JAPAN:The case of Megumi Yokota and seven others abducted by N orth Korea is a major diplomatic roadblock, write Akiko Yamamotoand Blaine Hardenin Niigata
Megumi Yokota was walking home from badminton practice in Niigata, on the northern coast of Japan, when North Korean agents grabbed the 13-year-old and packed her off to a waiting ship.
That was 30 years ago.
North Korea says she is long dead, a suicide. But her parents - and millions of Japanese - refuse to believe it. They regard Yokota as very much alive, a woman now in midlife, deprived of her freedom in a closed communist state.
"What is she being forced to do?" asked her mother, Sakie Yokota (71).
"Why can't she come back?"
For Japan, the political potency of these anguished questions is almost impossible to overstate. The unresolved questions about Yokota and seven other Japanese have become a national obsession, a public-opinion faultline that Japanese politicians dare not cross, and a formidable roadblock for diplomacy in northeast Asia.
With North Korea emerging from its Stalinist shell and acceding to international demands to disable its nuclear facilities, Japan's enduring anger over the decades-old abductions is not only blocking improved ties with North Korea but also straining relations with Japan's most important ally, the United States.
"I vow to have in mind the abduction issue as the first priority in the normalisation process with North Korea," prime minister Yasuo Fukuda said in October, after meeting families of the abductees.
Japanese officials express concern about the Bush administration's apparent willingness to remove North Korea from the US list of states that sponsor terrorism, without explicitly linking that removal to progress on the abduction issue.
While the Bush administration has begun delivering fuel to North Korea, Japan says it will not take part in any economic or energy assistance unless it gets a detailed, credible explanation of what happened to its kidnapped citizens.
Fukuda's government decided in October to extend by six months sanctions on North Korea. They include a ban on all imports from the country and an order that keeps its ships out of Japanese ports.
There is also a ban on the export of Japanese luxury goods to North Korea. A court in Japan has cracked down on Chosen Soren, the de facto North Korean embassy in Japan, ordering it to pay $550 million (€382 million) on overdue debts it owes the Japanese government. The order is likely to force the organisation to close.
There was no official news about Megumi Yokota for 25 years. But evidence mounted that she had been a victim in a series of kidnappings that North Korean agents appeared to be staging in Japanese coastal communities to obtain teachers to train spies in language and culture.
North Korean defectors provided snippets of information - Megumi was locked in a dark chamber of the ship that took her away; she scratched on the walls throughout the voyage; she arrived in North Korea covered in blood, with her nails partially ripped from her fingers.
They said, too, that she tried many times to escape from North Korea but was caught and forced back.
Her family eventually left Niigata and settled in Kawasaki city, near Tokyo. But before moving, her parents left a note for their daughter on the door of their former house. It listed their new address and said they would be waiting for her.
In September 2002, North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, admitted publicly that his agents had abducted 13 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s, including Megumi Yokota.
Kim's government returned five of the abductees to Japan the following month. But Yokota and the seven others, the North Koreans said, had died.
Yokota had married a South Korean man who had come to the North, and they had had a daughter, the officials said. The North Koreans released photographs that they said showed Yokota, first as a terrified teenager shortly after her abduction, later as a poised young woman. But, the North Koreans said, she became mentally unstable and in 1993 killed herself.
Japan rejects the North's account. It says death documents were forged.
Japanese DNA tests have shown that cremated bones sent from North Korea were not the remains of the missing abductees. "How can you trust a government that sends you phoney bones?" asked a senior government official in Tokyo.
The Japanese media were allowed to interview the girl identified as Yokota's daughter, but the girl's grandparents in Japan have never seen her. "We are waiting every single day" to see Megumi and her daughter, Sakie Yokota said.
In Japan, the political impact of the abduction saga has not diminished with the passage of time. The Japanese government itself helps keep the issue alive.
This year the government's Headquarters for the Abduction Issue released a DVD, Abduction: an Unforgivable Crime. The US ambassador to Japan, Thomas Schieffer, sent a private message this autumn to President Bush, warning that US-Japanese relations could be damaged if Washington offered incentives to Pyongyang before the North had accounted for the abductees to the satisfaction of the Japanese.
Until recently, the Bush administration seemed to consider progress on the issue a prerequisite for taking North Korea off the terror list. Last year at the White House Bush met Sakie Yokota and her son, Takuya, and called the meeting "one of the most moving meetings since I've been the president".
After a White House meeting in November with Japan's prime minister, Bush said he understood "how important the issue is to the Japanese people, and we will not forget the Japanese abductees, nor their families".
But later that day, state department spokesman Tom Casey said the delisting and the abductees "are not necessarily specifically linked".
The families continue to lobby in Washington.