In Japan, Anger Toward North Korea Intensifies

KOBE, Japan — Tormented by illness and guilt, Chang Yong Woon slumped on his office couch here last week reciting a lengthy confession of his 18 years of work for a secret North Korean spy network in Japan.

Chang told of millions of dollars he pried from fellow business-people of Korean descent and secretly shipped to the Stalinist regime in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital; of Japanese citizens abducted so that their identities could be assumed by North Korean agents; and of agents trained in Japan and then infiltrated into South Korea--including the assassin who killed the wife of President Park Chung Hee in 1974.

Even a few years ago, such tales would have been dismissed as preposterous ravings. But this month, the Japanese police publicly named North Korea as the leading suspect in the disappearances of at least nine Japanese citizens over the past two decades.

The Japanese public is outraged, wondering why the abductions were unsolved for so long, why their country allegedly was allowed to be used as a base camp for North Korean espionage, and how much logistic and financial support the totalitarian regime has been receiving from North Koreans living in Japan.

Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto has refused to provide more food aid to North Korea until Japan gets answers about the alleged abductions, including the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl.

“We know that humanitarian aid is needed, but if we’re going to talk about humanitarianism, we’d like North Korea to show some,” Hashimoto said after meeting with President Clinton last month and explaining Japan’s reluctance to ship more of its vast rice surplus to its starving neighbor.

That’s a view increasingly shared by Koreans in Japan.

In 1977, 13-year-old Megumi Yokota vanished a few hundred yards from home in a town on the Sea of Japan. Rumors that she had been snatched by North Koreans went nowhere until this winter, when a North Korean defector said he saw a Japanese woman matching her description in Pyongyang.

Now the “Megumi case” has become a cause celebre in Japan, and the families of others who have disappeared have teamed up with lawmakers to demand a thorough investigation.

Hashimoto told reporters it is “pretty certain” that North Korea was involved in the abductions of at least nine Japanese and that “there are very strong suspicions” but no conclusive proof that it had a hand in the disappearances of more than 10 others.

Chang claims that at least 20 to 30 Japanese have been kidnapped at home and abroad--but that only the clumsy abductions of people with relatives have been investigated. For example, he said an orphaned ramen chef named Minoru Tanaka was abducted in Vienna in 1978 after being lured there by his employer, an ethnic Korean in Kobe who belonged to Chang’s secret group, but Tanaka was never considered missing until Chang blew the whistle.

North Korean operatives sailed back and forth freely from Japan, and probably snatched Megumi because she saw their faces, Chang maintains. “Usually they were under orders to kill witnesses, but they couldn’t kill a little girl, so they took her back” to Pyongyang, he said.

Kansai University economics professor Lee Young Hwa said he met an abductee while he was an exchange student in Pyongyang in 1991. The man, then 28, said he was born in Japan but had North Korean citizenship and was kidnapped in the early 1980s, along with his younger brother, by an uncle who promised to take them to Disneyland.

The apparent motive was to get the children’s alien registration cards, Lee said, because adult foreign residents must be fingerprinted in Japan but children are not. Japanese who had no relatives and had never applied for passports also were targeted so that North Korean agents could assume their identities, he said.

Books by Lee and others about such tactics, and a barrage of media reports, also have heightened concerns about the fate of about 1,830 Japanese wives who emigrated to North Korea, most between 1959 and 1961, with their Korean husbands and have not come home.

“I would like them to at least be allowed the freedom to exchange letters and visits with their families,” Hashimoto said. Some ethnic Koreans in Japan say they should organize to demand that the women be allowed to repatriate.

As if Tokyo-Pyongyang relations were not rocky enough, Japanese authorities also are reportedly investigating whether the cash-strapped North Koreans have teamed up with a yakuza crime syndicate to sell illegal drugs in Japan.

Last month, Japanese officials announced that they had discovered about 150 pounds of amphetamines in tin cans labeled as honey aboard a North Korean ship that docked at Kyushu island.

The giant cache--reported to be worth almost $100 million--was discovered by a port official who thought it odd that North Korea would be exporting food during a famine and insisted on opening one of the “honey” cans.

According to recent media reports, police have said privately that the true amount seized was double the announced total. Moreover, two North Korean residents of Japan arrested trying to pick up the cargo allegedly were working for a yakuza front organization, and one of them had been a senior executive in a North Korean-owned credit union in Osaka that is believed to have funneled money to Pyongyang.

Although the Japanese government has stopped short of accusing the North Korean government of state-sponsored drug trafficking, Chief Cabinet Secretary Seiroku Kajiyama pointedly noted that the ship nabbed in Kyushu had sailed directly from North Korea to Japan without calling at any other ports.

