The Invitation-Only Zone (5 page)

By the time of Kaoru and Yukiko’s abduction, North Korea
had perfected the process. All ships departing from North Korea in the 1970s were tracked by South Korean intelligence, so the spies would steer northeast to the Sea of Okhotsk, before doubling back toward Japan, where it would melt into the many fleets of Japanese fishing vessels to avoid being detected on radar. Once in international waters, it would release several smaller boats stowed in its
rear. These vessels were disguised to look like Japanese fishing vessels; their users would conceal the presence of their high-speed engines by venting the exhaust underwater.

The strategy was to grab young Japanese couples from beaches and parks, and separate them before they arrived in North Korea. Isolation was the key variable. The regime found that it generally took a year and a half to
break an individual down into a state of psychological helplessness, during which time they could teach him the Korean language and introduce him to
juche
, the regime’s official ideology. If all went according to plan, they would begin to build him back up right before he descended into a state of absolute despair. Having experienced the total control of the North Korean state, he would become
passive and compliant. The process had been tried with intact couples, but it was observed that the presence of a partner encouraged the abductees to resist, collaborate, and occasionally fight back. On the other hand, an abductee who was completely isolated for too long was
more
difficult to control; loneliness had a way of turning into depression and even, in some cases, led to suicide. But
if the correct balance was maintained and the couple was separated, trained, and then reunited, the options were unlimited. They could serve the state together, whether as spies or language teachers, each functioning as a hostage with which to threaten and manipulate the other—a strategy the North routinely employed with Korean diplomats, athletes, and anyone else given permission to travel abroad.

Yukiko Hasuike
(Kyodo)

Kaoru and Yukiko married three days after reuniting. “I would have done it that morning,” says Kaoru. “I didn’t want to wait.” North Korean marriage ceremonies are straightforward affairs, with none of the opulence typical in the West. The groom received a haircut and was outfitted with a new white shirt and a necktie; the bride wore a simple flower-patterned dress. Six
guests attended: Kaoru and Yukiko’s minder (the man who guided their education and oversaw every aspect of their lives in North Korea), the two high party officials who oversaw their minder, their driver, the woman who cooked the food for the wedding party, and the barber who cut Kaoru’s hair. Jewelry and adornments of any kind are frowned upon, so rings were not exchanged. The ceremony was officiated
by the most senior official present, who opened by invoking the blessings of the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung. Kaoru and Yukiko then thanked their superiors for bringing them to the socialist paradise and allowing them to marry, and everyone bowed deeply before the photo of the Great Leader that hangs on the walls of every house and office in North Korea. Everyone raised his glass, shouted a hearty
Geon Bae!
, and sang a Workers’ Party of Korea standard. It wasn’t the wedding they’d dreamed of, of course, attended by family and friends, but it was the first time Kaoru and Yukiko had participated in a normal event since they’d been abducted, and it meant that, whatever their future held, they’d face it together.

*   *   *

The most important wedding gift a North Korean newlywed couple can
receive is a home in which to start their new life. Because there is no private property, the gift is from the state and can be withdrawn at any time. The 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 learned to grow eggplant, cucumbers, lettuce, cabbage, and peppers. He got seed and fertilizer by trading cigarettes with a farmer from a nearby food cooperative, and arranged for a cow to till the field at the beginning of the growing season. The rest of the work he did himself. He had become fond of the spicy kimchi that had troubled his stomach when he first arrived,
and now he made it for himself in the traditional manner, stuffing cabbage and hot red peppers into clay pots and burying them in the yard to ferment.

The smallest organized social unit in North Korea is the “people’s group” (
inminban
), of anywhere between twenty and forty households, each with the duty of monitoring the others and providing labor for parades and state celebrations. The head
of each group works with the resident police officer to make sure that everyone is properly registered and that all radios and television sets are rendered incapable of receiving signals other than those broadcast by the state. In addition, the Ministry of State Security has a network of informers, reputedly maintaining one for every fifty adults, for a total of three hundred thousand.
²
Even when
there were no overt signs of surveillance, Kaoru and Yukiko knew they were always being observed.

