Re-examining "Alleged Abduction of Japanese"

From "Sekai", Jan. & Feb. Issues
By Haruki Wada

An earlier solution to the issue of the suspicion of abduction of Japanese by North Korea, as in any case of this kind, must be preceded by a thorough investigation of the origins of the matter as well as a serious consideration of its heart and structure.

Content of the Suspicion

At present the Japanese authorities hold: "We have determined that the number of abduction cases in which North Korea is suspected of having been involved, amounts to 7 with a total of 10 Japanese involved. Moreover, there is one more case in which two people were nearly kidnapped." Out of the seven, six cases of disappearance occurred in a concentrated way between 1977 and 1978 and the remaining one in 1980.

The police, however, have not yet disclosed what led them to this conclusion for reason of being classified information affecting their investigation.

How the Matter Came to the Fore

It was an article in a daily paper in 1980 that this matter became an issue for the first time in Japan. In its Jan. 7, 1980 issue, the Japanese daily Sankei Shimbun front-paged a story titled "Three couples missing ÷ Kidnapping by foreign intelligence agents suspected." It referred to the disappearance of three couples in Fukui, Niigata, and Kagoshima prefectures and an attempted kidnapping case in Toyama Prefecture, which took place during the summer of 1978, by quoting a police statement of Jan. 6 which said, "we have reached a conclusion that all these cases were committed by the same suspects."

A second news report on the issue came on June 28, 1985, which was released by South Korea's National Security Planning Agency (former KCIA). It was about an attempted abduction which occurred on June 20, 1980. The South Korean intelligence agency stated that it had arrested a North Korean spy, Shin Gwang Soo, on the charge of having kidnapped Tadaaki Hara, a Japanese cook at a Chinese restaurant in Osaka, from an eastern coast of Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan; and that Shin was carrying Hara's forged passport and driver's license. North Korea flatly denies its involvement.

The KAL jetliner bombing incident of Nov. 29, 1987 and the ensuing developments resulted in a great change in this matter. The arrested suspect Kim Hyun Hee was reported to have possessed a forged passport of a Japanese woman. The NSPA made it public that her teacher of Japanese was "Lee Eun Hye" who had been allegedly abducted from Japan to North Korea. On May 15, 1991, Saitama Pref. Police identified "Lee" as Yaeko Taguchi, a missing citizen of Saitama.

According to an article which appeared in a Japanese weekly magazine Sunday Mainichi (Nov. 12, 2000 issue), however, Taguchi's relatives revealed that her date of birth released by the South Korean intelligence agency based on Kim Hyun Hee's "confession" was not identical with that in her family register.

This was broached at the intergovernmental talks for normalization between Japan and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea which started in 1991. During the 3rd round of the talks held in May of the same year, the Japanese side asked the North Korean side to see about collecting information on "Lee Eun Hye" (Yaeko Taguchi). Tokyo raised the same request at the 4th and 8th meetings, which provoked the North Korean counterparts to leave the conference room in a rage, and led to 7 and a half years of suspension of the bilateral negotiation after that.

On June 30, 1995. Kim's memoir ÷ "Twenty months with the unforgettable woman Lee Eun Hye" ÷ was printed in Japan. In the last part of the book, she referred to different stories of abduction including "a senior high school girl", of whom, she claimed, she was told by "a woman working at a guest house." The stories also include one about "a Japanese couple who had been kidnapped as they were dating on a beach, and held a wedding in North Korea." This tale, however, seems to be a fabrication concocted by piecing together the cases already raised in those days, given the fact that the first memoir she wrote in Seoul had not mentioned that sort of story.

Emergence of Megumi Yokota Story

It was the emergence of an abduction story about Megumi Yokota in early 1997 that the issue of "abduction suspicion" drew national attention as a grave social problem in Japan.  In November 1977, a junior high school girl, Megumi Yokota, aged 13, disappeared from a coast in Niigata Pref. In the wake of a "testimony" by a North Korean "agent", An Myung Jin, who defected to South Korea in 1993, the story of the Japanese girl began being referred to as an illustrative case in question in a bid to justify Tokyo's insistent allegations against North Korea.

In September 1996, Kenji Ishidaka, an Asahi TV director, published a book titled "Kim Jong Il's Orders for Abduction." In the following month, he contributed an article to the Oct. issue of Gendai (modern) Korea, the monthly organ of the Gendai Korea Institute, to introduce a "testimony" about an allegedly abducted young school girl made by a North Korean "agent" ÷ not by An Myung Jin ÷ who reportedly defected to the South in 1994. The story was based on what he heard from South Korean intelligence agents.

