Tokyo Station commuters pass video ads featuring the family of North Korean abductee Megumi Yokota on Aug. 21, 2024. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
TOKYO — A 15-second video playing every six minutes in the world’s busiest train stations reminds millions of commuters of a 13-year-old Japanese girl kidnapped from her home nearly five decades ago by North Korean agents.
The video will play throughout this month on digital screens in Japan Railway stations in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area, including Tokyo, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro and Yokohama, according to Asagao-no-kai, the group responsible.
The digital advertisement shows images of Megumi Yokota, along with her brothers and father, Shigeru, who died in 2020. An accompanying message states, “We just want to get our happy family back.”
Another photo of Yokota’s 88-year-old mother, Sakie Yokota, carries the message: “Please let me see Megumi while I’m still alive.”
Asagao-no-kai is a group of the Yokota family’s neighbors, who have been supporting effort to get their daughter back.
“In order to make the reunion reality, we are running an opinion advertisement to urge Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to carry out summit talks,” the group announced a news release last month.
Japanese authorities believe Yokota was taken by the North while walking home from her junior high school in Niigata, a port city on the Sea of Japan, on Nov. 11, 1977. She was 13 at the time.
“What we want to convey is to get our family back and to make sure she is safe while I’m still alive and to be able see her, even just a glance,” Sakie Yokota said in a statement provided by the group by email Thursday.
“I would like everyone who sees this to remember that this is still a real issue and not something of the past, and that such tragedy could happen again at any time as this issue has not been resolved,” she added.
Yokohama Station commuters pass video ads featuring the family of North Korean abductee Megumi Yokota on Aug. 21, 2024. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)
In 2002, North Korea admitted to abducting Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s, and apologized during a summit with Tokyo, according to Japan’s Foreign Ministry.
Five abductees were returned to Japan that October; however, another dozen remain unaccounted for, including Megumi Yokota. Japan continues to investigate more than 800 people who may have been abducted, according to the Cabinet Office.
Ambassador Julie Turner, the U.S. special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, visited Niigata in February and walked the same route from the school to the beach where Yokota vanished. Turner pledged to help resolve the Japanese abduction issue.
Kishida is seeking a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to bring other abductees home as quickly as possible. However, Pyongyang says all living abductees have been returned.
North Korea may have abducted Japanese citizens to teach their spies the Japanese language and to use their identities to enter South Korea, according to the National Police Agency website.
