N. Korea Admits Kidnappings

Years after the mysterious disappearances of at least a dozen citizens from its shores, Japan on Tuesday got a grim revelation about their fates--and an apology--from reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

The victims were indeed kidnapped by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s to assist spies in infiltrating South Korea. Eight have since died of undisclosed “disease or disaster”--including Megumi Yokota, who disappeared from a coastal path in 1977 at age 13 while walking home from school badminton practice and was never heard from again.

Four are alive and living in North Korea.

It was an extraordinary revelation for Kim to make to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi during the first summit between the two long-estranged nations. It was also a reversal of North Korea’s repeated denials that it had abducted Japanese citizens.

Kim’s seeming candor and his apology paved the way for the two countries to agree to begin discussions next month aimed at establishing diplomatic relations. Koizumi had made it clear that negotiations on other issues would fail if North Korea didn’t come clean about the kidnappings.

In the discussions, Kim admitted to Koizumi that a North Korean “organization with a special mission” abducted the Japanese, saying it did so without his knowledge. Kim said he has punished those involved, and he vowed that nothing of the kind would happen again.

Kim also agreed to extend North Korea’s moratorium on nuclear missile testing through “2003 and beyond.” In addition, spy ships that recently ventured into Japanese waters--including one sunk by Japan’s coast guard in December--were probably “elements of the North Korean military” that Kim vowed to investigate and prevent from straying again. And he asked the Japanese leader to tell the Bush administration that the North is ready to resume stalled negotiations with the U.S.

For his part, Koizumi apologized to North Korea for Japan’s brutal 35-year occupation of the Korean peninsula, which began in 1910.

Koizumi said that although the summit didn’t solve “all the issues between Japan and North Korea,” he saw positive signs for the future. “I came with the hope to bring peace to the region to prevent these things from happening again,” he said.

Nick Eberstadt, a longtime North Korea watcher at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, heralded the summit as a “complete change” in the diplomatic posture of Kim’s government, which, he said, in the past has involved “lying about everything unapologetically and energetically.”

“To have North Korea for the first time in its history not lie about one of its misdeeds will give enormous hope to the proponents of engagement,” he said.

Clearly, one motivation for Kim is getting more aid to overhaul his barely functioning economy and feed his starving people. Japan is said to be discussing $300 million to $500 million in aid if talks proceed, and the amount may climb.

“It is not just the cash that will be important. There is an expectation that the Japanese government will build highways and power plants and communication systems,” said Jo Dong Ho of the Korea Development Institute, a think tank in Seoul sponsored by the South Korean government.

South Korea has given the North hundreds of millions of dollars since President Kim Dae Jung hugged and toasted with Kim Jong Il two years ago at a summit in Pyongyang, the North’s capital.

The North Korean leader also may be trying to placate the Bush administration, which has lumped North Korea with Iraq and Iran as an “axis of evil” because of its alleged attempts to produce nuclear weapons.

“North Korea understands the situation they’re going to be in if the United States targets North Korea after Iraq,” said Kaoru Murakami, an independent international relations analyst in Tokyo who has written extensively about North Korea.

In Japan, the summit’s diplomatic advances were overshadowed by the news that so many of the kidnapping victims had died.

Television news stations provided round-the-clock coverage of the one-day summit, and newspapers issued special editions with word of the dead. Many tearful interviews with the families of the kidnapping victims were shown.

Relatives of the missing expected that, at worst, they would get no word. No one was prepared to hear that many were dead.

“North Korea kept saying it had no involvement, and now we can’t believe them that she’s really dead, leaving out all the details of how she was taken, how she married, how she died,” said a sobbing Shigeru Yokota, father of Megumi Yokota.

The Yokotas did learn that they are grandparents: Megumi has a daughter living in North Korea who confirmed the death.

Pyongyang said Tuesday that the Japanese were taken to teach North Koreans the Japanese language and to provide false identities. North Koreans who were believed to be Japanese would more likely gain entry to South Korea.

But many questions remain unanswered. Why are so many dead, when many of those kidnapped would now be just in their late 40s? What were they made to do? How did North Korean agents arrive in and get away from Japan without being noticed? Were the victims killed to keep them from talking about the incidents? Are they really dead?

And how, in an authoritarian nation as tightly controlled as North Korea, could Kim Jong Il not have known about the kidnappings?

The victims’ families watched the summit together in a room in the parliament building, with TV news cameras trained on them. In the afternoon, they were taken to a Foreign Ministry guest house and briefed individually by top officials on the fate of family members.

Japan had demanded to know the whereabouts of 11 citizens allegedly kidnapped from Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku islands. Of those, the North Koreans reported that two couples are alive.

Yasushi Chimura, then a 23-year-old apprentice carpenter, and his fiancee, Fukie Hamamoto, a clothing shop employee, also 23 at the time, disappeared July 7, 1978, after dining in a restaurant to celebrate their engagement. Their car was found near the sea in Fukui prefecture in western Japan. The family was told that they are now married and have three children.

College student Kaoru Hasuike, then 20, and Yukiko Okudo, 22, a cosmetician, vanished from the coast of Niigata prefecture on July 31, 1978, after telling relatives that they were going on a date. Hasuike’s bicycle was found at the library near the coast where they were supposed to meet. They are alive and married with two children, and Hasuike is an interpreter in a research organization.

In addition to Megumi Yokota, the dead include:

* Keiko Arimoto, then 23, disappeared after writing her parents from Copenhagen in 1983 to say she had been offered a good job. This year, the former wife of one of nine Japanese who hijacked a Japan Airlines jet to North Korea in 1970 told a court that she helped abduct Arimoto.

* Shuichi Ichikawa, 23, a public corporation employee, and Rumiko Masumoto, 24, an office clerk, went missing on Aug. 12, 1978, after telling relatives that they were going to the beach to watch the sunset in Kagoshima, on the southern island of Kyushu.

* Tadaaki Hara, 43, a cook, disappeared in June 1980 from Miyazaki City on Kyushu. A South Korean court found that a Northern agent had abducted Hara and shipped him to North Korea, then tried to acquire a Japanese passport by impersonating him.

* Also, an unnamed Tokyo club hostess, 24 or 25, went missing in 1978 or 1979 after dropping her two children off at a day care center. Japanese authorities think she taught Japanese to a North Korean agent convicted in the bombing of a Korean Air jet in 1987.

North Korea offered two names of men that hadn’t been on Japan’s official list of victims. Toru Ishioka, then 23, of Sapporo, had traveled to Europe in March 1980. He disappeared after sending a letter postmarked from Vienna. In September 1988, his family received a letter from him saying he was living in North Korea with Arimoto and Kaoru Matsuki.

Matsuki, whom North Korea also said was dead, had left Japan for Spain in April 1980 to study Spanish. He disappeared after sending a letter to his family from Madrid around that time.

North Korea said it had no information about Hiroshi Kume, 52, a Tokyo security guard who disappeared from the Sea of Japan coast in September 1977, and couldn’t confirm whether he had been abducted. A North Korean living in Japan allegedly confessed to helping a North Korean agent abduct Kume.

Even the families of the four reported to be alive said they couldn’t rejoice at the news, particularly since all 11 families have been through so much together.

“If this had been 10 years earlier, everybody would have been alive, and now only a few are,” said Kazuo Okudo, father of Yukiko Okudo. “I can’t be happy just because my daughter was found alive. I need to actually see my daughter and decide after I see her alive and see how she’s living.”

*

Times staff writer Barbara Demick in Seoul and Takashi Yokota and Rie Sasaki of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.