The Forgotten Japanese in North Korea: Beyond the Politics of Abduction

Volume 7 | Issue 43 | Number 2 | Article ID 3241 | Oct 26, 2009 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus The Forgotten Japanese in North Korea: Beyond the Politics of Abduction Tessa Morris-Suzuki The Forgotten Japanese in North advertisement, I initially saw on the screen a Korea: Beyond the Politics ofyoung man struggling to free himself from a cube of ice, within which he was frozen. This Abduction was followed by other similar images – another ice-cube contains a girl in school uniform, Tessa Morris-Suzuki whose faint voice pleads, “please help me get back home”. Then the camera pans back, to reveal a map of North Korea dotted with The Girl in the Ice-Cube similar ice-cubes – ten, eleven, maybe twelve of them. Next, the scene shifts to the more For the past few years, international travelers familiar image of Yokota Shigeru and Yoshie, leaving Japan’s major airports have been the parents of young abduction victim Yokota confronted with a written instruction as they Megumi, meeting George W. Bush in the White queue in front of the passport control booths. House; and the meaning of the advertisement Displayed only in Japanese, and thus aimed becomes clear. As the narrative explains (in specifically at a domestic audience, theboth Japanese and English): “Japanese instruction informs Japanese people that they abductees are still being held by North Korea should “voluntarily refrain” [jishuku suru] from for thirty years now. The abduction issue is still visiting North Korea [the Democratic People’s unresolved. The abductees need your Republic of Korea, DPRK]. This is part of the assistance. They need your words and package of sanctions which was imposed on actions.”1 North Korea by the Japanese government in 2006, following the DPRK’s nuclear test, and The figures in the ice-cubes, then, represent which have remained in place ever since. the Japanese citizens abducted by agents of the North Korean state in the 1970s and early When I passed through Narita Airport on my 1980s. The advertisement, entitled “The way to the United States in December 2008, I Abduction Problem: Imprisoned Girls” Rachi[ found that this call for “voluntary restraint” had Mondai: Torawareta Shōjotachi] was been joined by another Japanese official commissioned by the Japanese government’s message about North Korea. The large screens Headquarters for the Abduction Issue Rachi[ in the airport waiting lounges, which generally Mondai Taisaku Honbu] and released to display glimpses of alluring tourist destinations coincide with the arrival of foreign dignitaries interspersed with travel health and safety and journalists for the Hokkaido Summit in July advice, were now intermittently broadcasting 2008, and continued to be broadcast at major an advertisement with imagery so striking that airports around the country until the end of it seized my attention even before I grasped the January 2009 as part of a campaign to “raise message that it conveyed. awareness” about the kidnapping issue. Arriving in the lounge mid-way through the The message graphically communicated by the 1 7 | 43 | 2 APJ | JF advertisement is that many (indeed probably groping helplessly at the transparent walls that all) of the Japanese abducted by North Korea in surround her, conveys a complex symbolism. At the 1970s and early 1980s are alive and are one level, this image is intensely evocative of being held prisoner in the DPRK. There is no the way in which the abduction story has been hint here of the fact that it is actually unknown told and re-told in the Japanese media. The whether any of the Japanese abduction victims victim is young – frozen in time, it seems, at the (other than those who have already returned to moment of her abduction, just as the faces of Japan) are alive today. At the time of Prime the abductees on countless posters and Minister Koizumi’s visit to Pyongyang in 2002, magazine covers are frozen in the eternal youth the North Korean government admitted to of their lost lives in Japan. It is almost as kidnapping twelve Japanese citizens, of whom though, like the legendary Urashima Tarō, they (it said) only five were still alive. The five are expected to return to the place of their surviving abductees were allowed to make a birth untouched by time and by their home visit to Japan in October 2002. Despite a experiences in that unimaginable other world commitment to the North Korean government in which they have spent the past thirty years. that this initial visit to Japan would be a The structure of the advertisement focuses on temporary one, on the instance of the Japanese the young girl: the title, indeed, multiplies her government, they remained there permanently, into plural “young girls”. This again is and were later joined in Japan by theiremblematic, for the figure of Yokota Megumi, a immediate families. While North Korea states thirteen-year-old schoolgirl at the time she