The Invitation-Only Zone (22 page)

Between the Dark Waves: North Korea’s Espionage Project
was broadcast at 8:00 p.m. on May 24, 1995. Ishidaka steeled himself for the criticism he was sure to receive from North Korea sympathizers. What he wasn’t prepared for, however, was the complete silence that followed the broadcast. The story was simply
too far-out for the average viewer to believe. The idea of a chef being abducted by North Korean spies was just too bizarre. And the sources for the story—a motley crew of convicted criminals, spies, and intelligence agents—didn’t help. Why would
anyone
believe them? Ishidaka was devastated.

It isn’t quite true that the documentary got
no
response. The next day, Ishidaka received a call from
an editor at Asahi’s book publishing division. “That documentary you showed last night was interesting. Did all that stuff really happen?” the editor asked. Ishidaka didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He had produced a documentary whose plot was so bizarre that someone inside his own company was skeptical. Annoyed, he assured the editor that it was journalism, not fiction. “Okay, then how about
writing a book about it so that future generations will know what happened?” Ishidaka had always fancied himself a writer, so the idea of a book no one could doubt appealed to him. Finishing the book took two more years of reporting, but he was determined to prove to the world, once and for all, that the abductions had taken place.

Finances were a problem. Japanese book publishers don’t generally
give authors an advance, and the disastrous television show had already aired, so there would be no further funds from his TV company. Japanese wives traditionally handle the family’s finances, so Ishidaka begged his for enough money to continue the reporting. She reluctantly agreed, and put him on an allowance. Ishidaka adopted a strict routine. Every day at 2:00 p.m., after the morning show
he produced had wrapped and the next day’s program was set, Ishidaka turned his attention to his abduction research. Every Friday, he caught a 5:00 p.m. flight from Osaka to Seoul to interview North Korean defectors, South Korean intelligence agents, and assorted spies.

Back in Japan, he met with anyone who suspected that a family member had been abducted. He was flooded with calls and letters
from families who had spent years asking the Japanese police and government for help. Other families, who felt they had been mistreated by the media, didn’t respond to Ishidaka. Kaoru Hasuike’s father had posted a sign, “Interview Requests Not Accepted,” on his front door. He told Ishidaka, “No matter how much we ask for help for Kaoru, the government refuses to do anything. I don’t think we can
get him back. It’s painful even to think about it.” Ishidaka learned of the 1988 letter that Toru Ishioka had written from Pyongyang about himself and Keiko Arimoto. Ishidaka accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Arimoto to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where an exasperated official warned them that their persistence might endanger their daughter. “If we ask the North Koreans about her, she’ll be in danger.
That country is capable of anything. We can’t do anything,” the official said.
²

*   *   *

Myeongdong is central Seoul’s busiest shopping district, crowded with boutiques, restaurants, and bars, and where the fragrance of barbecued beef lingers twenty-four hours a day. It is the perfect place for meeting people who don’t want to be noticed. On June 23, 1995, Ishidaka met with a South Korean intelligence
agent who had information he was eager to share. He had twice tried to relay it to the Japanese police, but they didn’t seem to be interested. Perhaps Ishidaka would bite? “A child was abducted from Japan. She was thirteen years old and was on her way home from badminton practice at school. It happened in either 1976 or ’77,” the agent said.
³
The agent didn’t know the girl’s name or where in Japan
she was from. The information had come from a North Korean defector who had met the girl in a Pyongyang hospital, where she was being treated for depression. She was suicidal, and it was her second extended stay there. “I was abducted and told that if I studied hard and mastered Korean within five years, I’d be sent back to my parents,” she told him. She had done as she was told, but when she
turned eighteen her handlers refused to release her.

Ishidaka had already completed his reporting for the book and didn’t know what to do with this information. He had checked every case meticulously, confirming the dates and circumstances for each abduction. Haunted by the humiliation of the documentary, he was determined not to take any chances. The idea that North Korea was abducting Japanese
people was bizarre enough. Who would believe they had targeted a thirteen-year-old girl? “It was just too crazy,” Ishidaka tells me. “If I included her story, people might think that the stories I told of the other abduction victims were also unreliable. I couldn’t risk that.”
⁴

In September 1996, advertisements for
Kim Jong-il’s Kidnapping Command
appeared in the
Asahi Daily
. At the offices of
Modern Korea
magazine, run by Katsumi Sato, the activist who had once worked on the repatriation project, saw the ads and contacted Ishidaka with an idea. Perhaps he would write an article for
Modern Korea
telling the story behind the book? Ishidaka agreed, and his article “Why I Wrote
Kim Jong-il’s Kidnapping Command
” appeared in
Modern Korea
’s October issue. Sato asked whether Ishidaka would
include some material that hadn’t made it into the book. Ishidaka immediately thought of the thirteen-year-old girl, and added a brief summary to the piece.

A few weeks later, Sato was in his hometown of Niigata, lecturing on North Korea to an audience of about eighty people. He described his youthful infatuation with communism and North Korea, his subsequent loss of faith, and the terrible suffering
the regime inflicted on its people. He plugged Ishidaka’s book and, as an afterthought, mentioned the story of the thirteen-year-old girl. Afterward, an older gentleman approached Sato. “That girl with the badminton racket. That just
has to be
Megumi Yokota. She disappeared from Niigata in 1977.”
⁵

16

THE GREAT LEADER DIES, A NATION STARVES

On the morning of July 9, 1994, Kaoru Hasuike was awakened by the announcement that a broadcast of great importance was scheduled for noon that day. With prolonged negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons, tensions were high and there had been several such announcements over the past few months. The United States had accused the regime of
diverting plutonium from the Yongbyon nuclear reactor to make warheads and had demanded that the United Nations be allowed to inspect the site. North Korea refused, and threatened to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty. By June, the situation had grown so dire that President Clinton approved plans to send cruise missiles and F-117 fighters to destroy the reactor—an act of aggression he knew
was likely to lead to all-out war.

