Whilst not quite delivering what it says on the tin, this was still a revealing account into everyday life and political control in North Korea.
Premise in a Nutshell
Investigative Journalist Boynton explores the abduction of foreign nationals, particularly Japanese citizens by North Korea. These individuals were forcibly taken, subjected to ideological re-education, and compelled to live in controlled “invitation-only zones.”
The book follows several of these abductees in detail, tracing how they were taken, how they adapted. Alongside these accounts, Boynton attempts to contextualise the kidnappings within the broader political and historical background of the region.
Thoughts
I thought the premise of this was fascinating, and the individual stories of abducted people very much lived up to it. The people highlighted in the book are, and I mean this with no disrespect, incredibly ordinary. Their lack of exceptional skills, knowledge, or status makes the whole thing very odd. This is not an attempt to find brilliant sportspeople, scientists, or thinkers. Once in Korea, there doesn’t appear to be a particularly long-ranging plan for them. And this is where the book falls short for me. Despite putting forward a couple of hypotheses, it never really explains why this happened or what the purpose or goal was.
The strength of this book is the glimpses it offers into life in North Korea. I appreciated hearing about life in the invitation-only zone. The details in the depiction of everyday life were compelling. Relationships some of the abductees had with their minders are well represented. Also rich was how they constructed routines and built personal meaning into their lives to endure their fate. The question of belonging, especially after decades away was also well shown and I was moved by the sense that they belonged in neither place.
These stories are also positioned against a short, potted history of not just North Korea but the whole region. I found the early chapter about Japanese nationalism, identity formation, and the challenges of empire and colonialism really interesting. The idea that, unlike Western colonialism, Japan chose to colonise areas where there were strong racial and cultural ties was new to me. So too was the idea of how this has driven a compulsive focus on similarities and differences in the post-colonial era, including an ongoing ‘othering’ of Koreans in Japan today – many of whom have been living in Japan for several generations and yet remain separate, with fewer rights.
The post-war politics, and the history of socialist and communist groups, was also useful context. I found the story of the men who worked to support Japanese Koreans returning to North Korea particularly intriguing. I was left with a real sense of tragedy in the naivity of their actions and beliefs, but still felt invested as they began to realise they had not helped people escape to a socialist utopia.
This slight hodgepodge of interesting elements is what ultimately frustrated me about the book. Boynton tends to bounce from story to anecdote to quote and back again, and threads are not fully carried through to create a cohesive narrative or a rich investigation. At one point, the book suggests hundreds of people of multiple nationalities have been abducted, but only a handful of these stories are touched upon. He also includes a section on US defectors, which again follows the pattern of not following the story through. The thread on film is also engaging but peters out without real conclusion.
The epilogue provides some answers as to why the book reads this way. In it, the author writes openly about why the story caught his fascination. It clearly shows that this is driven more by personal interest than by the desire to produce a tightly focused piece of investigative journalism. Whilst shining a light on a topic I knew little about this book leaves key questions about the motive, purpose or scale of the abductions.