Page 1 of 2 Close encounters with North Korea
By John Feffer
In the 1960s, a subculture of Americans became obsessed with alien abductions.
Their ur-narrative revolved around the experience of Betty and Barney Hill, a
sober, middle-aged, interracial couple who told of being taken from their car
one night in 1961 and subjected to medical investigation by extraterrestrials
with small bodies and large foreheads. They were not the type to fabulize
simply to draw attention to themselves, so their story attracted interest
beyond the usual unidentified flying objects (UFO) fans. Gradually others came
forward with similar tales.
These abduction narratives paralleled the central fears of the Cold War era.
Like the Soviets, the aliens were unintelligible. They were capable of
other-worldly scientific advances just as Sputnik
had dazzled and frightened Americans. They likely harbored designs for taking
over the world. And they seemed to hover just beyond our line of sight waiting
for an opportunity to put us to some unknown use. Although a small cadre of
Americans believed deeply in these UFO abductions, the majority saw no need to
displace their dread of communists onto visitors from a more distant world.
For roughly 20 years, the case of North Korean abductions seemed to exercise a
similar hold on the Japanese imagination. The stories of missing Japanese
rumored to have been abducted by North Korean agents belonged to the margins of
political and media discourse. No mainstream media outlet would touch the
story. In 1996, a North Korean defector described native Japanese helping to
train spies at a North Korean facility, and the abduction narratives gained
greater credibility. Still, after Pyongyang launched its Taepodong
intermediate-stage rocket over Japan in 1998, most Japanese simply feared North
Korea's conventional and potentially nuclear military threat. The abduction
stories belonged to the past. They were not confirmed. People disappeared for
various reasons: they were killed, they decamped for overseas, they assumed new
identities and took up residence far from their homes. The Japanese government
was portraying North Korea as a clear and present danger, and this conventional
Cold War framework held sway over the more outlandish version of North Korean
perfidy.
But in 2002, the abduction narrative in Japan swerved suddenly from the margins
to the very center of the policy debate. Japanese prime minister Koizumi
Junichiro visited Pyongyang on September 17, 2002, in an attempt to break the
logjam of non-recognition in Japan-North Korea relations. In the course of that
visit, Koizumi extracted a confession and an apology from North Korean leader
Kim Jong-il. North Korea had abducted Japanese citizens. It was as if a UFO had
landed in downtown Tokyo and the Earth stood still for the Japanese. A
narrative nurtured by a relatively small group of Japanese, particularly the
families of the disappeared, had turned out to be true.
But that was only the beginning of the story. It turned out that there were
several true narratives. And the story of Charles Robert Jenkins and his family
was one of them.
The narrative of Charles Robert Jenkins
In the early morning of January 5, 1965, worried that his unit was about to
leave South Korea to fight in the Vietnam War, Charles Robert Jenkins made what
he later regretted as the worst decision of his life. The 25-year-old deserted
from his unit and crossed the Demilitarized Zone into North Korea. He would
live for nearly 40 years in North Korea. It was, as he details in his book The
Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment
in North Korea, a life of privileged misery.
When it appeared in Japan in 2005, Jenkins' book was an instant sensation. The
abduction story dominated the news in Japan after Koizumi's 2002 visit, which
opened the way for five of the abductees to return the following month,
including Jenkins' wife Soga Hitomi. In 2004, Koizumi paid another visit to
Pyongyang and brought back five children of the abductees. Jenkins and his two
children followed shortly thereafter, through a third country.
The Japanese media and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party fanned a frenzy of
demands for information about the 13 people that North Korea officially
acknowledged abducting, the additional four people that Japan officially
recognized as abductees, the 19 more that the government "strongly suspects"
were abducted, and the 70-plus people that Japanese abductee organizations
claimed were snatched.
With a title more fitting for Japan's culture of apology - Kohuhaku or The
Confession - Jenkins' book in Japanese translation served up a few
heartbreaking nuggets of information about Yokota Megumi, the youngest of the
Japanese abductees, whom the North Korean government reported as committing
suicide in 1994. Jenkins provides no definitive answers to the Megumi mystery.
How did she die? How had she lived? But he does relate the abduction story of
Hitomi Soga, whom Jenkins married and lived with for 20 years before they were
whisked away from North Korea in as strange and unexpected a manner as they had
arrived.
While The Reluctant Communist fills in only a few pieces of the
abduction puzzle, its more important contribution is the description of life in
North Korea. Few foreigners have lived for significant stretches of time in
North Korea. Fewer still have written about their experiences: there's Briton
Michael Harrold's chronicle of seven years as an editor of North Korean
documents in Comrades and Strangers, Swede Erik Cornell's description of
his diplomatic tenure in Pyongyang in the 1970s in Envoy to Paradise,
and American Richard Saccone's account of his work with the Korean Peninsula
Energy Development Organization in Living with the Enemy. A few North
Korean defector narratives have appeared in Korean and several have been
translated, most notably Kang Chol-hwan's Aquariums of Pyongyang. These
books all illuminate small corners of life in North Korea.
