Shigeo Iizuka still has the black-and-white photo of his little sister, Yaeko, stuck on the inside cover of his pocket diary.
It was June 1978, when the 22-year-old suddenly disappeared, taken from the bustling heart of Tokyo and transferred to North Korea to be used as a teacher of Japanese language and customs for the spies of Kim Jong-il, the son of the leader of the time, Kim Il-sung.
"No one can imagine the tragedy that we have been through. I still yearn for the years I spent with my sister," sighs Iizuka, a Japanese engineer who is still working at the age of 75.
Sitting in a quaint restaurant in Ageo, a town in Tokyo's sprawling suburbs, he looks down at the photo of the young woman – she looks sad, her face framed by her long hair. At the time, she was working as a waitress in a bar in Tokyo's Ikebukuro neighborhood.
She was divorced and had two young children. After he learned of his sister's disappearance, Iizuka rushed to her apartment. Everything seemed to be in order. Yaeko had left no note, no trace.
She would come back, he told himself. However, one week passed, then one month, then two, and still she had not returned. Thirty-four years have now gone by.
Iizuka decided to adopt Yaeko's son, while another sister took on the young daughter. The secret was kept in the family. Their cousins were told to never let it slip. "They kept their promise for 20 years," Iizuka explains, up until the day when Yaeko's son, aged 21, needed his birth certificate to get a passport to go to the United Kingdom. That’s when he understood that he had been adopted.
Seeking help from the police was of no use. At the time, Yaeko was merely one more disappearance – they made no enquiries. The truth finally emerged in November 1987 when a North Korean spy, Kim Hyon-hui, was arrested in Bahrain for bombing a Korean Air aircraft, flying from Iraq to South Korea. The 115 passengers on board and the airline staff were all killed.
Thanks to a copy of the black and white photo of Yaeko that the police had been given by the family, Kim Hyon-hui was able to identify her "teacher," who had taught her how to blend in as a Japanese native. Yaeko had taught her the manners and customs of her native land, and given her lessons on Japanese cinema, music and fashion.
"As Kim Hyon-hui had lived with her for 20 months — from July 1981 to March 1983 — she had confided in her about numerous things: like how she had cried every night when thinking about her children. Kim had told her that she had to accept her destiny," says Iizuka, who had difficulty believing this incredible story at first, he admits.
"In the bar where she was working, Yaeko was approached a few times by two or three men, seemingly spies. They offered to take her to North Korea for a few days and she had accepted. That's what North Korea said — in 2002 — but I don't believe it.
She would never have agreed because of her two young children. It's a lie," her brother says, who now runs the Association of the Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea (AFVKN), created in 1997. Two years before Yaeko was abducted, in 1976, in the middle of the Cold War, North Korea's number one Kim Il-sung had decided on a change of direction for the communist regime's espionage campaign.
The defining word was "localization"— by abducting foreigners, especially South Koreans and Japanese people, it would be possible to infiltrate the countries to put in place an efficient network of spies.
Officially, Japanese authorities have reported 17 proven cases of Pyongyang abducting its citizens between 1977 and 1983. However, AFVKN and another association, the National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North Korea (NARKN), have much higher figures.
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