before she left she signed half a dozen postcards, pre-stamped and addressed to them,
filled with banalities (The weather here is beautiful). The Marriage Project, as the
matchmaking scheme came to be known, culminated in May, 1977, when the entire
group got married, one by one, in the course of a week. Kim Il-sung visited the
Revolutionary Village to celebrate the weddings, and told the Red Army that now they
must continue the revolution by giving birth to the next generation.
I asked Sergeant Jenkins what he considered the point of all the abductions. He
answered by telling me about a visit that two North Korean cadres paid to his home in
1995. Such a visit was unusual, so he was nervous. The conversation turned to his
daughters. Thanks to the great benevolence of Kim Jong-il, they said, the girls would
be sent to the Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies. The college is one of the most
prestigious in North Korea, but it also feeds into the countrys intelligence service.
Thats when I knew they were planning to turn Brinda and Mika into spies, he recalled.
Think about it. They would be perfect raw material for North Korean spies, because
they looked nothing like what someone would expect a North Korean spy to look like.
Mixed-race children are common in South Korea and Japan, but they are unheard of in
the North. Jenkins believes the abduction project was a long-term breeding program.
That could explain why most of the Japanese were abducted in pairs, usually a girlfriend
and boyfriend out for a romantic evening, and why the North Koreans had no use for
Jenkinss wifes mother.
He may have been on to something. The North Korean defector Jang Jin-sung, in his
2014 book, Dear Leader, describes a program instituted after it became clear that
abductees would never become spies. The seed-bearing strategy involved sending
attractive North Korean women to seduce foreign diplomats, journalists, and
businessmen. The resulting children gave the regime leverage over the fatherswho
would be manipulated into aiding the North through favorable news coverage, business
deals, or government aidand the children could be trained as spies. When I met Jang,
he connected the abduction project to the seed-bearing program. They were essentially
the same project, just using different methods, he said. They went from kidnapping
people to kidnapping eggs.
Kaoru Hasuike and Yukiko Okudo had a daughter and a son, born in 1981 and 1985.
The couple gave them secret Japanese names, Shigeyo and Katsuya. Every day, a minder
would ferry the children back and forth to day care outside the invitation-only zone, and,
like kids growing up anywhere, they perceived their lives to be normal. For native North
Koreans, secrets and omnipresent surveillance were as common as air. When each child
turned eight, the regime sent them to a boarding school a hundred and twenty miles
north of Pyongyang. They would be allowed to visit home for three months, during
winter and summer holidays; there were no parents-day visits or phone calls, and care

winter and summer holidays; there were no parents-day visits or phone calls, and care
packages took a month to arrive, if they were delivered at all. None of the students knew
precisely where their peers were from. The Hasuike children passed as North Korean,
and they believed they were.

ecause the locations of the kidnappings were scattered, and because the number of
disappearances was relatively small, few people in Japan drew a connection among
the incidents, or even identified them as abductions. A local paper slyly described a
couple as having been burned up by their passion, the implication being that they
eloped after the woman became pregnant. When the families of the missing went to the
police, they were told that, with no evidence of foul play, there was nothing to investigate.
Gradually, a few members of the Japanese government became aware of the abductions;
not every operation went according to plan, and the police occasionally found North
Korean military artifacts in spy boats that washed up on remote beaches. A Japanese
couple was discovered with their hands tied, bags over their heads, after their would-be
abductors had abandoned them and fled. But Japan avoided acknowledging the
abductions officially. What could have been done? Japan had neither diplomatic relations
with North Korea nor a military that could take unilateral action, and its mutual-security
treaty with the United States wouldnt be triggered by a handful of kidnappings. If a
Japanese official made the matter public, North Korea might hide the evidence by killing
the abductees. It cant be helped (shikata ga nai) is a phrase commonly used in Japan to
rationalize inaction. And so dozens of people languished in North Korea for a quarter
century.
The most dramatic proof of the abductions came in 1987, when two North Korean
terrorists tucked explosives, planted inside a Panasonic radio, into an overhead luggage
compartment on a South Korean airliner. They bailed on the flight in Abu Dhabi, before
the bomb killed everyone on board. One of the terrorists later confessed that she had
been taught Japanese by an abductee. North Korea never took responsibility, but after
several years it opened diplomatic discussions with Japan. Finally, at a meeting in 1997,
Japanese negotiators substituted the phrase missing people for abductees, and the
North agreed to investigate.
On September 17, 2002, the Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, flew from
Tokyo across the D.M.Z. in order to begin the process of normalizing diplomatic
relationsa condition of which was accounting for the Japanese citizens who had been
held in Korean custody. North Korea waited until the last possible moment to hand over
the list of surviving and deceased abductees: the North admitted to kidnapping thirteen
people, eight of whom the regime claimed were dead, all under suspicious circumstances.
Only five were said to be alive.

