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Bones of Japan-North Korea
discontent
By Gavan McCormack
(Republished with permission from Japan Focus)
On
June 24 a three-day "sit-in" will commence in
front of the offices of the Japanese prime
minister, organized not by a radical leftist group
but by some of Japan's most famous and respected
citizens and enjoying powerful backing in the
national Diet (parliament) and media, to demand
the imposition of immediate economic sanctions
against North Korea. Only by such means, the
organizers argue, can North Korea be forced to
return Japanese citizens they believe are still
being held in North Korea against their will.
As of that date, it will be six months
since Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi declared,
last December, that the explanation thus far
offered of the abductions by North Korea was
unsatisfactory and false, in particular, that the
cremated human remains offered as evidence of the
death of the most famous of the abductees, Yokota
Megumi (on whom see below), were in fact not hers.
The Japanese government therefore promised
"stern measures" unless Pyongyang responded
"promptly and sincerely" to set matters right, and
the sit-in will demand immediate recourse to these
"stern" measures. More than 5 million people have
signed a petition to that effect, and a meeting in
Tokyo's Hibiya in April to promote this cause drew
6,000 people. The leaders, including the parents
of Yokota Megumi, are household figures, regulars
on major television channels. Their patience is
exhausted, they say, and their anger at Koizumi's
refusal to do as they demand, or even to meet with
them and hear their demands, is at high pitch. If
still not satisfied, they promise to renew their
"sit-in" in July and subsequent months, and to
expand it around the country.
The
political importance of this campaign is
undeniable. There are, however, serious doubts
about the basic assumption on which it rests: that
North Korea was not only insincere in its
investigation of the abduction cases but
deliberately lied to Japan. Those doubts are dealt
with below.
While Koizumi is subject to
intense domestic political pressure from this
campaign, he is subject also to intense external
pressure, notably from the government of the
United States, for which nuclear matters far
outweigh the abductions. Hence, any unilateral
sanctions by Japan are ruled out, at least for the
time being. Koizumi's government drifts before the
fierce contradictory winds of these forces,
rudderless, so that for six months relations
between the two countries have been frozen, while
Koizumi apparently sleeps at the helm, dreaming
only of privatizing the Japanese post office.
On April 14, at the 61st session of the
United Nations Human Rights Commission meeting, a
resolution, drafted and submitted jointly by Japan
and the European Union, was adopted on the
situation of human rights in the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea).
Inter alia, it called on North Korea to
immediately return Japanese abductees and on the
UN General Assembly to take up the question of
North Korean human-rights violations in general
[1].
The No 1 abductee whose return is
sought by Japan is Yokota Megumi, snatched from
the Japan Sea coast in Niigata prefecture on
November 15, 1977, when she was a 13-year old
schoolgirl returning home from a badminton match.
If still alive today, she would be a woman in her
early 40s [2].
In 2002, when Koizumi made
his dramatic day trip to meet with North Korean
leader Kim Jong-il and try to normalize relations
between the two countries, North Korea admitted
and apologized for the abduction of Megumi and 12
other Japanese during the period 1977-82. Eight
were said to have died and five (who were returned
to Japan in 2002) survived. The Japanese
government's official list, revised in April, now
comprises 17 names: the five who were returned,
the eight supposedly dead, and four others still
denied by Pyongyang, including the most recent
addition to the list, Tanaka Minoru, a 28-year-old
Kobe noodle shop worker who disappeared from
Vienna in 1978 [3]. Spokesmen for the movement in
support of the victims insist that there may be as
many as 400 victims.
The fate of Yokota
Megumi
As for Megumi, North Korea
explained that during the two-and-a-half decades
since her abduction she had married a local Korean
man, Kim Chol-jun, in 1986, given birth to a
daughter the following year, but suffered
depression and committed suicide while undergoing
hospital treatment in March 1993 [4]. Two years
later, at a subsequent meeting between the two
sides, and after further investigations, North
Korea revised the date of Megumi's death first to
March, then to April, 1994. When the Japanese
government demanded evidence of her death, her
supposed husband, Kim Chol-jun, handed over ash
and bone fragments, saying that he had kept her
body buried in his garden for two years, then dug
it up and cremated it, keeping the remains in his
own possession.