Ishidaka interviewed An Myung Jin twice in June and November 1995. Strange enough, however, he did not ask An about the kidnapping case of the Japanese girl. Taken together, his is a thrice-baked story ÷ 1) It first came from a South Korean intelligence man and another agent based in Tokyo; 2) The two heard it from a North Korean defector, who was reportedly said to have gotten  the abduction story from a "kidnapper" in North Korea; 3) The original source, therefore, is the defector's "teacher" who was said to have done the kidnapping himself.

In December the same year, Katsumi Sato, publisher of the Gendai Korea, used Ishidaka's article to start spreading a rumor in Niigata indicating that the kidnapped girl must have been Megumi Yokota. He managed to hide the fact that he was the very initiator of the anti-Pyongyang campaign. On Jan. 8, 1997, the first libel appeared on the Internet website of Gendai Korea's homepage. It also carried the full text of a local paper's article printed in November 1977 which reported the girl's disappearance.

Two weeks later, Sato faxed copies of Ishidaka's account and the paper's article to Tatsukichi Hamamoto, secretary of a Communist Diet man, adding his comment saying, "Please read through these accounts attached. The abducted junior high girl turned out to be none other than Megumi Yokota." Then, Hamamoto contacted Megumi's father Shigeru Yokota (living in Kanagawa Pref.), telling him: "I have information about your daughter. She is not dead but is living in North Korea. Please come to the Diet Members' Office Building soon."

He appointed the Parliamentarians' office as the place for a meeting, trying to lend credence to the information. Nonetheless, he never told Yokota that Katsumi Sato had been involved in this action from the beginning. In the meantime, Sato had already persuaded his old friend Shingo Nishimura, member of the House of Representatives, into joining in his maneuver. Nishimura responded to Sato's request by submitting to the government "a gist of questions on the abduction by the North Koren agents" on Jan. 23.

After Hamamoto met Yokota, the TV director Ishidaka visited Shigeru Yokota and his wife on Jan. 23 and 25 when a weekly "AERA" reporter also interviewed them. January 25 was the day when Katsumi Sato's account ÷ "The kidnapped girl identified" ÷ found its way into print in Gendai Korea's Jan./Feb. issue. Obviously, Sato's story linking Ishidaka's with the girl was elaborately set to come out only after things started having their course as he had expected.

On Jan. 28, follow-up interviews with Mr. and Mrs. Yokota were carried by Newsweek and Sankei Shimbun ÷ indicating the effect of on-the-web propaganda by Sato's institute and his account. Then came reports on the "abduction suspicion" by Sankei Shimbun and AERA on Feb. 3 when Shingo Nishimura raised this issue at a budget committee session of the House of Representatives. He quoted Kim Hyun Hee's memoir and jumped to the conclusion that what Kim called a 'senior high school student' meant Megumi Yokota. (Note: she was in a junior high school when she disappeared.) By so doing he put together all information leaked by the South Korean intelligence agency in June 1996. But he avoided quoting the authority at all for Sato's account printed in the October 1996 issue of Gendai Korea.

Thus the story was brought to the Parliament. From the very day of Feb. 3, 1997 on, the Megumi Yokota abduction case was to create a national sensation without its nature and origin being questioned.

Emergence of An Myung Jin's Testimonies

Feb. 4, 1997 witnessed Jin Takase, director of Nihon Dempa News production, interview An Myung Jin in Seoul. Showing to the North Korean defector copies of the accounts which appeared in the previous day's issues of Sankei Shimbun and AERA, Takase asked him whether he recognized her and knew anything about her case.

An took a look at the photos of Megumi Yokota (taken when she was in a junior high) and said that he had found her among the Japanese staff of a college in Pyongyang at some memorial ceremony. An was told by his instructor, he said, that he himself had kidnapped the Japanese girl from Niigata, Japan. And after the ceremony he "bombarded the instructor with questions to get the details of his story," he added.

This was a surprise. An Myung Jin who defected to the South in 1993 could not be the one who defected in the following year and became the source of the same story Kenji Ishidaka got from South Korean intelligence agents. Then, the instructor who allegedly told An his abduction story, however, should be identified as the same man who Ishidaka believed was the provider of the first information. Moreover, An's "testimony," if it is true, should be called first-rate information based on his own experience because he had seen the girl more than once.

