As someone with firsthand knowledge of what it was like to be spirited away against their will to North Korea, Kaoru Hasuike has a unique insight into the thorny abduction issue.

As one of a handful of Japanese abduction victims allowed to leave North Korea in 2002, Hasuike is now calling on Tokyo to drive home to Pyongyang the message that the longer it leaves the problem of abductees unresolved, the more it threatens to harm its own self-interest.

Twenty-one years have passed since North Korea first admitted to having abducted Japanese citizens and permitted five victims to return to Japan in 2002.

Hasuike was snatched by North Korean agents with his girlfriend and future wife, Yukiko, now 67, from a coastal area in Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture, in 1978. Japan suspects that as many as 17 of its nationals were taken to North Korea in the 1970s and ’80s to train its spies in Japanese language, customs and culture.

At the time, he was a student at Japan’s Chuo University.

Currently serving as a specially appointed professor of studies on the language and culture on the Korean Peninsula at Niigata Sangyo University, Hasuike, now 65, is committed to helping to resolve the abduction issue through speeches and any other means.

Born in 1957, Hasuike is the author of “Rachi to Ketsudan” (Abduction and decision) and “Hanto e Futatabi” (Toward the peninsula again), and other books.

During a recent Asahi Shimbun interview, he recounted the reality facing the aging family members of abduction victims who long for the day they will be reunited with their loved ones.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

* * *

Question: What are your thoughts on the situation facing victims who are apparently still in North Korea, given your experience of having lived there for 24 years under constant monitoring by the authorities?

Hasuike: Of the five abductees who arrived in Japan in 2002, four, including myself, belonged to the foreign intelligence department of the (ruling) Workers’ Party of Korea and stayed in the same guesthouse. Hitomi Soga started living at another guesthouse after marrying Charles Jenkins and working at the military’s reconnaissance bureau.

The North appears to make sure the abductees live separately to keep their details in strict secrecy. Keeping them under constant close surveillance must cause them to be stressed out, so they are likely given minimal chances of going out  shopping and other activities.

Q: There is a rumor that abductees are managed by number. What does that mean?

A: Numbers were assigned to the spies and all the other residents of the guesthouse I was in. The guesthouse’s rationing and management were under control of the party’s finance and accounting department, not the intelligence department.

Numbers are used for everyone to prevent the names of the intelligence department’s members from being leaked to outsiders via rationing and other procedures. It is all to do with maintaining secrecy.

But there are no longer any secrets that the North must keep about abductees.

In 2002, the North acknowledged that five of us were the only ones still alive and insisted that eight others, including Megumi Yokota, were already dead. It asserted that four others never entered North Korea. But these explanations were full of contradictions, and no evidence was provided.

Why did the North tell such a lie? Yaeko Taguchi taught Japanese to Kim Hyon-hui, who served time on death row for the midair bombing of Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987. Those who hijacked Japan Airlines Flight 351 in 1970 were engaged in the abduction program, too. The North feared that those clandestine activities would be brought to light if it returned the abductees. But all those details have already surfaced through a range of accounts.

What kind of life the five returned victims, including myself, were forced to lead in North Korea is well known, owing to news reports. With that in mind, the North should send the remaining victims back to Japan as soon as possible. Keeping secrets can no longer be a reason for hesitating to return those abductees.

PYONGYANG LISTENS TO TOKYO

Q: What do you think of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s call in May this year for “high-level direct dialogue” as part of efforts to arrange a Tokyo-Pyongyang summit meeting soon?

A: The North sat down for talks with Japan every time it reached a diplomatic deadlock. Now that Russia is approaching the North in the face of a serious shortage of artillery shells in its war against Ukraine, Pyongyang does not find it essential to negotiate with Japan immediately.

It should be noted, however, that the North is an adept diplomat. It believes in neither China nor Russia. Pyongyang will act if it feels talks with Japan can produce tangible benefits.

The Japanese government needs to continue issuing this message.

Shortly after Kishida’s announcement, a North Korean vice minister of foreign affairs released a statement, contending that “there are no reasons for Pyongyang and Tokyo to avoid meeting with one another.” This indicates the North listened to Kishida’s call despite the fact it claims the abduction issue “has already been solved.”

Q: What message do you believe will prove effective?

A: Tokyo should constantly exert pressure on the North to allow the other abduction victims to come back to Japan as soon as possible. As the victims’ family members are now well advanced in years, they more frequently pass away, much to our dismay. Time is running out and the deadline is looming.

The Japanese public will never forgive North Korea if it misses the deadline. The normalization of diplomatic relationship will never happen, depriving the North of the chance of receiving economic aid and postwar compensation.

Japan must make the North understand this.

NORTH’S MERIT

Q: Do you think Pyongyang will listen to that message?

A: The October issue of Bungeishunju magazine carried the meeting records of a May 2013 visit to North Korea of special Cabinet adviser Isao Iijima, a former secretary to former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. The article contained an especially noteworthy comment by Workers’ Party of Korea’s secretary Kim Yong Il.

Kim reportedly described it as “possible for us to find the end point, such as fulfilling the content of the Japan-North Korea Pyongyang Declaration, if we can move to dissolving misunderstandings and distrust” while admitting the “differences in our stances.”

How should we interpret this remark? A possible interpretation is that it was a message suggesting a top-level decision, namely, an order by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, would enable the abductees to go home immediately.

The 2002 Japan-North Korea Pyongyang Declaration has a provision for economic assistance once the two countries normalize their diplomatic ties. A comprehensive settlement of the abduction, nuclear weapons and missile issues is indispensable to the normalization of diplomatic relations. But if the abduction issue is finally resolved, it would be acceptable to lift Japan’s exclusive sanctions and start talks on economic aid that will be provided once diplomatic normalization is established.

Tokyo should tell the North that solving the abduction problem will bring a huge advantage to it.

Q: Why have you lately been referring in your speeches to the abduction issue as being “today’s problem?”

A: My point is, we can resolve this issue only now. It will be too late if the victims’ parents die out.

The North watches public sentiment in Japan carefully. We must stop the abduction issue from being forgotten. Any form of support, such as taking part in rallies, speeches and petition campaigns of the group representing abductees’ families, will be of help. We are asking people to keep maintaining an interest in the abduction issue.

From now on, I will be spreading information on the problem aggressively through speeches, publications and media interviews, too.

(This interview was conducted by Takuya Suzuki.)