THE COURTSHIP
In early 1980, my leaders told me that there would be a woman coming to live with me soon. But she was not a cook and she was not even Korean, though they called her by a Korean name, Min Hye-gyeong. They did not tell me she was Japanese at the time; only that she was Asian, and that they wanted me to teach her English. Her actual arrival did not come until months later. And even on the day she was finally to appear, she was still very late. That's because of the heavy rains that were coming down that made travel nearly impossible. The little bridge closest to my house had washed out, so they had to hook the 280 Mercedes they were driving to a bulldozer and pull it through the 5-m-wide river. Once they were crossing the river, the water came rushing into the car so high that the girl had to pull her feet up onto the seat and perch there like a bird. When they got to the top of the hill, they decided they could not chance driving down the steep, muddy lane that led to my house and chose to walk. But the girl was wearing high heels, so the leader ran ahead to my house to see if they could borrow a pair of my boots. He took a spare pair of leather boots I'd had for years and ran back up the hill to give them to her so she could come down safely.
Finally, on June 30, 1980 at about 10 p.m., there was a knock on my door. When I opened the door and Hitomi Soga walked in, my heart stopped. I didn't even notice the driver and the leader she was flanked by. I had never seen anybody so beautiful in my life. Just 21 years old, she was wearing a white blouse, a white skirt and white high-heel shoes. In those grubby, old surroundings, it was like she was from a dream or an entirely different planet.
She walked in and sat down with my leader and her leader. The four of us had a toast, including the always-required words of praise to Kim Il Sung, and we started talking. We were guarded, and it was awkward. She was especially spooked, since they did not tell her that she was going to a foreigner's house until she was at the top of the hill. She figured she was going to live with another Japanese girl, or at least a Japanese man. And this was North Korea, after all, where you learn real early not to trust anyone right off the bat. I didn't know much about the abductees, I had heard only rumors, so I figured that even if she were Japanese, which she said within the first few minutes, she could be a true believer, that she must have gone there by her own choice or her family's choice, to study Juche, Kim Il Sung's homegrown communist philosophy of national self-reliance, or something. The leaders left at 11:30 p.m., although I am sure one of them stayed up listening to us. Hitomi's Korean was good, a lot better than mine, and that made me a little suspicious. At that point, who knew who she could have been? She could have been a spy herself.
That first night we stayed up until 3 a.m. talking. Mostly it was small talk about how difficult her trip in the rain had been, where she had traveled from, things like that. As the hours passed and it grew late, I noticed that she was yawning frequently. I asked her if she was tired. She said yes, but she didn't make a move to lie down, even though she was sitting on my bed. I could tell that she was scared that I was going to try to take advantage of her. I tried to reassure her by showing her the extra bedding I had laid down in the corner of the other room. I told her that I would be sleeping in there from now on, and that the bed was hers. She must have been exhausted and relieved, because when she heard that her head hit the pillow, and she was deep asleep within minutes.
Although I was supposed to be teaching her English, both Hitomi and I knew that the Organization wanted us to get married. A man and a woman didn't get thrown together like that unless marriage was part of the plan. Even though our entire courtship wound up taking only a few weeks, the Organization did not force this marriage like they routinely forced marriages between foreigners (and North Koreans, for that matter) in the past. I don't know why, exactly, but I imagine it's because they figured there was no way they could make a young, beautiful woman like Hitomi be with a 40-year-old coot like me unless she really wanted to.
That first week, Hitomi barely came out of her room. She was very shy. In retrospect, she was probably very scared too. I didn't have a cook anymore, so while she was being her most shy, I did most of the cooking. One day I would bring her cabbage soup and rice. The next day, I would bring her rice and cabbage soup. "The same thing, every meal!" she soon started to exclaim. It was true. I'm not much of a cook now, and I was even less of one then. Cabbage soup was about all I could make. One thing I did learn to make over the years, though, is kimchi: I can make the best kimchi you have ever eaten.
At the time, one of my regular tasks was to transcribe English-language radio broadcasts into Korean for the cadres, so I had a Korean-made radio and a tape recorder in my bedroom that I didn't even have to hide. One day that first week, I went into the bedroom and turned on NHK, the Japanese public-radio station, for her. Her eyes got as big as headlights and she started shaking. "You can't do that," she said. "They're gonna kill us! They will cut our heads off!" I said to her that this is my house, and even in North Korea, I'll do as I please. But she never really believed me. She turned the radio off as soon as I walked out of the room, and she never touched it again.
