Script

13-year-old Yokota Megumi, a typical junior high school student, was walking home from badminton practice after school with two friends on the afternoon of 15 November 1977 in Niigata.  Niigata is a seaside town on the northern coast of Honshu, the largest Japanese island. She had grown up in a city by the sea and was simply an average middle school student, liked by her friends and respectful of her parents . She said goodbye to her friends as they parted company at six o’clock pm, when she was three blocks from Yorii Junior High School and less than eight hundred feet from her front door, and that was the last any Japanese person saw of Yokota.  By seven pm that evening, her rather strict mother began to panic when Megumi, who was never late, was overdue.  When her father, Yokota Shigeru, got home from his job at the bank, he called the police. The parents and the officers spent much of the night searching the neighborhood, the nearby beach, and the schoolyard, but no sign of Megumi was found. A special kidnapping unit of the  police arrived at the Yokota house the next day to wait for a ransom call, but none came.

Helicopters and boats went up and down the shore, looking for the girl or her body. Divers swam Niigata harbor, seeing if she had drowned somehow. The weeks passed, and there was no sign of the teenager. No note, no nothing. In 1983, the family, unable to stay in the home of their tragedy, moved to Tokyo, but left a note in plastic on the gate with their new address, in case Megumi ever came back. She never did. She couldn’t. You see, on that afternoon in November of 1977, Megumi had been taken by two agents of North Korea who kidnapped her, brought her to North Korea to convince her that North Korea was the best nation on earth and have her train North Korean spies to speak and act Japanese, so they could infiltrate Japanese society. Megumi was one of at least seventeen victims of the North Korean Abduction project, the very dark path we will walk down today.

Hi, I’m MF Thomas and welcome the My Dark Path podcast. Every episode explores the fringes of history, science and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these subjects, you're among friends here at My Dark Path. We hope you'll check us out on Instagram, sign up for our newsletter at mydarkpath.com, or just email us at explore@mydarkpath.com. We also want to thank our Patreon supporters.  Check out our Patreon, where subscribers will have access to exclusive full episodes starting with our special miniseries, a My Dark Path tour of history, science, and the paranormal in Cold War Moscow that we’re calling "Secrets of the Soviets."  If you're interested, head over to our website and consider becoming one of our Patreon supporters.

Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me.  Let’s get started by heading to Korean peninsula at the turn of the century, and briefly look at the history of the Korean people, and why two separate nations emerged from the second world war, one of which found it profitable to abduct not only the citizens of its southern counterpart, but also Japanese, Chinese, and Europeans as well.

PART ONE

The relationship between Japan and Korea could be described as “it’s complicated.” Several times in its history the Korean peninsula was invaded and occupied by foreign powers: the Mongol empire in the 13th century, the Japanese invasion at the end of the sixteenth century, the Manchus in the seventeenth. Korea remained a tributary state of China until 1895 when the Japanese won the Sino-Japanese War and Korea was declared independent, a state that lasted only ten years until the Russo-Japanese war broke out in 1904 and Korea became a Japanese protectorate in 1905. By 1907 Japan had full administration of the Korean peninsula and in 1910 it formally annexed Korea, making it a Japanese colony. The Japanese imposed martial law, insisted that the official language would now be Japanese and all education and government functions could only be carried out in Japanese. The Koreans resisted, and the Japanese rule grew sterner and more oppressive.  As Japan began to advance what it called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, but what was really an anti-western coalition of nations conquered by Japan to enforce Japanese hegemony, Korea was used as a staging area for attacks throughout East Asia and the South Pacific. No doubt you have heard of the “Comfort Women,” Korean women drafted into sexual slavery for the Japanese army. By 1945, Japan was defeated and the Korean peninsula was now occupied by the United States in the south and the Soviet Union in the north.

