North Korean operation that snatched young Japanese from coastal communities. Three North Korean agents grabbed her at dusk near a beach, stuffed her into a black body bag and stole her away on a ship.
But the woman, Hitomi Soga, ended up falling in love with Jenkins. They married and raised two daughters, both of whom were enrolled in a Pyongyang school that trained multilingual spies.
The beginning of the end of Jenkins’s strange adventures in North Korea came when Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi flew to Pyongyang for an extraordinary encounter with Kim Jong Il. During that 2002 meeting, Kim admitted to Koizumi that his agents had abducted thirteen Japanese civilians in the 1970s and 1980s, including Jenkins’s wife Hitomi. She was immediately allowed to leave the country on Koizumi’s airplane. After the Japanese prime minister made a second trip to North Korea in 2004, Jenkins and his daughters were also allowed to leave.
When I interviewed Jenkins, he and his family were living on Japan’s remote Sado Island, where his wife was born and where North Korean agents had kidnapped her.
During his decades in the North, Jenkins had a house in the countryside and cultivated a large garden that helped feed his family. He also received a monthly cash payment from the government — enough to make sure they did not starve during the famine. Still, he and his family had to fend off thieving neighbours and roaming soldiers in order to survive.
‘It became routine for us as the corn ripened to pull all-night guard watches because the army would pick us clean,’ he wrote.
Thieving peaked during the 1990s famine, when gangs of homeless youngsters — many of them orphans — began to congregate around train stations in cities like Gilju, Hamhung and Chongjin.
Their behaviour and desperation is described in
At Chongjin train station, she wrote, children snatched snacks out of travellers’ hands. Working in teams, older ones knocked over food stands and tempted vendors to give chase. Then younger kids moved in to pick up spilled food. Children also used sharp sticks to poke holes in bags of grain on slow-moving trains and trucks.[29]
During the famine, train station cleaning staff made rounds with a wooden handcart, collecting bodies from the station floor, wrote Demick. There were widespread rumours of cannibalism, with claims that some children hanging around the station were drugged, killed and butchered for meat.
Although the practice was not widespread, Demick concluded it did occur.
‘From my interviews with defectors, it does appear that there were at least two cases… in which people were arrested and executed for cannibalism.’
When Shin was stuck in Gilju in January 2005, the food situation was much less dire.
Harvests across North Korea had been relatively good in 2004. South Korea was pumping in food aid and free fertilizer. Food aid from China and the World Food Programme was also flooding into state coffers, and some of it ended up in street markets.
The homeless around the train station were hungry, but Shin, in his time on the streets of Gilju, never saw anyone dying or dead from exposure or hunger.
Markets in the city were booming with abundant supplies of dried, fresh and processed foods, including milled rice, tofu, crackers, cakes and meat. Clothes, kitchenware and electronics were also on sale. When Shin showed up with stolen daikon, he found market women eager to pay cash.
As he scrounged in Gilju, escape to China slipped from Shin’s mind. The homeless, whose ranks he had joined, had other plans. They intended to travel in March to a state-owned farm to plant potatoes, a job that provided regular meals. With nothing else to do and no other contacts, Shin decided to tag along with them. His plan changed again, however, after one exceptionally productive day of thieving.
In the countryside on the outskirts of town, Shin wandered away from his crew, whose members were digging up a vegetable garden. By himself, he went around to the back of a vacant house and broke in through a window.
Inside, he found winter clothes, a military-style woollen hat and a fifteen-pound bag of rice. He changed into the warmer clothes and carried the rice in his backpack to a Gilju merchant, who bought it for six thousand won (about six dollars).
With a new wad of cash for food and bribes, China again seemed possible, so Shin walked to the freight yard at Gilju station and crawled aboard a northbound boxcar.
18
The Tumen River, which forms about a third of the border between North Korea and China, is shallow and narrow. It usually freezes over in winter, and walking across it takes only a few minutes. In most areas, the Chinese bank of the river offers decent cover as it is thick with trees. Chinese border guards are sparse.
Shin learned about the Tumen from traders on the train. But he did not have detailed information about where to cross or what bribes would be acceptable to the North Korean guards who patrol its southern bank, so he travelled by boxcar from Gilju to Chongjin to Gomusan, a rail junction about twenty-five miles from the border, and began asking questions of local people.
‘Hello, isn’t it cold?’ he said to an elderly man crouched on the steps of the Gomusan train station.
Shin offered crackers.
‘Oh, thank you so much,’ the man said. ‘May I ask where you are from?’
Shin had come up with a truthful but vague answer. He said he had run away from home in South Pyongan Province, where Camp 14 is located, because he was hungry and life was hard.
The old man said his life had been much easier when he lived in China, where food and work were easy to find. Eight months earlier, the man said, Chinese police had arrested him and sent him back to North Korea, where he had served a few months in a labour camp. He asked if Shin had considered going there.
‘Can anyone cross over to China?’ Shin said, trying to control his curiosity and excitement.
The old man needed little prompting. He talked about China for more than half a day, explaining where to cross the Tumen and how to behave at the checkpoints near the border. Most of the guards, he said, were eager for bribes. His other instructions were, when guards ask for identification, give them a few cigarettes and a package of crackers, along with small amounts of cash. Tell them you are a soldier. Tell them you are going to visit family members in China.
Early the next morning, Shin hopped aboard a coal train bound for nearby Musan, a mining town on the border. He had been warned that the town was crawling with soldiers, so he jumped from the train as it slowed to enter Musan station and headed southwest on foot. He walked all day — about eighteen miles — looking for a stretch of the Tumen that was shallow and easy to cross.
With no identification papers, Shin knew he would be arrested if border guards did their job. At the first checkpoint, a guard asked for his papers. Trying to hide his fear, Shin said he was a soldier returning home. It helped that his clothing and woollen hat, stolen back in Gilju, were the dark green of army uniforms.
‘Here, smoke this,’ Shin said, handing the guard two packs of cigarettes.
The guard took the cigarettes and gestured for Shin to pass.
At a second checkpoint, another guard asked Shin for identification. Again he proffered cigarettes and a bag of crackers. Walking on, he met a third border guard and a fourth. They were young, scrawny and hungry. Before Shin could say a word, they asked him for cigarettes and food but, crucially, not for any identification.
Shin could not have escaped North Korea without an abundance of luck, especially at the border. As he bribed his way towards China in late January 2005, a window happened to be open, allowing relatively low-risk illegal passage across the border.
The North Korean government had been forced — by catastrophic famine in the mid-1990s and the importance of Chinese foodstuffs in feeding the population — to tolerate a porous border with China. That tolerance became semi-official policy in 2000, when North Korea promised leniency to those who had fled the country in search of food. It was a belated admission that tens of thousands of famine-stricken North Koreans had already gone to China and that the country was increasingly dependent on their remittances. Also, by 2000,