In Japan, the National
Research Institute of Police Science declared that
it could not extract any DNA from the samples it
received, but at Teikyo University, a private
university said to have a high reputation in the
field of mitochondrial DNA analysis, the medical
department succeeded where the institute had
failed. The government concluded from the Teikyo
study that the remains were not those of Megumi
(whose family had kept her umbilical cord) but of
two unrelated people. It insisted that there was
"absolutely no evidence" to support North Korea's
claim that Megumi (and seven others) had died.
Therefore, since there was the "possibility of
them being still alive", it demanded their return
[5]. Megumi's parents became the central figures
in a burgeoning national movement demanding
Koizumi's government impose sanctions or other
forms of retaliation against North Korea. For
many, nothing short of the end of the Kim Jong-ill
regime would suffice.
North Korea reacted
with anger to the outcome of the Japanese
investigation. Its formal response, on January 24,
took the form of a North Korean Central News
Agency "memorandum" [6]. It insisted its
explanations had been truthful, and suggested
Japan's government must have rigged the tests,
using other bones. It stressed the fact that the
Japanese Police Institute and Teikyo University
analyses had come to different conclusions and
argued that it was unscientific and improper to
place absolute weight on one conclusion only. It
was "common sense" that DNA material could not be
extracted from human remains cremated, as
according to North Korean custom, at 1,200 degrees
centigrade.
North Korea also protested
against the refusal of the Japanese side to
acknowledge its sincere effort to resolve the
abduction problem. No sooner had the Japanese
delegation returned from North Korea in November
2004, it protested, than "some politicians" were
calling for economic sanctions. It denounced the
Japanese side for breaking the promise, made in a
statement signed by the head of the Japanese
delegation at the time when the bones were handed
over, to the effect that "[w]e promise to hand
these remains directly to Yokota Megumi's parents,
and not to publish the matter". It concluded by
dismissing the outcome of the analysis as "a
fabrication by corrupt elements", saying that
"[n]ot only has Japan gone to the lengths of
fabricating the results of an analysis of human
bones and refused to concede that the abduction
problem has been settled, but it also completely
denies our sincerity and effort. It is they who
have pushed North Korea-Japan relations to this
worst-ever pitch of confrontation."
It
goes without saying that North Korean statements
have little credibility in Japan. In the dispute
over the technical, scientific matter of
mitochondrial DNA analysis, the Japanese
government's pronouncements were taken, at least
initially, as definitive. It was assumed, not only
in Japan but by many around the world, that North
Korea's deception had been exposed because Japan's
level of technology was above anything North Korea
could imagine.
Observers in Japan and
elsewhere also noted that North Korea's account of
the abductions had been full of inconsistencies
from the start. The alteration of the date of
Megumi's death, confusion over the hospital at
which she had received treatment, the inherently
improbable story that she had been strolling in
the hospital grounds with a doctor when she
escaped his attention and hanged herself from a
pine tree, using a rope she had made out of her
clothing, beggared belief [7]. There had also been
major discrepancies in the accounts of the fate of
other abductees, who were said to have died in
strange traffic accidents (in a country with
little traffic), or of heart attacks or liver
failures (when young and apparently healthy) or
from poisoning by a defective gas heater.
In two other cases, apart from Megumi's,
in 2002 and 2004 North Korea provided remains that
it said were "probably" those of a man abducted
from Europe in 1980 (Matsuki Kaoru), who is
supposed to have died with his wife and one child
in 1988. But on both occasions DNA tests showed,
apparently conclusively, that the remains were
unrelated.
It was hard in Japan to believe
North Korea's account that the remains of all the
deceased abductees had been lost in the floods,
dam bursts and landslides of the mid-1990s.
Furthermore, the scraps of evidence relating to
Megumi that the "sincere reinvestigation" promised
by Kim Jong-il turned up late in 2004 - hospital
records, traffic accident records, doctors'
accounts - all seemed implausible to the Japanese.