         This split made for a tension within what was now two separate nations. The Soviet Red Army had occupied Korea from the border down to the 38th parallel in August of 1945, and the American army began to work its way north from the south coast. Each side sought out like-minded Koreans to help them set up their style of government, matching what was occurring in Germany in Europe at the time. The difference is, Germany was a defeated enemy, occupied by the victors. Korea was a nation colonized and enslaved by Japan and now occupied by two other foreign powers.

         Supposedly, the occupying powers were only present to help Korea achieve independence and get back on its feet after decades of Japanese occupation. However, two incompatible governments were set up in the South and the north, and a conservative coalition of business owners, wealthy land owners, Christian missionaries, Korean independence movement leaders, and ethnic Koreans returned to the peninsula after the war convinced the Americans to give the independence at the earliest possible date, free from American and Soviet domination. The Americans agreed, but the Soviets believed the Americans had broken their agreement and were trying to separate the south from the north, believing all of Korea would be communist when the opportunity arose. This is a key reason why North Korea believes South Korea is an illegitimate nation – Soviet propaganda that Americans "stole" the southern half of the peninsula.  The levels of animosity and desire for the entire nation, not just half, rose in the North until finally, reunification became impossible and the northern part of Korea was placed in the hands of Kim Il Sung, handpicked by the Soviets to lead the communist nation. Kim had been a member of the Red Army and was a native of Pyongyang, so he seemed an excellent choice to reinforce Soviet hegemony on the Korean peninsula. 

In the south, the Americans installed Syngman Rhee, an American-educated independence leader, as the new president of South Korea.  In 1948, the Americans pulled out and the Republic of Korea was declared, followed by Kim Il Sung declaring the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North. Kim believed the Americans had imposed democracy on the south and if given a choice, the Korean people would prefer to be united under the single banner of the communist north. Thus, in 1950, announcing he had no other choice, Kim ordered the invasion of the Republic of Korea in order to “liberate” it. After receiving assurances from the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union that they would have his back and support his war efforts, on June 25 Kim’s troops poured over the border, resulting in a three year hot conflict with over two million Koreans dead on both sides. The United Nations, taking advantage of the walkout by the Soviet ambassador while the meeting was still in session (and thus unable to veto) voted to send troops to support the south. The United States and fifteen other nations joined the combat and pushed the northern army back to the 38th parallel.

On July 27, 1953, a truce ended the conflict, although there still is not a peace treaty, and technically the two Koreas remain at war. Under the terms of the armistice, a four-kilometer strip between the two nations was established, known as the DMZ – the demilitarized zone.  A “truce village was established at Panmunjom in the DMZ where exchanges can take place.

The Cold War meant a change in dynamics in East Asia. With North Korea on the side of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China and South Korea on the side of the United States and its allies, the global order shifted. After the American Occupation of Japan ended in 1952, a considerable effort was made by the United States to keep Japan on the side of the western bloc. Although South Korea still had memories of Japanese atrocities, and protested when, for example, each year the Japanese Prime Minister would visit the Yasukuni War Shine and lay a wreath at the memorial, thus honoring Japanese soldiers who had been in Korea, Japan and the Republic of Korea were now on the same “team,” opposing communism and supporting capitalism. As such, South Korea regarded Japan as less of an enemy than it had been in the past.

No such transition occurred in North Korea. Japan was and remained a mortal enemy of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and North Korea wanted Japan to pay for what it had done, and wanted Japanese people to know both how they made Korea suffer and how much better life was under Kim Il-Sung and communism.

South Korea was also the enemy to the North, an illegitimate state illegally made by the U.S.  North Korea began having difficulties in the decade after the Korean war, as China and the Soviet Union split over differences in their approaches to both communism and global relationships.  Kim pronounced his philosophy of Juch’esong, or Juch’e for short, roughly translated as “self-reliance.” Since not even the Soviets or the Chinese could be relied upon, North Korea would build itself into the greatest nation on the planet and demonstrate to all its enemies its superiority.

In order to do that, however, they needed technical expertise and help spying.