Kim Jong-il entered the negotiation room wearing his signature khaki-colored military

Kim Jong-il entered the negotiation room wearing his signature khaki-colored military
jacket. As the host, I regret that we had to make the Prime Minister of Japan come to
Pyongyang so early in the morning in order to open a new chapter in the D.P.R.K.Japan relationship, Kim said. Reading from a memo pad, Kim explained to Koizumi that
he wanted to initiate a truly neighborly relationship with Japan. I, too, hope that the
opportunity that this meeting presents will greatly advance bilateral relations between
our two countries, Koizumi replied. But then his tone grew stern. I was utterly
distressed by the information that was provided, he began. I ask that you arrange a
meeting for us with the surviving abductees. And I would like you to make an outright
apology. Kim listened in silence, looking uncomfortable. After a long pause, he
suggested, Shall we take a break now?
When the negotiations resumed, Kim got right to the point. We have thoroughly
investigated this matter, he read to the room. Decades of adversarial relations between
our two countries provided the background of this incident. It was, nevertheless, an
appalling incident. Kim continued, It is my understanding that this incident was
initiated by special-mission organizations in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, driven
by blindly motivated patriotism and misguided heroism. He explained that the purpose
of the abductions was to find people to teach its agents Japanese, and to steal identities
with which to infiltrate the South. As soon as their scheme and deeds were brought to
my attention, those who were responsible were punished. The North Koreans claimed
that the two people responsible for the abduction of Megumi Yokota, whose kidnapping
was highly publicized, had been tried and found guilty in 1998. One was executed and
the other was serving a fifteen-year sentence. I would like to take this opportunity to
apologize straightforwardly for the regrettable conduct of those people. I will not allow
that to happen again, Kim promised.
It was inconceivable to Koizumi that a program like this could have existed without
Kims knowledge, especially since he was in charge of espionage operations during the
years that most of the abductions occurred. Despite his misgivings, Koizumi signed the
Pyongyang Declaration at a ceremony at five-thirty that afternoon. The event was
immortalized on a North Korean postage stamp.

n October 16, 2002, a photograph of five middle-aged Japanese peopletwo

couples and a single woman, all wearing boxy nineteen-fifties-era suits, ties, and
skirtsseen descending from a Boeing 767 at Tokyos Haneda Airport appeared in
newspapers across the globe. The New York Times headline read: Tears and Hugs as 5
Abducted Japanese Go Home to Visit. Kaoru Hasuike and Yukiko Okudo, Hitomi
Soga, and two others returned to Japan twenty-four years after they had been abducted.
Sogas husband, Jenkins, remained in Pyongyang with their daughters. The major
Japanese television stations ran specials and live coverage all day, devoting thirty hours to

the homecoming. It would take nineteen more months of negotiations, and several

the homecoming. It would take nineteen more months of negotiations, and several
hundred thousand tons of rice, before the abductees children were allowed to reunite
with their parents in Japan.
The return left the public feeling simultaneously aghast at North Koreas treachery and
patronized by the Japanese governments incompetence. Within a week, national support
for normalizing relations with North Korea, which Koizumi had championed, plunged
from eighty-one per cent to forty-four per cent. Soon, every major political party
included dealing with the abductions in its official election agenda. When Shinz Abe
became Prime Minister, in 2006, one of his first acts was to establish the Headquarters
for the Abduction Issue, a cabinet-level office with an enormous budget to cordinate
the governments abduction-related efforts. It produced films, comic books, and cartoons
about the kidnappings. Abe also ordered NHK, the government-funded broadcaster, to
increase its already extensive coverage of the abductions.
In October, 2002, five abductees returned to Japan from
North Korea.
AP / COURTESY FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX

