Pod Insights Casefile True Crime Case 346: Megumi Yokota About this episode *** Content warnings: Child abduction ***
When 13-year-old Megumi Yokota failed to return home from her regular badminton practice on November 15 1977, her parents immediately raised the alarm.
The police in Niigata, Japan, conducted one of the city’s largest ever investigations, but no trace of Megumi was ever found. Two decades later, the case took a shocking turn that would rock the entire nation of Japan and have geopolitical ramifications…
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Narration – Anonymous Host https://www.instagram.com/caseys.snaps/
Research & writing – Erin Munro
Production & music – Mike Migas http://mikemigas.com/
Audio editing – Anthony Telfer
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Transcript 11,370 words · 3 speakers
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1:20 Speaker 00 Our episodes deal with serious and often distressing incidents. If you feel at any time you need support, please contact your local crisis centre. For suggested phone numbers for confidential support and for a more detailed list of content warnings, please see the show notes for this episode on your app or on our website.
1:49 Speaker 00 Forty-one-year-old Sakaya Yokota felt slightly nervous as the clock ticked past 7pm on Tuesday, November 15, 1977. Her daughter, Megumi, aged 13, was late in returning home from the bad minton practice she attended after school.
2:08 Speaker 00 Megumi walked to and from her middle school each day, and no matter how late her badminton practice ran, she was usually home by 6 o'clock. If there was a deviation from that plan, she made sure to let Sakieir know.
2:24 Speaker 00 The previous day, the Badminton Club had held a post-training meeting, which Megumi had made sure to tell her mother about in advance. She'd arrived home at 6:30 that night, half an hour later than usual. But Megumi hadn't said anything about another meeting or anything else that might delay her return home on Tuesday. After checking whether Megumi's twin brothers, who were nine years old, knew where their big sister might be, Sakieir decided to go out and look for her daughter. She put on some sandals and left the large, single-story home where the Yokota family lived on the coast of the Japanese port city of Nigata.
3:08 Speaker 00 The Yokotas, Sakieir, her husband Shigeru, and their three children Megumi, Tatsuya, and Takuya had only lived there for just over a year. They were used to moving about as Shigeru's work for the Bank of Japan saw him transferred to a different city every few years. They had relocated from Hiroshima to Nigata almost eighteen months earlier, in July of 1976. The neighborhood where they lived was filled with grand homes and was just a few minutes' walk from the beach. It was late autumn, and the sun had already set hours earlier. Sakieir Yokota hurried along the dark, dimly lit streets
3:53 Speaker 00 towards Megumi's school, expecting to bump into her daughter along the route. But she arrived at the school without seeing Megumi. When Sakieir headed towards the gymnasium, she felt a flood of relief as she saw its lights were on and heard female voices chatting inside. Believing Megumi must still be practicing, she almost turned to walk back home, but something stopped her. Wanting to make sure, Sakieir went to the gymnasium's entrance and saw a group of women inside playing volleyball. The voices she'd heard had belonged to them and not to the students.
4:36 Speaker 00 Gripped by fear again, Sakie ran to the school's main entrance and saw a security guard standing there. "Have the students who were practising badminton in the gymnasium gone home?" she asked. His answer filled her with dread. "They left a long time ago." "All the students left a little after six."
5:24 Speaker 00 Sakie ran all the way home, trying to calm herself with possible scenarios along the way. Megumi might have walked a different route home than usual, or gone to visit a friend. Once Sakie was back at home, she set about phoning some of Megumi's friends who had been at badminton practice with her. None of them were with Megumi, and all were shocked that she wasn't home yet. They'd all left practice more than an hour earlier. They'd chatted for a little bit outside the school first. Megumi had been laughing, and everything had seemed normal. Then she left at about 6:25pm with two friends.
6:08 Speaker 00 The three girls walked part of the way together along a long street that led to the sea. One of Megumi's friends soon turned right at a corner. Her other friend subsequently turned left at a busy intersection. She and Megumi said goodbye at 6:35pm. Megumi would have continued straight for two more blocks before turning left to reach her house. The walk from the intersection to the Yokota residence wouldn't take more than a few minutes.
6:44 Speaker 00 Sakae also called Megumi’s badminton coach, who urged Sakae to stay calm. Megumi might have stopped off somewhere else, like a bookshop. But Sakae knew it wasn’t in her daughter’s character to go somewhere without letting her know. She grabbed a torch and took her two sons out to look for Megumi with her. Sakae searched the neighboring streets, a Gokokuke shrine that sat a few blocks away, and the long road that led to the sea, which Megumi had walked with her friends. Sakae shone the torch into parked cars that lined the street and looked out across the beach’s shore. There was no sign of Megumi.
7:30 Speaker 00 Sakae began to panic that her daughter might be locked in the boot of one of the nearby parked cars, but had no way of opening them to check. At a loss, she and the boys walked back home at around 8 o’clock. Shortly after they arrived, the home phone rang. It was Shigeru Yokota, Sakae’s husband and the children’s father. He was calling to say he’d be home late due to a work event, but Sakae begged him to come home right away, explaining the situation. Shigeru rushed home in a taxi and immediately went out to search for Megumi.
8:11 Speaker 00 Finding no sign of her, he decided it was time to call the police.
8:20 Speaker 00 At 9:50 PM, police from Nigata Police Central Station arrived at the Yokota residence and set about searching for the missing 13-year-old. They were joined by colleagues from a neighboring district. The officers searched some of the same places Sakae had, as well as a nearby pine forest and a nearby vacant lot dotted with overgrown shrubs, where the University of Nigata Science Building had once stood. Two sniffer dogs were given Megumi scent via the pajamas that she’d worn the previous night and taken to the intersection where she was last seen.
8:59 Speaker 00 The dogs immediately continued straight along the street that Megumi would have walked. When they reached the corner where Megumi should have turned left, they abruptly stopped. They turned around and around in circles, refusing to walk any further. Megumi’s scent had been lost less than 250 metres from her home.
9:24 Speaker 00 The search was called off at midnight and resumed at 5am. Police formed a grid search to examine the beach and other locations in more detail. Divers searched the sea, checking between the concrete tetrapods used to protect the shoreline in case Megumi’s body was stuck under one. They door-knocked the area and stood at the intersection where Megumi was last seen, holding a photograph of her and questioning passersby.
9:55 Speaker 00 But, nobody had seen Megumi, and nothing belonging to her was found. It was as though she’d just disappeared without a trace. A special unit tasked with handling kidnapping cases was called in. They put a tracer on the Yokota's family’s telephone and parked unmarked cars nearby to keep a close eye on things. Hoping desperately that someone might call with the news of Megumi, Sakaya and Shigeru slept fully clothed, night after night, by the phone.
10:31 Speaker 00 No one claiming responsibility for Megumi’s disappearance ever rang. After a week went by with no calls and no information from the members of the public being stopped and questioned a daily, police decided to go public with their investigation. On Tuesday, November 22, the local newspaper ran a big article on Megumi’s disappearance. The story also reached the national papers. The Yokota family were hopeful that this media coverage would result in some much-needed leads. They also made appearances on several daytime television shows to publicise their daughter’s case, but nothing ever followed.
