The Invitation-Only Zone (30 page)

The dominant story in Asia today is the rise of Japan’s erstwhile colonies. Compared with Korea’s surge of wealth and China’s dramatic military and economic rise, the Japanese feel diminished and are mystified when accused of bullying their neighbors.
“Many Japanese, and particularly younger ones, feel that in today’s Asia, they are more victims than victimizers,” explains the writer and editor Yoichi Funabashi. For them news of the abductions had a strangely cathartic effect. “They are tired of the way South Korea and China have played the history card. So in 2002, when they got proof that Japanese were being abducted by North Korea,
they felt that finally they, too, were victims!”
²

From the day I saw the photograph, I was obsessed—with the abductions, with the window they gave me into North Korea, and with the perspective they gave me on the vexed politics of Northeast Asia. Every year from 2008 to 2015, I spent between three weeks to three months reporting in Japan and South Korea. Having written about race and ethnicity
in the American context, I was especially curious about the way these concepts had been used throughout history to alternately unite and divide Japan, Korea, and China. Though “race” is a biological fiction, its power comes from the stories it enables us to tell about the differences between those over whom we feel superior and those to whom we feel inferior. Asia didn’t possess anything like the
West’s version of “race” until the late nineteenth century, when Meiji Japan imported it as part of its modernization process. Looking at the outside world, the Japanese of that period had a dilemma: how could they manage to employ a concept used principally to rank peoples of different colors (white, black, yellow) in order to differentiate among similarly hued peoples (Koreans, Chinese) with whom
Japan shared deep historical roots?

I had thought I was working on two separate reporting projects during my first visit to Japan. One was the abductions. The other was a story about how Japan was dealing with its coming demographic crisis. I had noticed a small body of scholarship on the steps homogeneous Japan was taking to open itself up to foreigners—not by choice, but out of necessity. With
one of the lowest birthrates in Asia, and the world’s most rapidly aging population, by 2050 Japan is projected to see its population fall from 130 million to 90 million—the same as it was in 1952, when the U.S. occupation ended. Something has to give, and experts I surveyed suggested that a more open immigration policy was inevitable. Recently, Japan had been experimenting by creating a special
class of visas to bring in Brazilians with Japanese ethnicity and small groups of carefully selected foreign professionals, such as nurses from the Philippines. I was interested in how a country that is so protective of its ethnic purity might deal with these challenges.

I decided to focus on Japan’s largest ethnic minority as a test case of Japan’s potential as a multicultural country. Facing
discrimination similar to that once suffered by American blacks and Jews, Japan’s six hundred thousand Korean permanent residents (known as Zainichi) had found their way to professions—sports, entertainment, financial speculation—where their ethnicity hindered them less. Several generations on, most Zainichi families have so thoroughly assimilated that they are, for all intents and purposes, Japanese.
Many neither speak nor read Korean, and have taken Japanese names. Yet they are still disenfranchised, unable to vote or hold political office because they are “permanent resident foreigners,” not Japanese citizens. In order to travel abroad, they must obtain a passport from either South or North Korea, their official “home countries,” despite the fact that they may never have set foot in either.
Japan’s Koreans are in a state of permanent limbo, in but not of the only home most of them have ever known. Is this what’s in store, I wondered, for the immigrants Japan so desperately needs in order to save itself from extinction?

I’d barely started my work when something odd began to happen. About halfway through an interview for the abduction article, my subjects, unbidden by me, would start
to talk about Japan’s “Korean problem.” When I guided them back to the topic of the abductions, some postulated that the abductees had been tarnished in North Korea, even “brainwashed,” and might now be “too Korean” to qualify as “proper Japanese.” “If they are
really
Japanese,” one asked me, her voice dripping with suspicion, “why won’t they denounce Kim Jong-il?” Others suggested that one or
more of the abductees were North Korean “sleeper” spies awaiting coded instructions from Pyongyang.

Similarly, many of my interviews for the multiculturalism article would at some point swerve toward the subject of the abductions. One interviewee suggested to me that the Zainichi minority’s pro-North Korea sentiments (and alleged role in aiding the abductions) had exposed the fallacy of multiculturalism,
and undermined their protected status as ethnically defined “permanent residents.” I gradually came to understand that the subterranean link between Japan and Korea—whether by way of immigration, colonialism, or abduction—
was
the story. Understood in their proper historical context, the abductees were anything but unique. Rather, they were only the most recent reminder of the intimate connection
between Japan and the rest of Asia. From the sixth century to the tenth, the young state of Japan exchanged emissaries with the independent Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla kingdoms on the Korean Peninsula. Japan traded with Korea’s ancient empires and, through them, with China, absorbing the fruits of its more advanced civilization. Contact thrived through Japan’s period of self-imposed isolation,
up until the end of World War II.

