JAPAN: North Korea has finally admitted that it kidnapped people in Japan and used them to train spies. David McNeill, in Tokyo, reports on the ordeal of one family
Shigeru Yokota talks so fast he trips over his words. He has a cough from talking to so many reporters and he looks ill. His wife,Sakie, keeps telling him to slow down, but he can't because he wants to tell his story to as many people as he can.
Mr Yokota has been like this since his daughter, Megumi, disappeared on the way home from badminton class on November 17th, 1977. She was 13, "bright and full of life," says her father. "She loved to sing around the house."
Megumi's disappearance brought about the largest-ever missing-persons search in her home prefecture of Niigata, in northern Japan. Over 3,000 police traced her last steps and found nothing.
"We were at the end of our tether," says Mr Yokota. "We began to think she had been the victim of a sex crime or something."
Days turned into weeks, then months and years with no word of their missing daughter. Megumi's twin brothers grew up and left home. Her parents clung to the hope that she might one day turn up.
Then in 1997 a Japanese magazine carried an interview with a North Korean government agent who said he knew what had happened.
Walking along a coastal road along on the way home, Megumi had witnessed North Korean spies leaving the country in secret, he said. She was snatched and brought back to Pyongyang, where she still lived.
"The article had a ring of truth because it mentioned in detail the badminton racquet she carried the day she disappeared," says Mr Yokota.
For years there had been rumours of North Korean operatives swimming ashore from boats and submarines. Some said they took up life in Japan while secretly working as spies for the communist state, where hatred and distrust of Japan is still strong from the second World War. Other rumours said they kidnapped Japanese and brought them back to North Korea to work as language tutors. It all seemed like the bizarre stuff of second-rate spy novels, but the rumours persisted, and the Yokotas heard of similar stories.
Such as student Kaoru Hasuike and his girlfriend, Yukiko Okudo, who never returned from a date in 1978, and Yaeko Taguchi, who disappeared the same year after leaving her two children at a childcare centre.
This week Pyongyang reversed years of denials that it knew anything about these kidnappings when the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, acknowledged in his summit meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, that "renegade" agents had indeed snatched Megumi and 12 other Japanese nationals over the years. Some were still alive, living and working in the reclusive state, but eight were dead, including Megumi.
"We heard about it while Mr Koizumi was in North Korea," says Mr Yokota. "Pyongyang gave details of the missing people to the Foreign Office and we were called into a meeting with an official at 2 p.m. on Tuesday. We knew when we saw his face that it was bad news. He said 'I'm sorry to tell you your daughter is dead' and then he began crying."
After 25 years living in hope, it was a bitter blow, but there was worse to come. "He told us that Megumi had married in North Korea and had a daughter who is still alive," says Mrs Yokota.
"I began asking him questions. Who did my daughter marry? What age is my grandchild? Where is she now? But the official just kept saying 'I don't know, I don't know.' The longer the meeting went on the angrier I became."
By the time the Yokotas returned home to see the story on television, they were furious.
"I just don't believe Megumi is dead," says her father. "I won't believe it until I see proof. How can the foreign office just read off a list given to them by North Korea without checking for evidence? There is so much wrong with what they said. How did these eight people die and why did some of them die on the same date?"
The greatest worry the family has is that as Japan and North Korea strive to establish normal diplomatic relations, these questions will simply be swept aside.
The stakes for both countries are high. In exchange for Pyongyang's agreement to allow nuclear inspectors into the country and other concessions, Tokyo has offered a multi-billion-dollar package of economic aid. But Mr Koizumi must force the deal through the thick wall of anger and suspicion that the kidnappings have generated in Japan.
Mr Yokota has been on television most nights this week, dignified, tearful and furious, and much of the country sympathises with him. Feelings are running high. The father of Keiko Arimoto, who disappeared from London in 1983, says Japan should go to war with the Koreans.
"Mr Koizumi said he wouldn't start normalisation talks without solving the abduction issue," says Mr Yokota. "But he went ahead and joined a joint communiqué. I want him to take the leading role in these negotiations."
On a cabinet in the Yokotas' modest apartment sits a photograph of a pretty thirtysomething woman. "An artist friend made it up for us," says her mother.
"That's what Megumi looks like today. She's still alive, I know it."