by Robert S. Boynton
"Throughout the late 1970s and early '80s, dozens of Japanese citizens were abducted from coastal Japanese towns by North Korean commandos. In what proved to be part of a global project, North Korea attempted to reeducate the abductees and train them to spy on the state's behalf. When the project faltered, the abductees were hidden in a series of guarded communities known as "Invitation-Only Zones"--The fiction being that these were exclusive enclaves, not prisons. In 2002, Kim Jong Il admitted to kidnapping thirteen Japanese citizens and returned five of them (the other eight, he said, had died). From the moment that Robert S. Boynton first saw a photograph of these men and women, he became obsessed with the window their story provided into the vexed politics of Northeast Asia.…
"This paints a frightening portrait of North Korea’s abductions of Japanese citizens and North Korea’s efforts to use them to train spies. The stories are heartbreaking, and a constant source of tension between North Korea and Japan, even today. Boynton draws on a wide variety of interviews from defectors, diplomats, abductees and even crab fishermen to explain how North Korea was able to carry out its abduction program, and the fight to bring the abductees home. “The regime hasn’t changed, the dictators haven’t changed, the public executions and political imprisonments haven’t changed.” The book is particularly relevant these days, as North Korea appears to have abducted some South Korean citizens in China in retaliation for the defection of some North Korean restaurant workers, which North Korea claims were “abducted” by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. We give too much attention to the nuclear issue, which detracts from the issue of the denial of even the most basic human rights in North Korea. The suffering of the North Korean people is more important to me than the nuclear issue, which I think is a distraction from the more pressing concerns, including swathes of the population still starving, undernourished and malnourished, and this just the tip of the iceberg. Kim Jong-un knows that if he used nuclear weapons against other countries, his regime would be obliterated. He is using the nuclear issue as a threat to protect his hold on power, and – what is more – as domestic propaganda, showing the North Korean people how great he is, and to reinforce the falsity that the outside world hates North Korea."