The North Korean attempt to explain the lacunae in
terms of being hampered by the "special agencies
of state" originally responsible for the
abductions, which were said to have burned all
relevant documents, carried little credibility.
Curiouser and curiouser
It was
indisputable, however, that the 1990s had been a
decade of acute social and economic crisis in
North Korea, in which hundreds of thousands had
died of famine or in extremely straitened
circumstances, and much of the country had indeed
been devastated by floods and landslides. Still
the Japanese authorities insisted on verifiable
material evidence.
Japan's government
therefore denounced North Korea's 2004
"reinvestigation" as unsatisfactory and "extremely
insincere". Since Pyongyang persisted in denying
knowledge of other Japanese strongly suspected to
have been abducted, and since its explanations of
the fate of those it admitted to abducting were
implausible, the conviction grew in Japan that the
victims were not dead at all but being held,
involuntarily, perhaps because they might know
"too much".
Kim Chol-jun, who was
described in 2002 as an employee of a trading
company, himself transmogrified by 2004 into a
member of a "special agency of state", the very
group responsible (according to Kim Jong-il's 2002
explanation) for the abductions in the first
place. According to several of the abductees who
returned to Japan in 2002, his real name was
actually Kim Yon-su, and he had been separated
from Megumi for about a year before her supposed
death [8]. If that were so, the story of his
having buried, exhumed, cremated and then retained
her remains became even more unlikely. The
Japanese Sukuukai (National Movement for the
Rescue of Japanese Abducted by North Korea)
insists that she was known to have been a tutor to
a son of Kim Jong-il around 1995 [9].
Megumi's case became central to the
confrontation between the two countries. Shocked
by the seemingly irrefutable evidence of a North
Korean attempt to deceive Japan, and with no
shadow of doubt over the outcome of the DNA tests
in the Megumi case, the Japanese government, under
a rising wave of angry public and media pressure,
suspended the humanitarian aid that Koizumi had
promised in May 2004 and turned its attention
toward punitive economic sanctions.
However, while North Korea's protestations
were dismissed in Japan, they gained some support
from an unexpected quarter. An article in the
February 3 issue of the prestigious international
scientific journal, Nature, revealed that the DNA
analysis on Megumi's remains had been performed by
a member of the medical department of Teikyo
University, Yoshii Tomio [10]. Yoshii, it later
transpired, was a relatively junior faculty
member, of lecturer status, in a forensic
department that had neither a professor nor even
an assistant professor [11]. Remarkably, he said
that he had no previous experience in the analysis
of cremated specimens, described his tests as
inconclusive and pointed out that such samples
were very easily contaminated by anyone coming in
contact with them, like "stiff sponges that can
absorb anything".
In other words, the man
who had actually conducted the Japanese analysis
pronounced it anything but definitive. The five
tiny samples he had been given to work on (largest
of them 1.5 grams) had anyway been used up in his
laboratory; so independent verification was
thereafter impossible. It seemed likely as a
result that nobody could ever know for sure what
Pyongyang's package had contained.
When
the Japanese government's chief cabinet secretary,
Hosoda Hiroyuki, referred to this article as
inadequate and a misrepresentation of the
government-commissioned analysis, Nature
responded, in a highly unusual editorial (March
17), saying:
Japan is right to doubt North
Korea's every statement. But its interpretation
of the DNA tests has crossed the boundary of
science's freedom from political interference.
Nature's interview with the scientist who
carried out the tests raised the possibility
that the remains were merely contaminated,
making the DNA tests inconclusive. This
suggestion is uncomfortable for a Japanese
government that wants to have North Korea seen
as unambiguously fraudulent ... The inescapable
fact is that the bones may have been
contaminated ... It is also entirely possible
that North Korea is lying. But the DNA tests
that Japan is counting on won't resolve the
issue. The problem is not in the science but in
the fact that the government is meddling in
scientific matters at all.
