January 3, 2010
Heads Up
By HIROKO TABUCHI
THE ancient city of Nara has lived in the shadow of its neighbor, Kyoto,
for centuries. So this year, as Nara marks the 1,300th anniversary of its ascension as Japan’s imperial capital, the city might be forgiven for going over the top.
Nara was a splendor in its time — a world of silks, Chinese scripts and Buddhist culture set in a sleepy landscape. Built by the emperor Shomu, a convert to Buddhism, Nara played an important role in the spread of that religion in Japan, as evidenced by the ancient temples that still dot the city. Now it is celebrating that history in style.
After a $100 million investment, the eighth-century palace that once anchored Heijyokyo (Nara’s ancient name), only to be razed following the transfer of the capital to Kyoto in A.D. 784, has been painstakingly rebuilt and is scheduled to open on April 24. To celebrate the cultural diversity of the Nara Period, when the city reigned as the capital, Nara has built a life-size replica of a ship that carried Japanese envoys to and from Tang China.
But the restored palace and ship are just stage-setters for a yearlong festival (300.jp/foreign/english) to celebrate the city and its history. In the works are carnivals, fairs and musical performances drawing on an era that saw the rise of Buddhism in Japan, as well as the increased influence of the Tang Dynasty.
A highlight, officials say, is the “Corridor of Light” festival from Aug. 20 to 27, when the palace will be illuminated with candles and LED lights.
At the recreated palace, a 15-minute walk or short shuttle bus ride from Kintetsu Yamato-Saidaiji Station, guards in period armor will re-enact something akin to an ancient Japanese version of Buckingham Palace’s changing of the guard three times a day, between April 24 and Nov. 7.
At the heart of the city is Nara Park, and nearby is the Todaiji Temple, and home to Japan’s largest Buddha statue, erected in 752.
The city’s modern-day charms, however, lie in Naramachi, a historic merchant area in the heart of the city, which is now home to small museums, traditional town houses and a scattering of quaint cafes and restaurants. Ryo Yonehara, a Nara native who recently started an English language magazine, Nara Explorer, recommends taking at least an afternoon to explore Naramachi’s mazelike paths. “Strolling through Naramachi is when you’ll really fall in love with Nara,” he said.
In Naramachi, the restaurant Awa (1 Shonami-cho; 81-742-24-5699), set in a town house with pretty courtyard, offers a kaiseki, an elaborate seasonal meal with many courses, distinguished by Italian flourishes: think chilled eggplant with a sorghum and tomato sauce.
Mr. Yonehara’s favorite hangout is the more casual Mangyoku (9 Ganrin-cho; 81-742-22-2265), which occupies a former geisha house and offers tapas-style dishes like octopus marinated in Japanese vinegar and chili.
Locals will also tell you to stop by the Harushika “Spring Deer” sake brewery (27-4 Imamikado-cho; 81-742-23-2255) for a taste of the area’s famous rice wine. For just 400 yen, $4.50 at 89 yen to the dollar, a brewer will pour a sampling of five sakes. Don’t miss a Harushika blend prepared especially for the anniversary celebrations, which Shin Kamemura, a brewer, said is heavenly when taken chilled.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Saturday, January 2, 2010
JAPAN: Paris, Milan, Tokyo. Tokyo?
January 2, 2010
By HIROKO TABUCHI
TOKYO — Japan’s trailblazers of street fashion are the envy of Western designers, spawning Web sites filled with snapshots of Tokyo youngsters in the latest distressed jeans or psychedelic stockings.
With city sidewalks as their catwalks, young Japanese flaunt carefully layered tops and thigh-high boots sporting labels like Galaxxxy, Phenomenon and Function Junction.
But most of Tokyo’s clothing designers have not figured out how to cash in on the city’s fashion sense. Only a handful of Japanese brands, like A Bathing Ape or Evisu Jeans, have gained traction beyond the nation’s shores. Chic local labels like Fur Fur and Garcia Marquez Gauche remain mostly unknown outside Japan.
Experts say that the nation’s fashion industry is too fragmented and too focused on the domestic market to make it overseas.
“For much of this decade, fashion trends have started in Japan and gone global. But Japanese brands don’t even realize that,” said Loic Bizel, a French-born fashion consultant based in Tokyo. Japan “generates trends and ideas, but it stops there,” he said. “Many brands are not even interested in going overseas.”
