Word: yokota
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...then filtered back into Japan. Kim Jong Il said at a 2002 summit meeting with then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that the North had seized 12 Japanese citizens (though he also said to Koizumi that he himself was unaware of the program), including, most infamously, 13-year-old Megumi Yokota, who was abducted on the way home from school in Niigata, on the northwestern Japanese coast. Kim had hoped the admission would help relations with Japan. It didn't. Private groups in Japan have insisted that the total number of abductees was greatly understated. Indeed, the Investigative Commission on Missing...
...North. In the meantime, the general public continues to rally behind the abductees' families, who insist that Japan continue to hold the line. "I want to know why this happened, where she is and how I can help to bring her home," says Masaru Honma, whose younger sister, Megumi Yokota, was kidnapped in 1977 at age 13. "The fact that they sent us a stamped death certificate is proof to me that she is still alive...
...doubtful, however, that Japan would be ready to listen. The abductions were tragic - as anyone would know who has heard the elderly parents of abductee Megumi Yokota tell of their daughter, snatched near her home at the age of 13 by North Korean agents, never to be seen by her family again. But under Abe the quarter-century old kidnappings are increasingly taking precedence over the North Korean nuclear program on Japan's foreign policy agenda - and that is not healthy. His administration has connected Japan's tough sanctions against North Korean trade not to nuclear weapons...
...wary Japan prepares to re-enter the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program, two of the most important voices in the national debate belong not to politicians or diplomats, but to a 73-year-old retired salaryman and his wife. Shigeru and Sakie Yokota's only daughter, Megumi, was abducted on her way home from school by a North Korean agent in 1977, one of many Japanese citizens believed to have been kidnapped by North Korea during the 1970s and 1980s. The Yokotas have become the face of an influential lobby of abductee families, whose insistence that...
...successor, another leader may bear even more responsibility for boosting Abe to the premiership: Kim Jong Il. As deputy cabinet secretary, Abe accompanied Koizumi on his historic trip to Pyongyang in 2002. After Kim shocked Japan by admitting that North Korea had kidnapped Japanese nationals, including Megumi Yokota, Abe became the face of Tokyo's response. When a group of surviving abductees visited Japan, Abe insisted they not return to the North. "From then on he was very popular on TV and among the general public," says Jun Iio, professor of government at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies...