The saddest music in the world / haunted + haunting broadcasts, abductee radio in North Korea, the dreams of the disappointed
<This is a recording of a recent broadcast of Furusato no Kaze. I invite you to listen while you read. It was recorded in Japan, broadcast from Taipei or Tashkent, and intended for abductees in North Korea. It is not certain how many abductees from Japan remain alive. It is likely that nobody is listening.>
▬ You could disappear. ▭ I could disappear. ▭ A boy from my hometown did. We were about the same age, so I might have met him, but I don’t think I did. I can only remember his face from the color photograph on the front page of the newspaper that summer. When I moved away, it was to the city where he was last known to have lived, and the same picture, stuck to power poles, haunted me. I followed the story. I noticed the stories that ran each year on the anniversary. His mother and father pleaded for him to come back, for anyone that knew where he was to send in an anonymous tip. I can understand not wanting to let go. ▭ And who would be left behind to hang up the posters and cry on the news? I don’t want to imagine it. ▬
▬ There is a neighborhood not far away from where I am sitting now that was once favored by men that wanted to disappear completely. They walked out of the door of their homes up north or down south, tossed their identification in the trash, and caught a train to the city. On construction gangs, lining up to accept curry rice from the Korean missionaries in the park, sleeping in dirty socks in dormitory bunks, they assumed new names. When they died under the arcade roof, on the concrete steps up from the Sumida, or in one of the lodging houses, they were buried under no name at all. Somewhere, far away, people still imagined that they were going to come home someday, calling out a name that their loved one had done his best to kill. ▬
▬ I listen to shortwave radio broadcasts for Japanese abductees held in North Korea. These are broadcasts for those people plucked off beaches, or seduced by agents, or lured from holidays, who are now locked up somewhere, or perhaps carrying on lives that none of us could imagine, holding on to, their relatives at home hope, some memory of what they left behind. ▭ Two broadcasts are made into North Korea for the abductees. One is called Furusato no Kaze, which means Hometown Wind, and the other is called Shiokaze, which has an official translation of Radio Sea Breeze. Shiokaze is harder to tune in. It is broadcast from Mongolia and often changes frequencies. They were started in 2005 and 2007, when the issue of abductees entered the news again, when Japanese and North Korean relations were at a low point. They receive funding from the state, although it seems inconsistent. ▭ The content differs slightly between the two stations. They follow the same themes. They have songs from home. There is news about Japan and about Korea. There are personal messages. Cousins come on to talk about their missing relative. Uncles remember meals together and tell their niece in Korea to keep going, because she’ll be back home one day. ▭ There is a lot of talk about Yokota Megumi. She is the best known of the abductees. Even if the Koreans say she died many years ago, she was at least acknowledged. Her family says she is alive. If anybody is listening, it is her. ▭ There is nothing sadder in the whole world. Their cheerfulness is heartbreaking. Their solemnity is heartbreaking. Their sincerity is heartbreaking. ▬
▬ The radio is haunted. It feels that way, tuning across the dial, hearing the human voice scattered, dispersed, cut with static, struggling. It feels that way, listening to these broadcasts, which are probably for nobody, probably only an exercise in optimism, probably pulsed out for dead men, whose bodies have long since been consumed by the ocean or by the Earth. ▬
▬ But I will be rational. ▭ There is nobody listening. ▭ It is better to put it this way: it is unlikely that any abductees are listening. The signals are jammed. They are not there. They are dead, many of them, it is likely, no matter which list you go by. This is too terrible to contemplate. To make a pronouncement like this on the issue feels dangerous. It seems likely. ▭ But maybe I am saying this only because it is more terrible to contemplate the listeners that the stations hope to reach. It is more terrible to imagine that the advocacy groups are right, that hundreds are listening in for messages from home. ▬