So each season, Mr. Bizel takes fashion industry buyers from America and Europe — mass clothiers like Hennes & Mauritz of Sweden and Topshop of Britain — to buy up bagfuls of the latest hits. The designs are then whisked overseas to be reworked, resized, stitched together and sold under Western labels.
In that business model, there is little financial gain for Japan. In 2008, Japan’s clothing and apparel-related exports came to a mere $416 million, dwarfed by the $3.68 billion exported by American apparel companies, and a tiny fraction of China’s $113 billion.
Meanwhile, Japan’s domestic apparel industry is on the decline. It shrank 1.3 percent, to 4.37 trillion yen ($48 billion), in 2008, and is expected to post a steeper decline for 2009 as recession-weary consumers and an aging population cut back sharply on spending.
“Japanese fashion might be considered cutting-edge, but overseas markets have been largely elusive,” said Atsushi Izu, an analyst at the Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo. “Japan’s fashion industry is very fragmented, and most companies lack the resources and know-how to bring their brands to foreign markets.”
The government is trying to help. Earlier this year, the Foreign Ministry dispatched a group of suit-clad officials to Tokyo’s hip Harajuku neighborhood to survey the latest trends, part of an effort to promote Japanese fashion overseas. After interviews with shoppers and sales clerks, the ministry came up with a battle plan: to appoint three young trendsetters as “ambassadors” of Japanese chic, charged with extending the industry’s reach overseas and piquing interest in Japanese brands.
One ambassador, Misako Aoki — a model known in Tokyo for her Lolita look of frilly Rococo-inspired dresses paired with platform shoes — has been dispatched to France, Spain, Russia and Brazil, where she has attended expos and hosted fashion talk shows in her trademark floppy bow tie and frilly smock.
“I hope that Lolita fashion and Japanese fashion in general will raise your interest in Japan,” Ms. Aoki said in São Paulo, Brazil, in November after starring in a Lolita fashion show organized by the Japanese embassy. (Although Lolita style is a reference to the Vladimir Nabokov novel “Lolita,” its look is more covered-up Victorian schoolgirl than skin-baring teenage vixen.)
The trade ministry has also helped revamp the twice-yearly Tokyo Collection and started inviting foreign journalists to come on the government’s dime. For the first time this year, the collection, renamed Japan Fashion Week, sponsored a splinter fashion event in New York to showcase Japanese designers, and it has planned another runway show in New York in mid-February.
“Japanese fashion has so much global potential,” says Kenjiro Monji, director general of the Foreign Ministry’s Public Diplomacy Department, who oversees Japan’s cultural push overseas.
But the government’s efforts have won it few fans in the fashion industry. Besides Ms. Aoki, the two other fashion ambassadors chosen by the government are a woman who likes to dress up in cute high school uniforms and another who mixes and matches secondhand clothes. Promoting such niche tastes does little to help the wider fashion industry, many say.
And Japan Fashion Week remains a relative nonevent filled with relatively obscure designers like Motonari Ono and Kazuhiro Takakura. Ambitious young designers hoping to follow in the footsteps of Japanese greats like Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo may have to do what they did: pass over Tokyo’s shows for those in Paris.
Meanwhile, local favorites like Fur Fur — a new brand that mixes airy cotton frocks with distressed trench coats — have neither the expertise nor the resources to market overseas. Despite rave reviews from industry insiders, it has only one small store in Tokyo.
“Of course, taking my brand overseas is a dream,” said Fur Fur’s designer, Aya Furuhashi. “But to be honest, that’s really beyond us right now.”
What Japan’s fashion industry needs is more concrete help in marketing and setting up shop overseas, experts say. The government could also play a larger role helping Japanese labels protect their intellectual property rights, they say.
There are some promising signs. With government support, the start-up Xavel, which runs fashion shows that let women order outfits in real time using their cellphones, has opened shows in Paris and Beijing.
Fast Retailing, which sells the Uniqlo brand, has also been flexing its muscles overseas. Uniqlo, Japan’s answer to Gap, has roots in suburban outlets and does not have the level of respect among young fashion fans that many of Japan’s hipper brands do. But with ample funds and aggressive pricing on its fleece jackets and shirts, Uniqlo has expanded, with 92 stores worldwide.
Tadashi Yanai, chief executive of Fast Retailing, has said he hopes to build it into the world’s biggest apparel company, with sales of 5 trillion yen in 2020.
“We are part of a global economy,” Mr. Yanai said at a recent forum. “We cannot look inward.”
Moshe Komata contributed to this report.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
By HIROKO TABUCHI
TOKYO — Japan’s trailblazers of street fashion are the envy of Western designers, spawning Web sites filled with snapshots of Tokyo youngsters in the latest distressed jeans or psychedelic stockings.
With city sidewalks as their catwalks, young Japanese flaunt carefully layered tops and thigh-high boots sporting labels like Galaxxxy, Phenomenon and Function Junction.
But most of Tokyo’s clothing designers have not figured out how to cash in on the city’s fashion sense. Only a handful of Japanese brands, like A Bathing Ape or Evisu Jeans, have gained traction beyond the nation’s shores. Chic local labels like Fur Fur and Garcia Marquez Gauche remain mostly unknown outside Japan.
Experts say that the nation’s fashion industry is too fragmented and too focused on the domestic market to make it overseas.
“For much of this decade, fashion trends have started in Japan and gone global. But Japanese brands don’t even realize that,” said Loic Bizel, a French-born fashion consultant based in Tokyo. Japan “generates trends and ideas, but it stops there,” he said. “Many brands are not even interested in going overseas.”
So each season, Mr. Bizel takes fashion industry buyers from America and Europe — mass clothiers like Hennes & Mauritz of Sweden and Topshop of Britain — to buy up bagfuls of the latest hits. The designs are then whisked overseas to be reworked, resized, stitched together and sold under Western labels.
In that business model, there is little financial gain for Japan. In 2008, Japan’s clothing and apparel-related exports came to a mere $416 million, dwarfed by the $3.68 billion exported by American apparel companies, and a tiny fraction of China’s $113 billion.
Meanwhile, Japan’s domestic apparel industry is on the decline. It shrank 1.3 percent, to 4.37 trillion yen ($48 billion), in 2008, and is expected to post a steeper decline for 2009 as recession-weary consumers and an aging population cut back sharply on spending.
“Japanese fashion might be considered cutting-edge, but overseas markets have been largely elusive,” said Atsushi Izu, an analyst at the Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo. “Japan’s fashion industry is very fragmented, and most companies lack the resources and know-how to bring their brands to foreign markets.”
The government is trying to help. Earlier this year, the Foreign Ministry dispatched a group of suit-clad officials to Tokyo’s hip Harajuku neighborhood to survey the latest trends, part of an effort to promote Japanese fashion overseas. After interviews with shoppers and sales clerks, the ministry came up with a battle plan: to appoint three young trendsetters as “ambassadors” of Japanese chic, charged with extending the industry’s reach overseas and piquing interest in Japanese brands.
One ambassador, Misako Aoki — a model known in Tokyo for her Lolita look of frilly Rococo-inspired dresses paired with platform shoes — has been dispatched to France, Spain, Russia and Brazil, where she has attended expos and hosted fashion talk shows in her trademark floppy bow tie and frilly smock.
“I hope that Lolita fashion and Japanese fashion in general will raise your interest in Japan,” Ms. Aoki said in São Paulo, Brazil, in November after starring in a Lolita fashion show organized by the Japanese embassy. (Although Lolita style is a reference to the Vladimir Nabokov novel “Lolita,” its look is more covered-up Victorian schoolgirl than skin-baring teenage vixen.)
The trade ministry has also helped revamp the twice-yearly Tokyo Collection and started inviting foreign journalists to come on the government’s dime. For the first time this year, the collection, renamed Japan Fashion Week, sponsored a splinter fashion event in New York to showcase Japanese designers, and it has planned another runway show in New York in mid-February.
“Japanese fashion has so much global potential,” says Kenjiro Monji, director general of the Foreign Ministry’s Public Diplomacy Department, who oversees Japan’s cultural push overseas.
But the government’s efforts have won it few fans in the fashion industry. Besides Ms. Aoki, the two other fashion ambassadors chosen by the government are a woman who likes to dress up in cute high school uniforms and another who mixes and matches secondhand clothes. Promoting such niche tastes does little to help the wider fashion industry, many say.
And Japan Fashion Week remains a relative nonevent filled with relatively obscure designers like Motonari Ono and Kazuhiro Takakura. Ambitious young designers hoping to follow in the footsteps of Japanese greats like Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo may have to do what they did: pass over Tokyo’s shows for those in Paris.