The best way to get both was to look to nearby enemy states South Korea and Japan and abduct people, first showing them the superiority of North Korea and then learning from their abductees what they needed to help spies or advance their own technology. Beginning in the 1970s, many Japanese and South Korean citizens began disappearing from their own nations under strange circumstances.  Walking home from school, having a romantic walk on a beach at night, sailing out to go fishing, riding one's bike , and other everyday activities would end with a person or couple missing. It was later learned these individuals were taken by North Korean agents and either placed on a boat that would take them out into the Sea of Japan, where a larger North Korean boat was waiting, or they would be drugged and put on an airplane that would then be diverted to North Korea.  North Korea even went so far as to hijack South Korean commercial flights in order to get people.

Of course, the fact North Korea has to kidnap people to prove the supposed superiority of their way of life tells you everything you need to know.  Communism is a self-destructive system that demands complete obedience or death.

PART TWO

Given North Korea’s approach to politics and international relations, you wouldn’t be surprised that it also has an odd way of categorizing movies. North Koreans love cinema. But like everything else in North Korea, every aspect of filmmaking and movie watching is political.

The four categories are: 1) feature-length artistic films of any genre, 2) documentaries, 3) scientific films, a category separate from documentaries, and lastly,4) films for children.  The feature length artistic films that can be romance, science fiction, drama, war, or any genre of film – there is no distinction between genre and subject matter.  And the documentaries are unlike documentaries from other cultures.

The four categories are: Yesul yonghwa, or feature-length artistic films of any genre, kirok yonghwa, which are documentaries, kwahak yonghwa, or scientific films, a category separate from documentaries, and lastly, films for children or adong yonghwa.  Yesul yonghwa are the feature length artistic films that can be romance, science fiction, drama, war, or any genre of film – there is no distinction between genre and subject matter.  Kirok yonghwa, the documentaries, are unlike documentaries from other cultures. 

Their style is similar to American news reels of the thirties, forties and fifties. They tend not to have narrative but rather simply record events.  The events they record tend to be those that document the perfection of North Korean leadership and the party, so they tend to show party meetings, the leaders on-the-spot guidance (which is always brilliant and insightful and never in error), heroic individuals and collectives, and people showing devotion to the Kim family. 

Science films, kawhak yonghwa, on the other hand are closer to the discovery channel National Geographic, teaching about the natural world or the proper scientific way to do things, such as plant crops or tend to animals.  Children’s films, adong yonghwa, include animated films, instructional or educational videos, live children’s shows, and dramas aimed to indoctrinate young North Koreans.

All films must support juch’e and glorify the nation and the regime. Villains must be capitalists, or those who are politically suspect, and are often in the pay of the Americans. The heroes are ordinary North Koreans who, because of their spirit and their leaders, triumph over all adversity. These precepts do not necessarily make for a truly great national cinema. And this isn’t just a North Korean concept – just look at the disastrous US film and TV industry that has displaced story and character building with a monolithic, not to mention boring, political message.

Once he was established as his father’s second-in-command and the heir to rule North Korea next, Kim Jong-il turned his sights to cinema.  He loved film. Kim’s vast personal film library reportedly consisted over 15,000 films from around the world, at a time before Blu-ray, DVD or even VHS. He had 35 millimeter prints of fifteen thousand films.  In 1973 he published his magnum opus, Yŏnghwa yesul ron, which is translated as “On the Art of the Cinema.” You can read it. It has been translated into English and is available on the internet (I’ve put the link in the show notes). But be warned, it is almost 500 pages long and rather dense and obscure. Kim advances his theories about what makes for good cinema and how films should work.  His two most prominent theories are “humanics” and “seed theory.” The former asks what makes a good and worthy life and emphasizes how right-thinking individuals can transform society through good art, and thus, in turn, transform society.  “Seed theory,” however, argues that all artistic creation is directed through a single ideological foundation, the “seed” of the title, and everything in the film, from story to costume to props to performance are both generated by and received through this seed.  This idea proved to be indispensable for North Korean film theory and North Korean film industry practice. Anyone wishing to make films in North Korea had to both read the book and embrace seed theory.