Science runs
on the premise that experiments, and all the
uncertainty involved in them, should be open for
scrutiny. Arguments made by other Japanese
scientists that the tests should have been
carried out by a larger team are convincing. Why
did Japan entrust them to one scientist working
alone, one who no longer seems to be free to
talk about them? Japan's policy seems a
desperate effort to make up for what has been a
diplomatic failure ... Part of the burden for
Japan's political and diplomatic failure is
being shifted to a scientist for doing his job -
deriving conclusions from experiments and
presenting reasonable doubts about them. But the
friction between North Korea and Japan will not
be decided by a DNA test. Likewise, the
interpretation of DNA test results cannot be
decided by the government of either country.
Dealing with North Korea is no fun, but it
doesn't justify breaking the rules of separation
between science and politics [12].
Apart from a brief reference in one
weekly journal, for months no word of this
extraordinary exchange penetrated into the
Japanese mass media. Three weeks after it, the
foreign minister told the Diet, in answer to a
question, that he knew nothing about the Nature
article [13]. As for Yoshii, one week after the
Nature editorial he left Teikyo hospital, promoted
from lowly university lecturer to the prestigious
position of head of the forensic medical
department of the Tokyo metropolitan police
department. Nature reported, in its third
discussion of the case (April 7), that it had been
told Yoshii was therefore not available for media
comment [14]. The suggestion, in a parliamentary
question on March 30, that this smacked of
government complicity in "hiding a witness" drew
outrage and the comment from the minister of
foreign affairs that it was "extremely
regrettable" for such aspersions to be cast on
Japan's scientific integrity [15].
Beyond
the immediate parties to the dispute, South Korean
forensic scientists also expressed skepticism
about the Japanese findings, on grounds of the low
possibility of DNA material surviving cremation
and the high probability of contamination [16].
Time magazine (April 4) reported that the
technique that Yoshii had used, known as "nested
PCR", was one that professional forensic
laboratories in the US avoided because of the risk
of contamination [17]. On March 31, a delegation
of the Japanese National Association for
Normalization of Relations with North Korea (whose
president is former prime minister Murayama
Tomiichi) met in Pyongyang with Song Il-ho, deputy
head of the North Korean Foreign Ministry's Asian
Bureau.
Song expressed to them his
government's grave disquiet over the fact that
North Korea had carried out exhaustive
investigation into the abductions, produced 16
witnesses for the Japanese to interview in
Pyongyang in November 2004, and even handed over
remains of Megumi, but the Japanese side had
behaved unscientifically in purporting to carry
out a DNA analysis, not revealing (ie initially)
either the name of the analyst or offering any
corroboration. "We can live without Japan," he
concluded [18]. The head of the Japan section of
the North Korean Foreign Ministry demanded that
Japan return the Megumi remains, which would then
be submitted for analysis to some independent
institution [19].
Subsequently, the
national media silence on the issue was broken by
the Asahi on May 10 [20]. It reported on the
Nature articles and added that both Megumi's
father and the National Association for Rescue of
the Abducted Japanese (Sukuukai) had urged the
Japanese government to "make a proper response" to
North Korea and to make public the details of the
DNA analysis. It also quoted the senior
anthropologist and DNA specialist at the National
Science Museum, Shinoda Ken-ichi, saying that "to
ensure scientific objectivity, the data should be
published and further tests to confirm the results
should be conducted by an independent
institution".
In the international media,
the International Herald Tribune took up the story
on June 2 [21]. Norimitsu Onishi quoted three more
Japanese experts, one of them Yoshii's own mentor
at Teikyo University hospital, who agreed that it
was "not possible" for the Japanese government to
claim that the remains North Korea submitted were
not Megumi's. As one of the experts (Honda
Katsuya, professor of forensic medicine at Tsukuba
University) put it, "all we can conclude from the
tests is that two people's DNA were detected in
the given material and that they did not agree
with Megumi-san's. That's it. There is another
huge step before we can conclude that they are not
Megumi-san's bones."