▬ But I will be rational. ▭ The number of Japanese people kidnapped by North Korea was, according to the current number from the government of Japan, seventeen. ▭ During periods of diplomatic good will, North Korea was willing to talk to the Japanese about certain cases. About twenty years ago, after the meeting of Kim Jong-il and Koizumi Junichiro, when the official number recognized by the Japanese government was only eleven, the Koreans admitted that their agents, without the authorization of the leadership, carried out those kidnappings. They added to the list two more than had not yet been confirmed by the Japanese government, bringing their number to thirteen. ▭ Of those thirteen people, five returned to Japan and eight are deceased. Although the government of Korea provided details to confirm the deaths, relatives and the Japanese government did not accept this in all cases. There is the case of Taguchi Yaeko, Kim Hyon-hui’s trainer in Japanese language and culture ahead of the Korean Air 858 bombing, who is, it seems, based on the evidence from defectors and returned abductees, certainly lived long past the date on the death certificate provided by North Korea. The case of Yokota, abducted by Korean agent Sin Gwang-su in Niigata in 1977, is the best known: Korea admitted to the kidnapping but her family has rejected the claim that she killed herself in 1994, as well as a later rumor that she died in 2004. Their conviction is based on a DNA test of her cremated remains, beliefs about her temperament, and testimony from defectors and returned abductees. ▭ (Is Yokota Megumi alive? Let me answer that question: I think so. I pray that she is. Maybe I’m too sentimental to evaluate the evidence objectively. If you listen to enough of these broadcasts, you will be convinced, too, or you will be too ashamed to publicly state what you really think. She would be fifty-nine years old.) ▭ Of the four victims that Japan recognizes but Korea denies or has simply not acknowledged, there has been evidence of two—Tanaka Minoru (recognized by the Japanese government in 2005) and Matsumoto Kyoko (recognized in 2006)—still living, elderly, and under the care of doctors in the capital. The other two that Korea has not admitted or acknowledged—Soga Miyoshi and Kume Yutaka—are likely no longer alive, as both would be in or approaching their late nineties. ▭ The list of abductees recognized by activists is much longer. The National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North Korea (NARKN) adds twenty-three additional names to the seventeen. The Association of the Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea (AFVKN) supported the claim of the Investigation Commission on Missing Japanese Probably Related to North Korea (COMJAN) that four hundred seventy Japanese citizens were probably abducted. COMJAN says that an additional thousand missing persons cases might be linked to North Korea. Close to four hundred of those names are available on a list on the COMJAN website. ▭ The earliest suspected abduction is 1948, involving a military veteran that had previously lived in Korea. He went missing after visiting another veteran. The most recent case, from 2003, involves Okita Naruki. He went to an izakaya in Osaka at around three in the afternoon, then followed one of the employees to another bar. The employee later dropped him off at the pier. A multiple day search of the water nearby turned up nothing. ▭ Some of the cases do have some possible connection to North Korea. One man, who disappeared in 1973, was described in unspecified reports from other abductees. In a 1973 case, a woman in Hokkaido unwittingly married a Korean man that was rumored to be an agent of North Korea, and when he disappeared, she tracked him to Shinagawa, after which she disappeared. Most of the cases marked as having evidence of North Korean involvement are shakier. ▭ I will not speak about government funding of these efforts. I will not say anything about the motives of AFVKN or NARKN or COMJAN. They must be pure. I won’t talk about the support given to any project that might strike a blow against the Koreans. ▬
▬ But I will be rational. ▭ Nobody wants to think of their loved one stumbling off a pier and being eaten by crabs. Nobody wants to think that their loved one found living in this world so painful that they decided to end everything in a remote pine copse. And so this is preferable: they are away somewhere, in a terrible place but one that keeps them alive, and which allows hope for their return to stay alive. ▬
<To read more about Yokota Megumi and her family’s activism: “Heartbreak over lack of progress in abduction of Megumi Yokota.” To read more about recent activism on behalf of abductees, which often takes the form of appeals to the Americans, who have so far mostly paid lip service to the issue: “Biden reaffirms U.S. effort to resolve N. Korea abduction issue.” To read more about skepticism about the lengthy list of possible abductees: “COMJAN 'abduction' list grows -- despite lack of evidence.” The photograph at the top of the entry comes from one of the “Letter to Megumi” columns by Yokota Sakie: “Japanese Politicians Must Act Resolutely.”>