11:19 Speaker 00 As days turned to weeks with no answers, the Yokota struggled to make sense of their new reality.
11:27 Speaker 00 Megumi's nine-year-old twin brothers cried frequently, asking their parents, "Where did Megumi go?" Sakuya Yokota felt overwhelmed by anxiety and became highly emotional. Shigeru managed to remain composed, holding himself together for his family. He constantly reassured them: "She is alright, she will be back."
11:54 Speaker 00 Sakuya Yokota clutched at hope that her daughter might have gone missing of her own volition.
12:01 Speaker 00 The move from Hiroshima to Nagata the previous year hadn't been easy.
12:07 Speaker 00 Although the family was provided for by Shigeru's employer, who gave them a big house in a lovely neighbourhood to live in, Megumi missed Hiroshima and was initially lonely. Sakuya empathised with her daughter. From the moment she first set eyes on Nagata, she felt it was a forlorn and lonely place. Like Megumi, Sakuya missed the sunny streets of Hiroshima.
12:35 Speaker 00 Megumi had soon settled into school and made friends, but perhaps she'd been unhappier than she let on. Maybe she'd become depressed about something and wanted to be alone. In the days before she went missing, Megumi had been stressed about her badminton skills. The school badminton team she was a part of took the sport very seriously. On Sunday, November 13, there'd been a tournament for students of Megumi's age throughout the city. She and her partner had competed in doubles and placed fifth.
13:12 Speaker 00 Sakie and Shigeru had been proud of their daughter, but Megumi was hard on herself, saying: “It’s not good at all. At our school, fifth isn’t even considered good.” She’d agonised about what she perceived as her poor performance, and her anxiety only increased after she found out she’d been chosen to attend a special training camp. Not thinking she was good enough for the camp, Megumi thought about telling her bad minton coach that she wouldn’t participate. On the day she went missing, she’d been planning to speak to him about it.
13:51 Speaker 00 Sakie feared that her daughter’s anxiety might have been so great that she’d taken her own life by jumping into the sea, or maybe she’d run away. They called friends and relatives who lived in other cities, but no one had seen her, nor did police find any trace of Megumi on ferry passenger lists. Megumi’s father, Shigeru, was less inclined to believe his daughter had run away. After all, she’d left all of her clothes and her winter jacket behind, along with her allowance and bank account deposit book. Nor did he believe that his daughter had taken her life. Megumi was a cheerful, bright and active girl who loved her family,
14:35 Speaker 00 especially her younger brothers. She had many interests, including music, painting and books. Despite disagreeing over what might have happened to their daughter, Sakie and Shigeru walked together to the beach every day, just in case some of Megumi’s belongings washed up on the shore.
14:58 Speaker 00 About two months after Megumi went missing, the phone rang at their house one day in January 1978. Sakie picked it up, answering “yes”, when the caller on the other line asked if they had the Yokota residence. “I have Megumi with me,” the caller said. Upon hearing this, Sakie’s legs began to shake. She was both shocked by his words, and felt a sense of hope. By this stage, the tracer had been removed from the telephone, as police had long discounted the notion that Megumi might have been kidnapped for ransom.
15:40 Speaker 00 Sakie asked the caller to please hold for one moment, then scribbled a note that read: "Phone call from kidnapper. Call police. Go next door."
15:52 Speaker 00 She handed the note to one of her sons, who was homesick from school. Sakie then returned to the call and tried to placate the man on the other end while she waited. He sounded like he was in his mid twenties. Soon, Sakie's son returned with the neighbour. They quietly sat and listened in on the call. The police quickly followed and attached a tracer to the phone while Sakie maintained the conversation. It would take time for the tracer to work, and Sakie needed to stretch out the call for as long as possible.
16:32 Speaker 00 The caller made no demands, so Sakie started asking him questions. She asked how he knew Megumi, and where she was now.
16:44 Speaker 00 The caller claimed to have met her at Nigata train station, and he'd forced her to start working at a noodle shop. He provided the name of the shop. "You sound like a very young man," Sakie said. "Why are you doing something that will make the police come after you, when you have so much ahead of you?"
17:07 Speaker 00 Eventually, the caller made a ransom demand. He wanted up to 8 million yen, delivered near Hiyoriyama Beach at 9pm that night. This was about 360 kilometres north-east of Nigata, on the other side of the country. Sakie promised to deliver the ransom herself.
17:30 Speaker 00 In the meantime, detectives had successfully traced the call to an apartment. Police arrived at the residence just as the caller was about to hang up the phone. He wasn't in his twenties, as Sakie had thought. He was a high school student. Newspaper articles about Megumi's disappearance were strewn about the phone.
17:54 Speaker 00 The teenager was taken into custody and interviewed at length over the next week or so.
18:01 Speaker 00 He quickly admitted that the call had been a hoax. Nevertheless, police looked into his claims just to make sure. They tracked down the noodle shop he'd mentioned, but Megumi wasn't working there. Sakie and Shigeru felt their hope would dissipate as suddenly as it had arrived.
18:26 Speaker 00 Over the next year, the police dedicated three thousand man days to investigating Megumi's disappearance. Her young age meant the case was a top priority. But, no trace of Megumi or any useful information was uncovered. Only a few small clues came up during the course of the investigation.
18:49 Speaker 00 One was a report about something that had happened to another girl on the same day that Megumi went missing. The girl was several years older than Megumi and lived nearby. She had been walking home at about 6pm that day, about thirty minutes before Megumi left her school. She was walking down the same long street that took Megumi home when she noticed two men walking towards her from the beach. As the girl passed to the men, she felt uneasy. They both had stern expressions on their faces that made her uncomfortable.
19:28 Speaker 00 The girl glanced over her shoulder a moment later, and, to her horror, she saw the two men had turned around and were now following her. They were extremely close, and the girl braced the tennis racket she was carrying in one hand, preparing to hit them. But the men abruptly stopped. She hurried on, glancing back again once she was a little further away. The two men were looking at her and talking. She ran the rest of the way home. When she later learned about Megumi's disappearance, she immediately told the police what had happened to her.
20:08 Speaker 00 She also reported that she'd seen a parked car in the empty lot where the University of Nikita's old science building was.
20:17 Speaker 00 That same day, another woman also took note of a suspicious vehicle. This woman was the mother of a friend of Megumi’s, and she worked nearby. She’d been walking home from work when a light-coloured car paused in front of her. One of the windows wound down, and a person inside stretched their arm out, beckoning towards her. Scared, the woman hurried away.
20:45 Speaker 00 Finally, one of the other students in the badminton club who’d been training with Megumi spotted a white car parked across the road on the school’s north side. The car stood out. Private vehicles weren’t allowed to park along that street due to a large hospital nearby. But, none of these sightings led to a particular car being identified, nor any man.