The silent
approach
To early June, the Japanese
government maintained its silence, refusing to
respond to either the North Korean government,
Megumi-san's father, the National Association for
the Rescue of the Abducted Japanese, leading
forensic experts in Japan, or the Japanese and
international scientific community. The matter of
Megumi's bones had become the key factor blocking
the resumption of negotiations between Japan and
North Korea and justifying the hardline case for
sanctions against North Korea. Yet the issue has
continued to be ignored by the Japanese media and,
since a few brief altercations in March, the Diet.
Several courses remain open. On the one
hand, Wada Haruki, well-known academic and
secretary general of the National Association for
Normalization of Relations with North Korea,
offers a proposal for the abduction issue that is
radically different from Sukuukai's nationally
publicized demand for sanctions.
Mr and Mrs Yokota appear to believe
that by putting pressure on the North Korean
government through economic sanctions, the truth
will be revealed. However, might it not be the
case that they could apply real pressure on the
North Korean government to carry out a more
sincere investigation if they were themselves to
go to North Korea [accompanied by interpreters
and appropriate assistants from the Japanese
government], pleading their position as parents,
to pursue all of those with connections to
Megumi for answers? Let me suggest once again
that Mr and Mrs Yokota consider making a visit
to North Korea. [22] This would not
be a popular course of action, but the Yokotas do
have a granddaughter in Pyongyang, Hyegyong
(Megumi's daughter), who is about the same age as
Megumi when she disappeared and whom they have
never met. Mr Yokota in particular has several
times said how much he would love to meet her and
the thought of making such a visit must never be
far from his mind.
On the other hand,
Sukuukai and the forces that will gather outside
the prime minister's office on June 24, insist on
sanctions. Although it (and Mr Yokota) have
(according to the Asahi) demanded that Japan make
a proper response on the DNA issue, that demand is
conspicuously absent from those to be publicized
by the sit-in. The DNA issue is not to be pressed
presumably because of the fundamental assumption
that the North Korean government has behaved
offensively and deliberately deceptively, and that
it will only respond to pressure. However, for
Sukuukai, DNA is an issue that will not go away.
Its reluctance to address the issues raised in the
international media, especially in the journal of
the international scientific community, undermines
its case.
Leading figures in Sukuukai have
many times insisted that their goal is not so much
a resolution of the abductions in and of itself as
the achievement of regime change in North Korea.
Whether such a happy outcome could be anticipated
in the likely political and social upheaval that
would entail remains a moot point.
Even as
the stalemate in Japan-North Korea relations
continued and outrage toward North Korea became
universal, the Japanese government was conducting
its own belated investigation into other cases of
"abduction": Koreans brought to Japan as forced
laborers during World War ll. Civic organizations
in Japan had drawn up and submitted to the South
Korean government a list, thought to be incomplete
but containing 427,930 such names, and the
government was sponsoring DNA tests to try to
identify some of those whose remains had long ago
been deposited in Japanese temples [23].
There is no comparative scale of human
suffering, but the tendency in Japan has been to
overlook the fact that Japan had been far more
commonly assailant than victims in 20th century
East Asian abduction cases. Indeed, it is only in
the 60th year since the end of the war that the
Japanese government has begun to seriously address
the problem of its own 20th century abductions.
While rage over the crimes against its citizens
seems to know no bounds, it is framed in
exclusively "Japanese" terms, and tends to feed a
self-righteousness that allows a blind eye to be
turned both to Japan's own past crimes and to the
present suffering of North Korean people, since
humanitarian aid on which the survival of millions
of elderly, weak and vulnerable members of that
society depend, remains suspended since December
2004. The North Korean abduction problem is
rarely, if ever, framed in the context of a
universal commitment to human rights or to Japan's
historical relationship to colonial Korea.
