Captured as a Pawn of Politics

After nearly two decades of tears, anguish and bureaucratic frustration, the Arimoto family finally met their daughter’s kidnapper.

For years, they’d imagined what they would say to the person responsible for taking their round-faced Keiko away so many years before. How they’d convey the pain and anger they’d suffered, and the fear as they’d imagined the worst, before finally learning years later that the 23-year-old had been lured to Communist North Korea--where she may still be alive.

Then self-confessed kidnapper Megumi Yao walked into their hotel suite in Yokohama, fell to the floor and begged forgiveness. Keiko’s mother, Kayoko Arimoto, found herself weeping with Yao and trying to comfort her.

“I couldn’t really get mad at her,” Arimoto says. “She was crying so much. It just made me cry as well.”

One of the strangest chapters in North Korea’s bizarre recent history involves the totalitarian regime’s alleged practice during the 1970s and ‘80s of kidnapping Japanese--11 by official count, and as many as 70 according to Japanese abductee groups.

The victims ranged in age from 13 to 52 at the time they are said to have been taken from Europe and Japan for various purposes: to help train North Korean spies, to serve as wives for other kidnapped Japanese or, eventually, to help spread a Communist revolution to Japan. The North Korean government vehemently denies there were abductions, or having any role in Keiko’s disappearance from London, but has nonetheless said it will search for the missing.

For years, Keiko’s father kept up a lonely fight for information on the whereabouts of his lost daughter. He hounded Japanese police, Foreign Ministry bureaucrats and slick politicians who refused to listen to or believe him, brushing him off with one excuse or another. It wasn’t their jurisdiction. They couldn’t do anything without a body. She’d probably met someone and run away.

“My concern over the years has been the lack of activity by the Japanese government,” said Christopher Poll, who was Keiko’s host father in England at the time of her disappearance. “It completely failed to protect its people despite evidence that something had happened.”

Ten days after Yao met with the Arimotos in March, she voluntarily testified before the Tokyo District Court in a further bid to assuage her guilt.

Her testimony electrified the nation, as she described how she’d sidled up to Keiko after trying to snare two other young Japanese. How she’d earned Keiko’s trust by playing up their shared upbringing before delivering the hook: a job offer and the lure of an exciting life overseas.

Earlier this year, President Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi discussed the issue during their Tokyo summit. And after Yao’s confession, Japan officially listed Keiko as abducted by North Korea--a step sought by her father for years.

At a Japanese-North Korean Red Cross meeting in Beijing in late April, North Korea agreed to step up its search for Japanese “lost” in its country. The pledge was made even though the government has “searched” before to no avail, decrying as recently as December Japan’s “fuss” over the “nonexistent” issue.

The obstacles ahead are daunting: The two countries have technically been at war for more than half a century. And it may be difficult to get a sovereign nation--and a mercurial one, at that--to admit it’s been in the kidnapping business.

Despite all the impediments, the Arimotos still hold out hope that they’ll one day see their daughter alive.

*

Keiko was born Jan. 12, 1960, the third of six children, and grew up in the same house her parents live in today. Family members recall her as an easy baby and a quiet child. Her grandfather, who refused to baby-sit for the youngest children, gladly cared for Keiko. Ask her to do anything, her mother recalls, and she’d bow her head politely and say yes.

Keiko’s four sisters and a brother always had loads of friends running through the house. Keiko was a quiet soul and tended to get lost in the shuffle. Her one close girlhood friend, Masae Koya, remembers how serious, and distinctly unimpressive, she appeared to most of her teachers and classmates.

Occasionally, Keiko would let loose and show a wilder side, her mother says, by laughing and carrying on, but generally only with her younger sister Ikuko. In high school, Keiko started studying English in earnest. Her mother believes that this represented less a thirst for foreign culture than an interest in the technical aspects of linguistics. Ikuko disagrees, citing her sister’s keen interest in British pop bands.

There are other signs that Keiko was trying to stretch her wings. She moved out of the house toward the end of high school, a relatively unusual step in Japan, and enrolled in college classes at night, staying with an unmarried aunt.

In March 1982, armed with an Anglo-American studies degree, she graduated from the Kobe City University of Foreign Studies.

Keiko enrolled in an English-language school in London. Perhaps anticipating her parents’ displeasure, she paid the tuition before telling them with savings earned from sewing jobs and other part-time work. Grudgingly, they gave their blessing, never expecting they’d never see her again.

Keiko wrote home every few weeks through the spring of 1983. A sister and her aunt visited her in London that May, and Keiko told them she’d be home soon. A postcard to her parents dated June 6 said she’d arrive in Osaka on Singapore Airlines at 17:15 on Aug. 9.

Around the same time, her English host family started to get some very different signals from the shy, unworldly young woman, says Poll, her host father.

Toward the end of May, she suddenly announced she was going away for the weekend with friends. Poll says he was surprised, given that she appeared to have no real friends, but she would give no details. She was even more evasive and distant when she returned, and announced a few weeks later that she was leaving two months early.

“She was totally transformed overnight,” Poll says.

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North Korea experts say that, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the government adopted a policy of abducting Japanese to help teach its spies Japanese customs and language, to provide wives for Japanese abductees or Red Army radicals who’d hijacked a Japan Air Lines jet to the Communist state in 1970 and to help export the revolution to Japan. Three people, including Keiko, are said to have been taken from Europe, the rest from Japan, including couples seized while relaxing on deserted Japanese beaches reportedly frequented by North Korean spy ships.

