Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

For Families of Japanese Abducted by North Korea, Trump Visit Brings Spotlight

Masaru Honma in Kita, his hometown, near Tokyo. Yaeko Taguchi, his sister, was abducted by North Korea in June 1978. He believes she is still alive and says, “This is a matter of life and death.”Credit...Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times

TOKYO — Their stories are wrenching narratives of normalcy interrupted: the young couple taken while on a date at the beach, the single mother snatched on her way to pick up her toddlers after work, and the teenager who never made it home from badminton practice.

Four decades ago, according to the Japanese government, at least 17 Japanese citizens vanished at the hands of North Korea, leaving their families with precious little information. North Korea has acknowledged only that its agents abducted 13 Japanese in the 1970s and ’80s. Five of them were returned home in 2002; North Korea has said the rest died long ago.

The Japanese government insists otherwise, with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe repeatedly calling for North Korea to return the remaining abductees as part of his broader hawkish approach to the North.

Now President Trump also plans to press the cause, meeting during a visit to Japan starting Sunday with several of the affected families, including the parents of Megumi Yokota, abducted by North Korea in 1977 when she was just 13 years old.

Image
Masaru Honma’s family pictures: From left, his sister, Yaeko Taguchi, at 5; Ms. Taguchi as an adult, left, with her four children and a friend; and a 2010 meeting in Japan between (from left) Mr. Honma, the former North Korean spy Kim Hyon-hui, Koichiro Iizuka (Ms. Taguchi’s son) and Shigeo Iizuka (Ms. Taguchi’s brother).Credit...Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times

Here in Japan, the tragic disappearances strike a deeper emotional chord than the fear of ballistic missile attacks, and have resonance akin to that of the fate of American P.O.W.’s during the Vietnam War. Interviews with family members regularly appear in the Japanese media, and the National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North Korea raises hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

“The abductee issue pulls at the heartstrings of the general public in a way that no other issue can,” said Richard Samuels, a Japan specialist and the director of the M.I.T. Center for International Studies. “Because it’s about innocent people.”

Unlike others who have fallen prey to North Korea after traveling there, the kidnapped Japanese citizens were instead taken from their hometowns to train spies there, leaving families wondering for years if they had run away or been murdered.

Now, with family members getting older, they are desperate to secure their loved ones’ return.

“This is a matter of life and death,” said Masaru Honma, 73, one of four living siblings of Yaeko Taguchi, a bar hostess and divorced mother who was kidnapped by North Korea 39 years ago. “There is a time limit.”

Image
Some abductees’ relatives get hope from Kim Hyon-hui, the former North Korean spy, who has said the Japanese are still alive. Ms. Kim’s book describes the plight of Yaeko Taguchi, who she says tutored her in acting Japanese.Credit...Jean Chung for The New York Times

Mr. Honma said he and his family believe Ms. Taguchi — who would now be 62 — is still alive in North Korea. They occasionally get snippets of information from defectors, but their faith rests predominantly on the word of one woman: Kim Hyon-hui, a former North Korea spy who says Ms. Taguchi tutored her in Japanese language and culture so she could pass as Japanese while traveling abroad.

When Ms. Kim visited Japan decades later in 2010, she met with Mr. Honma, along with another brother and Ms. Taguchi’s son. On the back of a photograph taken during that visit, Ms. Kim scrawled a cryptic message in slightly awkward Japanese: “Definitely welcome home.”

Ms. Kim, in an interview in Seoul, said she had wanted to give Ms. Taguchi’s family a thread of hope, and let them know that she believed the missing woman would someday make it home.

Ms. Kim, a convicted terrorist who helped plant a bomb on a Korean Air Lines flight in 1987 that killed 115 people, was given a presidential pardon in South Korea, which has since used her for propaganda purposes and to provide information about the North.

Image
Ms. Kim, with her mouth taped, arriving in Seoul, South Korea, in 1987, after she helped bomb a Korean Air Lines jet.Credit...Kim Chon-kil/Associated Press

She says that in the 1980s, she lived with Ms. Taguchi in Tongbuk-ri, south of Pyongyang, for almost two years. She has also said that she once met Ms. Yokota, the girl who was captured at 13, and that Ms. Yokota also had tutored another North Korean spy.

Ms. Kim says she has not seen either of the women for more than 30 years, but that does not matter to the victims’ families.

“Kim Hyon-hui said Yaeko is definitely alive,” said Mr. Honma. “Even though it’s been a long time since she last met Yaeko, her talk made us feel that she is still alive in North Korea.”