21:14 Speaker 00 Months continued to pass, and then years. It was impossible to understand how a thirteen-year-old girl could go missing from a well-populated city without someone seeing something. Every night, the Yokota left their front door unlocked and the porch light on, just in case Megumi came home. They even purchased a stronger lightbulb, so it would shine brighter. Whenever she heard a car drive by at night, Sakia rushed outside to check if it was her daughter coming home. The Yokota also went to the police station to look at photographs of unidentified bodies that were made publicly available for one week each year
21:58 Speaker 00 in the hopes that these unknown victims might be named. None of the photographs ever depicted Megumi. Every day, they scoured the newspapers in the hopes of a report that might be relevant.
22:15 Speaker 00 On Monday, January 7, 1980, more than two years after Megumi had gone missing, a friend of the Yokota stopped by their home with an article they hadn’t seen. Published in a daily national paper, it bore the headline: “Mysterious Disappearance of Three Couples From Beaches in Fukushima, Nigata, and Kagoshima in the Summer of 1978”
22:43 Speaker 00 It turned out that Megumi wasn't the only person who'd gone missing from a coastal area in recent years. On Friday, July 7, 1978, a young couple, 23-year-olds Yasushi Chimura and Fukie Hamamoto, left their respective homes to go on a date. Yasushi and Fukie headed to Wakasa Bay in Obama, a city in Japan's Fukui Prefecture, more than 430 kilometres from Nigata. The couple was never seen again. There was no reason for them to leave without telling anybody. They were engaged to be married in four months' time and had already booked the reception
23:28 Speaker 00 hall for their wedding. Both families were delighted about the upcoming nuptials, and the couple were happy in their lives. A few weeks later, on Monday, July 31, a 20-year-old university student named Keiru Hasuika left home on his bicycle, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts. Keiru was in his third year of university and had returned home for the summer holidays to his family's residence in Kashibazaki, a seaside city in Nigata Prefecture, about 46 kilometres from Nigata. Keiru had told his grandmother that he'd be home for dinner; he was just heading out to meet a girl at the library.
24:13 Speaker 00 22-year-old beautician Yukiko Okuda had told her mother she was meeting Keiru at the library at 6pm. They planned to have tea together, and then Yukiko would be home by 8 o'clock. Neither of them ever came home. Keiru's bicycle was later found outside the library at a bike rack. Two weeks after this, on Saturday, August 12, 23-year-old Shuichi Ichikawa and 24-year-old Ramiko Masamoto went to a beach in Fukiyaga, Kagashima Prefecture, about 1,400 kilometres from Nigata, near the southern tip of Japan.
24:57 Speaker 00 Their plan was to watch the sunset together. Both disappeared without a trace.
25:05 Speaker 00 Although they'd all vanished from different places in different regions of the country, there were a number of similarities. All were young, all had been visiting coastal areas in the evening or night time, and all had disappeared without a word to anyone, without taking anything they might need to start a new life, within a tight forty-day window.
25:30 Speaker 00 Massive searches were conducted for all six victims in case they had drowned, but none were ever found. Initially, no connections were made between the bizarre disappearances, but that all changed after reports were received about a fourth incident.
25:51 Speaker 00 A young couple called Hiroshi and Keiko—not their real names— had experienced a terrifying ordeal. They lived in Takawaka City, roughly 250 kilometres south-west of Nigata, and on Tuesday, August 15, 1978, they went with some relatives to Shimao Beach, which was only a short distance from their homes. The group swam throughout the afternoon, and most of them left at around 5pm to give Hiroshi and Keiko some privacy. Hiroshi and Keiko, who were engaged to be married, continued swimming until about 6:30pm. As they walked up the beach together to leave,
26:36 Speaker 00 they noticed a group of four men walking towards them in the opposite direction. The men appeared to be in their mid-thirties. All wore long, loose pants, short-sleeved shirts and runners. They were tanned and muscular.
26:54 Speaker 00 Hiroshi and Keiko expected the four men to walk straight past them, but instead, they suddenly rushed them, grabbing and wrestling the couple to the ground. The man handcuffed Hiroshi's hands behind his back, tied his feet together, stuffed a towel in his mouth, and gagged him before dropping a hood over his head. Then, they did the same to Keiko. The four men picked up the bound and gagged couple and carried them to a nearby grove of pine trees. They dropped them on the ground, then covered them with tree branches.
27:32 Speaker 00 The entire procedure was businesslike and efficient, with each attacker seemingly knowing exactly what to do. They didn’t speak amongst themselves, only breaking their silence once to tell Keiko to be quiet.
27:48 Speaker 00 After the couple was concealed, the men sat down in front of them. They appeared to be waiting for something. Minutes passed, and soon, they’d been waiting for about half an hour. Somewhere nearby, a dog suddenly barked. This appeared to scare the men off, and they disappeared.
28:13 Speaker 00 Hiroshi managed to get to his feet, despite the hood over his head and his feet being tied together. He hopped to a house that stood about 100 metres away, and raised the alarm. Police investigating the attempted abduction later found some foreign-made objects close to the scene, items that were impossible to purchase in Japan. Roughly 18 months later, on January 6, 1980, Japan’s National Police Agency announced that a single group was behind all three abductions and the aborted attempt.
28:53 Speaker 00 The Yokota’s friend brought the article about the abductions to them in case it had something to do with Megumi’s disappearance. Although Megumi was younger than all of the victims listed and had gone missing on her own at a different time of year, there were some similarities: the time of day, the beachside setting, the complete lack of clues. As Sakia Yokota read the article, she immediately thought to herself: “This might be the explanation for everything.”
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33:09 Speaker 00 At 11:30 PM on Saturday, November 28, 1987, more than a decade after Megumi Yokata's disappearance, Korean Air Flight KAL 858 taxied down a runway at Baghdad International Airport in Iraq before taking off. The Boeing 707's ultimate destination was Seoul, the capital of South Korea, but there were two stopovers scheduled on the journey. First, it would have a brief layover in Abu Dhabi, followed by another in Bangkok, Thailand.
33:44 Speaker 00 KAL 858 completed its first leg within three hours with no issues. As the plane began the second leg from Abu Dhabi to Bangkok, there were 104 passengers and 11 crew members onboard. All were South Koreans, with the exception of one Lebanese national and one Indian national. Most of the passengers were young workers who were returning home after spending several years working on construction and development projects in the Middle East. A diplomat was also onboard, the Korean consul general from the country's embassy in Baghdad, accompanied by his wife.
34:26 Speaker 00 At around 2:05 PM on Sunday, November 29, Korean Standard Time, the plane was cruising over the Andaman Sea. The pilot radioed a message to the control tower in Rangoon. “We expect to arrive at Bangkok right on time. Time and location, normal.” Moments later, an explosion erupted, tearing the aircraft apart and sending the wreckage of KAL 858 plunging into the waters of the Andaman Sea below. Everybody onboard was killed.
35:04 Speaker 00 After the flight vanished from airspace and ceased communications with control towers below, the South Korean government and Korean Air immediately began to search for the plane. They received assistance from governments closest to the possible crash points, including those of Myanmar, Thailand, and India. A number of possibilities were considered, including that of a terrorist attack.
