North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens

What Happened

Between 1977 and 1983, agents working for the North Korean state seized Japanese citizens from Japanese soil and transported them to North Korea. The victims were ordinary people: students, couples, workers, people going about their lives on the coast or on the way home. The Japanese government officially recognises seventeen abducted citizens — eight men and nine women — as having been taken by North Korea. Estimates of the true number run into the hundreds.

The abductions were not confined to Japanese nationals. Citizens of European countries — eight in total — and one person from the Middle East were also abducted from Japan by North Korean agents.

For decades the Japanese public did not know what had happened. Families were left with disappearances that police treated as ordinary missing-person cases. The truth emerged only in 2002, when North Korea admitted to the abductions during diplomatic talks with Japan. A small number of abductees were subsequently allowed to return to Japan; most of the recognised victims remain unaccounted for.

Background

The abductions belong to the broader phenomenon of North Korean abductions and sit within the long, fraught history of Japan–North Korea relations. North Korea's stated purpose was to obtain native Japanese speakers who could train its intelligence agents in Japanese language and customs, allowing operatives to pass as Japanese.

The period of the abductions falls in the Shōwa era (昭和, Shōwa, "bright harmony"), the reign name of Emperor Hirohito, which ran from 1926 to 1989. The abductions took place in the later Shōwa decades, when Japan was an economic power and North Korea was a secretive, isolated state with an active intelligence apparatus.

Why It Mattered

The abductions became one of the central obstacles in Japan–North Korea relations. When North Korea admitted the abductions in 2002, the admission transformed a cold missing-persons mystery into a national political cause. The Japanese government classified the seventeen recognised victims as abductees, and their families — most famously the parents of Megumi Yokota, taken as a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl in 1977 — campaigned publicly for decades.

The issue shaped public opinion in Japan more deeply than almost any other aspect of the bilateral relationship. It constrained Japan's willingness to normalise relations with North Korea and to provide economic assistance. It also fed a wider suspicion of North Korea within Japanese society and influenced how Japanese governments approached the country's nuclear and missile programmes.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name is 北朝鮮による日本人拉致問題, read in kana as きたちょうせんによるにほんじんらちもんだい, and romanised as Kitachōsen ni yoru Nihonjin rachi mondai.

A character-by-character breakdown:

• 北 (きた, kita) — "north".
• 朝 (ちょう, chō) — "morning"; here part of the country name.
• 鮮 (せん, sen) — "fresh" or "vivid"; together 朝鮮 (Chōsen) is the Japanese name for Korea.
• に (kana) — the particle ni, "by" or "due to".
• よる (kana) — the verb yoru, "to be caused by"; による means "by" or "caused by".
• 日 (に, ni) — "sun"; here the first element of 日本.
• 本 (ほん, hon) — "origin" or "book"; together 日本 (Nihon) means "Japan".
• 人 (じん, jin) — "person"; 日本人 (Nihonjin) means "Japanese person" or "Japanese people".
• 拉 (ら, ra) — "to drag" or "to pull"; used here in the compound for abduction.
• 致 (ち, chi) — "to cause" or "to bring about"; together 拉致 (rachi) means "abduction" or "taking away by force".
• 問 (もん, mon) — "question" or "problem".
• 題 (だい, dai) — "topic" or "subject"; together 問題 (mondai) means "problem" or "issue".

Read as a whole, the phrase means "the problem of the abduction of Japanese people by North Korea". The compound 拉致 (rachi) is the standard Japanese term for this kind of forcible abduction and appears throughout Japanese news coverage of the issue.

Key Figures

• Megumi Yokota (横田めぐみ) — abducted in 1977 at the age of thirteen on her way home from school; she became the most widely known of the recognised victims, and her parents' campaign brought the issue to national attention.
• The seventeen recognised abductees — eight men and nine women officially acknowledged by the Japanese government as taken by North Korea between 1977 and 1983.
• North Korean state agents — the operatives who carried out the abductions from Japanese soil, acting on behalf of the North Korean government.
• The families of the abductees — the parents, spouses and siblings who sustained public pressure on the Japanese government and on North Korea for the return of the victims.