Megumi Yokota

About Megumi Yokota

Megumi Yokota (Japanese: 横田めぐみ; Yokota Megumi), born October 15, 1964-March 13, 1994?, is one of at least thirteen Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was abducted on November 15, 1977 at the age of thirteen and apparently forced to help train North Korean spies to pass as Japanese citizens. In 2002, North Korea admitted that she and others had been abducted, but claimed that she had committed suicide on March 13, 1994 (originally announced as 1993 and later corrected to 1994) and returned what it said were her ashes. Japan stated that a DNA test had proved that they could not have been her remains, and her family does not believe that she would have committed suicide. She is believed to have been abducted by Sin Gwang-su.

In the North in 1986, Yokota married a South Korean national, Kim Young-nam (Korean: 김영남, Hanja: 金英男), likely also abducted, and the couple had a daughter in 1987, Kim Hye-gyong (김혜경, whose real name was later revealed to be Kim Eun-gyong, 김은경). In June 2006, Kim Young-Nam, who has since remarried, was allowed to have his family from the South visit him, and during the reunion he confirmed Yokota had committed suicide in 1994 after suffering from mental illness, and had had several attempts at suicide before. He also claimed the remains handed in 2004 are genuine. His comments were however widely dismissed as repeating the official Pyongyang line, and many, especially on the Japanese side, still believe Yokota is alive somewhere; in August 2006, however, some accused the Tokyo government of hiding proof of her death.

The independent scientific journal "Nature" has published an article highly critical of the DNA testing performed by the Japanese. An article in the 3 February 2005 issue revealed that the DNA analysis on Megumi's remains had been performed by a member of the medical department of Teikyo University, Yoshii Tomio. Yoshii, it later transpired, was a relatively junior faculty member, of lecturer status, in a forensic department that had neither a professor nor even an assistant professor. Remarkably, he said that he had no previous experience in the analysis of cremated specimens, described his tests as inconclusive and remarked that such samples were very easily contaminated by anyone coming in contact with them, like "stiff sponges that can absorb anything." In other words, the man who had actually conducted the Japanese analysis pronounced it anything but definitive. The five tiny samples he had been given to work on (the largest of them 1.5 grams) had anyway been used up in his laboratory, so independent verification was thereafter impossible. It seemed likely as a result that nobody could ever know for sure what Pyongyang's package had contained.