The Invitation-Only Zone Read Free Page B

abductions I heard from scholars, journalists, or spies was entirely convincing. I concluded that, ultimately, there was no single motivation. The most plausible explanation is that the abductions were a small part of a larger plan to unify the two Koreas, spread Kim Il-sung’s ideology throughout Asia, and humiliate Japan. “The apparentlysenseless campaign of kidnappings becomes slightly more comprehensible if it is seen, not so much as a bizarre method for obtaining language teachers, but rather as linked to dreams of destabilizing Japan (and possibly other Asian countries) via revolutionary cells, composed either of kidnap victims themselves or of North Korean agents,” writes the historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki. “The idea thatJapanese society could be propelled into chaos through the actions of North Korean trained revolutionaries may have seemed marginally less far-fetched than it does today.” 1
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    On the evening of August 15, 1974, South Korean president Park Chung-hee took the dais at Seoul’s National Theater to address an audience of government dignitaries and foreign diplomats on the twenty-ninth anniversaryof the end of Japanese rule. It is a measure of the psychological and linguistic distance separating Japan and Korea that the former refers to August 15, 1945, the day it surrendered, as “The Day to Commemorate the End of the War” ( Shusen kinenbi ), while that date is known in Korea as “Restoration of Light Day” ( Gwangbokjeol ). Soon after Park began to speak, a young man bounded down the aislefiring a gun. The six men sitting beside Park leaped from their seats, while others subdued the attacker. In the midst of the commotion, Park’s wife tilted over in her chair, a bullet having hit her head. Once the assassin was apprehended, and Park’s wife was taken to the hospital, Park insisted on finishing the speech. His wife died later that night.
    A twenty-two-year-old Japan-born ethnic Korean,the assassin was a member of the Chosen Soren, an organization that acts as North Korea’s de facto embassy in Japan. He had entered the South legally, carrying a revolver he stole from a police station in Osaka, his hometown. The attack, the North’s second attempt on Park’s life, was the last straw. The South upgraded its already formidable security apparatus and conducted more thorough backgroundchecks on ethnic Koreans from Japan. The incident strained Japan’s relations with South Korea, which accused it of neglecting the Communist threat posed by Chosen Soren.
    The South had already cracked down on North Korean spies posing as South Koreans, so the new focus on Japan-born ethnic Koreans presented a serious problem for the North. If its agents could no longer use South Korean identitiesor Japanese Korean proxies, how could it infiltrate and undermine its southern foe? The idea of using Japanese nationals to infiltrate South Korea had a kind of cockeyed brilliance to it. Japan circa 1977 looked more favorably on Kim Il-sung’s regime than on Park Chung-hee’s oppressive military dictatorship. And still atoning for the pain Japan had inflicted on Korea in colonial times, its left-leaningmedia, intellectuals, and politicians were loath to criticize anything Korea-related. As a result, when rumors about the abductions occasionally arose, they were dismissed as products of anti-Korean prejudice. Any newspaper reporter with the temerity to write critically about North Korea received angry phone calls and letters. “It simply wasn’t worth the hassle, so it became a taboo to writeabout the North,” a reporter told me.
    Until the late seventies, the abduction project was an all-Korean affair. North Korean troops had occupied and retreated from Seoul twice during the Korean War, each time taking thousands of southerners with them. As Kim Il-sung explained in his 1946 decree “On Transporting Intellectuals from South Korea,” the goal was to bring five hundred thousand peopleto the North