WUNRN
JAPANESE WOMEN WHO
HAVE ESCAPED FROM NORTH KOREA FIND LITTLE SYMPATHY AT HOME IN JAPAN
Yoshi Takeuch in her kitchen on Sept. 8 in
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“But it was too late. Some of the people on our ferry actually killed
themselves when we arrived in
Takeuchi was part of
a wave of about 93,000 people — mostly ethnic Koreans, called “zainichi” here —
who moved to North Korea as part of a Red Cross “repatriation” movement between
1959 and 1984, the vast majority of them in the first three years. Several
thousand were Japanese women who went with their zainichi husbands, told they could
return if they wanted. They could not.
In this undated photo released in 2004, Megumi Yokota,
then said to be 13-year-old, is seated in an unknown place in
The plight of
Japanese citizens still trapped in North Korea is now at the top of the
political agenda in Tokyo, with Shinzo Abe, the conservative prime minister,
pushing Pyongyang to finally account for the 12 people it abducted during
the late 1970s and early 1980s, apparently to use them to help train spies. The
12 have never returned home.
There is a huge
amount of public interest in the abductees, who have been featured in
everything from documentaries to comic books, and especially in Megumi Yokota,
who was 13 when she was snatched on her way home from school. People wear blue
pins on their lapels as a sign of support for the abductees, and posters in
subway stations show an old man with the words: “We have not forgotten.”
But there is little sympathy for the women who moved to
“Some people say that
they chose to go to
In many cases, even their
own families think they brought their fate upon themselves.
Tsutae Ueda, one of
the first Japanese wives to return home, recalled her first phone conversation
with her mother, then 93, upon her escape after 43 years: “Why are you
calling now? You should go back to
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