Free The Invitation-Only Zone by Robert S. Boynton Page B

would glance at her minder before initiating contact. “As long as I didn’t talk to any Japanese people, I don’t think he cared whom I met. After all, what could any of us do?” she says. Conversations were always circumspect, and nobody said a word about how they’d come to be living in North Korea. The abductees would swap items among themselves, tradingshampoo for cosmetics and other goods, before getting back into their respective cars and returning to their own Invitation-Only Zones.
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    Having children tied Kaoru and Yukiko more firmly to life in North Korea. The couple gave their son and daughter secret Japanese names, Shigeyo and Katsuya, when they were born in 1981 and 1985. Kaoru had lost interest in his own life, but with childrenhe now felt a sense of hope for the future. “I lost my family bonds due to the abduction, but was now able to create new bonds,” he says. “To ensure that our kids could eat, have their own families, and live a life worth living after we died—that became the goal of my life,” he explains. “Dreaming about their future made our lives more bearable.” North Korea was his children’s home in a waythat it had never been his, and he had to do whatever he could to help them survive. 2
    Kim Jong-il’s first public appearance, in October 1980, gave Kaoru cause for hope. The aging Kim Il-sung had been making arrangements for his son to succeed him since the late 1960s, and while newspapers had mentioned Kim Jong-il before (as when he joined the Politburo in 1974), his image had never appearedin public. “He represented a brand-new hope for us. A strong, young man who would lead the country into a new era,” Kaoru recalls. “There was a great deal of excitement throughout the country, and I shared it.” In addition to introducing Kim Il-sung’s successor, the Sixth Congress of the Workers’ Party kicked off a new seven-year economic plan, at the end of which every citizen was promised a colortelevision, new clothes, and improved housing. “We were promised a new era with a very specific description of what that would entail,” Kaoru says.
    If he and Yukiko were confined to a bubble, their children lived in a bubble within the bubble. Every day, a minder would ferry the Hasuikes’ son and daughter back and forth to daycare facilities outside the Invitation-Only Zone. Like kids growingup anywhere, the children perceived their lives as normal. For native North Koreans, secrets and omnipresent surveillance were as common as air. To them, the Invitation-Only Zone was not a prison, but rather the North Korean version of a gated community.
    The Hasuike and Chimura children led happy, even privileged lives. Both Kaoru and Yasushi’s daughters danced in the mass games, the synchronizedmultimedia extravaganza performed in Kim Il-sung Stadium each fall. All was well until their eighth birthdays. Receiving an education so close to the Invitation-Only Zone posed a problem. Now that they were entering the kinds of friendships in which children compared the details of their family lives, the regime feared that information about the Invitation-Only Zones would spread, along withcuriosity about these special communities. The coast of North Korea is peppered with dozens of islands, many of which are too small for proper schools. For the children of those who inhabit the islands, the state set up a system of public boarding schools. So it was decided that the abductees’ children would attend a boarding school two hundred miles north of Pyongyang, where whatever they had gleanedabout the zone would be less meaningful. If none of the students knew precisely where, or with whom, their fellow students lived, any information they learned about them was useless. The abductees’ children would visit home for three months, during winter and summer holidays. There were no parents’ day visits or phone calls, and care packages took a month to arrive, if they were delivered