As an aside, I wonder if Disney is also making Kim Jong-il’s book required reading and is a part of their seemingly pathological commitment to making tedious, political movies…that, unsurprisingly, also lose money.

The book also cemented Kim Jong Il as the leader of North Korean culture. His father, Kim Il Sung placed him in charge of North Korean culture and Kim the Younger wanted to build up the DPRK’s film industry. He was deeply disappointed that the North Korean film industry was not more appreciated or celebrated outside of North Korea, and allegedly privately admitted that North Korean cinema was not very good as cinema (although it was ideologically perfect). He was very jealous of South Korean cinema and wanted North Korean cinema to rival it.

So, he kidnapped people.

In 1978, Choi Eun-hee was a major star of Korean cinema, and her husband, Shin Jeong-guyn was a celebrated director. They were a celebrity couple celebrated in the Republic of Korea, but Shin’s affair with an actress and the couple’s financial problems led to divorce. At the same time, Choi received an invitation to travel to Hong Kong to meet with producers. It seemed, if the promised production worked out, at least some of the financial problems would be solved.

The invitation was part of a plot by North Korean agents. When she arrived she was escorted to a speedboat down by the docks in Hong Kong where she was kidnapped and brought to North Korea. Upon arrival, she was greeted by no less than Kim Jong Il himself, who shook her hand and said, “Thanks for coming,” as photographers snapped pictures of the two of them together. Kim had ordered her brought to North Korea by any means necessary, but once she arrived was treated as a celebrity who had come voluntarily.

After Choi disappeared from Hong Kong without a trace, Shin began to look for her. Simultaneously, he was travelling around Asia looking for a producer who might support his next film, as the South Korean government had suspended his license to make films in South Korea. He was invited to Hong Kong where, just like Choi, he was kidnapped by North Korean agents just six months after his estranged wife.

Because he kept trying to escape, Shin spent three years in a North Korean prison and was then reunited with Choi. Again, Kim Jong-Il was present at the party in which the two were reunited. Initially, they were given access to Kim’s film library and instructed to watch and critique four films per day. Kim wanted them to understand his perspective on film. Then they were told they were to make great films together like they had in South Korea, but this time in the service of the North Korean people. From 1983 until their eventual escape in 1989, they made seventeen Yesul yonghwa films for Kim Jong-Il – feature-length films in a variety of genres.

The films they made during that seven year period were varied. An Emissary of No Return, based on a stage play by Kim Il-sung about a Korean diplomat in the early twentieth century who killed himself to draw attention to Japanese atrocities in Korea, actually filmed its western scenes in Czechoslovakia. Love, Love, My Love was a film musical adaptation of a Korean folktale. The Tale of Shim Chong was based on a famous classical Korean story of a young girl who volunteers to be thrown in the sea as a sacrifice to help her family and ends up marrying the dragon king of the sea. 

But most interestingly, in 1985, the same year that the United States re-edited the Japanese film Gojira from the previous year and released it as Godzilla 1985, Shin directed North Korea’s contribution to the daikaiju (giant monster) genre. Pulgasari is a fascinating film combining the men-in-rubber-suits-giant-monster movie vibe with juch’e philosophy and Korean history as perceived by Kim.  The film is set in feudal Korea, when an evil king fears a peasant uprising, so he confiscates all metal tools and arrests a blacksmith who defended the people’s right to iron tools. The blacksmith manufactures a dragon doll, and when his daughter accidentally bleeds on it, the doll becomes a giant metallic monster that consumes metal. As the king's troops attack the peasants, they resist and Pulgasari, for that is what the monster is called, works with the peasants to fight the king and his forces. After much heroic sacrifice, the people defeat the king, but Pulgasari keeps eating all the metal, so the blacksmith’s daughter must sacrifice herself to destroy Pulgasari, as he has become the new oppressor. The people are then free to found a collective in which the nation is ruled justly and for and by the people.