Meanwhile, local favorites like Fur Fur — a new brand that mixes airy cotton frocks with distressed trench coats — have neither the expertise nor the resources to market overseas. Despite rave reviews from industry insiders, it has only one small store in Tokyo.
“Of course, taking my brand overseas is a dream,” said Fur Fur’s designer, Aya Furuhashi. “But to be honest, that’s really beyond us right now.”
What Japan’s fashion industry needs is more concrete help in marketing and setting up shop overseas, experts say. The government could also play a larger role helping Japanese labels protect their intellectual property rights, they say.
There are some promising signs. With government support, the start-up Xavel, which runs fashion shows that let women order outfits in real time using their cellphones, has opened shows in Paris and Beijing.
Fast Retailing, which sells the Uniqlo brand, has also been flexing its muscles overseas. Uniqlo, Japan’s answer to Gap, has roots in suburban outlets and does not have the level of respect among young fashion fans that many of Japan’s hipper brands do. But with ample funds and aggressive pricing on its fleece jackets and shirts, Uniqlo has expanded, with 92 stores worldwide.
Tadashi Yanai, chief executive of Fast Retailing, has said he hopes to build it into the world’s biggest apparel company, with sales of 5 trillion yen in 2020.
“We are part of a global economy,” Mr. Yanai said at a recent forum. “We cannot look inward.”
Moshe Komata contributed to this report.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
JAPAN: For Some in Japan, Home Is a Tiny Plastic Bunk
January 2, 2010
By HIROKO TABUCHI
TOKYO — For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels.
“It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.”
When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.
Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.
Once-booming exporters laid off workers en masse in 2009 as the global economic crisis pushed down demand. Many of the newly unemployed, forced from their company-sponsored housing or unable to make rent, have become homeless.
The country’s woes have led the government to open emergency shelters over the New Year holiday in a nationwide drive to help the homeless. The Democratic Party, which swept to power in September, wants to avoid the fate of the previous pro-business government, which was caught off-guard when unemployed workers pitched tents near public offices last year to call attention to their plight.
“In this bitter-cold New Year’s season, the government intends to do all it can to help those who face hardship,” Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said in a video posted Dec. 26 on YouTube. “You are not alone.”
On Friday, he visited a Tokyo shelter housing 700 homeless people, telling reporters that “help can’t wait.”
Mr. Nakanishi considers himself relatively lucky. After working odd jobs on an Isuzu assembly line, at pachinko parlors and as a security guard, Mr. Nakanishi, 40, moved into the capsule hotel in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district in April to save on rent while he worked night shifts at a delivery company.
Mr. Nakanishi, who studied economics at a regional university, dreams of becoming a lawyer and pores over legal manuals during the day. But with no job since Christmas, he does not know how much longer he can afford a capsule bed.
The rent is surprisingly high for such a small space: 59,000 yen a month, or about $640, for an upper bunk. But with no upfront deposit or extra utility charges, and basic amenities like fresh linens and free use of a communal bath and sauna, the cost is far less than renting an apartment in Tokyo, Mr. Nakanishi says.
Still, it is a bleak world where deep sleep is rare. The capsules do not have doors, only screens that pull down. Every bump of the shoulder on the plastic walls, every muffled cough, echoes loudly through the rows.
Each capsule is furnished only with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks.
Most possessions, from shirts to shaving cream, must be kept in lockers. There is a common room with old couches, a dining area and rows of sinks. Cigarette smoke is everywhere, as are security cameras. But the hotel staff does its best to put guests at ease: “Welcome home,” employees say at the entrance.
“Our main clients used to be salarymen who were out drinking and missed the last train,” said Tetsuya Akasako, head manager at the hotel.
But about two years ago, the hotel started to notice that guests were staying weeks, then months, he said. This year, it introduced a reduced rent for dwellers of a month or longer; now, about 100 of the hotel’s 300 capsules are rented out by the month.
After requests from its long-term dwellers, the hotel received special government permission to let them register their capsules as their official abode; that made it easier to land job interviews.
At 2 a.m. on one recent December night, two young women watched the American television show “24” on a TV inside the sauna. One said she had traveled to Tokyo from her native Gunma, north of the city, to look for work. She intended to be a hostess at one of the capital’s cabaret clubs, where women engage in conversation with men for a fee.