35:31 Speaker 00 Investigation authorities quickly obtained the flight manifest and scrutinized the names of passengers who’d been onboard. In particular, they were interested in individuals who had disembarked KAL 858 at the first layover in Abu Dhabi and not re-boarded for the second leg. Two names soon caught their attention: A Japanese father and daughter named Shinichi Hachua and Megumi Hachia. The pair was suspicious for a number of reasons. They had listed their ultimate destination as Bahrain, an island country in West Asia that could have been more easily reached by a direct route.
36:15 Speaker 00 The Korean air flight they had taken had involved long, three to six-hour waits at airports, making it far less convenient.
36:24 Speaker 00 Notably, on their entry report forms, the two had only provided their given names of Shinichi and Megumi. This was at odds with the Japanese custom of simply providing a surname.
36:38 Speaker 00 After authorities approached them at their hotel in Bahrain to discuss the plane's disappearance, they abruptly checked out ahead of their planned departure. Suspicions raised, the Korean embassy in Bahrain had the couple's passports checked by the Japanese embassy. Both were confirmed to be fakes. The Bahraini authorities were immediately notified and immigration officials apprehended the father and daughter at the airport where they were preparing to board a flight to Rome. They were informed that they would have to return to Japan as there was an issue with their passports.
37:16 Speaker 00 A guard watched over the two as they sat on a bench outside the airport's immigration office. The father, Shinichi, was about seventy years old and frail. His daughter, Megumi, was twenty-five. Both were quiet.
37:34 Speaker 00 Megumi pulled out a packet of Marlboro cigarettes and offered it to her father. He took a cigarette, as did his daughter, and lit it. After smoking them, Shinichi and Megumi slumped over and collapsed.
37:53 Speaker 00 The cigarettes contained cyanide. Shinichi Hachia was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead upon arrival. But Megumi survived.
38:06 Speaker 00 Investigators now had an even stronger suspicion as to who had been behind the attack on KAL 858. The method of suicide used by Shinichi and attempted by Megumi exactly matched that employed by agents from North Korea who had been apprehended in the past. The fact that the target of the attack had been a South Korean airline carrying mostly South Korean passengers underscored the likelihood that the bombing had been a terrorist attack by North Korea.
38:40 Speaker 00 The history of the two Koreas was fraught and had only intensified in recent years. From 1910 until 1945, Japan had annexed Korea, placing it under Japanese control. After Japan was defeated in the Second World War, the allied powers took over Korea, dividing its peninsula into two. The Soviet Union occupied the North, while the United States took the South. When the Cold War escalated over the ensuing decades, the border between the two Koreas became more important. Unhappy with the separation, North Korea wanted to unite the two countries
39:22 Speaker 00 under a single authoritarian communist regime led by their supreme leader, Kim Il-sung. In 1950, two years after the Soviet troops had left, North Korea invaded the South, leading to the Korean War. The war lasted three years, with South Korea and the United States managing to thwart the North.
39:47 Speaker 00 There was never a formal peace treaty, and these events only served to further increase the hostilities between the two countries.
39:56 Speaker 00 Over the next few decades, the two Koreas exchanged threats and attacks. The fighting became more underhanded, with North Korea committing terrorist attacks against the South and sending spy boats to kidnap its citizens. In the 1980s, South Korea's economy grew rapidly, and the country had become far more modernized. It was chosen as the host nation for the 1988 Olympics, an event that would put South Korea on the world stage and served as further motivation for North Korea to cause disruption.
40:33 Speaker 00 An investigation found that the Japanese father and daughter going as Shinichi and Megumi Hachia were actually North Korean agents named Kim Sung-il and Kim Hyun-hee.
40:49 Speaker 00 Twenty-five-year-old Kim Hyun-hee survived her suicide attempt and was transferred to Seoul in South Korea. She initially denied any connection to the attack, instead claiming to be a Chinese orphan who had grown up in Japan. But after more than a week of interrogation, she gradually began to open up after watching a film that depicted a life in South Korea. She realised that everything she had been told by the North was a lie.
41:21 Speaker 00 As a North Korean, Kim Hyun-hee was taught that citizens of South Korea were impoverished and lived lives of hardship. Intense state-run propaganda was used to make North Koreans believe that their neighbour to the South was nothing more than an American puppet state.
41:40 Speaker 00 Upon seeing what the country was actually like, Kim Hyun-hee broke down and said, “Forgive me, I am sorry. I will tell you everything.”
41:52 Speaker 00 Hyun-hee was trained as an espionage agent for North Korea and had been tasked with carrying out the bombing of KAL 858. Kim Jong-il, the son and heir of North Korea’s supreme leader, had ordered the attack to scare away other countries from attending the Olympic Games in Seoul the following year. Kim Hyun-hee was told that the attack would assist in reunifying the two Koreas and creating one peaceful nation-state.
42:22 Speaker 00 In preparation for the attack, Hyun-hee had spent three years travelling undercover. On November 12, 1987, Hyun-hee and her much older partner in crime, Kim Sung-il, left the North Korean capital of Pyongyang to fly to Budapest, Hungary. They stayed at the home of a North Korean guidance officer for almost a week before heading to the Austrian capital of Vienna, where they were given two forged Japanese passports. In Vienna, they purchased their tickets for flight KAL 858.
42:59 Speaker 00 Next, they travelled to Belgrade, where they received their weapons for the attack from North Korean officials: a time bomb disguised as a Panasonic brand radio and a liquid explosive inside a liquor bottle.
43:13 Speaker 00 They made their way to Iraq to board the fated flight, waiting in the transit lounge for almost three and a half hours.
43:21 Speaker 00 While waiting, Kim Sung-il set the time bomb to detonate nine hours later. Then they boarded KAL 858, which took off at 11:30pm.
43:34 Speaker 00 They put the explosives in the overhead compartment above their assigned seats in 7B and 7C. After a three-hour flight, they disembarked in Abu Dhabi while KAL 858 continued on to Bangkok, exploding over the Andaman Sea.
43:54 Speaker 00 As well as detailing how the attack had been planned and committed, Kim Hyun-hee shared information about her life in North Korea. When she was 16 years old, she had been chosen for espionage training by the Workers' Party of Korea, the country's sole ruling party. This involved spending seven years and eight months at an elite secret school, where she underwent grueling psychological and physical training. Hyun-hee was trained in firearms and other means of murder, such as how to kill a person using only her hands or feet. Hyun-hee also studied a number of languages to aid in her spy activities, and was taught
44:37 Speaker 00 how to pass herself off as other nationalities. She had been able to pass as Japanese because she'd studied the language and culture, and the person who had taught her those things was a woman who had been abducted from Japan.
44:57 Speaker 00 It was well-known that North Korea had been abducting South Koreans since the Korean War. It was estimated that almost 83,000 individuals were taken during the war and about 500 were taken over the two decades following. Most of these were fishermen, whose boats strayed too close to the north. What was less well-known was that North Korea had also started abducting citizens from other countries. Rumours occasionally spread around Japan about North Korea abducting people, but many dismissed these as conspiracy theories driven by Cold War paranoia.
45:37 Speaker 00 But, Japanese authorities began to realise that their own citizens were being targeted after three couples were taken from seaside locations in 1978 and another couple survived an attempted abduction. Foreign-made objects were found at the scene of each crime and suspicious radio transmissions that were believed to be espionage-related were intercepted at the locations where each of the couples went missing at the time they went missing. The link between these disappearances was initially kept under tight wraps. About 18 months after the abductions,
46:17 Speaker 00 the National Police Agency publicly confirmed that all four cases were connected and were the work of a foreign intelligence agency, though they didn't name which foreign agency. It was believed that the victims had been targeted so that their identities could be stolen for espionage purposes. Passports could be issued in their names and foreign spies could pose as the missing Japanese citizens.
46:46 Speaker 00 A friend of the Yokota saw an article about this and brought it to their attention. Struck by the similarities between these cases and that of her missing daughter, Megumi, Sakie Yokota approached the newspaper's local bureau and Nigata Police Station to share her concerns. But no one she spoke to agreed that Megumi's case could be connected. There were similarities between her disappearance and the others, but there were differences too, such as the time of year and Megumi's young age. If people were being abducted for identity theft, then Megumi would be useless to any foreign agency.
47:29 Speaker 00 Being only 13, she was too young to apply for a passport without her parents' signatures. Despondent, Sakie Yokota dropped what had felt to her like a promising lead. There was little more said about the disappearances in the media. But behind the scenes, Japanese authorities identified more missing people throughout the country as North Korean abductees, including a mother and daughter who disappeared after a shopping trip, a 23-year-old who went missing while on holiday in Denmark, and a woman who was taken one month before Megumi Yokota while on her way to a knitting class.
48:11 Speaker 00 In total, Japan identified 10 victims who had been abducted in seven separate incidents. When the North Korean terrorist turned de facto, Kim Hyun-hee, told South Korean investigators in 1987 that she had been taught Japanese by a woman abducted from Japan, this indicated that Japanese citizens weren't just kidnapped for their identities. They were taken for the skills they offered too. Kim Hyun-hee said her Japanese teacher had been given the Korean name, Leeun-hae. Further investigations would reveal that she was Yayeko Taguchi, a 22-year-old mother
48:53 Speaker 00 who went missing in Tokyo in June 1978 after dropping off her 3-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son at daycare.
49:02 Speaker 00 Kim Hyun-hee lived alongside Yaeko for two years. Yaeko often cried and told Kim Hyun-hee how much she missed her children. Kim Hyun-hee later identified several other kidnapped victims she'd met who were made to teach spies Japanese. One of them was Megumi Yokota.
49:27 Speaker 00 Meanwhile, the Yokota tried their best to move on with their lives. A few years after Megumi went missing, they relocated to Tokyo. It was a difficult and painful move to make, but Shigeru's work required his transfer to the country's capital, and they believed the fresh start would be in their son's best interests.
49:51 Speaker 00 The police in Nigata promised to continue their investigation, and friends said they would make sure to keep an eye out for Megumi. Still, leaving the place where their daughter had last been with them was devastating. The family wrote down their new address on a piece of paper, placed it in plastic, and put it on the front door of their Nigata house in case Megumi ever came back. By January 1997, almost 20 years had passed since Megumi went missing. Her younger brothers had grown up, and her parents were now in their 60s and living in Kawasaki, a city in the Greater Tokyo area.
50:34 Speaker 00 Shigeru had retired from his job at the Bank of Japan, and Sakia had found a new faith and purpose after converting to Christianity. On Tuesday, January 21, at around lunchtime, the phone rang at the Yokota residence. Shigeru answered it. On the other line was an acquaintance associated with the Bank of Japan who told him that the personal secretary to a politician was trying to get in touch with Shigeru. Shigeru immediately called the secretary, whose name was Tatsukashi Hiomoto, as requested.
51:13 Speaker 00 After greeting Shigeru, Mr. Hiomoto stunned the now 64-year-old father by saying, "We have information that your daughter is alive in North Korea."
51:26 Speaker 00 Shigeru listened in shock as Mr. Hyomoto explained that he had been looking into the abductions of Japanese citizens by North Korea. He wanted to discuss Megumi’s case further, but didn’t feel comfortable doing so over the phone. Shigeru Yokota agreed to meet Mr. Hyomoto right away and rushed to meet him at the National Day Building, the building in Tokyo that houses Japan’s government. When he got there, Mr. Hyomoto showed Shigeru a copy of Modern Korea magazine. It featured an article by a journalist named Kenji Ishidaka, who had produced a television documentary about North Korea’s kidnappings.
52:10 Speaker 00 Ishidaka had initially set out to cover the issue of North Korea’s repatriation programme, in which ethnic Koreans living in Japan were lured to the North with false promises of a better life. While investigating the matter, he realised that North Korea had been abducting Japanese nationals as well. Ishidaka had written a feature article on the issue for the October 1996 edition of Modern Korea. The magazine had been sent to Mr. Hyomoto by an acquaintance, who included a note that read: “Please read: The abducted middle-school girl was Megumi Yokota.”
52:53 Speaker 00 Shigeru Yokota read Kenji Ishidaka’s article. In it, the journalist described how high-ranking officials from South Korea’s intelligence agency told him about North Korea’s abduction of Japanese citizens. One of the claims he’d heard was especially shocking. Two years earlier, in late 1994, a former spy from North Korea who had defected to the South had testified that before North Korea began kidnapping Japanese couples, they had abducted a child. A thirteen-year-old girl had been taken from somewhere along the Sea of Japan coast, though the spy wasn’t sure exactly where.
53:37 Speaker 00 He believed that the girl was the younger of a pair of twins. She had been walking home from badminton practice when she happened to spot some North Korean spies about to depart the area via the beach. They abducted her so she couldn’t report what she’d seen.
53:56 Speaker 00 As soon as Shigeru Yokota read the article, he knew the girl had to be his daughter Megumi. Some of the details were so specific, such as the fact she'd been walking home from bad mint and practice. The mention of her being the younger of a set of twins was also interesting. Megumi wasn't a twin, but her younger brothers were. This seemed like more confirmation than might have been muddled somewhere along the way.
54:28 Speaker 00 When Shigeru told his wife Sakie about the magazine article, she felt a rush of elation at the news that her daughter was still alive.
54:38 Speaker 00 The feeling was quickly replaced by a sense of despair. If the story was true, then retrieving Megumi from North Korea would surely be an impossible mission.
54:51 Speaker 00 The news that Megumi Yokota had possibly been found twenty years after she went missing spread like wildfire. Modern Korea ran an article with the headline “Identity of Abducted Girl Confirmed”. Politicians promised to pursue the matter further, with one member submitting a letter of inquiry on the matter to the government. Shigeru and Sakie Yokota met with Kenji Yoshitaka, the journalist who'd written the article, to speak about what he knew. He also set up a meeting between the Yokota and a former North Korean spy named Ahn Myungjin. In March 1997, the couple travelled to South Korea to meet Ahn.
55:38 Speaker 00 Ahn had defected several years earlier, in 1993, by crossing the 38th parallel, the border between North and South Korea, and seeking political asylum. He'd since provided intelligence to South Korea about his espionage activities.
55:56 Speaker 00 Between 1988 and 1991, Ahn had attended the Kim Jong-il Political and Military University, where North Korea's spies were trained. There, he learnt how to break into properties without being detected, how to blow up a building, and how to kill people.
56:15 Speaker 00 In October 1988, Ahn attended a celebratory ceremony for the Korean Workers' Party. It was held in a large hall at the university, and staff attended the event alongside students. Ahn sat towards the front row, surrounded by other students and one of his instructors, a man named Mr. Chung. Last to enter the hall were ten Japanese teachers, who taught students the Japanese language and customs. As they took their seats in the rows behind Ahn, Mr. Chung pointed out the last Japanese teacher to file in. She was an attractive woman in her mid-twenties, wearing a navy suit with a white blouse,
56:58 Speaker 00 and was chatting and laughing with two female colleagues. "I brought her here from Nikita," Mr. Chung said.
57:08 Speaker 00 Mr. Chung went on to tell Ahn that he and two other spies had abducted Megumi about a decade earlier, in the mid-1970s. They grabbed her impulsively after she'd seen them on the beach, scared she might report seeing them. At the time, they hadn't realised how young she was, thinking her to be in her late teens or early twenties. They hustled her onto their ship that would take them back across the Sea of Japan to North Korea. Megumi cried so much that they locked her in the storage room for the entire forty-hour journey. Pleading for her mother, she scratched repeatedly against the door.
57:51 Speaker 00 When the spies went to let her out after arriving back in North Korea, Megumi appeared dazed and in shock. Her fingers were covered in blood from scratching her nails off on the iron door, and she had vomited everywhere.
58:06 Speaker 00 When North Korean officials realised how young Megumi was, they reprimanded the spies who'd taken her. She was taken to a facility where she was taught Korean. Megumi continued to cry and refused to eat, until she was told that if she learnt Korean, she would be taken home to her mother. Megumi studied hard and was a strong student, becoming fluent in Korean. When she was eighteen years old, however, she realised that she had been lied to. She wasn't going to be allowed to return to Japan. Instead, she would have to work at Kim Jong-il University, teaching young spies to pass as Japanese
58:51 Speaker 00 so they could better disguise themselves when undertaking espionage activities.
58:58 Speaker 00 She suffered a mental health crisis and had to be hospitalized twice at Hospital 915, a treatment facility for anti-south agents and their families. Mr Chung said that he'd seen Megumi a few times since first abducting her and always tried to speak to her, but she ignored him. "No doubt she disliked him," Ahn explained. Mr Chung had been back to Japan on several missions in the years after he took Megumi. On one occasion, he saw a missing persons flyer with Megumi's photograph. He stole it and took it home as a souvenir.
59:40 Speaker 00 Ahn saw Megumi once more a few months later, in January 1989. She looked well and seemed to be good friends with another Japanese woman. As a teacher of Japanese to would-be spies, Megumi would have lived a comfortable life by North Korean standards. But she would have been closely guarded with limited freedoms. Years later, after Ahn defected from North Korea, he was shown a photo of Megumi as a schoolgirl and told that she was thought to have been abducted by his country. Ahn immediately recognised the girl in the picture as the woman he had seen at Kim Jong-il University.
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1:02:20 Speaker 00 Sakia Yokota felt like throwing up when she learnt the specifics of Nagumi's kidnapping. The details about her daughter's ordeal during the ship's voyage were especially painful to hear. Reflecting on Mr Chung's claim that Nagumi was taken impulsively because she'd seen the North Korean spies, Sakia recalled some reports that had emerged decades earlier.
1:02:47 Speaker 00 On the same day that Megumi went missing, a couple of women had reported being stalked by two men in the same area. A suspicious vehicle had also been seen outside the school where Megumi’s badminton practice was held. Sakieir didn’t believe that Megumi was taken after seeing something she shouldn’t have. She suspected that North Korean agents had been in Nigata that evening with the intention of abducting a woman. Megumi had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the darkness of the street providing a perfect cover for the spies’ mission.
1:03:26 Speaker 00 After the Yokota returned to Japan, they formed an advocacy group alongside other family members of abductees called the Association of the Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea. Shigeru Yokota was chosen as the organisation’s chairperson. He and Sakieir bonded with the other parents, who had suffered like them for decades. Many of them had also struggled with the police force who hadn’t taken their concerns seriously. As most of the abductees were aged in their early twenties, authorities had usually suspected that they’d just taken off to start a new life. The group began to lobby for the Japanese government to investigate the abductions
1:04:11 Speaker 00 further and intervene on behalf of their loved ones. They held rallies and coordinated a petition that received 500,000 signatures before being submitted to the Prime Minister’s office. Their actions led to the Japanese media covering the story extensively. At a press conference, Shigeru Yokota read a statement while flanked by a number of other parents and siblings of abductees. “Please give us our sons and daughters back,” he said. “Our kids disappeared suddenly between 1977 and 1983. We thought about everything that could have happened to them and did everything we could
1:04:55 Speaker 00 to find them, but we never did.”
1:05:00 Speaker 00 North Korea denied having abducted any foreign citizens, despite the evidence to the contrary. And as Japan had no diplomatic relationship with North Korea, negotiating with the totalitarian regime appeared impossible. But the abductees’ families were angry because during the late 1990s, Japan was providing North Korea with significant support. In 1995, a famine hit North Korea due to economic mismanagement and the loss of Soviet support following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thousands of North Koreans were dying from starvation, with the deaths peaking in 1997.
1:05:44 Speaker 00 This led to Japan sending them substantial amounts of rusk and humanitarian aid. The abductees’ families wanted Japan to rescind this support unless North Korea returned to their kidnapped loved ones. Others supported their aims, including a well-known journalist who publicly stated: “The Japanese government has an obligation to protect its own citizens before it even considers undertaking activities for the greater good in the international community.”
1:06:16 Speaker 00 Eventually, after several years of tireless campaigning, the advocacy group had an impact. In 2002, it was decided that the Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi would visit North Korea for an inaugural summit between the two countries. For Japan, the key motivation for the summit was to seek answers about the abductions. North Korea, still struggling economically and in need of aid, hoped to gain something too. On Tuesday, September 17, 2002, Prime Minister Koizumi travelled to Pyongyang, where he met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.
1:06:58 Speaker 00 He took with him video messages recorded by the abductees’ family members for their loved ones. In Shigeru Yokota's video, he updated Megumi on all the changes in their family. Both of her brothers were now married with children, and her parents were living in Kawasaki. Sakia Yokota grew tearful as she said: “Megumi, I’m so happy you’re alive. I wonder about your life in North Korea. I’m older now, with grey hair, but we can still have fun when you get back, just like we used to. Come home soon.”