Their house was located in one of the many mile-square, guarded Invitation-Only Zones that dotted suburban Pyongyang. The area served a dual function by limiting its inhabitants’ freedom while warning nosy outsiders that only those “invited” to enter were welcome. All North Koreans develop a heightened
sensitivity to coded language, and knew well enough to avoid anyplace that required an “invitation.” Still, the area’s euphemistic name did little to keep Kaoru from perceiving it as the gilded cage it was—a spacious, well-tended prison inside the secretive state. The Hasuikes’ neighbors were an odd assortment: abductees, spies, and foreign-language experts—anyone whose access to outside information
made him or her a threat to the regime’s carefully crafted official narrative. Living in the area wasn’t punishment, and in fact the housing and food supply were of a higher quality than that enjoyed by most North Koreans. As part of its attempt to control the flow of information into the country, the North grants few visas to foreign visitors, and rarely permits those allowed in to stay
for more than a week. Therefore, the cluster of Japanese abductees provided a rare opportunity for the North’s spies, many of whom would infiltrate Japan, to observe them in the way one might observe the habits of caged zoo animals.

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 guesthouse, which had spaces for meetings and classes. Monday was the designated study day, but when the New Year Editorials or Kim Il-sung’s new policy declarations were published, work was suspended and everyone would retreat to the guesthouse and study for several days straight.

As much as
Kaoru loathed the people who had abducted him, he was touched by the kindness and humanity of the ordinary Koreans he met. The cooks in the zone were usually women in their fifties whose husbands had been killed in the Korean War. The managers were unmarried young women in their twenties who prized the job because it came with membership in the Korean Workers’ Party, a credential that could help
them marry someone of higher status. Kaoru was in a frail state of mind and was grateful for the kindness of “Granny Kim,” a cook at the first of several Invitation-Only Zones he lived in during his time in North Korea. The combination of despair and an unfamiliar cuisine had caused him to lose weight, and the kindly cook prepared him blanched spinach and pickled cabbage in the milder Japanese style
he was used to. Later, when his liver acted up and no suitable medicine was available, she prepared a traditional Korean remedy from roots and herbs. She treated him as a member of her family, confiding that she had lost her husband in an accident and had supported her three children by working in a munitions factory before becoming a cook. She raised his spirits with stories of her weekend visits
to Pyongyang, when she brought her grandson snacks and candies. Kaoru was alone at first, so he sometimes ate with Granny Kim and the other workers. One night over dinner, his inhibitions lowered by a few glasses of beer, he told them the story of his being abducted from Japan. Using a combination of pantomime and primitive Korean, he described being beaten, put in a bag, and dragged to a boat.
Kaoru had been instructed by his minder to keep the episode secret, but he hoped that Granny Kim and the others would show some sympathy for the ordeal he had been through. At first the women refused to believe it. How could their beloved country do such a thing? “But in their expressions, if not in their words, I knew that they felt empathy for me,” Kaoru says.
³
It felt good to have bonded with
a few other people. But a week later, his minder scolded him for divulging the state secret. Evidently, one woman’s sense of duty had trumped her empathy, and she reported Kaoru’s indiscretion. He was beginning to understand that in North Korea, loyalty to the state is the highest value.