The woman, 20, said she was hoping to land a job with a club that would put her up in an apartment. She declined to give her name because she did not want her family to know her whereabouts.
“It’s tough to live like this, but it won’t be for too long,” she said. “At least there are more jobs here than in Gunma.”
The government says about 15,800 people live on the streets in Japan, but aid groups put the figure much higher, with at least 10,000 in Tokyo alone. Those numbers do not count the city’s “hidden” homeless, like those who live in capsule hotels. There is also a floating population that sleeps overnight in the country’s many 24-hour Internet cafes and saunas.
The jobless rate, at 5.2 percent, is at a record high, and the number of households on welfare has risen sharply. The country’s 15.7 percent poverty rate is one of the highest among industrialized nations.
These statistics have helped shatter an image, held since the country’s rise as an industrial power in the 1970s, that Japan is a classless society.
“When the country enjoyed rapid economic growth, standards of living improved across the board and class differences were obscured,” said Prof. Hiroshi Ishida of the University of Tokyo. “With a stagnating economy, class is more visible again.”
The government has poured money into bolstering Japan’s social welfare system, promising cash payments to households with children and abolishing tuition fees at public high schools.
Still, Naoto Iwaya, 46, is on the verge of joining the hopeless. A former tuna fisherman, he has been living at another capsule hotel in Tokyo since August. He most recently worked on a landfill at the city’s Haneda Airport, but that job ended last month.
“I have looked and looked, but there are no jobs. Now my savings are almost gone,” Mr. Iwaya said, after checking into an emergency shelter in Tokyo. He will be allowed to stay until Monday.
After that, he said, “I don’t know where I can go.”
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
By HIROKO TABUCHI
TOKYO — For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels.
“It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.”
When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.
Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.
Once-booming exporters laid off workers en masse in 2009 as the global economic crisis pushed down demand. Many of the newly unemployed, forced from their company-sponsored housing or unable to make rent, have become homeless.
The country’s woes have led the government to open emergency shelters over the New Year holiday in a nationwide drive to help the homeless. The Democratic Party, which swept to power in September, wants to avoid the fate of the previous pro-business government, which was caught off-guard when unemployed workers pitched tents near public offices last year to call attention to their plight.
“In this bitter-cold New Year’s season, the government intends to do all it can to help those who face hardship,” Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said in a video posted Dec. 26 on YouTube. “You are not alone.”
On Friday, he visited a Tokyo shelter housing 700 homeless people, telling reporters that “help can’t wait.”
Mr. Nakanishi considers himself relatively lucky. After working odd jobs on an Isuzu assembly line, at pachinko parlors and as a security guard, Mr. Nakanishi, 40, moved into the capsule hotel in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district in April to save on rent while he worked night shifts at a delivery company.
Mr. Nakanishi, who studied economics at a regional university, dreams of becoming a lawyer and pores over legal manuals during the day. But with no job since Christmas, he does not know how much longer he can afford a capsule bed.
The rent is surprisingly high for such a small space: 59,000 yen a month, or about $640, for an upper bunk. But with no upfront deposit or extra utility charges, and basic amenities like fresh linens and free use of a communal bath and sauna, the cost is far less than renting an apartment in Tokyo, Mr. Nakanishi says.
Still, it is a bleak world where deep sleep is rare. The capsules do not have doors, only screens that pull down. Every bump of the shoulder on the plastic walls, every muffled cough, echoes loudly through the rows.
Each capsule is furnished only with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks.
Most possessions, from shirts to shaving cream, must be kept in lockers. There is a common room with old couches, a dining area and rows of sinks. Cigarette smoke is everywhere, as are security cameras. But the hotel staff does its best to put guests at ease: “Welcome home,” employees say at the entrance.
“Our main clients used to be salarymen who were out drinking and missed the last train,” said Tetsuya Akasako, head manager at the hotel.
But about two years ago, the hotel started to notice that guests were staying weeks, then months, he said. This year, it introduced a reduced rent for dwellers of a month or longer; now, about 100 of the hotel’s 300 capsules are rented out by the month.
After requests from its long-term dwellers, the hotel received special government permission to let them register their capsules as their official abode; that made it easier to land job interviews.