Some Japanese activists have continued pushing for

more, driven by the conviction that the abductees
claimed dead by the North Korean regime were still
alive. An abduction support group held press
conferences and raised money for a reconnaissance
mission to infiltrate North Korea and locate the
remaining abductees. (It failed.) Another
organization, the Investigation Commission on
Missing Japanese Probably Related to North Korea,
has, since 2005, beamed a shortwave broadcast called
Shiokaze twice a day into North Korea. Segments
are announced in Japanese, English, Chinese, and
Korean; they include some international news items
and messages to individual abductees, often read by friends and relatives. Soothing piano
music plays in the background. A repeating message tells the abductees to keep the faith,
because it will not be long until we rescue you.

met Kaoru Hasuike on a warm April afternoon. His shaggy haircut and taut, angular
face made 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 through 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 monthly stipend
offered to abductees. He and Yukiko found part-time work at the Kashiwazaki city hall
during the year and a half it took for their children to be freed. Now Kaoru earns a living

during the year and a half it took for their children to be freed. Now Kaoru earns a living
translating books from Korean; he also writes his own. Yukiko is a cook in a local
kindergarten.
Having spent half his life as a Korean among Koreans, it would be odd if he were able to
shed his experience easily. Japanese culture has difficulty with elements that dont fit
precise categories, and the suspicion that Kaoru was ambivalent about returning to Japan,
that he was somehow both Korean and Japanese, drove some people crazy. But Kaoru
seems to have survived his North Korean ordeal by living as normally as possiblea life
with more than its share of oppression, fear, and misery, of course, but a life nonetheless.
He married, had children, and, to an extent, formed friendships. What was the
alternative?
Kaoru told me that the time he spent waiting for North Korea to release his children was
the most difficult. The regime had made it clear that it was monitoring his every move,
so Kaoru had to be careful not to say or do anything that would offend North Korea, and
perhaps keep him from seeing his children again. During this period, the North Koreans
prepared the children for the shock of learning the truth both about their parents and
themselves. 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 didnt mention the abduction part, Kaoru said. The
North Korean authorities couldnt release them into a P.R. storm where they were
traumatized, which would leave a negative impact on North Koreas reputation. In order
to have the proper promotional value, they had to be prepared bit by bit.
In Kaorus first interaction with his son after he was sent over from North Korea, he
could sense the uncertainty. On May 22, 2004, once the childrens plane took off, a
Japanese official handed Katsuya a cell phone with his father on the other end. Your
Korean is strange, the boy said. This isnt really my father, is it? Kaoru had been giving
Korean lessons since he returned, and the South Korean language tapes he used had
changed his accent slightly.
The first couple of days, we didnt say much, we just let time pass, he recalled. Knowing
that their Japanese was poor, Kaoru bought his kids a few Korean DVDs. The family
spent its first night together in Kashiwazaki watching Winter Sonata, a popular South
Korean soap opera. When stories about North Korean defectors appeared on the
television news, Kaoru noticed the childrens concentration intensify as they tried to sort
out what was true and what was propaganda. Once they learned that the country they
had been taught to love had abducted and imprisoned their parents, they realized they
would have no future in North Korea. After learning Japanese, their greatest challenge
was handling their newfound freedom. It was scary to suddenly not be told what to do.

Today, when I speak with my children, I never lie about anything, Kaoru said. That is

Today, when I speak with my children, I never lie about anything, Kaoru said. That is
the rule. Once you open the door and are honest, you have to continue to speak truthfully
and be completely open.
Katsuya earned a degree in computer science from Waseda University and works for a
bank in Seoul. Kaorus daughter, Shigeyo, is pursuing a doctorate in education. Brinda
Jenkins studied bridal and wedding services at a Niigata trade school, got a sales job at a
sake distillery, and in 2014 married the son of a cement manufacturer whom she met at
the sake factory. Her sister, Mika, teaches at a day care and lives at home with her mother
and father, who still communicate in Korean, their only common language.

Robert S. Boynton directs the literary-reportage program at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism
Institute at New York University. This piece has been excerpted from his forthcoming book,
The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Koreas Abduction Project.