1:07:41 Speaker 00 The meeting between the two leaders was a hugely significant moment, which only became more significant as the day went on. At some point in the afternoon, Kim Jong-il made a shocking admission: North Korean agents had abducted a total of thirteen Japanese citizens. However, they denied involvement in a number of cases that Japanese authorities attributed to them. Kim Jong-il gave a formal apology, in which he distanced the government itself from the abductions, stating: “We have thoroughly investigated this matter. Decades of adversarial relations between our two countries provided the background of this incident.
1:08:25 Speaker 00 It was, nevertheless, an appalling incident. It is my understanding that this incident was initiated by special mission organizations in the 1970s and 80s, driven by blindly motivated patriotism and misguided heroism. As soon as their scheme and deeds were brought to my attention, those who were responsible were punished. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize straightforwardly for the regrettable conduct of those people. I will not allow that to happen again.”
1:09:04 Speaker 00 Megumi Yokota’s kidnapping was one of the thirteen abductions that North Korea admitted to. The country provided updates on the individuals it acknowledged had been abducted. Unfortunately, eight of the thirteen victims were dead. All had died in strange circumstances. Keiko Aramoto, who was abducted at age 23 from Denmark, died five years later of gas poisoning. So did a man named Toru Ishioka, who was abducted during a holiday in Spain in 1980. According to North Korea, Toru drowned in 1988.
1:09:48 Speaker 00 Koral Matsuki, his friend who was kidnapped alongside him, was killed in a car accident in 1996. Shuichi Ichikawa, who vanished in 1978 with his girlfriend during a date at the beach, drowned shortly after. His girlfriend, Remiko Masamoto, died of a heart attack several years later at age 27. Yaiko Taguchi, the mother of two who had taught Japanese to Kim Hyun-hee, was killed in a car accident on July 30, 1986, the year before Kim Hyun-hee helped blow up KAL 858. In 1986, nine years after her abduction,
1:10:33 Speaker 00 Megumi Yokota married a South Korean man who was also abducted in 1977 when he was 16. The following year, Megumi gave birth to a daughter named Kim Un-yong.
1:10:48 Speaker 00 But Megumi had continued to struggle with her mental health and had to be hospitalized multiple times. She made more than one suicide attempt, and on March 13, 1993, at the age of 28, Megumi took her own life. The Yokotas were devastated by this news. At a press conference held shortly after the summit, Shigeru Yokota wept as he relayed North Korea's report, saying, “I was hoping to get better results.” Sakia Yokota told the public that she refused to believe her daughter was dead unless North Korea provided more information about how and when she died.
1:11:33 Speaker 00 “If she’s dead, then Megumi was a victim and a diet for a cause,” Sakia added. “She didn’t die in vain. Everyone dies eventually, but I believe she left a legacy. I’m still going to keep hoping. I’ll keep fighting, believing she’s still alive.”
1:11:55 Speaker 00 The five surviving abductees were permitted to return home to Japan on Tuesday, October 15, 2002, one month after the Japan-North Korea summit. There were conditions, though. They were only going for a visit and would have to return to North Korea. They also had to leave any children they'd had behind. The five repatriated victims included two of the couples who'd been abducted in 1978: Yasushi Chimura and Fukie Hamamoto, and Kurei Hasuike and Yukiko Akudo. Both couples had married and had children in North Korea.
1:12:38 Speaker 00 The fifth victim was Hatomi Soga, who was kidnapped with her mother after a shopping trip. North Korea denied taking Hatomi's mother, a claim that Hatomi refuted. Hatomi's husband, an American prisoner named Charles Robert Jenkins, wasn't permitted to go.
1:12:59 Speaker 00 The return of the five survivors was met with huge fanfare. Camera crews captured the moment they disembarked the aeroplane that brought them back to Japan and were embraced by loved ones waiting on the tarmac. They addressed the public at a press conference, with more than one victim apologising for making everyone worry for so long. Tragically, some had lost family members before they could be reunited. Yasushi Chimura was 23 when he was abducted, and his mother suffered such severe anxiety after his disappearance that she became very sick. She collapsed from high blood pressure caused by mental distress.
1:13:43 Speaker 00 After she had surgery to treat the problem, she struggled with partial paralysis and had difficulty speaking. She became bedridden, with her husband providing full-time care. For years and years after Yasushi's disappearance, she would cry out for him in despair: "My son, my son." She told a documentary crew: "I just want the chance to say one thing: 'Welcome home, my son.'" She died six months before Yasushi's return.
1:14:21 Speaker 00 Megumi Yokota's parents watched the arrival of the abductees with a bittersweet feeling. They knew Megumi wouldn't be among them, but they kept hoping to see her step off the plane.
1:14:38 Speaker 00 Megumi's daughter, Kim Un-yong, was 15 years old in 2002. She attended the Japan-North Korea summit at the request of North Korean officials, and was presented to the Japanese Prime Minister. She brought with her the badminton racket that Megumi had been carrying when she was abducted, and a photo of her mother that had been taken when Megumi was in her twenties. Megumi's parents were shocked to discover that they had a granddaughter. In the 2006 documentary, "Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story", Sakieir remarked: "If North Korea was a normal country, I'd go there and see Un-yong and give her a hug.
1:15:22 Speaker 00 I'd do anything for her. But North Korea is an evil place."
1:15:29 Speaker 00 Megumi's husband, Kim Young-nam, had remarried in the year since Megumi's death. In 2006, he was permitted to have some family members from South Korea visit. During this visit, he confirmed that Megumi had taken her own life after suffering from depression, and had attempted suicide several times before. But some people doubted these claims, suspecting that he was merely parroting a script written by the North Korean government. There were some inconsistencies when it came to Megumi's supposed death. Initially, North Korea said she died on March 13, 1993.
1:16:12 Speaker 00 But another abductee, Fukieir Hamamoto, said she'd lived next door to Megumi for several months, beginning in June 1994. Fukieir said that Megumi had been suffering from severe depression and was not doing well.
1:16:30 Speaker 00 Fellow abductee, Kauru Hasuike, said that Megumi had separated from her husband in the spring of 1993. About a year later, Kauru had helped arrange for Megumi to go to a psychiatric hospital to treat her depression.
1:16:47 Speaker 00 Following these statements, North Korea amended its claim, asserting that Megumi had actually died a year later than they'd previously said. They produced a death certificate with the date of March 13, 1994. However, this certificate appeared to be falsified and was dated three months before Fukier Hamamoto sightings of Megumi. In late September 2002, after the summit, Japanese investigators were permitted to visit the hospital where Megumi was committed and subsequently took her life. It was said that despite being in psychiatric care, Megumi had removed her clothes and used them to hang herself.
1:17:32 Speaker 00 The hospital produced a record of Megumi's death, but part of the record was crossed out.
