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Do you believe some Japanese abductees are still alive in North Korea, and if you do, why do you think North Korea hasn't come clean on the issue?

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Most likely some may still be alive but to sensitive to release publicly. Why not grab one of Kim's family members out of the whorehouses of Macau and beat the truth out of him?

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They are probably still alive, never to be returned.

North Korea won't come clean beacause- there is only a North and South Korea because of Japan. They will not forget that. That is why this problem will never go away. Paying money after a war is very very different to being sorry and trying to fix the probelm.

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My gut feeling is that Megumi Yokota and the others are not alive, though I have no evidence one way or the other. I just can't come up with a good theory as to why North Korea wouldn't have let them return to Japan with the others in 2002. I don't buy the argument that Megumi, Taguchi and others know too much sensitive information about North Korea. As Japanese abductees, it is unlikely they would have been given access to top secret info. And even if they did have sensitive info, wouldn't it have been more prudent for North Korea to kill them once all this came to light in 2002, rather than keeping them alive?

Anyway, if they are alive and come back to Japan, on that day I will rejoice with the relatives.

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my gut says if any are still alive in NK that they themselves do not want to rtn to Jpn because of what they had to do to survive.

but my gut also says there probably arent any survivors because lets face it, NK is a very harsh place for 99.999% of the population, many illnesses can & do takes lives there so its unlikely anyone there now will live to ripe age, just they way it is in NK

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The way DPRK used the abductees (spying activities) make me think that they probably know to much about DPRK to be released. Same with the Japanese Red Army terrorists who hijacked this plane to PyongYang (8 members If I am not mistaked), they could never come back to Japan because they just became spies (one of them was caught in Tokyo in the 80s, but he was planning to launch a terrorist attack during the Seoul Olympics though). On the other hand,I remember this government mole in Aum Shinrikyo who fled to NK (don t remember her name) to seek political asylum. She stayed in DPRK for a while and could come back anytime she wanted, probably because she didn t acces any sensitive information (and also because she prolly was a nutcase).

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Most likely some may still be alive but to sensitive to release publicly. Why not grab one of Kim's family members out of the whorehouses of Macau and beat the truth out of him?

Yep, Japan missed its chance when they got the son of Kim Jong Ill on a passport violation at Narita about 10 years ago. Of all things, he was trying to sneak into Japan to go to Disneyland (probably sick of the socialist paradise). Japan just PNGed him and sent him on his way. Then again, at that time the Japanese government was still not admitting to the possibility that its citizens had been abducted by NK.

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Really,who cares ? Most Japanese couldn't give a rats about the issue,don't have an opinion on it and find those Yokota's sad and embarrassing.It's Japan's issue,why doesn't it take responsibility for it instead of asking America all the time ? After what the Japnese did to Koreans in history,it's no wonder people don't care about 47 people that were kidnapped....

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The Japanese national obsession with this matter is getting in the way of the much more important isue of cooperating with other countries to keep the lid on North Korean nukes and stop the North Korean military from developing their ballistic missile capabilities. Japan should be much more forthcoming in providing financial development support to North Korea as part of a workable international settlement on the nuke issue. Otherwise Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be repeated in the future.

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In all probability they are already dead, NK is not the sort of place that would keep them alive after they had no useful purpose but were in fact possibly becoming a risk &/or an embarrassment

Potsu at 02:15 PM JST - 12th March

“Really,who cares ?”

I do & a lot of others do too. What an incredibly selfish comment to write? If they are not your family or from your country they are not important.

Ayesha at 04:40 PM JST - 12th March

“Japan should be much more forthcoming in providing financial development support to North Korea”

What utter nonsense.

Perhaps you should volunteer to go there now as a special advisor. It would get you away from all those things Japanese that you so obviously dislike so much.

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Some may be alive, some may be dead. No way of knowing without a full and complete investigation with North Korean cooperation. And they haven't come clean on this issue because such an investigation would reveal far too much of their secret operations and past history. It would take a complete cleaning-house of the DPRK regime, or a replacement thereof, to achieve this.