Nevertheless, there arises the most serious doubt here. What An said to Ishidaka about an abduction issue during an interview held in November 1995 was widely different from what he told Takase this time. During the interview in 1995 he had no memory of an impressive content like this, while during that in 1997 he all of a sudden did remember at the sight of her picture (taken when she was much younger than when he "saw" her). This is unconvincing because he must have already given the South Korean intelligence agency every important piece of information and his memory regarding the abduction soon after he came to Seoul in 1993.

Let us compare his statement of 1995 with that of 1997. In the 1995 testimony An said that the Japanese staff members of a college were gathered in a lecture room to hear lectures separately and he stole a glance at their faces through a door which was ajar. His 1997 testimony, however, said that the Japanese attended a ceremony together with Korean students.

Asked if he could recognize anybody in the pictures of missing Japanese women during the 1995 interview, he simply answered: "No, I don't recognize any one of these women. There were only two or three women in all among the Japanese I had seen in the college's meeting room." But in the 1997 interview, he started talking about Megumi Yokota volubly, saying that he saw her with his own eyes at the time of a ceremony.

Moreover, in the former interview he stated that An had been told by his senior ÷ and instructor ÷ about the two Japanese he had kidnapped from Japan himself, and added, "He did not tell me when and from what part of Japan he had taken them." In the latter, however, he said that he pestered him with questions about further details of the story and finally succeeded in getting information on when and how the kidnapping was conducted.

An Myung Jin was interviewed in early March 1997 again by Sankei Shimbun, in which he not only introduced additional information that the Japanese girl had been hospitalized twice because of sickness, but also mentioned even her facial features. It took no longer than a month for his testimony to attain a significant evolution.

On Mar. 15, An Myung Jin met Megumi Yokota's parents with Kenji Ishidaka as an intermediary, when An told them that it was Chung who had abducted their daughter ÷ earlier, he had testified it was Pae. The part of his statement that refers to the reason why his teacher perpetrated it, was altered also this time. He said that the agent was planning to kidnap anybody in an indiscriminate manner, while he had stated earlier that he had no other choice than to do that because he had been witnessed by the girl on the spot. The TV director must have been somewhat embarrassed by An's revised story. Despite this he had to defend An in the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Yokota.

In his second book published in November 1997, Ishidaka cursorily referred to the authenticity of An's changing testimonies, in a defensive manner.

The conclusion is that the substance of An's story has changed. Why did Ishidaka not inquire more closely about the defector's contradictory statements? Wasn't it a neglect of professionalism on his part as a journalist?

On Mar. 26, 1997, the Japanese government dispatched a group of investigators to South Korea to obtain direct information from An Myung Jin on that matter. On May 1, a Japanese police authority told a Diet meeting: "We have thus far judged that the abduction cases of Japanese citizens in which North Korea was believed to be involved, took place 6 times involving 9 people.However, we have come to judge now that such cases occurred 7 times involving 10 people in all, ä including the missing case of Megumi Yokota." This was a judgment apparently based on An's verbal evidence.

Upsurge of Save-Abductees Campaign

The upsurge of a nationwide campaign for getting back the allegedly kidnapped followed news reporting on the Megumi Yokota case and her parents' decision to take action. It was kicked off by the inauguration of a liaison conference of the families of victims "abducted by North Korea" with Shigeru Yokota as its president. It was followed by the formation of the "Society to Save Japanese Abducted by North Korea" on Oct. 4 in Tokyo with the director of Gendai Korea Institute Katsumi Sato as its president. In April 1998, the "National Council to Save Out Abducted Japanese from North Korea" came into being, embracing local groups concerned, which elected Katsumi Sato as chairman and Kazuhiro Araki, director of the research department of the institute, as secretary-general, respectively. Tsutomu Nishioka, editor of Gendai Korea, has been president of its Kanto bloc. And the national organization's office was housed in the institute.

An Myung Jin's "information" kept rolling as the time went by. His memoir titled "Abduction Agents of North Korea" was published in March 1998 in Japan. In the chapter "The Japanese girl with cute dimples on her face," he gave further details of her facial features again, which included the following: "Her dimples were deep in a smile, which gave me the impression that she was a sweet-hearted girl." This part was supposed to be another truthful illustration of his story since he was aware of her dimples. On the contrary, however, the veracity of this statement must be questioned because his description of the girl's facial features became more vivid as the days went by, and included even his discovery of her dimples. If he had recognized the impressive dimples, why didn't he mention it from the beginning?