Keiko--young, impressionable and without a husband or boyfriend--apparently fit a profile. Yao’s instructions in the spring of 1983, she says, were to recruit “Japanese women under 25” in Europe who were honest, obedient, imbued with a strong sense of duty and free of strong political views. Once in North Korea, the women would become wives for two men previously kidnapped from Spain and the beginning of an envisioned “Japan Revolutionary Village.”

Yao initially tried to draw in two other women at Keiko’s school before realizing they had boyfriends or husbands and were tough prospects. She settled on Keiko, who was just wrapping up her language program, and won her trust by emphasizing their childhoods in Japan’s Kansai region.

“She was perfect,” Yao testified. “I convinced myself that cheating people was unavoidable, and I believed at that time in what I was doing.”

Yao met secretly with her North Korean handler that spring in Zagreb, Croatia, then part of the former Yugoslav federation, and they decided to spring the trap in Copenhagen. Denmark was one of the few Western countries that had diplomatic relations with North Korea, which would protect the North Korean diplomat working with her if he was caught.

Yao returned to London and proceeded to sell Keiko on the idea of marketing work in North Korea. The “job interview” was set for July 16 in Copenhagen.

“It’s ironic she was offered a market research job in a country with no real market,” Keiko’s mother says.

Keiko apparently was so eager and so trusting that she arrived in Copenhagen two weeks early and waited for the meeting, which took place in a Chinese restaurant.

Yao’s handler, Kimihiro Abe, played the part of the trading company president, and the North Korean diplomat, Kim Yu Chol, stood in as a ginseng trader.

“It’ll be fun, and it’s very interesting work,” Yao told Keiko. After hearing about the work, plus free food and lodging, Keiko agreed. They held her passport overnight before whisking her the following day onto a flight bound for the Stalinist state via Moscow. Yao waved goodbye at the airport. She says it was the last time she saw Keiko.

“It’s even more eerie that she wasn’t even forced,” Keiko’s mother says. “My God! If she’d only reconsidered and returned to Japan.”

It would take nearly 20 years, however, for Keiko’s parents to piece together many of these details. All they knew in the summer of 1983 was that they hadn’t heard from their daughter in a while.

On Aug. 8, they received a telegram saying she’d gotten a job and would arrive home sometime later. They went to meet the Singapore Airlines flight anyway in hopes she’d changed her mind. Then, in mid-October, they got a last, vague letter postmarked Copenhagen with no details for contacting her. Certain weather references were also suspicious, suggesting it was written earlier, says author Koji Takazawa in his book “Destiny,” about Japanese revolutionaries and abductees in North Korea.

In the years that followed, the family came to suspect that Keiko had been murdered or forced into prostitution, even as they reread every note from her dozens of times, checked their mailbox incessantly and jumped whenever the phone rang at an unusual hour.

*

In September 1988, the Arimotos got a call from a family on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. They said they’d just received a letter from their son, last seen in Spain in 1980, saying he was with Keiko in North Korea.

The letter, which described life as tough and filled with shortages of food, clothing and books, included Keiko’s insurance card as well as photos of the pair. It had evidently been smuggled out of North Korea and mailed from then-Soviet bloc Poland, presumably by some East European diplomat or delegation member.

“Sorry for making you worry so much,” it concluded. “I just want you to know we’re alive.”

In Japan, the two families reflected on their fate. In a nation where bloodlines are often joined by arranged marriage, theirs appeared to be joined by abduction.

It quickly became apparent how their philosophies differed. Akihiro Arimoto, a tough, salt-of-the-earth entrepreneur running a ball-bearing factory, has waged a fearless fight for his daughter, condemning both Japan and the North Koreans.

The only way to get Keiko back, he concluded early on, was to go public.

“When something’s so obviously wrong, you must oppose it,” he says, spitting out his words. “My priority has been to keep pushing the government and the worthless politicians who haven’t done their jobs. They should be trying to save my daughter.”

His “in-laws,” on the other hand, have not identified themselves in public. They believe the best way to get their son home is to studiously avoid confrontation or publicity and instead trust Japanese diplomats to reach some understanding with North Korea.

“Just sneaking that letter out probably risked his life,” said his older brother. “Our family believes making noise will jeopardize his safety.”

Kidnapper Yao’s change of heart was the result of growing disenchantment with North Korea.

Yao, who had socialist leanings, moved to North Korea voluntarily in 1977. She says she was forced to marry one of the Japanese hijackers. They had two daughters.

Initially, she believed in the cause, she says. Later, however, operatives in North Korea would have to exert pressure on her, using her children as hostages.

Finally, after the Keiko operation, Yao returned to Japan. She says she hopes her apologies and testimony can in some way repair the damage to the Arimotos and families of other victims.

“I am so sorry,” Yao said from the witness stand. “I have done things no human should do.”

Keiko’s parents think they would recognize Keiko. Her mother worries she could have been brainwashed but hopes she could become a caring person even with all she’s been through.

Above all, they’re aware that time is running out for them.

“I can feel myself getting weaker and older every day,” the 76-year-old Kayoko says with tears in her eyes. “All I want is to see my daughter before I die.”

Magnier is The Times’ Tokyo Bureau chief. Hisako Ueno in the Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.