In order to achieve the monster effects in the film, a Japanese special effects team from Toho, the studio that makes the Godzilla films, was hired, being told they were making a film in China, only to find themselves in North Korea. Unlike Shin and Choi, they were allowed to return to Japan when their work was completed. While in the DPRK, they were treated as honored and respected guests.

It is a curious film, and North Korea released it to the international market, Kim believing it would attract as much interest, love and support as Godzilla, and no other nation was interested in showing the film. It was finally screened in Japan in 1998, and was also distributed in South Korea, but has never found a home in the larger global market, the propaganda aspect rendering the film rather ridiculous. In a future episode of My Dark Path, we will be looking at this film in much more detail as part of a larger exploration of North Korean science fiction.

With each film, Shin and Choi were sent to various film festivals in communist nations and were told to say in interviews that they had voluntarily immigrated to North Korea as they could no longer stand working in the corrupt and decadent South and that North Korea was a glorious workers’ paradise. So long as their handlers were with them, Shin and Choi repeated this lie, but while in Vienna in March of 1989 to discuss making a movie about Genghis Khan, they evaded their minders, got lost in traffic and escaped to the U.S. embassy, where they asked for asylum. Shin then remained in the United States, and Choi returned to South Korea. To this day, North Korea claims they were not abducted but voluntarily defected to North Korea. The problem with that claim is that so many other South Koreans, Japanese, and others who were far less famous and connected than Shin and Choi have also been kidnapped.

PART THREE

Shin and Choi were actually the exception, being famous people kidnapped by the North Korean government at Kim’s specific request. The vast majority of North Korean abductions are random, targeting people who had no fame or political significance. Indeed, they were often targets of convenience. People were taken because they were where the North Korean abductors were looking for someone to take.  North Korean spies disguised their boats to look like Japanese fishing vessels and would drift off the coast of Japan, sending individual North Koreans to shore to grab anyone they could find. Very quickly, a specific process was established for the Japanese abductees. The North Koreans would arrive at dusk on a beach, grab a young Japanese couple, cover their heads with bags, bring them out to the boat, separate and isolate them and deliver them to North Korea. They discovered it took about a year and a half before the kidnapped individual would be broken down, had learned the Korean language and would no longer try to escape. They would then be reunited with the person they had been kidnapped with. The North Koreans had learned that keeping the couple together made it easier for them to resist brainwashing, and keeping them completely isolated and never reunited resulted in depression and often suicide. By ultimately reuniting the couple after they had been individually brainwashed, the couple acted as hostages for each other.

Every abducted person brought to North Korea was assigned a minder, a specific individual responsible for every aspect of their “education”: Korean language, juch’e philosophy, and every aspect of their lives in North Korea, from where they lived to with whom they could speak. An escaped or resistant “guest” would mean punishment for the minders, so they worked very hard to ensure compliance on the part of their abducted charge.

After the will to escape had been broken and the reunited couple married, they would be assigned to live in something called an “Invitation Only Zone,” a neighborhood that, by its name seemed to be elite and exclusive, but in reality, it was a neighborhood prison in which politically risky individuals could be kept separate from the rest of the North Korean population. Invitation only zones are heavily guarded and one cannot leave them without one’s minder. They exist in the suburbs of Pyongyang, which seems apt – near the political, cultural and social heart of North Korea, but on the border that separates city from countryside, neither here nor there, a limbo state for permanent guests of the DPRK who always, always claim to have chosen to defect. To claim otherwise would be to invite a trip to a prison camp in the northern mountains.  The regime had an official narrative, and those who knew it was not true either kept that information to themselves or vanished.