In as many ways that I could think of, I tried to make her as comfortable as possible. I would bring her cider and small sweets when she was studying in her room alone. Soon we started playing cards. Blackjack was the only game I knew how to play well, so we played endless games of blackjack. And we smoked. A lot. In that first month, we must have gone through 90 packs of cigarettes. One time while we were playing cards alone, I said to her that I had heard that a number of Japanese had been kidnapped and brought there against their will. Without saying a word, she pointed to her nose, to indicate: "I am one of them." Before long, she had told me her whole story. On August 12, 1978, Hitomi and her mother, Miyoshi, went shopping at a small grocery shop and general store down the street from their house. They lived in a town called Mano on Sado, a small island off the west coast of Honshu. It is a very beautiful place, but very isolated, so much so that in feudal times political prisoners were frequently banished there. Hitomi, the eldest of two daughters, was studying to be a nurse. On that day, it was around dusk. The mother and daughter had bought ice cream, among other items, and they were walking home when three men jumped them from behind. That was the last time Hitomi ever saw her mother. To this day, nobody knows what happened to her. The man who grabbed her threw Hitomi over his shoulder like a sack of coal and carried her to a small skiff under a bridge. The boat chugged about an hour out to sea, where Hitomi was picked up and carried onto a larger boat and put down in the hold. Within a few more days, she was in Pyongyang.
After a few weeks of getting thrown in and out of different guesthouses, Hitomi was finally placed with Megumi Yokota. Yokota is a Japanese abductee who was snatched by North Koreans on her way home from badminton practice from her home city of Niigata in late 1977, when she was only 13. For about 18 months, my wife and Megumi were roommates in a small house in central Pyongyang. Back then, according to my wife, the two girls did little else than study Korean language and Juche philosophy. Hitomi says that during the time they spent together, Megumi, who was only 15 at the time, was horribly homesick and cried a lot. Since they had only each other, it should be no surprise that they became best friends. Years later, we learned that Megumi had named her own daughter Hye-gyeong, which was my wife's Korean name. Hye-gyeong is a fairly common name in Korea, but I doubt this was a coincidence. I am certain that Megumi named her daughter after her best friend, my wife.
Around the second or third week Hitomi and I were together, I started teaching her English. Hitomi knew her A-B-Cs, but not much more than that. So we started just with writing, penmanship. But she kept holding the pencil like a calligraphy brush. I would try to correct her form by putting my arm over hers and my writing hand over hers. At first, she was having none of that, flinching at the very touch. But over the next few weeks, as she got more comfortable with me, and more comfortable with my instruction, she would let me teach her this way, with my arm and hand moving hers on how to make the strokes. Not long after that, during a similar lesson, I was teaching her a new word, my hand and arm on hers, my cheek right up close to hers. I turned to look at her, and she turned into me, and we kissed.
I don't know what it was that drove us together. On the face of it, we had very little in common. I do know that we were very lonely in a world where we were total outsiders. And it took us a very short time to realize that we both hated North Korea. One of the leaders, one of the few I ever liked very much, summed a lot of it up in a conversation he had with me during those early weeks with Hitomi. He said, "You and she don't seem like it, but you are actually the same. You both have nothing here. Together, you would each at least have something." I thought what he said was very true. It wasn't much longer after that that I started asking her to marry me on an almost daily basis.
One of those first few weeks after we became a couple, we went to the Pyongyang Shop. Now, I had been going there for years, so when the shop girls saw me walk in with this young, beautiful woman, they could not believe it. Hitomi told me later that she was embarrassed at first, and that early on she found it difficult to be with me. Not because I was old or because of how I looked, but because I was a Western man. She had never seen one before me other than on the television or in movies. She didn't know how to act around me and she was self-conscious about what other people thought. In time, as we fell in love and she became more comfortable with me than with anyone else, she simply decided that she didn't care what anyone else thought. That day at the Pyongyang Shop I told her I would buy her anything she wanted. She chose an umbrella, which, considering the rain-soaked day she showed up on my doorstep, was something she needed.
Not long after that she said yes, she would marry me. I walked down to the police station, the only place with a phone. I rang up the Organization and said, "Come quick, it's an emergency." They came rushing and said, "What is it? What is it? Where is she?" They thought at first that she had run away. I said, "Set a date, Hitomi and I are getting married." They could not believe it. They could not believe that someone like her would agree to marry someone like me. "How did you do it?" they asked. I said it was no big mystery. Number one, I was nice to her and gave her the first of everything. I lit her cigarettes, I gave her the best food, I made her furniture and I gave her gifts. Number two, I told the cadres to get the hell out of the way so that we could actually get to know each other better. And number three, I told her the truth. I told her that she needed me. I told her that we needed each other, and I assured her that I could protect her.