Many years later, that child - or perhaps another person, surgically altered to look like the kidnapping victim - reappears at home, to the joy of family and friends. What the welcoming parents and neighbors do not know, however, is that returning child, now grown up, is actually a spy for the communists.
This scenario sounds like a movie, but it is fact. The Guardian reports on what eventually happened to some of these kidnapping victims:
Five Japanese citizens who were abducted by North Korean spies at the height of the cold war returned to Japan yesterday to be reunited with relatives they have not seen for almost a quarter of a century.The five, the only confirmed survivors among 13 Japanese nationals North Korea has admitted abducting in the 1970s and 80s, arrived at Haneda airport in Tokyo yesterday afternoon on a government-chartered plane. They will spend about two weeks in Japan before returning together to North Korea.
For many years, the North Korean government insisted that it had never abducted any Japanese citizens. Continued pressure from the Japanese and other nations, including South Korea and the United States, eventually caused the North Koreans to admit to their crimes. The communists hoped that by doing so, they might gain some diplomatic advantage among the free nations.
after years of denials, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, told Mr Koizumi during bilateral talks in Pyongyang that his country's special forces had indeed kidnapped Japanese and used them to teach their language to spies.
The exact number of Japanese citizens abducted by the North Koreans remains unclear; likewise, how many of those victims are still alive is not precisely known. The Yale Daily News reports that
With the North Korean government recently admitting to kidnapping Japanese citizens throughout the 1980s, University of Hawaii sociology professor Patricia Steinhoff — who has had direct contact with the kidnappers — offered a personal perspective of the situation at a lecture.
Professor Steinhoff explained, according to Yale reporter Chris Fortson, about the complicated political environment inside Japan at the time of the abductions - there was a significant communist underground group hoping to abolish freedom in Japan, and some Japanese may have willingly defected to North Korea at the time.
One of the more bizarre aspects of this already-strange episode centers around a group of Japanese communists terrorists. Wanting to refine their terrorism skills, they hijacked an airplane in order to fly to Cuba. They hoped to be able to overthrow the Japanese government and create a communist dictatorship. But they never made it to Cuba. The airplane which they had hijacked turned out to be a short-range aircraft. They landed in North Korea, and remained there. The Japanese communist terrorists, known as the Yodogo group, were happy to remain in a communist country, and the North Koreans were happy to have them. To provide the Yodogo terrorists with wives, the North Koreans began kidnapping Japanese women.
Steinhoff ended her lecture by presenting a list of all those she believes were kidnapped. While the North Korean government admitted to kidnapping only 13 Japanese citizens, Steinhoff said she believes there were more than 30 Japanese victims, including the Yodogo wives.
By 2008, although North Korea had admitted the crime and some victims had been returned to Japan, the issue was not yet put to rest. The New York Times reported that
For decades, the North denied responsibility for the disappearance of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s, despite Japanese news reports that agents had been spotted on Japanese soil.But during a visit to Pyongyang in 2002 by former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, the North’s leader, Kim Jong-il, admitted that North Korean agents had kidnapped 13 Japanese as part of a program to train Japanese-speaking spies.
The North released five of them along with their children, but said the other eight had died over the years.
Japan has said that it believes that some of them may still be alive and that there may be other abductees in North Korea. The abductions became a highly emotional and politicized issue in Japan, one used by the Japanese right to whip up anger against the North and to argue for Japan’s remilitarization.
Although the conflict resulting from these kidnappings was primarily between Japan and North Korea, it eventually involved other nations. South Korea and Thailand allied themselves with Japan; citizens from both of those countries had been abducted by North Korea. The United States, although not directly involved, engaged on the matter as well; the U.S. hoped to gain leverage in its talks with North Korea about nuclear weapons. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote that, in 2002, America's allies worked to simultaneously normalize relations with North Korea and persuade it to abandon its nuclear weapons program. In the United States, there were competing views. Some felt that we should work to normalize relations with North Korea in order to make progress on the weapons negotiations; others felt that we should focus first on the nuclear arms talks, in order to make progress toward normalization later:
Yet our allies were moving forward with the North. As we were deliberating, Prime Minister Koizumi of Japan visited Pyongyang in an effort to normalize relations between the two adversaries and resolve the crisis over Japan's abducted citizens. In one of the more bizarre revelations in modern international history, the North admitted that it had in fact kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 1970s and '80s to steal their identities and use them to train North Korean spies how to speak Japanese. The issue was deeply emotional for the families of the abducted and for the Japanese people as a whole. Kim's promise to allow the citizens to leave (to this day only partially fulfilled) encouraged Koizumi, though of the thirteen who had been abducted only five were still alive. The Japanese foreign minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi, pressed both Colin and me to send a U.S. delegation to North Korea. Koizumi made the same request of the President a couple of days later in a phone call.