At 2 a.m. on one recent December night, two young women watched the American television show “24” on a TV inside the sauna. One said she had traveled to Tokyo from her native Gunma, north of the city, to look for work. She intended to be a hostess at one of the capital’s cabaret clubs, where women engage in conversation with men for a fee.
The woman, 20, said she was hoping to land a job with a club that would put her up in an apartment. She declined to give her name because she did not want her family to know her whereabouts.
“It’s tough to live like this, but it won’t be for too long,” she said. “At least there are more jobs here than in Gunma.”
The government says about 15,800 people live on the streets in Japan, but aid groups put the figure much higher, with at least 10,000 in Tokyo alone. Those numbers do not count the city’s “hidden” homeless, like those who live in capsule hotels. There is also a floating population that sleeps overnight in the country’s many 24-hour Internet cafes and saunas.
The jobless rate, at 5.2 percent, is at a record high, and the number of households on welfare has risen sharply. The country’s 15.7 percent poverty rate is one of the highest among industrialized nations.
These statistics have helped shatter an image, held since the country’s rise as an industrial power in the 1970s, that Japan is a classless society.
“When the country enjoyed rapid economic growth, standards of living improved across the board and class differences were obscured,” said Prof. Hiroshi Ishida of the University of Tokyo. “With a stagnating economy, class is more visible again.”
The government has poured money into bolstering Japan’s social welfare system, promising cash payments to households with children and abolishing tuition fees at public high schools.
Still, Naoto Iwaya, 46, is on the verge of joining the hopeless. A former tuna fisherman, he has been living at another capsule hotel in Tokyo since August. He most recently worked on a landfill at the city’s Haneda Airport, but that job ended last month.
“I have looked and looked, but there are no jobs. Now my savings are almost gone,” Mr. Iwaya said, after checking into an emergency shelter in Tokyo. He will be allowed to stay until Monday.
After that, he said, “I don’t know where I can go.”
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
THE KOREAS: Serving a Father by Bringing Long-Lost Koreans Home
Woohae Cho for The New York Times
“I have been a headache for the South Korean government, but I am finally carrying out my filial duty to my father.” — Choi Sung-yong
January 2, 2010
The Saturday Profile
SEOUL, South Korea
CHOI SUNG-YONG remembers his father as a war hero who became a successful fishing boat captain, a reserved man who helped at orphanages and once splurged to buy his music-loving teenage son a record player, a true luxury at the time.
But all the memories are tinged with loss. In 1967, when Mr. Choi was just 15, his father’s boat failed to return from sea. The family went into mourning, assuming the boat had sunk. But three months later they were shocked to learn that Mr. Choi’s father, Choi Won-mo, was alive, but lost to them. His vessel, it turned out, had been captured by North Korea, and when the North Koreans released the crew, they kept Mr. Choi’s father.
In the more than four decades since, Mr. Choi, 57, has devoted himself to trying to find his father and the hundreds of other missing South Koreans believed to have been snatched by North Korean agents.
He toils in a tiny office here, where the walls are covered with sepia-toned photos of the missing.
“So far,” he said, “my work has been a lonely fight.”
Unlike in Japan — where the plight of fewer than 20 Japanese abductees has become something of a national obsession — the issue of the disappeared is a divisive one here, freighted with a tangle of conflicting emotions about the North and the collective suffering of South Koreans since the peninsula’s fratricidal war from 1950 to 1953.
In the early years, South Korea’s fervently anti-Communist military rulers treated families like Mr. Choi’s with suspicion, fearful that those who had disappeared were defectors lured by the same ideology that helped cleave the country. But even a shift away from authoritarianism did not help. A succession of liberal presidents who gained power in democratic elections starting in the 1990s ignored the families’ cause in pursuit of reconciliation with the North.
While South Korea’s current, conservative, president, Lee Myung-bak, has taken a tougher line on the abduction issue, the South Korean public remains far less passionate on the subject than the Japanese, who helped drive their leaders not only to sever economic ties with the North, but also to continually urge the United States not to forget the abductees in its drive to get the North to give up its nuclear weapons program.
Fed up with waiting, Mr. Choi decided years ago to take matters into his own hands. In the late 1990s, he began traveling to northern China, where he developed contacts among North Koreans to try to gather information about his father.
Over time, he built something of an underground railroad in the North by using Koreans, sometimes by paying, to help the abductees escape across the border. And slowly, he began to achieve, in a small way, what the Seoul government has so far failed to do.
