Kidnapped 

by BILL STONEHILL

October 13, 2000

If Megumi Yokota is still alive, she's 36 years old. On the night of November 15, 1977, Megumi, then 13 years old, said goodbye to her friends after badminton practice at her local school gym in Niigata, a city facing the Japan Sea. They never saw her again.

Her way home lay for the most part through residential streets, but part of it ran along the seashore. When Megumi didn't turn up for dinner, her father called the police. "She always came straight home so we immediately called the police when she didn't come back when she was supposed to," her father, Shigeru, would tell reporters countless times over the following 23 years.

The search started with the police calling all known friends, relatives and acquaintances, but no trace was discovered. The next several days were spent with hundreds of police and local volunteers going over every route that she might have taken home and looking under every bush and through the extensive woodlands that surround Niigata. The search widened to surrounding prefectures, but after several weeks had passed, not a single clue was found.

It's difficult to pinpoint how or where the rumor sprang up, but as the weeks began to wear on, the Yokotas became convinced that Megumi had been kidnapped by North Korean agents. The beaches of Niigata lie about 580 miles (950 kilometers) from North Korea, across the Japan Sea, but unexplained disappearances and strange sightings occurred time and time again during the period from about 1970 through 1985.

During this 15-year period, up and down the coast of Japan's main island of Honshu where it faces North Korea across the Japan Sea, strange boats were reported at night, lights were seen on the sea, and couples who went down to the beach for privacy saw frogmen emerge from the surf, reconnoiter briefly and then return to the ocean. Indeed, one of the strangest disappearances was of a newlywed couple, both about 20, who abruptly vanished one night near the seashore without a trace.

Although exact numbers do not exist, it is thought that during this 15-year period, somewhere in the range of 40 to 60 unexplained disappearances took place within a short distance of the Japan Sea. This is perhaps not a large number. In Japan, as elsewhere, every year thousands of people go missing without a reason. Yet these disappearances were particularly baffling, and often associated with sightings of unidentified ships or rumors of frogmen.

Information also began to filter back to the National Police Agency about Japanese supposedly held in North Korea. North Korean agents who were captured in Japan or South Korea spoke of being trained by Japanese. The descriptions of their Japanese instructors did not fit the descriptions of the few known Japanese Red Army members in North Korea.

For one thing, there were no known Red Army female members in North Korea. The "instructors" were often females. North Korean female agents were also assigned Japanese female roommates so they could observe them and become as "Japanese" as possible. North Korean female agents often tried to pass themselves off as being Japanese when on overseas missions. Also, the agents spoke of these "instructors" as being prisoners.

Gradually, the Japanese realized that there was a strong possibility that North Korean commandos, as a "graduation exercise," were being assigned missions of kidnapping Japanese from the beaches of Japan as training for sabotage missions in the event of war. This news slowly leaked out to the Japanese public at large, and families like the Yokotas, who had a loved one disappear under mysterious circumstances, formed groups to seek the return of their lost children and family members.

There was a good reason for this: the Japanese government has been trying to sweep the whole subject of "kidnapped" Japanese under the rug, both because there is no concrete proof, and for fear of antagonizing the North Koreans. The Japanese government is unmistakably pusillanimous.

Probably what brought the kidnapping missions, if there were such, to a halt was the widespread publicity they began to receive. It certainly wasn't any type of action on the part of the Japanese government. Until just a year or two ago, the Japanese Naval Self Defense Forces never intercepted a spy ship, and they have done almost nothing to defend Japan's long and exposed coastline that faces Korea. Indeed, the impression is very strong in many circles that the Japanese government has gone out of its way to avoid any type of confrontation with the North Koreans at all. The Japanese government seems to have done little to defend Japan, except to try to appease North Korea.

When Japanese patrol boats did accidentally stumble across two Korean spy boats so deep inside Japanese waters two years ago that they could literally be hit with a stone thrown from the shore, the government was paralyzed. Confusion reigned in Tokyo, and it was almost four hours after the intrusion was discovered and the two spy boats chased out of Japanese waters that the cabinet was finally able to meet. Even then, it could not make up its mind whether to fire on the boats or not, and the debate raged all day. Not that it mattered. The ammunition lockers on the Japanese patrol boats were padlocked shut, and the keys were lost. Finally a crewman broke the padlock off with an axe, and the Japanese patrol boats were able to fire across the bows of the Korean boats, which just revved up further and disappeared in rooster-tail waves to North Korea.

No matter how often they demonstrate, or stand in front of the foreign ministry with portraits of their missing children, the victims are ignored. Japan has just announced, once again, that it will be giving free food aid to North Korea, this time 500,000 tons of rice. It has given close to a million tons of rice to North Korea since 1995 (including the newest donations), with the donations interrupted for a period after the North Korean sent a rocket sailing over Japan. The foreign minister, when asked about kidnap victims, replied, "We have to keep giving the North Koreans food to keep them talking." The foreign ministry has also asked the U.S. government to take up the subject of both the Yodo hijacking (a JAL plane skyjacked to North Korea in 1970) and the abducted Japanese.

Neither of these are concerns of the United States, and it is unreasonable to expect that the USA will pursue these issues aggressively, other than in the broad context of other negotiations. This is the responsibility of the government of Japan, not the government of the United States of America.

Around the turn of the century, when China was being pulled apart by foreign powers, Sun Yat Sen, who eventually overthrew the Ching Dynasty in 1911 and founded China's first modern government, said there were three principles by which you could judge if a country was really being effectively governed. The "People's Three Principles" are that a government must (1) protect the people's sovereignty, (2) protect the people's livelihood, and (3) protect the people's democracy.

If a government cannot do these three things, in Sun's opinion, it is not a real government anymore and needs to be replaced. The Japanese government seems to be unwilling to take any steps to protect its own people. Although the proof is largely circumstantial, there is a very strong suspicion, close to certainty, that Japanese have been kidnapped from beaches up and down the coast of Japan and held against their will in North Korea. Megumi Yokota, if she is still alive, is probably somewhere in North Korea.

What type of government is it that has abandoned Megumi Yokota?