Jenkins' book is a low-wattage addition to this literature. His 40-year stay in
the country is a narrative of survival. There is pain, mind-numbing boredom,
hatred and resignation, and finally some respite in married life. There is also
redemption, as Jenkins and his family manage to negotiate their way out of the
country and he atones for his desertion. But Jenkins is neither a dramatic
personage nor a keen observer. He confesses a fondness for drink. This
understandable weakness helped him survive, but may also have diminished his
capacity or his desire to pierce the mysteries of North Korean life. If Jenkins
had dictated his story to a North Korea expert, rather than to journalist Jim
Frederick, his debriefing might have been more illuminating.
Hard knocks, North Korean-style
Jenkins was accustomed to austerity. He came from a poor North Carolina family
where "when we had enough spare butter to spread right onto our bread, that was
a good day". He joined the army and came to enjoy the drills and duties. If the
rumor of his unit shipping out to Vietnam had not touched his deepest fears, he
would have likely become career military. So, on reaching North Korea, he was
not the type to grouse about a little hardship. But he faced a good deal more
than standard hardship.
Jenkins was thrown in with three other deserters, whom he describes as "pretty
much total fuck-ups as soldiers". Their living conditions were typical of rural
Korean life in the 1960s: outside toilet, no running water. Still it was a life
of privilege. They didn't have to work very hard. And they usually had enough
to eat. They were, however, subjected to daily propaganda sessions. "We studied
about 10 or 11 hours a day," he writes. "If we didn't memorize enough or were
not able to recite portions of our studies on demand, we were forced to study
16 hours a day on Sunday, which was usually our only day of rest." This crash
course in ideology enabled the four to catch up to average North Koreans, who
had been studying the precepts of North Korean communism, more precisely Kim
Il-sungism, all their lives. There are occasional descents into greater
hardship - for instance, when a North Korean doctor removes Jenkins' US Army
tattoo without anesthesia - but for the most part the story is of drudgery and
boredom and workaday austerity.
Jenkins sees North Korea as "little more than a giant prison". After several
ill-fated attempts to escape, he and his compatriots eventually resign
themselves to getting by. They teach English, work on a military dictionary,
translate lines from English-language movies, even star in North Korean movies
when Western actors are needed. Ultimately they become citizens. They are
rewarded for their good behavior not by reduced sentences but with conjugal
visits. Each is matched with another foreigner. Jenkins, 40 years old in 1980,
is introduced to the 20-year-old Soga Hitomi, and, after some initial wariness,
they are married and have two children.
Jenkins was entitled to certain privileges, but that didn't include the ability
to travel around the country or meet a wide variety of people. He presents a
narrow slice of North Korea life. Still, there are some intriguing asides to
the main narrative. Jenkins tells of an Ethiopian who slips him Western movies
on videocassettes. He describes various market activities, such as his sales of
honey to augment his family's meager rations. He chronicles the rise of
corruption with the decline of the economy. As the food crisis sets in during
the mid-1990s, Jenkins and his family must take shifts to guard their corn plot
to prevent pilfering from thieves. One day, a soldier comes to the door and
asks for food. "That shocked us. It was one thing for the army to steal. But
for a soldier to beg? That is something that never would have happened in
decades past, when the country could at least feed itself."
The school where they send their two children demands that all students bring
supplies: a kilo of lead, rabbit skins. And then, of course, there is the
omnipresent nationalism that shapes North Korea more deeply than communism ever
did. Jenkins and the soldiers are paired off with foreigners, for their blood
must not be allowed to taint the "pure" Korean population. Similar sentiments
can be found among some in South Korea, but the version of ethnonationalism
that persists in the North embodies a much more unselfconscious racism.
Jenkins also provides the occasional glimpse of the human side of North
Koreans. There are the cadres whom he more-or-less befriends and who look the
other way when, one drunken night, he calls Kim Jong-il a dog. As Jenkins
struggles with the choice to leave the country to visit his wife in a third
country - he worries that he'll end up in a US brig if he gets out or in a
North Korean prison if he doesn't - his North Korean minder leans over to say
quietly to him: "If you don't come back, there is nothing we can do."
A few intriguing details aside, Jenkins' narrative provides no unexpected
revelations about North Korea. His story corresponds to what we more or less
know about the country. There is only one part of the story that is
controversial. Jenkins alleges that one of his American compatriots, Joseph
Dresnok, beat him 30 times over a seven-year period. In the first one, and
presumably some that followed, a North Korean cadre bound Jenkins' hands behind
his back and instructed Dresnok to administer the beating. For reasons that
Jenkins still can't fully fathom, Dresnok complied willingly. In the
documentary Crossing the Line, which features interviews with Dresnok in
Pyongyang, the last American deserter left in North Korea denies the charges.
Abduction narrative revised
The narrative of alien abduction that Betty and Barney Hill unleashed on
America sent UFOlogists scrambling to find examples of similar incidents in
history. After all, it just wasn't credible that aliens had appeared in the
past but had only decided to escort humans into their ships to conduct medical
examinations during the Kennedy years.
The abduction aficionados found what they were looking for: earlier cases in
Brazil, in France, elsewhere in the United States. As the cases multiplied,
different camps also emerged, for now there were competing narratives to
reconcile - what did the aliens look like, where did they come from, were they
having sex with
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