The very design of the Invitation Only Zone discouraged contact between neighbors other than at official functions. A central building served as a meeting place for the community for official announcements. Houses were spread out and set among artificially created forests and hills, so that one could not easily approach a neighbor’s house without being seen by the guards. While the setup is obviously an extended prison, the irony is that people who lived in Invitation Only Zones enjoyed better food and a higher lifestyle than most North Koreans.

The Invitation Only Zones also served as observation centers, where North Koreans who were to be sent abroad as spies might study and scrutinize how Japanese or South Koreans living there behaved and interacted in private moments. In short, an Invitation Only Zone was not quite a prison, it was more like a zoo.

Yokota Megumi most likely lived for decades in an Invitation Only Zone, as did the other kidnapped Japanese. For decades the Japanese government was likely aware of the abductions, but publicly said nothing, and victim’s families tried for years to bring attention to the issue. Ultimately, in the twenty-first century, the Japanese government confirmed at least seventeen Japanese nationals had been abducted.  But it was likely that dozens if not a hundred more had also been kidnapped.

The month before Megumi had been snatched, another young woman, Matsumoto Kyoka, was abducted while walking to a knitting class near her home. She was 29 years old. Restaurant worker Tanaka Minoru, 28, departed Japan for Europe for a vacation in June of 1978, but never arrived. He was later reported in North Korea. Taguchi Yaeko was a 22 year old young woman when she was kidnapped. After the bombing of a Korean airliner by a North Korean spy, who was captured, the spy revealed Taguchi had taught her Japanese language and culture. It is believed Taguchi was forcibly married to Hara Tadaoki, a 43 year old abducted in June of 1980, the two of them living together in an Invitation Only Zone. The North Korean government later claimed he had died of a disease and that Taguchi was killed in an automobile accident, but offer no evidence of either claim, nor has it produced the bodies for their families.  Japanese students were kidnapped from Europe, grabbed off of beaches in Japan, and abducted while in transit. In short, the abductions are often random.

The randomness of the abductions was used as evidence by North Korea that there were no abductions. Why would the North Korean secret police spend so much time and effort, not to mention risk getting caught on foreign soil, to kidnap nobodies, inconsequential individuals, teenagers, students, young couples? It did not make sense. No ransom was ever asked for – the kidnappings were never even acknowledged by North Korea.

However, during the period of thawing in the early twenty-first century, when North Korea reached out to its enemies and neighbors, Japan and the DPRK held a joint summit. On September 17, 2002, Japanese diplomats and the Foreign Minister travelled to Pyongyang for the meeting.  Kim Jong Il himself confirmed that North Korean had indeed abducted a number of Japanese citizens and apologized for the practice. Yet North Korea continued to hold those they had abducted. Kim promised to hold those officials responsible for the abduction project responsible pun,ish them appropriately, and attempt to facilitate meetings of families and their kidnapped loved ones in North Korea.

It was not just movie stars and Japanese that had been abducted, however. It is known that at least 486 South Koreans have been forcibly taken to the North and never returned as of 2005. North Korea also abducted their own dissenters – kidnapped from South Korea, the then Soviet Union, China, and the west.

Even before Shin and Choi, even before the Japanese, North Korea abducted targets of opportunity from South Korea. An old photo from 1974 was recently smuggled out of North Korea. It shows a group of young men in their late twenties and early thirties standing in front of Myohyangsan Mountain.  Every person in the photo was a missing South Korean. They had all been fishermen whose boats drifted into North Korean territorial waters, whose boats had been seized and the men themselves taken to North Korea for indoctrination. Other South Koreas have been grabbed in various places by North Korean spies and brought to the North to live in Invitation Only Zones as North Korean citizens.  Fishermen and students hardly seem to have access to valuable intelligence or unique skills not available in North Korea, but they still could be trained as spies or train North Korean intelligence operatives themselves. A number of abductees found themselves working for the North Korean government’s propaganda division, broadcasting into South Korea and preparing disinformation campaigns to be used outside North Korea.

