World News Returnees frustrated at lack of progress

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Japanese nationals who were abducted by North Korea voiced frustration Oct. 14, exactly one year after their return to their homeland, over the government's lack of progress in effecting a reunion with the children they left behind in Pyongyang.

One of the former abductees urged Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to visit Pyongyang again to hold talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to try and forge a breakthrough on the stalemate.

During the Koizumi-Kim talks in September 2002, North Korea for the first time admitted kidnapping more than a dozen Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s. It claims that eight of the 13 people it abducted have died.

On Oct. 15, 2002, Yasushi Chimura and his wife, Fukie, Kaoru Hasuike and his wife, Yukiko, and Hitomi Soga returned home, having been abducted to North Korea in 1978.

However, their North Korean-born children and Soga's husband, a former U.S. Army sergeant, remain in Pyongyang. The Chimuras have two sons and a daughter there and the Hasuikes have a son and a daughter. Soga has two daughters in Pyongyang.

Pyongyang has since rejected demands that the former abductees' relatives be allowed to come to Japan. It claims that issues relating to its abduction of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s have been resolved.

In a five-page letter, the Chimuras said they would continue to fight to seek a reunion in Japan with their children, and they voiced concern that the abduction issue could be sidelined by the international standoff over North Korea's suspected nuclear weapons program.(Kyodo)

拉致被害者帰国から1年

Shukan ST: Oct. 24, 2003

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