1. Megumi Yokota was born on 5 October 1964 and is a Japanese citizen who was abducted by a North Korean agent in 1977 when she was a thirteen-year-old junior high school student.
20 Facts About Megumi Yokota
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Megumi Yokota was one of at least seventeen Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
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Megumi Yokota was abducted on 15 November 1977 at the age of thirteen while walking home from school in her seaside village in Niigata Prefecture.
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Megumi Yokota was eventually assigned to a university where North Korean spies were taught foreign languages, customs and practices.
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Megumi Yokota is believed to have been abducted by Sin Gwang-su.
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In June 2006, Kim Young-nam, who has since remarried, was allowed to have his family from the South visit him, and during the reunion he confirmed Megumi Yokota had committed suicide in 1994 after suffering from mental illness, and had several attempts at suicide before.
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Megumi Yokota claimed the remains returned in 2004 are genuine.
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Megumi Yokota's comments were however widely dismissed as repeating the official Pyongyang line, with Megumi's father claiming that Young-nam was not allowed to speak freely during his interview in Pyongyang, stating that "he was likely restricted in terms of what he can say" and that "it looked as if he was reading a script".
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In June 2012, Choi Seong-ryong, head of a support group for relatives of South Koreans abducted to the North, claimed that he had obtained North Korean government documents which stated that Megumi Yokota had died from "depression" on 14 December 2004.
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In March 2014, the parents of Megumi Yokota met their granddaughter Kim Eun-gyong for the first time in Mongolia, along with her own baby daughter, whose father was not identified.
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Thae Yong-ho, North Korea's former Deputy Ambassador to the United Kingdom who defected to the South, claimed in his book Passcode to the Third Floor Secretariat that the controversy regarding the return of Megumi Yokota's remains was unexpected by Kim Jong-il and caused significant infighting between the ministry and Kim Jong-Il's staff, leading Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Kang Sok-ju to demand an explanation.
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Yokota Megumi died of a mental illness at the No 49 Hospital [A special type of Psychiatric Institutions located in remote areas reserved for severe illnesses].
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Megumi Yokota died at a time when those who died at the hospital were buried in a mountain behind the hospital without even a funeral.
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The authorities relied simply on the memory of a staff member to find the spot where they thought Megumi Yokota's remains were buried, and after looking around there they found some remains.
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An interview in the 3 February 2005 issue of Nature revealed that the DNA analysis on Megumi Yokota's remains had been performed by a member of the medical department of Teikyo University, Yoshii Tomio.
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Megumi Yokota said that he had no previous experience in the analysis of cremated specimens, described his tests as inconclusive, and remarked that such samples were very easily contaminated by anyone coming in contact with them, like "stiff sponges that can absorb anything".
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Yokota's parents supervised the creation of a serial manga, one titled Megumi detailing her last days in Japan before her abduction, and another titled Dakkan about returned victim Kaoru Hasuike.
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On 10 October 2011, Japan Today reported a defector had asserted that Megumi Yokota was still alive, but that she was not allowed to leave North Korea because she was in possession of sensitive information.
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In early 2007, Paul Stookey introduced a song dedicated to Megumi Yokota, titled "Song for Megumi Yokota".
20.
In 2010, British rock singer Peter Frampton recorded two songs about Megumi Yokota after watching the documentary Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story on PBS.