While it may be true that North Korea
"routinely and egregiously violates nearly all
international human-rights standards", [24] that
does not diminish the requirement for
scrupulousness on the part of the Japanese
government in presenting its case. The Japanese
government presumably thought its claim to the
moral high ground in a dispute with North Korea
would go unchallenged, yet the bureaucratically
controlled, peer-unsupervised analysis by a single
researcher without experience in work on cremated
remains, whose findings could not be confirmed and
who was promptly removed from public
accountability when doubts were raised about his
work, served to complicate the issue and to give
comfort rather than to undermine the regime in
North Korea. Koizumi seems now incapable of
resolving the contradictions in which he is
enmeshed. While all his attention today seems
focused on the drive to privatize the post office,
his key foreign-policy pledge - to normalize
Japan's relations with its neighbor - is neglected
and policy drifts at the mercy of forces beyond
his control.
Notes
[1]
Statement by the Press Secretary/Director-General
for Press and Public Relations, Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, on the adoption of the resolution
on the situation of human rights in the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea at the UN Commission on
Human Rights, April 15, 2005.
[2] For
general details on the abductions, Gavan
McCormack, Target North Korea: Pushing North
Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, New
York Nation Books, 2004, chapter 6, and Gavan
McCormack and Wada Haruki, "Forever Stepping Back:
The Strange Record of 15 Years of Negotiations
between Japan and North Korea," forthcoming in a
volume edited by John Feffer.
[3] Asahi
Shimbun, April 26, 2005.
[4] For details
of the abductions and the various statements by
the two governments, see, for the Japanese side,
the Japanese government's Ministry of Foreign
Affairs website, and for the North Korean side,
statements as reported in the Japanese media.
[5] Japanese government statement of
December 24, 2004.
[6] "Biboroku", Asahi
Shimbun, January 28, 2005.
[7] Japanese
officials, shown the tree in November 2004,
estimated that its trunk was a mere 10 centimeters
in diameter, a circumstance that deepened their
doubt about the suicide story. ("Rachi higaisha
seizon no kanosei," Asahi Shimbun, April 3, 2005.)
[8] NHK television, March 27, 2005.
[9] See the Sukuukai home page.
[10] David
Cyranoski, "DNA is burning issue as Japan and
Korea clash over kidnaps," Nature, Vol 433,
February 3, 2005, p 445.
[11] "Netsuzo wa,
kiji ka kantei kekka ka," Shukan gendai, March 19,
2005.
[12] "Politics versus reality,"
Nature, Vol 434, March 17, 2005, p 257.
[13] Machimura Nobutaka, foreign minister,
in response to question in the House of
Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee,
February 23, 2005.
[14] David Cyranoski,
"Geneticist's new post could stop him testifying
about DNA tests," Nature, Vol 434, April 7, 2005,
p 685.
[15] Machimura, in response to
question in the House of Representatives, March
30, 2005.
[16] "'Nicho ikotsu kantei kobo'
senmonka kenkai," Seoul, Yonhap, January 26, 2005.
[17] Donald Macintyre, "Bones of
Contention," Time, April 4, 2005, Vol 165, No 13.
[18] Sekai henshubu, "Gekido no Nanboku
Chosen," Sekai, June 2005, pp 283-290, at p 290.
[19] "Nihon gaimusho to awanu' meigen,"
Asahi Shimbun, April 3, 2005.
[20]
"Megumi-san 'ikotsu' de ronso," Asahi Shimbun, May
10, 2005.
[21] Norimitsu Onishi, "Asia
Letter: About a Kidnap Victim, DNA Testing, and
Doubt," IHT, June 2, 2005.
[22] Wada
Haruki, Dojidai hihyo - 2002 nen 9-gatsu - 2005
nen 1-gatsu, Nicho kankei to rachi mondai,
Sairyusha, 2005, p 48.
[23] "Ikotsu chosa,
jiin ni yosei," Asahi Shimbun, May 20, 2005.
[24] "North Korea: Human Rights Concerns
for the 61st Session of the UN Human Rights
Commission," New York, Human Rights Watch, April
4, 2005.
Gavan McCormack is
professor in the Research School of Pacific and
Asian Studies, Australian National University and
visiting professor in social science,
International Christian University, Tokyo. He is
author of Target North Korea: Pushing North
Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, New
York, Nation Books, 2004, and of other essays on
North Korea and Japan-related topics.
(Republished with permission from Japan Focus) |
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