How Do You Stop Looking?
It’s not really within my nature to say nice things about filmmakers, so I’ll just call Patty Kim and Chris Sheridan documentary makers. Now I can say nice things about them. Why would I say things about them that I could never say about Oliver Stone?  It’s their small-budget, and somewhat bigger vision, feature about a little girl . . . and her parent’s refusal to let a small piece of ocean and thirty years keep them apart.
    Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story, tells the story of a young Polish girl who disappears from Warsaw in 1942 . . . or was it the Cambodian girl who disappeared in 1978?  No! It was the Korean woman abducted in 1943 . . . or it might have been the Somali girl who’s not been heard of since 1990 . . . or maybe the little girl in Brazil . . . wait a minute, was she the Hungarian girl grabbed in Budapest in 1956?
    How do you tell the story of 13 year old Megumi Yokota, walking home late on a school night in a quiet city on the west coast of Japan, badminton racquet in hand, minutes earlier waving goodbye to her friends — and then she is gone. How do you tell this story and not one of a hundred thousand or more awful such tales?
   Her family believed she might have run away, her mother went on television and cried and begged her daughter for forgiveness and asked only that Megumi send a note to say she was alright. Megumi probably cried that night too but she wasn’t watching television. She was in North Korea, an abductee, a hostage of Kim Il Jong’s regime of madness. Her ransom? To teach North Korean spies the Japanese way so they could infiltrate Japanese society.
   What could a child teach an adult spy? Nothing really. As if to magnify her tragedy, she was never meant to be abducted. It was dark, her North Korean abductor was nervous, he made a terrible mistake. Already they’d kidnapped a number of Japanese men and women, they were all in their early twenties, all except Megumi. Sometime between snatching her off the street in coastal Niigata, and bundling Megumi onto a North Korean freighter on a forty hour trip across the Japan Sea, they realized they’d taken a child. They kept her. Years later a North Korean defector told the story of that trip. Megumi was locked in a hold. She slammed her hands on the door. She cried for her mother. She cried for her mother for the next forty hours. 
   Two decades later Megumi’s family discovered that their daughter was quite possibly alive and that she was almost certainly in North Korea. Of all the Japanese abducted she was the only child . . . it had to be her. Later, they found out it was.
  So Megumi’s story became the story of her parents and their desperation to find out if she was still alive. Desperate for the North Korean government to give her back and even more desperate for a seemingly indifferent Japanese Government to do something, to do anything. Herein lies the plight of all the world’s Megumi’s — the currency of diplomacy is national interests. And that price is awful when it comes at the cost of human interests.
   During World War II somewhere between 80,000 and 160,000 Korean women were abducted by the Japanese, to ostensibly become sex slaves for Japanese troops. They called them comfort women. “It was war!” they say. They were people! I say. Like Megumi they had mothers and fathers and brothers. And hopes and dreams and plans. And this.
   The Japanese Government officially admitted to, and apologized for, this policy – almost fifty years later. What finally pushed them to it was a Japanese history professor writing about it in the nation’s biggest newspaper in January of 1992.
   For the ills of war, the shame of mistakes and the embarrassment of admissions, the Japanese government could not bring itself to pressure North Korea over Megumi and a dozen or more young Japanese men and women who shared her fate. That’s the pursuit of national interests. And for this very reason, despite having many more of its people fall prey to North Korean abductors, South Korea would not unite with Japan on a crusade to bring their children home.
   Patty and Chris don’t tell a story of governments, they tell a story of people. Of the Yokota family who never gave up, her mother Sakie, father Shigeru and her brothers Tetsuya and Takuya (pictured right). 
   They stood on street corners with pictures of their little girl and begged “Have you seen our child?” Went to newspapers and spoke to reporters. Posed for photos. Cried on television. Found the parents of other abductees. Went with them to rallies and screamed at Japanese politicians. Went to America and told their story to American politicians. Met with President Bush and, though he is man of faith who could have appreciated the human tragedy, would never have known of Megumi if North Korea had no nuclear weapons.  
   How can you tell Megumi’s story and not tell the story of so many other who vanished in similarly tragic ways? Or millions if we include those who disappeared in wartime? I really don’t know the answer. Maybe you tell the story of one family and hope some of its audience pauses to think not just of Megumi but of all the Megumis. 
   In all honesty Abduction is not a great a triumph of filmmaking. But it's pretty hard to go past its storytelling. I don't know that Patty and Chirs got it right – they don't know that they got it right (but that's the nature of documentary making). I don't know what I'd do but I like to think I would have done my best. In making this film, Patty and Chris did their best, not only to make it but to make sure people like me see it. Patty had the good grace to speak to me after I saw her film – while Spielberg couldn't spare me a second after I saw War of the Worlds (and all I wanted from him was my money back). I thank Patty for her time and if you have the chance to see her film – but don't have the time – I suggest you make the time.       
      And what of Megumi? “Yes” North Korea says, “she was abducted.” She married a South Korean man, himself an abductee. They had a daughter. She still played badminton. North Korea says she’s dead but they can’t produce her remains. They said she took her life at age twenty-nine.  But they took her life at thirteen.