TERUAKI MASUMOTO is a 48-year-old tuna department manager at the Tohto Suisan Company in Tokyo, Japan. He’s soft-spoken and was a bit weary-eyed from traveling when I met him in Washington last week. For more than 20 years, Masumoto has had to live without knowing what happened to his sister the day she vanished, August 12, 1978: “I was a 22-year-old student and my sister Rumiko was 24 and working as a clerk,” he tells me through a translator. “It was a holiday so I was home from school and saw my sister off–she was going out with her boyfriend Shuichi to the beach on the Fukiage Coast, known for its beautiful sunsets. And that was the last time I saw her.” Masumoto knew something was wrong when she didn’t come home that night. “Before that night, she never stayed out late. It was very unlike her.”
The next day, Shuichi’s car was found in a parking lot near the beach. It was locked and Rumiko’s handbag, a wallet with money, and a camera were still inside. “Because they were dating, many people thought they had eloped. But they had been going out for only two or three months and she hadn’t even met his parents. We later found one of Shuichi’s sandals near the beach path and thought it could’ve been a crime, but police were doubtful. So we thought maybe it was an accident. It got so crazy some even thought they might have been abducted by a UFO. For those first few years, we didn’t have any answers.”
Then, in 1980, a Japanese reporter broke a story about people who had gone missing from the area where Rumiko and Shuichi were last seen. The disappearances all took place between July and August 1978. Around that time, witnesses saw a North Korean vessel off the coast and investigators intercepted some suspicious radio transmissions. Three days after Masumoto’s sister disappeared, another couple in Takaoka City was ambushed by a group of unidentified men. The man and woman were bound, gagged, and shoved into large bags. But after a distraction forced the kidnappers into hiding, the couple managed to escape. Authorities later found handcuffs and other materials that were not manufactured in Japan.
Which is when Masumoto started believing that his sister had been abducted by North Koreans. “My family’s first reaction was one of relief. At least she is alive and hopefully we can meet her. But we didn’t know how we could rescue her from North Korea.”
It wasn’t until September 17, 2002, that Kim Jong Il, in the midst of normalization talks with Japan’s prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, finally admitted that his regime had in fact kidnapped a number of Japanese (he ultimately acknowledged fifteen abductions). In many cases, the abductees were forced to serve as translators for the government. Kim apologized, said neither he nor his father had known what these renegade, kidnapping agents were doing, and promised it wouldn’t happen again. Unfortunately, he also said that of the fifteen abductees, ten were dead, among them Rumiko Masumoto and her boyfriend Shuichi Ichikawa.
“I was angry. I was furious,” recalls Teruaki Masumoto. “At first, they gave us no other information. But later in September, a fact-finding mission told me that according to documents, Rumiko died on August 11, 1981, only three years after being kidnapped. They said she died of heart disease. Heart disease? She was only 27.”
Masumoto strongly believes that his sister is alive. A North Korean spy who defected several years ago told him he saw Rumiko between 1988 and 1990 at Kim Jong Il Political University. And the medical papers themselves are shoddy: Though Rumiko and the others died in different cities and on different dates, the format of the death certificates are the same. “Even the stamps are identical,” Masumoto adds, and while he was shown a marriage certificate for his sister and Shuichi Ichikawa along with their signatures, “their dates of birth are both incorrect.”
To make things more complicated, the North Koreans allowed five abductees to visit Japan last October. They have been staying with relatives ever since. But in a display of unbelievable audacity, the regime is demanding they be returned to North Korea to be with their other families, including children and one American spouse.* The Japanese government is insisting that these collateral family members be brought to Japan.
Jack Rendler, the North Korea coordinator for Amnesty International USA, says that even though the North Koreans are taking a hard line, the families will eventually be ransomed to Japan because the abductees have outlived their usefulness. “There’s really no need for them anymore,” he says. “The North Koreans will allow the abductees’ families to go to Japan–for the right price. . . . This is the position the North Korean government puts you in, in order to extract the maximum price. To get what you want, are you willing to help this regime?”
SOME in the Japanese government are not willing. “We are not ultimately confident yet that we can get the rest of the families back from North Korea,” says Shingo Nishimura, a Liberal member of the Japanese Diet and director of the Committee on Security. “This situation can only be resolved when we eliminate North Korea’s nuclear weapons capacities and Kim Jong Il.”
Consequently there is concern that if the standoff continues, the families living in North Korea may suffer retribution. Masumoto speculates that such punishment hinges on “how much the abductees talk–and if they cross a certain line, then their families will be threatened. But I don’t think that line has been crossed.” (Indeed, the abductees are speaking to the press mostly through their relatives.)
Both Masumoto and Nishimura are in Washington as part of a delegation that includes the Association of the Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea (AFVKN), of which Masumoto serves as deputy secretary general. One member of Congress the delegation met with was Senator Sam Brownback, who says, “They want to have this as a major issue when the U.N. deals with North Korea and I think it’s appropriate. They should deal with the totality of the problem around North Korea, . . . this is a key time to build the alliance against North Korea and it is, I think, starting to take shape.”
It is, of course, uncertain how Kim Jong Il will react to such pressures. “He is sneaky as a fox” says Nishimura (who also mentions that “a large portion of Japan believes that North Korea may launch a missile while the United States is attacking Iraq”). Rendler reminds me it’s all part of the same pattern: “This regime puts people in the position of supporting them. Food organizations, for example, have had to make this decision, giving food to a government to help its starving people, but knowing a portion of that food will end up with the elites and the military. Doctors Without Borders made the difficult decision of not providing aid since they had no way of knowing how it would be distributed. The United States must also make a decision. Will we agree to meeting one on one diplomatically in order to avert a crisis while at the same time lending some recognition to this regime as a nuclear power? This is one of the worst regimes in the world. They have managed to create a system of societal control, with hundreds of thousands in prison camps, punishing families for the misdeeds of an individual, using food or employment opportunities to get whatever they want.”
Masumoto sees things in equally stark terms: “Japan used to give 1.1 million tons of rice to North Korea and tried to raise the abduction issue in negotiations but they would not admit to it. But last year President Bush called North Korea a part of the Axis of Evil and then in March Prime Minister Koizumi said there would be no normalization until the abduction issue is resolved. Then, finally, Kim Jong Il admitted to these kidnappings and apologized. We learned that in order to get him to admit to these abductions, we needed to force him. Appeasement will not work. Even the Japanese government doesn’t know how many of its people have been abducted. And the only real way to know is by removing him from his regime.”
According to the AFVKN, there are close to one hundred missing persons thought to have been abducted by North Korea.
Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
*In one of the more bizarre twists to this story, abductee Hitomi Soga married Charles Robert Jenkins, a U.S. Army soldier who deserted his unit and entered North Korea by walking across the DMZ while on patrol in 1965. In an interview with Shukan Kinyobi magazine, Jenkins insists he has “lived happily in Korea for 37 years. I’m a citizen of Korea; my daughters are freely studying in school. We received a car from the country. We’re living without anything lacking. All I want now is my wife to come back.” But according to the Washington Post, “some of his relatives have insisted that he must have been forced to cross into North Korea.”
