Commuters at Tokyo Station pass video displays featuring the family of North Korean abductee Megumi Yokota on August 21, 2024. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
TOKYO – A 15-second video played every six minutes in the world’s busiest train stations reminds millions of commuters of a 13-year-old Japanese girl abducted from her home by North Korean agents nearly five decades ago.
According to the group responsible, Asagao-no-kai, the video will be shown this month on digital screens in Japan Railways stations in the greater Tokyo area, including Tokyo, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro and Yokohama.
The digital display shows pictures of Megumi Yokota together with her brothers and her father Shigeru, who died in 2020. The accompanying message reads: “We just want our happy family back.”
Another photo taken by Yokota’s 88-year-old mother, Sakie Yokota, bears the message: “Please let me see Megumi while I’m still alive.”
Asagao-no-kai is a group of neighbors of the Yokota family who support the efforts to return their daughter.
“To make reunification a reality, we are running an opinion piece to urge Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to hold summit talks,” the group announced in a press release last month.
Japanese authorities believe Yokota was abducted by North Korea on November 11, 1977, as she was walking home from her high school in Niigata, a port city on the Sea of Japan. She was 13 years old at the time.
“We want to get our family back and make sure they are safe while I am still alive and that I can see them, even if it is just for a quick glimpse,” Sakie Yokota said in an emailed statement from the group on Thursday.
“I want everyone who sees this to remember that this is still a real problem and it is not a thing of the past, and that a tragedy like this could happen again at any time because this problem is not solved,” she added.
Commuters at Yokohama Station pass video displays featuring the family of North Korean abductee Megumi Yokota on August 21, 2024. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
In 2002, North Korea admitted to kidnapping Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s and apologized during a summit with Tokyo, according to the Japanese Foreign Ministry.
In October this year, five abductees were returned to Japan, but another dozen remain missing, including Megumi Yokota. According to the Cabinet Office, Japan is continuing to investigate more than 800 people who may have been abducted.
Ambassador Julie Turner, the U.S. special envoy for human rights in North Korea, visited Niigata in February and walked the same route from the school to the beach where Yokota disappeared. Turner promised to help resolve the Japanese abduction problem.
Kishida is seeking a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to bring the other abductees home as soon as possible. However, Pyongyang says all of the living abductees have been returned.
According to the National Police Agency website, North Korea may have kidnapped Japanese citizens in order to teach its spies the Japanese language and use their identities to enter South Korea.