SINCE 2000, Mr. Choi says, Abductees’ Family Union, which he leads, has smuggled seven South Koreans back to their country via China, including one who later returned to the North because he had started a family there. Officials at South Korea’s Ministry of Unification, which helps oversee inter-Korean relations, acknowledge that Mr. Choi has succeeded in bringing out abducted South Koreans, though they will not confirm the number.
His efforts — and his role with Abductees’ Family Union, which lobbies for the families of 505 civilians thought by the South Korean government to have been kidnapped — have earned him wide attention in the South’s media. They have also, he says, led to death threats from the North.
As a result, he is now afraid to travel to China. But he says he will press on until he finds out what happened to his father, who would be 99 years old now if still alive, or at least retrieve his remains. His father’s former crew said his father had been kept in the North because of his war record, and Mr. Choi fears he may have been executed.
“I have been a headache for the South Korean government,” Mr. Choi said. “But I am finally carrying out my filial duty to my father.”
Like his father, most of the missing are fishermen who vanished when they ventured out to sea in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on South Korean intelligence and the tales of defectors, it appears that the North had several goals in mind when it captured South Koreans. Some were put to work as laborers. Others — like at least some of the Japanese — helped train spies who had little chance to learn about other nations, given their reclusive leaders’ absolute control on news and penchant for propaganda.
The abductees, experts on the issue in the South say, were also tools for the North’s propaganda machine; North Korea still insists that South Koreans who left their country defected for a happier life.
One of those who Mr. Choi’s group smuggled out of North Korea is Choi Wook-il, who is no relation to him. A shrimp fisherman, Choi Wook-il said his boat was seized by a North Korean gunboat in 1975. He was kept in the North until three years ago, when he was led at night across a frozen river into China and freedom, he said.
Now 69, he lives with his wife in a government-provided apartment in the city of Ansan, south of Seoul.
He said that without the efforts of Choi Sung-yong, he would never have been able to return to his life. “He is the only one making efforts.”
The fisherman’s wife, Yang Jeong-ja, 67, said she thought he was dead until Choi Sung-yong one day showed her a letter her husband had written to his brother, which was smuggled out via China. He also presented a picture of her husband taken in North Korea and said he could get her husband out. Ms. Yang was skeptical, but agreed to his plan.
Her husband said that one night almost a decade ago, he got a knock on the door from a North Korean who said he had been sent by Ms. Yang to lead him to China. At first, Mr. Choi — who had been working on a pear and corn farm because his middle-school education was deemed inadequate for spy training — said he did not believe his visitor. It took nine visits until he finally agreed to leave. After they arrived in South Korea, his guide defected. The other Mr. Choi said such successes help make up for the continued pushback from many South Koreans.
He has been criticized by government officials and many people in the public for threatening the South’s engagement with the North, which most South Koreans support in some form. That stance is somewhat pragmatic; those who want to unite with the North say peace will not only allow any abductees who are alive to return home, but also reunite the thousands of families split up during the war.
Experts say it is also difficult for the families of those who were kidnapped to gain sympathy because many of their countrymen feel some bitterness about their singling out their own suffering when so many families have been separated.
“This issue has been intertwined with all the national pain,” said Lee Keum-soon, a researcher on the abductions at the Korea Institute for National Unification, a government-financed research center.
FAMILIES of abductees say they are more hopeful now. President Lee, who took office two years ago, in November called addressing the abduction issue a precondition for holding any future summit meeting with the North.
Mr. Choi has also been appointed to a group that advises the government as it continues to investigate missing persons cases to determine if more of them are possible abductees. On his wall, he proudly displays a plaque that he received in 2009 from the president proclaiming his father a patriot for having piloted a boat that clandestinely dropped off guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines during the Korean War.
“Whenever I ask a North Korean for news of my father, my heart still beats wildly,” Mr. Choi said. “I have struggled to accept that I am a child whose father will never return.”
Su-Hyun Lee contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 5, 2010
A picture with the Saturday Profile about Choi Sung-yong, the leader of Abductees’ Family Union who works to bring home South Koreans believed to have been kidnapped by North Korea, was published in error. The picture showed Choi Wook-il, a man who was smuggled out of the North by the Abductees’ Family Union; it was not of Choi Sung-yong.
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