In a recent interview in Seoul, where Ms. Kim traveled with five secret service escorts from her home in an undisclosed location in South Korea, she described how Ms. Taguchi gave her cultural pointers on table manners, makeup and hand gestures between July 1981 and March 1983.

Image
Teruaki Masumoto, a brother of Rumiko Masumoto, who was abducted from a beach while on a date with her boyfriend in 1978. Every two weeks he broadcasts a message directed at North Korea with shortwave radio.Credit...Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times

The North Korean authorities say Ms. Taguchi died in a car accident in 1986. But Ms. Kim said she had spoken to a driver who said he had seen Ms. Taguchi alive a year after that.

“I still believe they are alive,” Ms. Kim said of Ms. Taguchi and the other Japanese abductees. “Those who are compliant and just listen to the North Korean authorities are given basic necessities and treated as foreigners living in North Korea.”

As recently as 2014, North Korea agreed to investigate the fates of those abducted even though it had previously declared most of them dead. But last year, after Japan imposed sanctions in response to a nuclear test, North Korea halted the inquiry.

Some experts say there is little chance the kidnapped Japanese have survived this long.

“I don’t think they are lying about the fact that many of these abductees are now dead,” said Go Myong-Hyun, a research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul.

Image
Teruaki Masumoto’s picture of his elder sister, Rumiko. North Korea has acknowledged kidnapping her and has said she is dead.Credit...Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times

But in Japan it is taboo to suggest that publicly.

“The families of the victims have hope, and they want to believe,” said Satoru Miyamoto, a professor of political science and a North Korea specialist at Seigakuin University in Japan.

The North Korean government released five abductees in 2002 after Junichiro Koizumi, then Japan’s prime minister, went to Pyongyang for a summit meeting. It also provided death certificates — and in two cases, bones — for eight others whom the North admitted kidnapping in the 1970s and 1980s.

But the families say that the death certificates were faked and that DNA tests indicated the bones did not come from their loved ones. The Japanese government does not officially acknowledge their deaths.

“I don’t think they would easily kill a precious diplomatic card like my sister or Yaeko Taguchi,” said Takuya Yokota, 49, a younger brother of Megumi Yokota.

Image
Takuya, left, and Tetsuya Yokota, Megumi Yokota’s twin brothers. She was abducted by North Koreans in 1977 when she was 13. “I don’t think they would easily kill a precious diplomatic card like my sister,” Takuya Yokota said.Credit...Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times

Mr. Yokota and his twin brother were just 9 when their 13-year-old sister disappeared from coastal Niigata. Mr. Yokota still recalls the day she did not come home from badminton practice, and how they helped their mother search for her as dusk fell.

The Yokotas also met with Ms. Kim in 2010. “She could not say much because she was surrounded by South Korean intelligence and police,” Mr. Yokota said. “But she did tell my mother, ‘She’s all right, and you don’t have to worry.’ ” North Korea maintains Ms. Yokota committed suicide in 1994.

Ms. Kim is somewhat vague about how she knows that either Ms. Taguchi or Ms. Yokota is still alive.

She said the women had probably picked up classified information from working with spies, so it made sense for North Korea to declare them dead.

But, she said, “I do not think they have passed away, because the reasons that North Korea gave for their deaths are not reasonable.”

After Ms. Kim was convicted in the airplane bombing, the Japanese police showed her photos of several women suspected of having been abducted by North Korea. Ms. Kim says she recognized Ms. Taguchi.

Ms. Taguchi’s family did not come forward to the police until 2002, when the prime minister, Mr. Koizumi, went to Pyongyang. Seven years later, when Ms. Taguchi’s son, Koichiro Iizuka, was 32, he and an uncle who had raised him met with Ms. Kim for the first time.

Ms. Kim said that when she met Koichiro, she felt an immediate kinship after having listened to his mother weep for her children. “I almost felt like his mother,” Ms. Kim said.

Shigeru Iizuka, Ms. Taguchi’s brother, said he grieves for the maternal love that the man he raised as his own son has never known. “Although he has heard a lot of information about his mother by now, he will never know his mother’s warmth or hear the sound of her voice,” he said.

For now, all the families can do is wait. “The same situation has been dragging on for 40 years,” Mr. Iizuka said. “I feel the weight of the years.”

Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Tokyo, and Su-hyun Lee from Seoul.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Visit Brings Spotlight to North Korean Abductions of Japanese. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT