Free The Invitation-Only Zone by Robert S. Boynton

Marxist discourse so wellthat I could pull it out and apply it to any situation. But now I had to refute all the ideas I had held as true, breaking down every theory. And then I had to build up my own sensibility from scratch, piece by piece. For the next three years I was barely able to write a sentence,” he says. Sato’s evolving ideology no longer fit with the Korea Research Institute’s pro-North Korea policies, andin 1984 he broke with it and founded the Modern Korea Institute, starting a journal that became an important outlet for anti-North Korea essays and research. “I helped send the Korean residents in Japan to hell,” he wrote in a remorseful 1995 essay, “instead of to the paradise they were promised.” 11

 
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    NEIGHBORS IN THE INVITATION-ONLY ZONE
    For all the regime’s security arrangements, information circulated within the Invitation-Only Zone via one of humankind’s most durable cultural practices: gossip. Soon after Kaoru and Yukiko moved into their first house, the woman who looked after them stopped by to introduce herself. The Hasuikes had not yet assumed their new identities and simplytold her where they were from. “Ah, so you’re Japanese!” the woman exclaimed, after hearing their accented Korean. “Another Japanese couple arrived a while ago. You should meet them!”
    Engaged to be married in the fall of 1978, Yasushi Chimura and Fukie Hamamoto, both twenty-two, lived with their parents in Obama, a small coastal town three hundred miles west of Tokyo. Fukie sold cosmetics, andYasushi worked in construction, and when they wanted to be alone, they drove Yasushi’s car up a steep, twisty single-lane road to a cliffside park where couples came to gaze out at the ocean and kiss. July 7 was a moonless night, and Yasushi and Fukie were sitting on a bench, picking out the familiar lights from the blackness that had enveloped the town, when four men jumped out from behind nearbybushes. After restraining the couple and placing them in separate bags, the men slung them over their shoulders and carried them several hundred feet down the hill to a waiting dinghy. As the men crossed the road from the bluff to the beach, Yasushi peered through the bag’s mesh material and caught a glimpse of a passing car’s taillights.

    Young Yasushi and Fukie Chimura (Kyodo)
    Like the Hasuikes, the Chimuras were separated before they arrived, each assured that the other had been left behind in Japan. Each morning when she awoke, Fukie would at first think she had only dreamed about the abduction. She yearned for Yasushi, whom she had expected to marry that fall. As weeks turned into months, and the reality of her situationsank in, her mood shifted from absolute despair to a kind of grim determination. She had to survive her ordeal. “I can live here, if I have to. But please, God, don’t let me die here,” she thought to herself. 1
    Fukie’s minder repeatedly inquired whether she had any interest in getting married, which she interpreted as a tease about being of a “marriageable age.” Gradually she realized he was serious,and feared she’d be forced into an arranged marriage, perhaps with a North Korean spy. “I knew I didn’t want to marry anyone from North Korea, so I just replied as if it were a big joke. I’d say ‘Are you kidding me? I couldn’t do anything like that.’” So she had good reason to be apprehensive on the day she was presented with a pretty new dress and ushered into a suite of rooms that had been decoratedfor a formal occasion. An arranged marriage was indeed on the agenda, but the groom was familiar to her. After eighteen months of study and despair, Yasushi and Fukie wed the same day they were reunited.
    Given that everyone living in the Invitation-Only Zone had secrets to hide, neighbors tended to keep their distance. It turned out that Kaoru and Yasushi had actually met during their first fewmonths in captivity, but each had avoided discussing his circumstances for