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by Sakie Yokota
On November 15, 1977, 13 year-old Megumi Yokota disappeared without a trace while on her way home from school.
Twenty years later a newspaper revealed she was abducted by North Korean operatives and was still in North Korea. Megumi and at least 13 others were taken from coastal cities in Japan during the 1970s and 80s, shoved into holding cells on spy vessels, and shipped off to North Korea to train agents in Japanese culture and customs. The perpetrators of the Korean Air Flight 858 bombing in 1987 posed as Japanese nationals thanks to such training.
North Korea Kidnapped My Daughter is Sakie Yokota's memoir of the last 30 years without her daughter. Her resounding faith is inspirational as is her unfaltering determination to repatriate Megumi. Mrs. Yokota vividly recounts the horrifying panic when Megumi went missing and the entire ordeal of her daughter's absence.
In 2002, North Korea released five of the victims, claiming the other eight were dead; however, it refused to provide legitimate evidence to support these claims. After four years of deliberations in Japan, Sakie Yokota attended the first U.S. Congressional hearing on the abductions and asked America for help.
If alive, Megumi is now 44 years old. Her mother and father have aged, her twin brothers have families of their own, and while they know where Megumi was taken to, she still has not been returned. Mrs. Yokota is strongly opposed to any "de-listing" of North Korea barring the return of the remaining abductees.
"The abduction issue may be Japanese-centric but it must be understood in the broader context of an assault on the dignity of the family, everyone's family." —James A. Leach, Former House of Representative Member and chairman of the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
"The Yokotas' story has everything: intrigue, suspense, international scandal, betrayal, hope, despair, faith, endurance, redemption. Most of all, it has the stirring example of a mother's love that unexpectedly brought her to faith and a role on the world stage." —Philip Yancey
This information about North Korea Kidnapped My Daughter was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sakie Yokota was a simple housewife, happily married with a 13-year-old daughter and twin 7-year old sons, when her daughter Megumi mysteriously disappeared in November 1977. Through tireless efforts and relentless faith, she fought to find answers to her daughter's fate, eventually coming up against an international espionage conspiracy involving North Korea under the leadership of Kim Jong-il.
In 1997, her husband Shigeru was designated chairman of the newly founded Association of the Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea. The Association supports the victims of North Korea's abductions of Japanese citizens in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In August 2006, Sakie met with President Bush to further talks about demanding sanctions on North Korea.
Today, Sakie still does not know whether Megumi is alive or not.
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