Abductee families keep Japan and North Korea apart

It is an amazing story: A person who probably does not exist has been holding an entire nation, North Korea, in semi-poverty for more than the past twenty years, and the rest of us under alleged nuclear threat.

It begins in 2001, when a senior Japanese Foreign Ministry official, Hitoshi Tanaka, spent a year in secret negotiations with a Mister X close to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, and finally managed to get Pyongyang to admit that long-standing rumours it had abducted Japanese citizens from Japan in the late seventies and early eighties were true.

Most had since died but Pyongyang could return two married couples and the Japanese wife of a US Korean War deserter it was holding.

To mark this event, both sides agreed to issue a Pyongyang Declaration in which Japan promised to normalize relations with North Korea and to provide significant economic aid. Pyongyang in return would continue its moratorium on missile testing.

North Korea would also apologize for the abductions (the work of uncontrolled agents who would be punished, it was claimed), and Japan would offer deep remorse for sufferings caused by its past colonial occupation of Korea.

In 2002 Japan’s then prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, went to Pyongyang to sign the declaration and confirm the return of the five abductees.

But when Koizumi returned to Japan his then deputy cabinet secretary, the very rightwing Shinzo Abe, who had gone with him to Pyongyang, began pushing rumors that North Korea’s abductions of Japanese had in fact numbered over 800. They, too, had to be returned.

After prolonged delays and haggling, Tokyo eventually accepted the official figure for abductees to be 17, of whom only five had been returned.

But the powerful