For example, in December 1969, a Korean Air Lines YS-11 jet flying a domestic route from Gangneung Airbase to Seoul was hijacked ten minutes into the flight by a North Korean agent. As the plane turned North, three North Korean military jets accompanied it. The immediate presence of the jets seems to suggest this was planned ahead at the highest levels of the North Korean government. The pilot of the passenger jet was forced to land in North Korea.  The communist authorities claimed the airplane crew had purposely defected to protest the government of South Korea’s policies towards the north Eventually, two stewardesses became announcers of the North Korean propaganda broadcasts that target South Korean audiences, and were still alive and in North Korea as of 2001. All four crew and seven out of forty six passengers are still in North Korea. The other thirty-nine passengers were released after two months of captivity. They reported they had been subjected to lengthy indoctrination sessions during the sixty-six days of their captivity. It is not known why North Korea released these passengers and kept others.

Again, the victims seemed to be taken at random – wrong place, wrong time.

These abductions, however, were not meaningless in the eyes of the North Korean government. They served very real purposes. Captured Japanese, South Koreans, and westerners met a number of objectives for the North Korean government. First, the Japanese provided language and culture training to help North Korean spies blend in. Second, the kidnapped South Koreans were part of a larger project to reunify Korea under Kim’s rule. They could also help train North Korean spies to work in South Korea, or perhaps even return to the Republic of Korea as spies themselves. Given the North’s continued animosity towards Japan, the blatant and flagrant kidnapping of Japanese national on Japanese soil, with the Japanese government powerless to stop them served to humiliate Japan, a constant goal of the DPRK. The dream was to transform the Japanese abductees into agents of North Korea – Kim-loving, juch’e-spouting revolutionary Japanese set to overthrow the Japanese government and free the Japanese people, or at least serve as chaos agents.

Lastly, the abductions represent a genuine belief (or a cynical façade, depending on whom you ask) that they are rescuing people from a decadent world and educating them to live in a glorious worker’s paradise. The minders seemed to genuinely believe that their charges would embrace juch’e and the North Korean identity and help spread the philosophy and ideology of Kim Il-Sung throughout Asia and eventually Europe and the Americas. By 2002 it seems Kim the younger realized that was not going to happen, and chose to reveal the program.

Even North Korean allies are not safe from the Abduction Project. North Korea has allegedly also abducted approximately two hundred citizens of the People’s Republic of China. As with Japan, for most of the period this practice occurred, the Chinese government neither accused North Korea of abducting its citizens nor requested their return in order to “keep the peace” with the erratic hermit kingdom.

As for the fishermen in the photograph, in some cases the captured crews were eventually repatriated, but often Pyongyang alleged that at least a few crew members had "chosen to stay in the socialist paradise and not to go to the living hell of the capitalist South."

PART FOUR

Yokota Megumi’s story is a sad one, and part of it she does not even know herself. The thirteen year old girl kidnapped blocks from her front door became the face of the Kidnapped Citizens movement. Her face was on the poster used by the group organized by the families of the disappeared to continue to call attention to the issue decades later. She has been the subject of four documentaries, a manga series, a television drama, and an animated film. She has also inspired songs by Peter Frampton and Peter, Paul and Mary’s Paul Stookey. 

The North Korean government reported to the Japanese government in 2002 that Megumi had married Kim Young-nam, a South Korean abductee, and had given birth to a daughter, Kim Eun-gyong. They claim Megumi committed suicide in 1994, but offered no evidence.  They returned ashes they claimed were hers to Japan, but DNA testing confirmed they were not Megumi’s remains. Her current status is unknown. If still alive, she would be 59 years old right now.  Kim Eun-gyong grew up, attended Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang where she majored in computer science and now has a daughter of her own. In March of 2014, the parents of Megumi Yokota met their granddaughter and great-granddaughter for the first time in Mongolia. Kim Eun-gyong and her daughter then returned to North Korea.