In his interview with Sankei Shimbun held in March 1997, he stressed that she was very impressive with her thick make-up, which presents a sharp contrast to the story of her dimples. In fact, the mother of Megumi could hardly remember the dimples when asked about them by a reporter. According to the mother, "much more recognizable was her round face rather than the deep dimples on her cheeks."

An said in the new book that he had been first told by his teacher about the Japanese school girl and that she had been staying in the college; and that he, out of curiosity, waited for a chance to see her with his own eyes. Once again, he altered his previous statement of 1997.

Furthermore, another episode was added to the book, which goes this way: Confined in a ship's hold after being kidnapped, she burst into crying, calling "Mother! Mother!" and scratched the walls and the door with her nails. When the ship arrived in North Korea, she found herself covered with blood with all her nails being nearly torn off from her fingers. This may be a sophisticated fiction made up later. But this tale pained the mother unbearably, with a heartbreaking vision of her daughter.

At the time of his second visit to Japan at the invitation of the aforementioned Japanese groups between July and August 1998, An Myung Jin made another amendment to what he had stated earlier, after he visited the scene of "abduction" of 21 years ago. Until that time he had been claiming that North Korean agents took her because she was watching them trying to get back to the ship from the coast. But the course the girl used to take on her way home after school was far away from the coast, with the view of the coast being completely blocked. Standing on the scene, one will clearly see that his former theory did not hold good.

Then he began to adopt a conjecture made by Gendai Korea that "Megumi was taken away by car from the road." He had managed to make his story ÷hearsay from the beginning÷ coherent by amending it time and again. Now he was trying to bridge the gap between his previous statements and the reality of the scene by basing himself on another person's theory. This gravely harms his ability as a "witness."

On the other hand, Ishidaka rewrote his 1996 original text drastically before it was reprinted in a paperback. As a matter of course, the revised edition makes a reference to the Megumi Yokota story. To my surprise, however, all of An's statements relevant to this matter were deleted, including the fact that the author had arranged a meeting between An and the girl's parents before. Did he begin to suspect the truth of An's abduction story?

Although Ishidaka did quote An on other abduction cases, he made necessary amendments to his statements, too. The first edition of his book quoted An as saying that he had seen "some 20 Japanese," while the second edition changes this to "about a dozen." And the original text carried his statement which says that the Japanese used to hear lectures exclusively in a meeting room, whereas the revised pocket edition says that they were present at both ceremonies and lectures. The most remarkable difference between the two versions is that his teacher's words ÷ which were quoted in the first edition as "I have intruded into Japan to bring back home two Japanese" ÷ were struck out from the revised edition.

Obviously because this part contradicts decisively what he had stated in 1977. By avoiding incorporating An's conflicting statements with reference to the Megumi Yokota case in his book, the Japanese TV director is still defending the defector.

Conclusion

As seen above, information about the Megumi Yokota case arouses grave doubts as to both its content and the way it has been released. A systematic examination of the traces of An's "testimonies," which evolved from 1994 through 1998, will lead to a conclusion that there is little credibility in his words. Many doubts also linger about the information that Ishidaka claims he got from the South Korean intelligence men. His information alone, at the point of February 1977, was not enough for the Japanese government itself to conclude that the girl had been kidnapped by North Korea. These facts simply suggest, so far as this case is concerned, that it is nothing more than "suspicion."

Then, how are we to view the remaining 6 cases?

First, the Yutaka Kume case may suggest a strong possibility of North Korean involvement. However, it should be solved as a "missing man" through diplomatic channels with Pyongyang, given the fact that the Japanese police did not indict an arrested Japan-resident Korean for having allegedly helped North Korea abduct him. On Sept. 19, 1977, Yutaka Kume, a guard at the Mitaka Municipal Office, Tokyo, was reportedly nearly kidnapped by North Korean agents with the help of a Korean resident in Japan. The Korean got arrested but was acquitted later on.

Second, in dealing with the "Lee Eun Hye" case, the question of identifying "Lee" as Yaeko Taguchi should be solved. Third, a solution to the cases of three missing couples directly depends on the authenticity of An Myung Jin's "testimonies." These people, therefore, cannot but be dealt with as missing couples. Lastly, Tadaaki Hara's is the only case that Japan can make an issue, given the statements by the suspect, Lee Gwang Soo, at present living in North Korea, as well as some relevant evidence.

Tokyo's negotiation with Pyongyang, however, should be conducted by taking into account other sensitive elements to say nothing of the factors mentioned above.