Kidnapped by North Korea in 1978, this Japanese man lived to tell the tale

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

KASHIWAZAKI, Japan — Kaoru Hasuike was sitting on the beach with his girlfriend, watching the sun set, smoking a cigarette. A man approached the pair from the seashore, asking for a light. As Hasuike lit the stranger’s cigarette, other men approached the pair from behind and wrestled them to the ground.

Hasuike recalls he was punched in the face, had something placed over his mouth, and was ordered, in broken Japanese, to keep quiet.

It was July 31, 1978. Hasuike was a 20-year-old university student. His girlfriend, Yukiko, was 22. They had been kidnapped by North Korean agents and would spend the next 24 years working for the regime in Pyongyang.

“At first, I think I resisted a little,” he said, speaking to reporters last week by the same stretch of beach where he was kidnapped. “But in that sort of a situation, and after I was hit, I was utterly in fear, I couldn’t move.”

Japan says it has been able to confirm that 17 of its nationals, including 13-year-old schoolgirl Megumi Yokota, were abducted by North Korea between 1977 and 1983, but says hundreds more missing people may also have been kidnapped. The issue has become something of a national obsession, and a personal crusade for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Officials say the conservative leader has raised the matter in every one of the 40-odd meetings and telephone conversations he has had with President Trump, pressing the U.S. leader to bring it up with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/kidnapped-by-north-korea-in-1978-this-japanese-man-is-now-telling-his-tale/2019/09/10/dbcd3dbe-d2c9-11e9-8924-1db7dac797fb_story.html?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1

Sorry Abe. Trump and Kim are in love.

[mitch96]

1. I wonder why a 20 yo college student was kidnapped? For what reason? nt

[Tanuki]

2. From the article:

"For the next two and a half decades, Hasuike lived in North Korea, in an “Invitation District” in Pyongyang reserved for foreigners who had been kidnapped to serve the regime. At first, they were given intense political indoctrination, in what he suspects was an attempt to turn them into spies. But when two Lebanese women who had undergone such training escaped on a trip to Belgrade in 1979, Pyongyang appeared to abandon that idea, and the indoctrination stopped.

The next idea was language training. Hasuike was set to work teaching North Korean agents to speak Japanese so they could spy in his home country. That program lasted until a North Korean agent was arrested for placing a bomb on a Korean Air flight in 1987, and admitted she had been taught Japanese by a former abductee. The agent, Kim Hyon Hui, was initially sentenced to death but was pardoned soon after.

From then on, Hasuike was set to work translating Japanese newspaper and magazine articles into Korean. "...(more)