(3 of 4)
On the morning of May 22, Mika, Brinda and I were picked up by a high cadre from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and taken to an old country house of Kim Jong Il's about 20 km outside of Pyongyang. That's where we were to meet with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
We arrived at about 9 a.m., three hours early, and were taken into a big waiting room, where there was fruit on a silver platter and lots of soft drinks on a side table. Just before noon, someone announced that Koizumi had arrived. He came in with an entourage of about seven or eight people. No North Koreans came into the room. They waited just outside with the larger contingent of Japanese. Koizumi walked in and I shook his hand. I told him it was a great honor to meet him. He sat down across from me and my daughters. There was a note-taker in the corner, two translators at Koizumi's side and a couple of other Japanese diplomats hanging around the edges of the room.
Then we launched in on what turned out to be a pretty testy debate. Remember that my family and I were still operating under the assumption that Hitomi was being held in Japan against her will. We had none of the information that the rest of the world considered common knowledge. I had no understanding about how hard my wife was working on my behalf and how strongly all of Japan had rallied to her cause of reuniting her family. Every day now, I thank God for my wife, the Japanese people and the Japanese government, and I know I am a free man because of them. Today, I have nothing but the highest respect, admiration and gratitude for everything Koizumi has done for me and my family, persevering on our behalf even when it was politically risky for him to do so. But at that time, I was madder than hell at him.
As he sat down, Koizumi reached into his briefcase and handed me a letter written by my wife. I took it but did not open it right away. "You know why I am here, don't you?" he asked. "Yeah," I said, "you are here because you have my wife." Mika is a feisty one and she jumped in almost immediately, asking, "Why haven't you let her come back like you promised?" Koizumi said, "I could never send her back to a country that had stolen her in the first place." "But this is where her home and her family are," she said. Koizumi responded, "I am here because I am trying to reunite her with her family." While Mika and Koizumi and were fighting, I was able to read my wife's letter. In it, she told me to think very hard before making my decision, but she thought I should come with Koizumi.
I thought about the letter as I refolded it, and at the time I pondered how much of it had been coerced, or if she was just saying what she knew Japan wanted to hear. I told Koizumi that my wife was kidnapped right now, in Japan. Koizumi said that was not true. "She does not want to come back to North Korea," he said. "She wants you to come to Japan." I told him that if I went back with him, then I was going to go to jail for a very long time—a prospect I was not too happy about. Koizumi told me that he could not promise anything, but that he would do everything in his power to ensure I would receive fair and compassionate treatment from the U.S.
At that point, one of his men passed him a note, which he read. He then ripped a piece of paper from a small notebook of his own. Looking at the note he had been passed, he wrote a new one in his own hand. He then passed me the note he had written across the table. It said, in English, "The Prime Minister of Japan will assure you that he will do the utmost that you can live together happily with Mrs. Jenkins in Japan." I read it, folded it, put it in my jacket pocket, and did not say a word.
Following this, Koizumi said, "Kim Jong Il has said you can go." Mika piped up again. "Is that really true?" she challenged. Koizumi assured us it was. Throughout the whole meeting, Brinda didn't say a word. I was glad, because the thing she was most likely to say was, "Let's go to Japan!" and that would have caused all kinds of trouble. The North Koreans originally told us we would have about 10 minutes with Koizumi, but the whole conversation wound up taking an hour. At the end of it, I told him that I appreciated all of his efforts, and he certainly gave me a lot of new stuff to think about, but there was simply no way that we were going to be able to go with him to Japan that day.
Realizing we had hit the end, he signaled for one of his people to come over and introduce a new topic. "There is one more thing we could try," said this Japanese diplomat. "Would you be willing to meet your wife in a third country, maybe China, in a little while, where you could all discuss further what, as a family, you would like to do?" I said yes, that sounded like a very good idea, let's do that. As we were parting, the Japanese gave us a few gifts: a disk of cartoon videos for the girls, an inspirational book in English about a Japanese who overcomes adversity despite being born without any arms and legs, and a carton of Mild Seven cigarettes for me.
As we were walking out, I told Koizumi that I loved Japan when I visited Yokohama in 1960 and 1961. He threw up his hands in celebration, as if to say, "That's great!" Through his interpreter, he said that he was sorry it didn't work out this time, but he held out hope that I would be able to come to Japan someday. I said, "We shall see."