It is an amazing story: For more than 20 years, a person who allegedly does n’t exist has been keeping North Korea as a whole in semi-poverty and the rest of us in alleged nuclear danger.
It begins in 2001 when a senior Chinese official, Hitoshi Tanaka, spent a year conducting covert conversations with a Mister X near to Kim Jong Il, and finally managed to persuade Pyongyang to acknowledge the long-running rumors that it had abducted Chinese people from Japan in the late 1970s and early 1980s were accurate.  ,
Although the majority of the dead were returned, Pyongyang was able to retrieve the Chinese partner of a fugitive from the US Korean War.  ,
Both parties agreed to sign a Pyongyang Declaration in which Japan pledged to restore normal relations with North Korea and provide substantial financial help as a way to mark this occasion. In return, Pyongyang would carry on its missile tests ban.
It was claimed that Japan would express heavy regret for the sufferings caused by its previous colonial occupation of Korea and that North Korea would likewise express regret for the abductions as uncontrolled agents would be punished.  ,
In 2002 Japan’s next prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, went to Pyongyang to mark the declaration and ensure the transfer of the five captives.
However, Shinzo Abe, who had accompany Koizumi to Pyongyang when he returned home, started refuting stories that North Korea’s violence of Chinese were actually more than 800. They, too, had to be returned.
Tokyo later accepted the official number for captives at 17 years old, of whom only five had been returned after lengthy delays and negotiations.
But the strong institutions that Abe had helped establish for the families of missing captives, both before and after he became prime minister in 2006, were nevertheless unsatisfied. Before there could be any steps to improve ties with North Korea, all those who were said to be missing had to be returned.
One of them was a girl, Megumi Yokota, abducted at age 13 from a beach ( probably because she had seen another abduction nearby ). Even though North Korea had listed her name among the deceased abductees, her name eventually came to represent the reportedly however unresolved abductee case.
In her honor, temples and music were created. As part of Tokyo’s massive Marketing campaign, her grieving parents traveled to Washington to meet with President Obama and to other assets. For all the lost Japanese in North Korea, repeated requirements were made for Pyongyang’s bill.  ,
But Pyongyang continued to insist Megumi had died, in 1994 after being married and giving birth to a child, Kim Eun Gyong. Megumi’s burned bones were offered as evidence.  ,
The UK academic publication, Nature, criticized Tokyo’s try to use a criminal DNA test of the legs to show Pyongyang was lying. The DNA test was never repeated.
The Megumi matter really began to fall off in 2014 when Tokyo, continuing to insist Megumi was still intact,  , suddenly decided to allow Megumi’s parents to attend Megumi’s daughter, the then older Kim Eun Gyong – provided the meeting was held in a second country, Mongolia.  ,
But when the kids came back from Mongolia, they were unable to disclose what they had done or even inquired about Megumi. Only the mother’s assertion that” Megumi is also safe there” was refuted by them.
So what are we supposed to believe?  , Asked only this problem last week at a press conference to mark yet another strategy for the immediate release of all abductees, Megumi’s brother, Takuya, then head of the leading abductee grouping, said he was certain North Korean agents , were current in Mongolia to make sure there was no talk of Megumi.
And so the abductee drama has continued. Pyongyang now says that out of Tokyo ‘s , claimed 17 abductees, five have been returned, five never entered the country and the remainder have died. Since the case has ended, North Korea will refuse to speak out if the abduction issue is brought up again if Japan makes any more calls for direct talks, as Prime Minister Fumio Kishida did last month.  ,
I’m not sure if Pyongyang leaders can do much more than that, although they have in the past claimed to. According to the now-deceased Abe, who relyed on the gullibility of the Japanese public to deadlock Japan’s relations with North Korea for a very long time.  ,
The 26 million people in North Korea continue to live alone, and the West continues to be worried about Pyongyang’s nuclear threat, according to the optimistic Pyongyang Declaration.
Gregory Clark was formerly an Australian diplomat and a resident of Japan for many years.