Katsumi Sato, who heads the Modern Korea Research Institute, believes these developments have prompted a hardening in the Japanese government’s historically tolerant policy toward North Korea--just when the United States is trying to lure the North to the negotiating table for four-party peace talks that would also include China and South Korea.

“The [Japanese] government is now admitting they knew that six or nine Japanese were abducted by North Korea, so now people are demanding to know why on Earth they didn’t do anything about it before,” Sato said.

“Hashimoto can’t possibly back off” on the food aid issue, Sato added. “He’d lose the next election. This is the first time I’ve seen the Japanese people so angry.”

So far, however, Japan has taken no action on suggestions that it curb the flow of visitors and money to North Korea. Although Tokyo has no diplomatic relations with Pyongyang, it has imposed no economic sanctions against the Communist regime and has allowed the 660,000 ethnic Koreans living in Japan, the majority of whom long sided with the North, to travel freely and to send money to their relatives in the North.

American Enterprise Institute economist Nicholas Eberstadt estimates that hard currency flowing from Japan to North Korea totaled at least $100 million a year in the early 1990s, while other reports say the sum could be six times higher. Chang, who said he was in charge of fund-raising for his secret network, called the Natongan, claims he raised about $60 million for Pyongyang, some of which was used to fund espionage activities in Japan.

But everyone agrees that remittances have plunged sharply since their 1991 peak because of Japan’s recession and a growing disenchantment with the North Korean regime among its ethnic brethren in Japan. Official statistics are not available, but at least two-thirds of the ethnic Koreans in the country, once predominantly registered as North Korean citizens, now are citizens of the South. A few have adopted Japanese citizenship for themselves or their children.

Donations to Chosensoren, the main organization of pro-Pyongyang Koreans and the de facto North Korean embassy in Tokyo, have fallen to perhaps 10% or 20% of their peak in the late 1980s, said Lee, the Kansai professor.

“Chosensoren is Kim Jong Il’s wallet, and it’s drying up,” Lee said, referring to North Korea’s current leader. “When the money from Japan dries up completely, North Korea will be finished.”

North Korea was devastated by the loss of its major patron when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. China has grown cool as it pursues free-market economics and trade with South Korea. Now famine-stricken North Korea appears to be losing its last friend--the rich, generous Koreans of Japan.

“You would think that because of the famine, people would send money to save their relatives, but it has been the reverse,” Lee said, citing the case of a pachinko parlor owner who has stopped sending up to $500,000 a year to support his 200 relatives in the North.

“People think that they should not prop up the regime any longer even if it means their relatives will starve . . . and they are tired of helping and helping and seeing that things have only gotten worse.”

Chosensoren spokesman So Chung On said any flagging of support for Chosensoren is the result of the “Japanization” of ethnic Koreans. He denied the existence of an espionage group of the type described by Chang and said reports of abductions are “a frame-up by the South Korean intelligence agency.”

But other former Chosensoren supporters say the defection in February of North Korean ideologue Hwang Jang Yop and the alleged abductions have dealt possibly lethal blows to the group.

Two businessmen interviewed last week on condition of anonymity said they are prepared to believe Pyongyang masterminded the abductions. Both continue to send small sums of money--but only so as to remain on speaking terms with the regime that they say is holding relatives “hostage.”

One man said he had donated $10,000 a year to Chosensoren for decades. He stopped six years ago after concluding that the group was “a front office for North Korea” and that the North’s Communist economic system was doomed. Still, he continues to do an unprofitable trading business with North Korea so that he can visit and hand his siblings the yen they require to keep from starving.

The man’s children went to Chosensoren schools, the only option in Japan for parents who want their children to have a Korean education. But his grandchildren are in Japanese schools and do not speak Korean. “When I die, my children will become Japanese citizens” and abandon their father’s relatives and their ethnic identity, he said.

Chang, the defector from Natongan, said that Pyongyang radio has branded him a traitor and that he has been under Japanese police protection since publishing his story in December. He claims he was not personally involved in the abductions and that the 14 other members of Natongan are no longer active.

Chang said his deepest regret is that he and his comrades set out to fight prejudice and injustice against Koreans in Japan but succeeded only in sowing more distrust.

“Before the war, Koreans were discriminated against, but now we are creating reasons to be despised once again,” Chang said. “Anti-Japanese education [in Chosensoren schools], kidnapping, spying, illegal transfer of money. . . . There will certainly be a backlash. It is unavoidable.”

Special correspondent Yasuhiro Idei contributed to this report.