Like the millions of people who in previous centuries moved back and forth between the peninsula and the archipelago (voluntarily or not), the abductees were living proof of the region’s deep, and deeply denied, connectedness. Japan’s colonial empire was a rare example in modern history of one ethnic group annexing a similar, neighboring ethnic group, as opposed
to distant “natives.” As the historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki writes, Japan “colonized the regions with which it had the deepest and most ancient cultural ties,” which led to an “almost obsessive concern with similarity and difference: a passion both for detailing the links that bound the colonizer to the colonized and for assiduously tending the frontiers that kept them apart.”
³

Despite their aesthetic
appreciation of ambiguity, the Japanese have difficulty conceiving of identities that don’t fit neatly into categories. Whether they are Japanese abductees in North Korea or Koreans born in Japan, groups that don’t fit in make the Japanese anxious. I came to think of the return of the abductees as akin to Freud’s “return of the repressed”—the unrecognizable element of Japanese history that
haunted the present.

For every nationalist who saw the abductions as a (literal) call to arms against the North, there was a liberal who cited the dispute as a reminder of Japan’s guilty conscience, and of how little progress Japan had made mending relations with its neighbors. Many people I talked to were quick to point out that Japan itself had forced (some said abducted) millions of Koreans
to work in its mines and factories in the 1930s and ’40s. Were their lives worth less than those of a dozen Japanese?

It turned out that the abductions divided the Japanese public as much as they united it. Most people viewed the abductees as innocent victims of North Korean treachery. Others were more suspicious, and pointed to their continued reluctance to talk about their experience as proof
that they were not entirely victims, and must have compromised themselves by working against Japan while in North Korea. Still others tried to pretend that the whole episode had never taken place. When I interviewed Yasushi and Fukie Chimura, I was struck by the way their families tried to avoid the fact that the couple spent fully half their lives living as North Koreans. “It’s like they never
left,” Fukie’s uncle told me. “Things just went back to normal the moment they got back. Nothing’s changed about them.”

After some initial awkwardness, Fukie talked for an hour straight. Surely she had gone over this territory before, I asked. “No, none of my friends ask me anything about North Korea. They don’t want to be rude,” she said.

*   *   *

I often describe this book as an act of “extreme
journalism,” the reporter’s equivalent to the rock climber who leaves behind his ropes. Reporting on a series of events spanning several decades, in three countries, in two languages I don’t speak, sometimes struck me as foolish, if not insane. I believe that, done correctly, literary reportage has the power to bridge the gaps between people who hold radically different worldviews, and this
book is a test of my convictions.

Throughout the project, I kept returning to something the writer Lawrence Wright told me in my book
The New New Journalism
. “When I’m reporting an international story I do my best to strip away the exotic veneer of the place in order to write about my characters in a fashion that is recognizable in any context,” he said. “Then, once I’ve established their everyday
humanity, I can get at the truly exotic dimension of the story.” The most exciting part of being a reporter is interacting with people who are different from, and more interesting than, me. I’ve rarely written a story in which I wasn’t, in some sense, the odd man out, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’d never found my oddness more obvious than in Asia, whether I was reporting in Seoul,
Tokyo, Niigata, or Osaka. I know I miss a lot because of my outsider status, but the advantage of not belonging to any of the relevant ethnic groups was that it allowed some of my subjects to speak more freely than they might have otherwise. In cultures as hierarchical as those of Japan and Korea, the low expectations many have of outsiders is a great advantage for a reporter. I hope I have been
a worthy receptacle for the stories people were so generous to share with me.

TIME LINE

NOTES

1. Welcome to the Invitation-Only Zone

  
1
. Interview with the author, Kashiwazaki, Japan, June 19, 2010.

  
2
. Bruce Cumings,
Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 423.

  
3
. In 1990, North Korea imported 1.2 million tons of rice and grain. S. Kim, “North Korea in 1995: The Crucible of Our Style of Socialism,”
Asian Survey
36, no. 1 (1996): 61.