The Japanese request to Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and President Bush was seen as progress by some, and as appeasement by others. In Japan, the issue stood on its own. In America, the abduction issue was almost always seen in the larger contexts of normalization and of negotiations about nuclear weapons. On October 9, 2008, President Bush met with Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Steve Hadley. The discussion centered around North Korea, its current position on the official list of terrorist nations, and a "verification proposal" which was part of the arms negotiations process. Vice President Dick Cheney, who was also present at the meeting and who had been in Japan speaking with the families of the kidnapping vicitms, writes:
The issue of Japan came up. We had known for some time that the Japanese government was very unhappy that we might lift the terrorism designation. They were concerned in particular about Japanese citizens, many of them children, who had been abducted by the North Koreans decades earlier. I had met with some of their families during my trip to Asia in 2007, and the stories of lost children were heartbreaking. Now, the Japanese perceived we might be contemplating removing North Korea from the terrorism list without a resolution of this issue, and their diplomats had been in repeatedly to see my deputy national security advisor, Samantha Ravich, and others on my national security staff. The Japanese were also troubled by our apparent willingness to take the North Koreans at their word, to trust this rogue regime. Secretary Rice denied there was any objection from the Japanese and told the president they had simply asked for a delay of twenty-four hours so they could "handle their political situation." This was inaccurate. Later that day I received a message from our ambassador in Japan, Tom Schieffer, which I would pass on to the president. Schieffer, who had been one of the president's partners when he owned the Texas Rangers, had grown increasingly concerned about our North Korean policy and was now reporting that the Japanese found the "verification proposal" unacceptable as presented. Schieffer also passed along a warning from the prime minister of Japan: Given North Korea's history of duplicity, it was essential to get any agreement with them in writing.
Within the Bush administration, then, there were substantially different views: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wanted to proceed along the path toward normalization with North Korea, while Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to place more pressure on North Korea so that it would back away from nuclear weapons and back away from kidnapping. In October 2006, Condi Rice had been in Japan, speaking with the Japanese government both about North Korea's nuclear weapons and about the abductions. She writes:
Tokyo wanted North Korea's program stopped, but feared that we might make a deal with Pyongyang before the tragic Japanese abduction cases could be resolved. While Foreign Minister Taro Aso mentioned the issue of the abductions at our joint press conference, I focused on the nuclear issue at hand and the Security Council resolution. I didn't want to get a deal to halt North Korea's nuclear program only to have to resolve the abduction issue fully before it could go into effect. It would be a constant balancing act throughout the next two years.
The United States agreed with Japan that both issues were important: the kidnappings and the nuclear weapons. But Japan wanted the abductions resolved before finalizing any agreement about nuclear weapons; the United States - or least some of its diplomats - wanted the weapons issue resolved without necessarily waiting for a final resolution to the kidnapping issue. By late 2007, Secretary of State Rice would note that the Six-Party Talks (Russia, North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, and the U.S.) were continuing; South Korea, Japan, and Australia - along with the U.S. - represented the spirit of democracy in the Pacific,
but Japan was emerging as a weakening link in that chain. I've mentioned Prime Minister Koizumi's determination to undertake long-delayed, much-needed bureaucratic and economic reforms. When he left office, Japan fell back into consensus politics again, with essentially interchangeable prime ministers who never seemed to move the country forward. It was increasingly depressing to go to Japan, which seemed not only stagnant and aging but hamstrung by old animosities with its neighbors. And I was concerned too about my personal chemistry with the Japanese, who believed I was too interested in resolving the North Korean nuclear issue and unwilling to hold the line on the abductions. It began to feel as if the Japanese wanted the Six-Party Talks to fail lest they lose their leverage with us to help them with the admittedly tragic abduction issue.
