Japanese Hope U.S. Will Help Unravel Mysteries of Kidnappings by North Korea
www.washingtonpost.com By Nora Boustany Wednesday, March 5, 2003; Page A14
Sakie Yokota said she still lives in the moment when her 13-year-old daughter, Megumi, went missing. For years, the girl's room and her world of schoolbooks, dolls and dresses remained untouched. Today they are neatly packaged, awaiting her return.
"I have not been able to forget for a second the exact moment when my daughter vanished," Yokota said yesterday in an interview at the Mayflower Hotel. "I am still in that moment when she was lifted out of her life, and I am still waiting for her to come back to it. It has been very, very painful."
Megumi disappeared in 1977 while on her way home from badminton practice, walking along a road in the city of Niigata that leads to the dark, windswept shores of the Sea of Japan. At the time, no one suspected that North Korean agents had abducted the girl, stuffing her in a canvas bag and locking her aboard a ship bound for Pyongyang, where she would join other kidnapped Japanese in training North Korean spies in Japanese customs and language.
Now, at a time of heightened anxiety over North Korea's nuclear weapons program, the parents, relatives and other supporters of Japanese abducted by the Communist state are in Washington to appeal to legislators and the public. Frustrated in their efforts to gain more information about their missing loved ones -- or the return of those they believe to be alive -- they want the United States to take up their cause in any future talks with North Korea.
"We wanted Americans to realize there was another major cause," Yokota said. "People have been subjected to a terror that is ongoing: North Korea's continued terrorism. We want this to be a focus as well." In addition, she said, the United States ought to have leverage with other countries such as Russia and China that can bring pressure on Pyongyang.
When family members met with U.S. Ambassador Howard H. Baker Jr. in Tokyo last week, he advised them to take their case to Washington "as soon as possible," said her husband, Shigeru Yokota, who added that similar efforts by the Japanese government are at a stalemate.
For six years after Megumi's kidnapping, the Yokotas kept their front-porch light on so their daughter would find her way home. When they moved away from Niigata in 1983, they left a note for her.
It was not until a defector and former spy from North Korea testified in 1997 that he had seen the dimpled girl that North Korea's involvement in the disappearance of several Japanese nationals was acknowledged. On Sept. 17 last year, during normalization talks that North Korea hoped would help obtain aid from Japan, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il told Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that Japanese citizens, including Megumi, had been grabbed off Japanese shores.
North Korean officials said Megumi committed suicide in 1993, but her parents do not believe she is dead. North Korea did not provide her remains, first claiming that they were moved, then that they were washed away in a flood. In addition, the Yokotas said, other North Korean defectors had claimed there were sightings of their daughter.
The authorities in Pyongyang produced a photo of a 15-year-old girl born to Megumi, and DNA testing of hair and blood samples proved a match with her grandparents. The Yokotas wrote their granddaughter two letters, but have no proof they were delivered, and a request to meet her was declined.
Asked if she wanted to believe her daughter was still alive, Sakie Yokota shook her head. "It is not that I want to believe, I believe she is alive and so does our family, as do her younger twin brothers," she said.
From his left breast pocket, Shigeru Yokota pulled out a tortoise-shell comb in a brown leather case, Megumi's birthday gift to him the day before she disappeared.
"The leather used to be light," he said. "Now it is dark. It is because of my finger oil; I am always pulling it out to stroke it. I touch it and I think of my daughter."