1:17:39 Speaker 00 On November 15, 2004, 27 years to the day since Megumi had been kidnapped, the Yokota family was told to go to Japan's Foreign Ministry office. There, they were given more photos of Megumi from her time in North Korea, and an urn. Japanese investigators had brought back these items from a recent visit to North Korea, where they'd attempted to obtain more answers about the deceased abductees. They explained that the urn contained Megumi's cremated remains. Megumi had supposedly been buried following her death, but North Korea had recently located her remains and cremated them.
1:18:25 Speaker 00 The Japanese government ordered that the remains be tested for DNA. They were not a match for Megumi.
1:18:34 Speaker 00 Remains that had been provided for Kurao Matsuki proved to be false as well. Megumi's parents were relieved by this result, but also angered by the cruelty of being sent fake remains. The following year, it would be revealed that the DNA analysis had been performed by a relatively junior faculty member of Takeo University's Medical Department. He had no prior experience in the analysis of cremated remains. He described his tests as "inconclusive", and added that the specimens he'd been given were tiny, weighing 1.5 grams at most, and easily contaminated.
1:19:16 Speaker 00 He'd tested all five given to him and had no more available to examine.
1:19:23 Speaker 00 It was later reported that North Korea was desperate to produce the remains of some Japanese abductees, as their failure to do so was interfering with negotiations between the two countries. They had claimed that the graves of six of the victims had been washed away during floods. Megumi, however, hadn't been buried in a graveyard. The hospital where she had died supposedly buried her in a mountain that lay behind the building, without a funeral or any form of marking, even though to do so would violate North Korea's environmental hygiene laws. A staff member who'd worked there at the time tried to recall the spot where Megumi
1:20:05 Speaker 00 was buried, and after looking in the area, they did find some human remains. It was assumed these were Megumi's, but they may have belonged to another patient.
1:20:18 Speaker 00 The claim was published in a memoir by North Korea's former deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom, who defected to the South. While the Japanese government and media believed North Korea was deliberately trying to deceive them by sending the wrong remains, he explained that it had been a genuine mistake.
1:20:42 Speaker 00 Many people in Japan, including the Yogyitas, believe that Megumi and other abductees said to have died are still alive and are being hidden somewhere in North Korea. Kim Hyun-hee, the former North Korean agent who blew up KAL 858, has also said that she believes Megumi is alive. Hyun-hee, who was initially sentenced to death for her crime but was later pardoned, has advocated for the North Korean abductees. She had heard of Megumi's hospitalization for mental health, but said she was told her condition was not severe. There have been reports from multiple sources that Megumi taught Japanese to Supreme Leader
1:21:25 Speaker 00 Kim Jong-il's sons, Kim Jong-chul and Kim Jong-nam, whose story is covered in episode 185 of Case File. It's thought that if this is true, Megumi's proximity to the Supreme Leader's family may be the motivation for North Korea to lie about her death.
1:21:45 Speaker 00 In November 2011, a South Korean magazine reported that a 2005 phone directory for the North Korean capital of Pyongyang listed a woman with the Korean name Kim Ung-gong, who had the same birth date as Megumi Yokota. Reports later indicated that this woman was actually Megumi’s daughter. It is unclear why her birth date would be listed as her mother’s. Despite North Korea’s insistence that the five surviving abductees sent back to Japan return to the North, the Japanese government refused. In 2004, the children of the abductees were permitted to travel to Japan to be reunited with their parents.
1:22:31 Speaker 00 In an interview with the Japanese police, abductees Yasushi Chimura and Kaoru Hasuika identified one of their abductors as Shin Guan-su, an infamous North Korean spy also suspected of kidnapping Megumi Yokota. Shin was apprehended by South Korean law enforcement in 2014 while travelling under a Japanese passport issued in the name of Tadaki Hara. Tadaki was a 43-year-old man who went missing from the Japanese city of Miyazaki in 1980.
1:23:07 Speaker 00 While North Korea has only admitted to 13 abductions of Japanese citizens, the Japanese government has officially recognised 17 victims. Some have estimated that up to 100 Japanese people have been taken by North Korea. Other individuals from around the world have been taken too, including citizens of the United States, France, Lebanon, Thailand, Italy, Singapore, and many more. Following the death of North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong-il in 2011, there was hope that progress might be made. But, nothing has changed under the leadership of his son and successor, Kim Jong-un.
1:23:51 Speaker 00 As of 2026, the abduction issue remains a key sticking point between Japan and North Korea, who continue to have no diplomatic ties. North Korea claims the matter is settled, while Japan maintains that the issue still needs to be addressed.
1:24:12 Speaker 00 In March 2014, Shigeru and Sakie Yokota travelled to the capital of Mongolia for a special purpose. The Japanese government had helped organise the trip so that the Yojitas could finally meet Kim Un-yong, Megumi’s now 26-year-old daughter. Sakie later described the meeting as a miraculous event, telling reporters: “We had hoped to meet her as a family. What we have dreamt about for such a long time has come true.” She was struck by how closely Un-yong resembled Megumi.
1:24:51 Speaker 00 Un-yong also brought her 10-month-old daughter along, allowing the Yojitas to meet their great-grandchild as well.
1:25:00 Speaker 00 They were careful about what they said, mindful that their granddaughter was watched closely by North Korea and would not be permitted to discuss Megumi’s life or supposed death candidly. “She has grown up in that country,” Sakie said. “We weren’t sure how much of the truth she could tell us.”
1:25:21 Speaker 00 Although meeting Un-yong was a precious moment for the Yojitas, they also felt grief that the person they wished to see most of all, Megumi, couldn’t be there. Sakie later told journalists that she had wondered privately if Megumi was watching the reunion from a secret part of the building, but hidden from joining her loved ones.
1:25:44 Speaker 00 Four years later, in April 2018, Shigeru Yokota, now in his mid-80s, was hospitalized for ill health. He died in 2020 at the age of 87.
1:25:58 Speaker 00 The day before Megumi went missing was Shigeru’s 45th birthday. Her gift to him was a turtle shawl comb to keep his messy hair tidy, with Megumi instructing her father to look after himself as she handed it over. From that moment, he carried the comb with him always and took it everywhere he went until his final days.
1:26:23 Speaker 00 Sakie Yokota is now 90 years old and is still seeking answers for her daughter alongside her two sons. In 1999, Sakie wrote a book about Megumi titled “North Korea Kidnapped My Daughter”. As of 2026, she is still pleading for Megumi’s return and begging for the Japanese government to take action. In an interview with The Japan Times, Sakie said:
1:26:53 Speaker 00 “Everyone ages, but I never imagined spending my life in this way. We could have lived happily if we were together. This is endless suffering.”
1:27:06 Speaker 00 In 2006, the Yojotas participated in a documentary about Megumi’s abduction and the other abductees, which was called “Abduction: The Megumi-Yokota Story”. Towards the end of the film, Sakie wistfully described how she pictured a life for Megumi after she was finally returned home to Japan.
1:27:30 Speaker 00 “When she comes back, I want her to feel liberated. I want her to experience nature so she’s not confined anymore. I want her to enjoy the outdoors. She used to like lying in the grass, watching the clouds, singing. I want her to experience a big, open space and hear her say: ‘Finally, I’m free.’”
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