The Invitation-Only Zone Read Free Page A

workplace, Yukiko would prepare a traditional Korean breakfast of miso soup, rice, eggs, and kimchi. After breakfast Kaoru would go for a run, taking a route past identical small white cottages,down the paths that cut through the hills and trees. It wasn’t a terribly long run, however, because after a few thousand yards, he would see the barbed-wire fence peeking above the trees.
    Once a week, the theater on the second floor of the neighborhood center screened movies, usually educational films filled with revolutionary propaganda. Kaoru quickly realized that the first few movies screenedwere expressly directed at him: Team 4/25 told the story of a North Korean soccer team touring Japan, the underdog beating the slick, arrogant Japanese—an unsubtle message about precisely who was in charge. Movies are one of the primary media through which the regime communicates with the people, and virtually every town in North Korea, no matter how small, has at least one theater. “There areno other tools in art and literature as powerful as cinema in educating people in a revolutionary manner,” writes Kim Jong-il in his book On the Art of the Cinema (1973). “As an ideological weapon, it is crucial to produce a highly ideological artistic film for the education of the masses.” Kim’s first job had been running the Central Committee’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, an organizationresponsible for stoking the people’s revolutionary spirit via movies and other media. One of the most popular movie series at the time was Unsung Heroes , a multipart Cold War saga in which North Korean spies match wits with an evil American CIA agent, played by Charles Robert Jenkins, an American soldier who had defected to the North in the 1960s and later married a Japanese abductee. Anotherfavorite was Pulgasari , the 1985 Godzilla remake directed by Shin Sang-ok, the South Korean film director whom Kim Jong-il abducted in 1978 along with Choi Eun-hee, Shin’s glamorous actress ex-wife (known as the Elizabeth Taylor of South Korea). Kim kidnapped them in the hope they would revitalize the North Korean film industry. He treated them like (captive) royalty, hosting parties and dinnersin their honor, in return for which they made seven films. Most nights, Kaoru and Yukiko stayed at home and watched the news on one of the two official television stations, Pyongyang Central Broadcasting and Kaesong Broadcasting, which were on air only from five until eleven each night. At eight o’clock, the news would end and a movie would begin. If they were lucky, the electricity would holdout long enough for them to see the whole thing. If not, they’d go to bed early.
    During their captivity, the Hasuikes were moved ten times between and within various Invitation-Only Zones, occupying a house anywhere from one week to one decade. Sometimes it was simply a question of supply and demand; other times, the moves were designed to reduce the abductees’ visibility by relocating them toever-more-remote locations. Whenever news about the abductions surfaced in Japan, Kaoru and Yukiko had to pack up their belongings and move. The question of their needs or desires never arose. The power of the North Korean regime over its citizens is absolute. Much as Koreans were dictated to by Japan during the thirty-five years they lived under colonial rule as “children of the emperor,” Kaoruand Yukiko, as citizens of North Korea, sublimated their own desires in order to serve the all-powerful Great Leader, Kim Il-sung.

 
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    ABDUCTION AS STATECRAFT
    Why did North Korea go to the trouble of snatching ordinary Japanese people from beaches and small towns? The question obsessed me for years, and I was hardly alone. Speculating about North Korea’s inner workings has become something of a parlor game among Pyongyang watchers in Tokyo, Seoul, and Washington, DC. Probably no other country has been as thoroughly surveilledand parsed. However, none of the explanations for the