As a married couple, Kaoru and Yukiko received the standard allotments of food, delivered three times a week,
even in the 1990s, when many North Koreans experienced hardship and famine. Food rationing is the regime’s primary means of social control, and with the exception of small farmers’ markets and home-grown produce, all staples (rice, vegetables, meat, poultry, and fish) are allocated through the public distribution system. In normal times, a working adult, depending on his occupation, receives 700–800
grams of grain a day. The elderly receive 300–600 grams, and children get 100–500 grams, depending on their age. White rice is the most prized staple, and any shortfall is filled with less desirable grains like wheat, corn, and barley. In addition, as “employees” of the state, Kaoru and Yukiko were each paid ten won per day, with which they could purchase additional food in private markets,
usually at exorbitant prices. Chinese cabbage, cucumber, and eggplant were cheap, but apples, pears, and meat were expensive. If Kaoru was lucky enough to find a store selling pork, the meat was usually half fat. It wasn’t anything like the abundance he had experienced in Japan, but he was grateful for what he got. One day an encounter with someone living outside the zone made him appreciate how
well off he and Yukiko were, relative to ordinary people. “If the people could all eat as you do in the Invitation-Only Zone, then I guess we could say that the true Communist society had been realized,” a man told him. “I sensed he was jealous, and in the future I was careful not to talk about how much food we had.”

Kaoru did what he could to make the house feel more like a home. “In the same
way that, as a child, I made up games without toys or playmates, I found ways to play by myself in the Invitation-Only Zone.”
⁴
He carved a mahjong set out of wood and taught his wife to play. Although he hadn’t 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 from glued-together cotton swabs. “As idiotic as it may seem, I was so starved for play that my golf course was a lot of fun.” On occasion he’d dream he was back home. He’d stare out the living room window at a hill that resembled one in Kashiwazaki that he used to climb to look out over the ocean. “I’m going to climb to the top
of that hill so I can see the water on the other side,” he told himself, well aware that Pyongyang is a landlocked city and the quest for the ocean view was folly. Still, one day he sneaked out and scrambled up to the top of the steep hill just to see what was there. On the other side was a flat, dusty landscape. “The crazy thing is that even after I saw it with my own eyes, I still felt there should
be an ocean behind that hill.”
⁵

The newlyweds fell into a routine. Every morning, after being woken up by the announcement coming from the loudspeaker that is installed in every North Korean house and workplace, Yukiko would prepare a traditional Korean breakfast of miso soup, rice, eggs, and kimchi. After breakfast Kaoru would go for a run, taking a route past identical small white cottages,
down the paths that cut through the hills and trees. It wasn’t a terribly long run, however, because after a few thousand yards, he would see the barbed-wire fence peeking above the trees.

Once a week, the theater on the second floor of the neighborhood center screened movies, usually educational films filled with revolutionary propaganda. Kaoru quickly realized that the first few movies screened
were expressly directed at him:
Team 4/25
told the story of a North Korean soccer team touring Japan, the underdog beating the slick, arrogant Japanese—an unsubtle message about precisely who was in charge. Movies are one of the primary media through which the regime communicates with the people, and virtually every town in North Korea, no matter how small, has at least one theater. “There are
no other tools in art and literature as powerful as cinema in educating people in a revolutionary manner,” writes Kim Jong-il in his book
On the Art of the Cinema
(1973). “As an ideological weapon, it is crucial to produce a highly ideological artistic film for the education of the masses.” Kim’s first job had been running the Central Committee’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, an organization
responsible for stoking the people’s revolutionary spirit via movies and other media. One of the most popular movie series at the time was
Unsung Heroes
, a multipart Cold War saga in which North Korean spies match wits with an evil American CIA agent, played by Charles Robert Jenkins, an American soldier who had defected to the North in the 1960s and later married a Japanese abductee. Another
favorite was
Pulgasari
, the 1985
Godzilla
remake directed by Shin Sang-ok, the South Korean film director whom Kim Jong-il abducted in 1978 along with Choi Eun-hee, Shin’s glamorous actress ex-wife (known as the Elizabeth Taylor of South Korea). Kim kidnapped them in the hope they would revitalize the North Korean film industry. He treated them like (captive) royalty, hosting parties and dinners
in their honor, in return for which they made seven films. Most nights, Kaoru and Yukiko stayed at home and watched the news on one of the two official television stations, Pyongyang Central Broadcasting and Kaesong Broadcasting, which were on air only from five until eleven each night. At eight o’clock, the news would end and a movie would begin. If they were lucky, the electricity would hold
out long enough for them to see the whole thing. If not, they’d go to bed early.