Mrs. Yokota goes to Washington

The family of Megumi Yokota, kidnapped by North Korean operatives from her town in Japan in 1977 and focibly taken to North Korea where she presumably was made to teach DPRK spies the Japanese language and culture, has gone to the US capital.

Sakie Yokota, Megumi's seventy-year-old mother, testified before a US congressional panel, calling for US help and international economic sanctions against North Korea to force it to return Japanese and other abducted nationals—including, one supposes, her daughter's South Korean husband and their North Korea-born child.

The family also met with US President George W. Bush, an act reminiscent of Bush's meeting with former North Korean prisoner Kang Chol-hwan, who later penned "The Aquariums of Pyongyang."

Bush promised Friday to press North Korea to return abductees and respect human rights:

'We strongly will work for freedom so that the people of North Korea can raise their children in a world that's free and hopeful, and so that moms will never again have to worry about an abducted daughter.

Along with Megumi's mother and younger brother, Takuya, were four North Korean defectors. These were former military officer Kim Sungmin and a family—a couple and their six-year-old daughter Kim Hanmi—who defected to South Korea via a Japanese consulate in Shenyang, China, in May 2002, in what was a major incident involving the Chinese police rushing into the Japanese consulate—sovereign Japanese territory—in order to retrive the defectors. Japanese Prime Minister famously demanded that China "give us back our North Koreans" (or something like that), something that impressed me about the PM.


It may be because of the news cycle, but virtually every one of the stories related to the Yokotas' visit that I've seen has been from the Japanese press. Maybe it will appear in the US media, too, but I'm guessing that this is not something that will resonate with many people. Sadly.

The rest of the Kyodo piece I linked to gives a decent overview of the issue as seen from Japan, where Megumi is something of a poster child for kidnap victims. While the official number of abuductees is only sixteen, significantly lower than the number of ROK nationals kidnapped by the North, it is (and should be) a story that has many people in Japan angry and upset.