The parents of Megumi Yokota have been frequent speakers at the FCCJ in the years since North Korea admitted that its agents kidnapped their daughter, in turns optimistic that their three-decade ordeal might be coming to an end and then expressing their dismay when the news was less good. Speaking at the Club on July 2 – their sixth visit to us – they were clearly in one of their less positive moods.

“Today, we are hanging on and carrying on with our activities to try to bring them home, but we fear they may never come back because of mistakes by the diplomats,” said Sakie Yokota, who called on Tokyo and Washington not to fall for Pyongyang’s
current charm offensive and instead step up the pressure on the North Korean government to return their daughter and at least 16 other alleged abductees.

Recent weeks have seen a dramatic thaw in relations between the United States and North Korea following the North’s destruction of a cooling tower at its Yongbyon nuclear facility in late June. In return, Washington removed Pyongyang from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and a U.S. ship soon docked in the North with a cargo of 37,000 tons of wheat to be distributed to the nation’s hungry people. Yet after more than 30 years of denials and lies, the Yokotas still have little faith that Kim Jong Il’s government has truly changed its tune.

“I hope the people of other countries are not fooled by North Korea and see the truth,” said Mrs. Yokota. Her daughter was 13 when she was seized on a coastal road in Niigata Prefecture in November 1977. “The world is watching North Korea’s response very carefully to being taken off the U.S. list,” she added. “They can be sincere or they can be cold and ruthless, as they have been in the past.”

In 2002, North Korea admitted that its agents had kidnapped Megumi and forced her to train its spies in the language and customs of Japan before they were infiltrated into the country. Pyongyang claimed that she committed suicide in March 1994 and eventually returned an urn of what it claimed were her ashes. DNA tests conducted in Japan allegedly proved that the remains were from two bodies, both of the wrong age for Megumi and ethnically Korean.

The Japanese government officially recognizes that 17 of its citizens were abducted between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s, but the National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North Korea has drawn up a list of more than 100 Japanese who have vanished in unusual circumstances and is demanding their release.

Since 2002, Pyongyang has repeated that the abduction issue has been settled and that no more missing Japanese are within its territory. In mid-June, however, it promised to conduct a new search for those on the Japanese government’s list.

The Yokotas say the promise is a sham. “They know where they are already,” said Shigeru Yokota, who fears the softly-softly approach that is apparently being adopted by both Washington and Tokyo will condemn their daughter to further decades as a prisoner of North Korea.
“It’s a battle,” said Mrs. Yokota. “No mother or father would ever accept this issue was over for them. I often wonder how many Japanese officials know where Megumi is, where the others are and how they are. I also wonder if maybe the U.S., China, South Korea or Russia know where the abductees are. We have been left in the dark for all these years and without diplomatic pressure, I am not optimistic there will be a positive resolution.” ❶