So much about the People’s Republic of Korea is so peculiar — the massed spectacles, the synchronized deference to the ruling class, the hypnotically surreal Kim Jong Un dynasty — that it’s easy to forget how exceptionally cruel the North Korean regime can be. This has been brought home in numerous ways in recent years: the millions of citizens starved to death to subsidize nuclear weaponry, the torturing to death of a visiting American college student, and the myriad methods invented to execute close relations of its present ruler, Kim.
Another reminder arrived last week with the news that a soft-spoken, silver-haired executive with the Bank of Japan, long retired, had died at his home in Kawasaki, near Tokyo. His name was Shigeru Yokota, he was 87 years old, and, at his death, he left a wife, two sons, and possibly a daughter named Megumi, whose present whereabouts are unknown.
In 1977, Megumi was a 13-year-old schoolgirl living with her family in Niigata Prefecture on Japan’s northwest coast. She was last seen walking home from school, and her sudden disappearance was both a tragedy for her family and an enduring mystery for police until it was confirmed, two decades later, that Megumi had been one of an estimated 17 Japanese nationals kidnapped by North Korean agents and enslaved in the People’s Republic.
It has since been learned that, in the 1970s and ’80s, North Korea’s espionage agency routinely seized foreigners in their home countries for transport to the People’s Republic, where they were forced to teach their native languages and culture to spies in training. The vast majority of these abductees were South Korean, the numbers of which are measured in the thousands, but Lebanese people who managed to escape have reported encountering abductees from France, Italy, and the Netherlands as well.
In recent years, with the blessing of the Chinese government, Pyongyang has concentrated its efforts on kidnapping and repatriating North Koreans who have fled to China and South Koreans assisting refugees from the north. Defectors living in Europe are also routine targets of abduction squads.
The exact number of kidnapped Japanese people is in dispute. When, in 2002, the North Korean government conceded for the first time that it had snatched Japanese people from the street, it admitted to 13 such abductions, further claiming that eight (including Megumi Yokota) had subsequently died. The five survivors were permitted to return to Japan.
Tokyo, however, maintains that 17 of its citizens were kidnapped by North Korea and rejects the validity of death certificates furnished by Pyongyang. And with reason: When North Korea shipped a sample of what it described as Megumi’s ashes to Japan, it was determined that the sample’s DNA revealed a mismatch and that the ashes had been mixed with nonhuman remains.
Shigeru Yokota’s role in all of this was a mixture of symbolic and practical. In 1997, he and his wife Sakie founded an organization devoted to finding and repatriating the kidnapped Japanese, and he proved to be a skilled politician and diplomat. His low-key manner, along with the poignant details of Megumi’s case, struck a responsive chord among his countrymen. Yokota was politely indefatigable in petitioning Tokyo to make repatriation a priority in talks with Pyongyang, and he transformed the issue into a national cause.
In 2014, he and his wife were permitted to travel to Mongolia to meet a woman described by the North Koreans as Megumi’s daughter.
Until health problems forced him to slow down in recent years, Yokota attended an estimated 1,400 public meetings and designed a blue enamel ribbon often seen on the lapels of Japanese politicians. When President Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly in 2017, he highlighted the case of Megumi Yokota, and last week, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe allowed that he was “filled with regret and sadness that we haven’t been able to bring [Megumi Yokota] back.”
Sadness indeed: On the day before she disappeared, Megumi Yokota had given her father a comb as a birthday present. It remained in Shigeru Yokota’s pocket until the day he died.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