Yokota Megumi’s case is sadly not unique in any aspect. North Korea returned the remains of Matsuki Kaoru who had been kidnapped while travelling in Europe in May 1980 as a twenty-year old student. What happened to him in North Korea is not known, but the government claimed he was killed in an automobile accident in August of 1996. Forensic analysis of the remains, however, determined that they were not Kaoru. Numerous kidnapped Japanese women were forced to marry Korean men, take Korean names, and raise their children to be good North Korean citizens, as Megumi did.

In October of 2002, at the request of the Japanese government, five abductees were allowed to finally return to Japan after over two decades in North Korea. Kidnapped couple Yasushi and Fukie Chimura, kidnapped while on a date on July 7, 1979, were married in North Korea in that same year. They had a daughter and two sons who were not allowed to leave with them, and remained in North Korea for another two years until finally allowed to join their parents in May of 2004. Kaoru and Yukiko Hasuike, kidnapped on July 31, 1978 and married while in North Korea were the other couple repatriated to Japan in October 2002. Their son and daughter also remained behind, rejoining their parents at the same time as the Chimura children. Lastly, Miyoshi Soga and her eighteen year old daughter Hitomi went out shopping on August 12, 1978 and never returned home. They were the second couple of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korean agents on that day, Ichikawa Shuichi and his date Matsumoto Rumiko were abducted while viewing the sunset further down the coast. It is not known what happened to Miyoshi, but Hitomi married an American abductee, Charles Jenkins, and had two daughters with him. Hitomi was released as part of the October 2002 group, with Charles and their daughters following with the group released in 2004. For these families, the abduction nightmare did not end with the return of the abducted people to Japan, as they had to wait two years for the children they left behind. Hundreds of Korean and Japanese abductees still remain in North Korea, their fates mostly unknown.

We have focused on the victims from Korea and Japan, but North Korea has kidnapped individuals all over the world. In the 1970s, many women were abducted from Lebanon. Dutch, French, Italians, Malaysians, and Jordanians have been kidnapped by North Korean agents.  Allegedly, a missing American citizen, David Sneddon, was kidnapped while traveling in China in 2004 by North Korean agents and brought to an Invitation-Only Zone just outside Pyongyang to be the personal English language tutor for Kim Jong Un.

How does one repair the loss of one’s freedom, identity, and time with one’s family? The North Korean abduction project irrevocably changed and damaged thousands of lives, not just those abducted, but their families.

Any system of government that compels action is evil.  The north koreans’ acted to kidnap and compel thousands.  Nothing screams failure more than forcing individuals to act.  Virtue comes from freedom and choice.  The North Korean abduction project has done untold harm around the globe and highlights the corruption of communism. 

Kim Jong-il glibly promised in 2002 to hold those who carried out the program accountable.  This would be incredibly challenging as he was accountable for the massive scope of the multiple Invitation-only zones and hundreds of minders.  The abductions were not a small side project.

North Korea has been in the news a great deal for the last decade, from the development of its nuclear program and missile tests, to the saber-rattling which occasionally manifests against South Korea and the United States, but it seems except for a few individuals, the issue of the historic abductees has become forgotten. These kidnappings occurred within a human lifetime, and many of the abductees are most likely still alive and in North Korea today. Even when North Korea says they are dead and offers to return remains, it is suspect whether or not the remains are who the DPRK says they are.  And has been proven by DNA testing, the north Koreans have outrighted lied.

Perhaps that is the darkest part of this very dark path. There remains uncertainty and lack of closure.  Hopefully other abductees are fortunate enough to leave North Korea alive, like the lucky five brought back to Japan in 2002.  But those individuals are few and far between.  But that path seems to be closed, and forgotten.

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with our engineer and creative director Dom Purdie. This story was prepared for us by Kevin Wetmore; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

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Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.