Kaoru had heard a disturbing rumor that was going around Pyongyang. During a meeting about the nuclear crisis, Kim Il-sung allegedly asked his son what he would do if war came and the North lost. The famously hawkish Kim Jong-il replied, “If that happens, I will blow up the earth. Because without the DPRK, the earth need not exist!” As military drills increased
and the tone of the North Korean media grew more belligerent, Kaoru feared war was inevitable, and he devised a plan to keep his family together.

With his children about to return to school, he brought his daughter to a remote graveyard nestled in a pine forest, where he occasionally retreated to think. Ten million Koreans had been displaced during the Korean War, many settling on opposing sides
of the divided nation, never to see each other again. What if war broke out and he and Yukiko were separated from their children? “If war comes, Mom and I won’t be able to stay here,” he explained to his daughter. “Before we leave, I’ll put a letter in a bottle and bury it next to that grave,” he said, gesturing at a small plot. The letter would specify a place to meet at five o’clock in the evening
on the first and fifteenth of every month. She was to wait thirty minutes and then repeat the process until he showed. “This is a secret between you and me. Don’t tell anyone, not even your brother,” he instructed the twelve-year-old girl.
¹

The last five years had been extremely unsettling for North Korea. In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and the people of Eastern Europe overthrew their oppressive
governments. Closer to home, Chinese students gathered in Tiananmen Square to demand freedom and an end to state corruption. In 1991 the Soviet Union, the first Communist nation in history, collapsed. China, under Deng Xiaoping, welcomed capitalism into its economy. In just three years, North Korea went from being a member of a global Communist movement to one of the last holdouts. Adding insult
to injury, Russia and China normalized relations with South Korea, whose economy had grown too large to ignore. Meanwhile, annual trade between North Korea and the Soviet Union dropped from $2.6 billion to $140 million between 1990 and 1994. The North Korean media blamed the Soviet Union’s demise on its leaders’ lack of revolutionary commitment, and in a stroke of genius it used the failure of Eastern
European communism to bolster the case for North Korea’s stark brand of totalitarianism: North Korea alone had stayed true to communism’s ideals! “The collapse of the Soviet Bloc was attributed not to the failure of socialism, but to the degenerative effect of capitalism, and the penetration of imperialist ideology and culture” says Kaoru.
²

Kim Il-sung’s funeral
(Associated Press)

On July 8, at the stroke of noon, Kaoru switched on the radio and heard a trembling, mournful voice announcing news that was literally unimaginable to most North Koreans: Kim Il-sung, the nation’s founder and only leader, had died. Although North Korea was officially an atheist state, the regime had never shied away from attributing divine powers to Kim:
the messiah who liberated his people from the Japanese in 1945, the benevolent father who lifted them up from poverty, the guardian who protected them from American imperialism. Nobody knew about his heart troubles, and North Koreans had expected his doctors at the Research Center for the Longevity of the Leader to keep him alive indefinitely. For North Koreans, slogans such as “The Great Leader
is forever with us!” were taken literally.

The nation descended into a ten-day period of mourning, during which dancing and amusement of all kinds were forbidden. While the people of North Korea pondered the frightening prospect of a future without the Great Leader, Kaoru faced a different dilemma. How would he, a Japanese prisoner, mourn Kim’s death? “Citizens were expected to wail and cry,
but I couldn’t grieve over the death of the man who had abducted me. I didn’t think my heart or pride would allow me to,” he says. The stakes were high. If his minder suspected that Kaoru’s grief was fake, his family might be in jeopardy. He decided to watch how others acted and imitate them. That afternoon, he and his minder brought flowers to a nearby statue of Kim Il-sung, where Kaoru noticed some
people sobbing, while others merely wiped tears from their eyes and bowed their heads, a style of mourning he felt he could mimic. During a service held at the Invitation-Only Zone the next day, several people threw themselves to the ground. Kaoru couldn’t risk standing out, and quickly fell to his knees, wiping fake tears from his face. The real test came on July 19, when one million people lined
the streets of Pyongyang for Kim’s state funeral. A car from the Invitation-Only Zone deposited Kaoru in downtown Pyongyang early that morning, and he waited several hours in the sweltering summer heat before he heard faint chords from “The Song of the Supreme General Kim Il-sung.” As the limousine bearing Kim’s body came into sight, the crowds of people who had stood silently for hours spontaneously
began stamping their feet and tearing at their clothes, swept up in a moment of religious fervor that Kaoru found frightening. He stood on tiptoe to glimpse the hearse, which had a huge flower-ringed portrait of a smiling Kim Il-sung perched on top. Amazed by the intensity of emotion around him, Kaoru forgot to cry. Fortunately, his minders were too overcome with emotion to notice.

North Korea
is often described as a country where history has stopped, and now as the official period of mourning was extended to three full years, it became a funereal state, led forever by Kim Il-sung, who was designated its “Eternal President.” His son, Kim Jong-il, refrained from replacing his father for the duration of the mourning period. The list of forbidden activities grew to include weddings and funerals.
When an officer whom Kaoru knew built a tombstone for his recently deceased mother, the man was punished with compulsory labor and a demotion. Fearing they’d get in trouble, farmers refrained from cultivating their fields that summer, further reducing a yield that had been declining since 1990.