Japan's ability to find ways to creatively respond to the abduction issue may have been hindered by internal political dynamics; those dynamics, in turn, may have been partially caused by Japan's demographic crisis: a lack of children. The Japanese had failed to have enough children for several decades. The Japanese economy was crippled by having too few people in the pre-retirement age group. Too few workers and too many retirees make for a non-sustainable funding structure for healthcare and other governmental services; the lack of workers also hurt Japan's businesses. While not directly tied to the issue of North Korean abductions, Japan's child shortage affected both the flexibility of its political leaders and the emotional reaction on the part of Japanese voters. Condi Rice had to work carefully with the Japanese diplomats.
For the remainder of the term, I'd fight to avoid linkage between the two issues. We could only say that we'd press the North Koreans to resolve the questions about the kidnapped Japanese citizens but if we could constrain - even end - Pyongyang's nuclear program, we needed to do that. Maintaining that position was very difficult. Tom Schieffer, the President's good friend and former co-owner of the Texas Rangers, was ambassador to Japan (having already served as ambassador to Australia). Tom was a great guy but sometimes a little too insistent in making Tokyo's case. After one incident in which Tom called the President - not me - about Japan's complaints, we had a discussion about the appropriate chain of command. He hadn't meant to cross the line, and we never had difficulties again. But I know it was hard on Tom because the Japanese were hypersensitive and insecure. Therein lay the problem: we needed a confident Japan as a partner in a changing Asia, and with the end of Junichiro Koizumi's term in office in 2006, those days had seemed to disappear.
A diversity of views continued within the Bush administration. Various approaches were recommended by the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Vice President. Long discussions analyzed various approaches, seeing the merits and the flaws in each. In contrast to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney wrote:
America's position in the world is strengthened when we stand with allies. In this instance we failed to do that, instead sidelining two key allies - Japan and the South Koreans - in our bilateral dealings with the North. Accepting a fundamentally flawed "agreement" also meant that we turned our back on an issue of critical importance to the Japanese, one that we had committed to helping them resolve: the return of their lost children.Discussions inside the Bush administration continued to weigh the idea of removing North Korea from the list of nations known to engage in state-sponsored terrorism. On the one hand, it might yield progress in the nuclear arms talks; on the other hand, it was clear that North Korea had not abstained from state-sponsored terrorism, and still constituted a threat to peace, safety, and dignity in western Pacific. Secretary of State Rice noted:
The Japanese were lobbying hard against the lifting of the designation, though. They worried, as before, that there would not be enough pressure on the North to resolve the abduction issue. We'd tried to help, and indeed, Pyongyang had agreed to some small steps, including a plan to reopen investigations into the abductions issue and answer questions about the fate of the victims.By October 2008, The New York Times could report
The Bush administration announced Saturday that it had removed North Korea from a list of state sponsors of terrorism in a bid to salvage a fragile nuclear deal that seemed on the verge of collapse.
Beyond this point, one can only speculate about what would have happened if the United States had had a chance to continue to pursue some kind of policy regarding North Korea. The election of November 2008 brought an end to foreign policy, and instead ushered in an era in which the relations between the United States and other countries would be conducted in the service of other goals. There has been no substantive action by the U.S. regarding these issues since late 2008. An American Diplomat, Kurt M. Campbell, who bears the impressive title Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, managed to offend Japanese sensibilities by encouraging their government to ratify an agreement about parental abductions - the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction - which does not bear on the North Korean kidnappings. Campbell was advocating for an agreement which addressed situations in which divorced parents of a child lived in two different countries, and in which one parent had abducted a child from the other parent, creating a case of international kidnapping. The Japanese found it offensive that they were being urged to take this action against abductions - urged by an American government which had done nothing after 2008 to help them retrieve their own children from the North Korean kidnappers. The Japan Times reported in May 2012:
Relatives of Japanese abducted by North Korea said they were upset by remarks by Kurt Campbell, the top U.S. diplomat on East Asian affairs, in their meeting Monday at which he urged Japan to address the issue of parental child abductions.
If the United States returns, at some future point in time, to formulating foreign policy, there will be a question waiting for them: what, if anything, is to be done about the Japanese children kidnapped by North Korea? Until such time, America will have no clearly articulated foreign policy, and the needs of domestic politics inside the United States will drive the State Department's relations to other nations, including Japan and North Korea.
