Takuya Yokota vividly remembers clutching a flashlight and running to the ocean with his mother and twin brother to look for his older sister in the dark, shouting her name. Megumi, then 13, had disappeared on her way home from school on a cold November day 40 years ago, kidnapped…
Takuya Yokota vividly remembers clutching a flashlight and running to the ocean with his mother and twin brother to look for his older sister in the dark, shouting her name.
Megumi, then 13, had disappeared on her way home from school on a cold November day 40 years ago, kidnapped – it emerged decades later – by North Korean agents to help train spies. None of them has ever seen her again, one of scores Japan believes were snatched away in the 1970s and 80s.
“Our house was thrust into a bottomless darkness,” Yokota, nine at the time, told Reuters. “Every day after that was silent and hard.”
Now, as tensions rise after North Korean missile launches over Japan and nuclear tests, U. S. President Donald Trump has made Megumi’s case part of his attacks on Pyongyang. He mentioned her in a September speech at the United Nations and during his Japan visit next week plans to meet her parents and other families whose loved ones were stolen.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made the abductions a keystone of his political career and said he won’t rest until all 13 of those Pyongyang admits to kidnapping have returned and divulges information about the others Japan suspects were taken.
