Kidnapped in Japan

OpinionJournal has an interesting story today about a 13-year-old Japanese girl, Megumi Yokota, who was kidnapped from a quiet street near her home in 1977, never to be heard from again. In 2002 the government of North Korea admitted it had kidnapped Megumi and 12 other Japanese citizens. They were forced into a kind of slavery for the purpose of training North Korean spies how to pass as Japanese natives. This is now the subject of a documentary film in Japan.

As "Abduction" explains, it took years before Megumi's parents suspected what had happened to their daughter, and even now, the full story remains unknown. In the film, Ahn Myong-Jin, a former North Korean spy who defected to the South in 1993, describes what his instructor at the spy school--a Mr. Chung--told him about Megumi's kidnapping. The girl was hidden inside a steel compartment in the hold of a freighter during the 200-mile journey to North Korea, he says, scratching at the door so hard in an effort to escape that her nails came off. Mr. Chung felt "terrible," he says, when he discovered he had grabbed a child. Mr. Ahn remembers seeing the grown-up Megumi once, a beautiful young woman with "pure eyes."

Akitaka Saiki, who led Japan's negotiations with Pyongyang on the abduction issue and is now deputy chief of mission at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, says the "Japanese government has identified that at least 17 Japanese citizens have been abducted in 12 separate cases." Are there others? "There are still others who disappeared suddenly without good reason--suddenly from the beach, suddenly from a train station. We've identified 17 people with 100% certainty. There may be more." No. 17--a 29-year-old woman kidnapped in 1977 on her way to a knitting class--was added to the list only two weeks ago.

Pyongyang has permitted just five abductees to return to Japan, and Mr. Saiki expresses skepticism about its explanations for what happened to the rest. One supposedly died in a traffic accident, but "how could a traffic accident have occurred in a country that has so few automobiles?" he asks. Another was said to have had a heart attack, "but that's hard to accept about a woman in her 20s."

And what of Megumi? In Pyongyang, in November 2004, North Korea announced that she had killed herself in 1994, handing over her "remains" to Mr. Saiki. Subsequent DNA analysis showed that they were not Megumi's. Mr. Ahn, the former North Korean spy, says he has heard that she was teaching Japanese to Kim Jong Il's son. Is she still alive? "That's what we believe," says Mr. Saiki. MORE

Now here is my question. If the North Koreans kidnapped Japanese citizens to help train their spies, is it possible they did the same with Americans? We know they are ruthless. We know they have great interest in acquiring information about the U.S. government and businesses. And we know lots of American citizens, young and old, disappear without a trace every year. Furthermore, if the North Koreans did this, is it so hard to believe that Russia, China or Iran have done the same thing?

Could some of those kids we see on milk cartons be teaching English in Pyongyang right now? I think it's entirely possible. It wouldn't be hard to nab a child from a park or a mall in a port city and then take them to a freighter, as was apparently done in Japan. I don't want to give false hope to anyone who has a missing loved one - if this does happen, it is probably quite rare. But even once is too much.