Last year at the UN General Assembly, Donald Trump brought up the issue of the Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea. This year, he praised North Korea’s leader for his courage.
Takuya Yokota was 9 in 1977 when his sister, Megumi, disappeared from their village in Japan.
She was 13.
“It was in the evening. Usually, she would have come home and we would have had dinner together,” Yokota says. “But that day she did not come home. My brother and I were watching TV, but no matter how long we waited, she did not come home.”
Yokota and his brother eventually went out to look for Megumi, who’d had badminton practice that afternoon. They walked to the junior high school to see if she was still there. They even checked an abandoned building to see if maybe she was hiding, but there was no trace of her.
“We suspected maybe she had some kind of accident on her way home, or maybe she was involved in some incident or something terrible,” Yokota says. “We even wondered if she had killed herself, but there was just no clue whatsoever of what happened.”
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After that day, home became a grim place. Yokota says he couldn’t understand why his sister was missing, but he didn’t feel comfortable talking about it, either.
“My mother and father, they looked so desolate and we didn’t even know whether it was all right to ask them,” he says. “When we were at school, some of the other children would jeer at us, and say, ‚Why is your sister missing?’”
Megumi Yokota is one of 17 Japanese citizens who Japan maintains were abducted by North Korean agents between 1977 and 1983. North Korea has acknowledged kidnapping 13 Japanese people in order to teach Japanese to North Korean spies. Five of the abductees returned home in 2002. The others were said to be dead, including Yokota’s sister. North Korea sent bones as proof, but the Japanese government claims those bones aren’t hers. North Korea also issued a death certificate for Megumi. Her brother says it’s fake.
“According to this certificate, my sister died in 1993, but the five abductees who were returned to Japan told us they saw her after that,” he says.