was that all the abductees have been accounted for, kidnapped, has come to represent the the position taken by abductee support groups abduction story in the minds of many people in in Japan, and reflected in the JapaneseJapan and worldwide, even though all the other government’s advertisements, is that all the abductees were adults. remaining kidnap victims are still alive and being forcibly prevented from returning home. The image of the block of ice is also a powerful The Japanese authorities also claim that at symbol of the entire state of Japan’s least four, and probably more, additional relationship with North Korea. Since the abductions were carried out by the DPRK. government of the DPRK admitted to the While the information provided by North Korea abductions in September 2002, this issue has leaves many questions unanswered, however, acted like a curse cast upon the Japan-North some of the evidence presented by theKorea relationship, freezing communication Japanese government to support its contentions and exchange. The chill created by the is also debatable.2 abductions, and further deepened by the North Korean nuclear and missile test, has The abductions were a state crime and an immobilized Japanese discourse about North extreme violation of human rights. The world Korea. The issues of the abductions and the should indeed be trying to find a way of nuclear threat became fused into a single ensuring that an effective investigation of the menacing image around which this discourse fate of these victims is carried out as soon as endlessly circles. The result has been a freezing possible, and, if any are still alive, they should of the imagination: an inability to envisage any be given the chance to return to Japandiscussion of, or relationship with, North Korea immediately. But the stark imagery of “The which does not centre on the abductions and Abduction Problem: Imprisoned Girls” also nuclear weapons. And, since memory and points to other, wider problems. imagination are inevitably intertwined, this restriction of the imagination has also involved The schoolgirl in the ice cube, her hands a closing off of memory, consigning to oblivion 2 7 | 43 | 2 APJ | JF many aspects of the past century of complex fate of these Japanese in North Korea became interaction between Japan and the northern the focus of moves which initiated the first half of the Korean Peninsula. cycle of relations between Japan and the DPRK. The opening of cautious communications Some three years after the end of the Korean between the DPRK and the USA and the War and more than a decade after the collapse election of a new Democratic Party government of Japan’s empire, one of the first tangible signs in Japan in the middle of 2009 create the of an emerging relationship appeared when a possibility that this ice-age in Japan-North ship set sail for Japan from North Korea Korea relations may be about to give way to a carrying thirty-six Japanese passengers, of gradual thaw. In that context, this paper whom seventeen were former Japanese colonial explores the fate of a group of people who, as settlers, while the remaining nineteen were much as any, have been victims of the freeze. their children. Of the adults who made this Despite the Japanese media’s obsessive focus journey in April 1956, only one was a man: a on the abduction issue, the remainingmigrant from Osaka who had left Japan in abductees (if still alive) are not the only 1929, trained as a printer and subsequently Japanese in the DPRK. An examination of the had been employed by the North Korean fate of the other Japanese in North Korea casts Ministry of Culture’s propaganda section.4 Most light on long-neglected facets of the Japan- of the women had been married to Koreans but DPRK relationship, and highlights the need for had become widowed or separated from their a new and broader approach to dialogue husbands. A Japan Red Cross official who between the two countries. traveled with them noted that many of the women cried as the coast of Korea disappeared Staying On from view, but that the children showed The first, and perhaps the mostremarkably little emotion. There were further comprehensively forgotten, group of Japanese tears mixed with cries of delight as the in North Korea are those who (for one reason Japanese coast appeared, and again as the 5 or another) remained there after the collapse of returnees were reunited with their families. the Japanese Empire in 1945. Following Japan’s The process which finally brought these defeat in the Asia-Pacific War, some 320,000 colonial migrants home to Japan, began in Japanese people (including both civilians and 1953, when the President of the Japan Red military) were repatriated to Japan from the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, either Cross Society, Shimazu Tadatsugu, visited 3 Moscow and raised with the Soviet authorities directly or via southern ports such as Busan.

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