Questions of Abduction: North Korea and the Disappearance of a Japanese Nuclear Scientist

Taken to the North?

In the summer of 2012, Asahi Shimbun journalist Watanabe Makoto was covering the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Station when he came across an odd story. It involved the mysterious disappearance in 1972 of a scientist from the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC; now Japan Atomic Energy Agency). As strange as the tale seemed, it came from a reputable source, a former PNC scientist.

The scientist described how Takemura Tatsuya, his colleague at PNC’s plutonium production section, disappeared from the dormitory where he lived in Tōkai, Ibaraki Prefecture. He suggested that Takemura had been abducted by North Korea.

The scientist had reason for his extraordinary claim. He recalled being questioned by a detective from the Ibaraki Prefectural Police’s Katsuta Station shortly after Takemura went missing. Baffled by why a serious and devoted employee like Takemura would suddenly vanish, he was unable to offer any leads. It was then that the detective put forward a startling idea: “He might have been carried off by the North.”

This was a confusing statement as no one at the time suspected North Korea of abducting Japanese citizens. It seemed a preposterous assertion. What purpose would that serve? Still, the detective’s words stuck with the scientist.

In retrospect, North Korea had ample motives for kidnapping Takemura. A native of Osaka, Takemura had joined PNC after graduating from Osaka University’s School of Engineering. As one of PNC’s top scientists, he spent time at a government-funded atomic research center in the United States, where he studied the process for producing plutonium. It was around this period that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions started to be of international concern. Could Takemura have been abducted and forced to work on the regime’s nuclear weapons program?

Suspicious Disappearances

Watanabe explores this and other questions in his 2023 book Kieta kakukagakusha: Kita Chōsen no kakukaihatsu to rachi (The Vanished Nuclear Scientist: Abduction and North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Program). Based on research and interviews Watanabe conducted with police, Takemura’s former colleagues, and others while at the Asahi and as a freelance journalist, the investigative work provides a captivating look into the puzzling case.

Front and center in Watanabe’s examination of Takemura’s disappearance is the niggling question of North Korea’s motives for abducting Japanese citizens. North Korea continued to deny its involvement in the disappearance of Japanese citizens. But the regime changed its stance when Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō visited Pyongyang for a summit with Kim Jong-il in September 2002. At the meeting, Kim officially acknowledged the abductions and proffered an apology, explaining that they were a means of providing North Korean agents with Japanese language abilities to allow them to enter Japan undetected by posing as Japanese nationals. Was this the real aim of the program, though?

The Japanese government officially recognizes 17 victims, but also claims that abduction cannot be ruled out in some 870 other missing person cases. Those suspected of being kidnapped include medical workers, mechanists, and printers, professionals with skills that many have pointed out were needed in North Korea. Watanabe in his book takes this idea one step further, suggesting that the regime might have utilized abductees with specialized training in its nuclear weapons program, a theory with dire implications for Japan’s national security.

Not a Lone Case

Takemura is not the only Japanese scientist suspected of having been snatched by North Korean agents. In April 2009, the Rodong Sinmun, the mouthpiece newspaper for Pyongyang, ran a story celebrating North Korea’s successful testing of a long-range ballistic missile. The article featured a photo of Kim Jong-il with members of the missile program. Among the group was an individual bearing an uncanny resemblance to a Japanese engineer missing since 1982.

The man was 23 years old when he disappeared. Having just graduated from Kantō Gakuin University, he was about to start a job with an automotive parts supplier. He had studied industrial robotics at the school’s department of mechanical engineering, a field, Watanabe notes, with practical application in nuclear energy for inserting and removing fuel rods. A forensic expert analyzed the photo and concluded that there was a “possibility” that the man in the picture was the missing student.

Watanabe notes other cases. In 1983, a 23-year-old maintenance worker at a nuclear power plant in Fukui Prefecture mysteriously disappeared. Then in 1988, a 35-year-old employee at a precision tools manufacturer vanished in Tottori Prefecture.

In exploring these cases, Watanabe attempts to demonstrate how even as the government became increasingly concerned about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, authorities failed to consider that the growing list of disappearances involved people whose skills Pyongyang would find useful. A more troubling suspicion is that the Japanese government knew and covered it up.

The author delves deep in his search for the truth, raising new questions that leave readers wondering what else is hiding in the seemingly fathomless depths of the North Korean abduction issue. Only time and more investigations like Watanabe’s will provide the sought-for answers.

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo: The cover of Kieta kakukagagusha: Kita Chōsen no kakukaihatsu to rachi. Courtesy of Iwanami Shoten.)