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the way this goes back and forth every year reminds me of all the conspiracy theories that get tossed around about places like "Area 51" in the States. the DPRK government is so shoddy and is on the verge of collapse at any given moment. Whether the japanese people are alive or not is probably beyond their capability to keep track.

A few years ago when this bruhaha was stirred up, the DPRK sent remains that were eventually identified as belonging to an animal but they had been cremated twice. Many yelled foul and said it was proof of a conspiracy to hide the truth, but from what the TV hidden cameras have revealed in the DPRK itself, I don't think they have the technology or guile to be so devious. I think they looked up in their files and the only match they had was the site where they got the bones. They dug up something put it in a box and sent it on its merry way. To the ditch-diggers, they likely didn't care what it was. Case closed. Its a communism, right? no one gets paid more for doing a good job. so why bother.

The Yokotas might as well look for bigfoot as hope to get some clear answers out of that mess of a country.

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If those people are still alive (and I'm not decided on this issue) I think NK could take its pick on the reasons: 1) Pure embarrassment as to what it has done; 2) It still needs those people for some future reason; 3) It wants to hurt or annoy Japan any way it can; 4) Maybe some/all of those kidnapped people mightn't even want to come back; 5) More ammunition to use for bargaining at some point and; 6) NK just doesn't want to give them back.

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Does anyone under the age of 60 actually care about this non-issue in Japan? Nobody I've asked seems to care, yet it's on the tv everyday.

Is it not painfully obvious that the government mouthpiece, NHK and the other "networks" are just pushing this to cover up the gross negligence which passes for governance in Tokyo??? Heaven forbid the masses awaken and catch the burglars in the act of robbing their country blind. They'll be fanning the flames of nationalism/fascism hard and fast here once economic shock takes hold.

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I would belive that some are still alive in NK. Why won't NK come clean? Because they are on an ego trip that says if the dear little leader commands it then it must be the right thing.

But this isn't a non-issue. It has everything to do with NK's behavior toward it's neighbors. NK owes the world a lot of explanations and should not be let off the hook on any of them as long as they persist in their agressive, arrogant behavior.

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When I lived in Niigata, the people I met there were generally interested in this issue for obvious reasons, and disgusted that successive governments for many years had virtually ignored the abductee issue.

What benefit would there be for N. Korea to "come clean" on this issue? Japan has taken a hard-line stance this decade against N. Korea concerning the abductees, tying any deals on aid/normalization of relations etc. to the resolution of these cases.

However, no matter how tragic the situation may be, Japan has foolishly put all of its eggs in one basket, so to speak, while the other countries dealing with N. Korea are taking a much broader approach to issues like N. Korea's nuclear program.

There is no military option available to Japan to force the issue.

Making another tear-jerker movie about the abductees won't help, either.

N. Korea can thumb its nose at Japan for the foreseeable future.

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If the remaining abductees are still alive, I think the North Koreans could be holding out for an offer from Japan that's good enough for them to consider handing them back over. I suspect, however, that they're dead and that the Japanese government does at least suspect this as well. It probably suits various LDP politicians to pretend otherwise though, as I think they've got it into their tiny brains that talking tough about the abductees is a good vote-winner.

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Clearly North Korea is a terrorist state: their current policy is to drag this out as long as possible so the television viewing public in Japan continue to be bored senseless by this issue on the news.

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"When I lived in Niigata, the people I met there were generally interested in this issue for obvious reasons, and disgusted that successive governments for many years had virtually ignored the abductee issue".

I think that is really a key point in the whole issue. Why wasn't something done much earlier? As I see it, Japan has far more problems now than it did in the 70s, 80s and 90s and is using the kidnappings as a tool to deflect attention from other issues in Japan (which are far more important). A complete failure of the Japanese government to protect its own people.

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This hurtful treatment of the North Koreans has gone on long enough. I feel very sad for the horror, oh the horror.

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