Wartime memories help mother of Megumi Yokota understand her plight

The Mainichi

2 days ago

KAWASAKI, Japan (Kyodo) -- The 89-year-old mother of Megumi Yokota, one of the most high-profile victims of North Korea's abductions of Japanese nationals decades ago, has spoken of her own experiences as a wartime evacuee, saying the loneliness and privations she suffered help her understand something of what her daughter must have faced.
"I was forced to live a life separated from my parents," Sakie Yokota said in an interview ahead of the 80th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II on Aug. 15, 1945. "The situation and feelings I felt then overlap" with Megumi's circumstances, she said.
At age 9, Yokota was evacuated to a temple in the mountains of Kyoto Prefecture along with her elementary school classmates from around March to September 1945, over 60 kilometers away from her home in the prefectural capital in western Japan.
Megumi was kidnapped at age 13 on her way home from school in Niigata Prefecture on the Sea of Japan coast in 1977 and is among the 17 people officially listed by Japan as abducted in the 1970s and 1980s by Pyongyang.
While five of the 17 abductees were repatriated in 2002, the group did not include Megumi, and no tangible progress has been made on the issue since.
"Although the times are different, I don't know how she is living now, whether she might be in poverty...but in terms of separation" of a child from its parents, it could be similar, Yokota said.
Due to the severe lack of food, the students staying at the temple would frequently fight over a single grain of rice, Yokota said, recalling that a snack was only three pieces of roasted soybeans. As they were so hungry, the wooden handle of a sliding door looked like chocolate to them, she said.
Sanitary conditions were terrible, with lice constantly sticking to children's skin and causing persistent itchiness, she said.
One girl scratched so hard that she wounded herself, with the wound then getting infected, eventually killing her in the absence of proper medical treatment. Her body was placed in a barrel rather than a coffin, Yokota said.
"It was a rainy day...I followed everyone to the crematorium, soaked to the skin, crying. I still remember."
Yokota said her daughter's abduction, just like a war, was the result of the intention of a political leader. In such cases, it is the innocent who suffer, she added.
Yokota reiterated her call on the Japanese government to take action to resolve the abduction issue, while expressing frustration that it has not become more of a political issue in Japan.
"If Japan continues to sit by and do nothing, North Korea will underestimate us," Yokota said.
(By Junko Horiuchi)