On the afternoon of November 15, 1977, 13-year-old Megumi Yokota was returning home with a group of peers after their training.
The distance from the badminton court to its front door was not more than 7 minutes and the little Japanese woman was famous for the accuracy of her movements.
When she left her friends at a turn, she had only 100 meters left until she reached the house and her mother who was waiting for her.
But Megumi never reached its destination. At the time they declared disappearance Her parents knew something tragic had happened to her.
With extensive Japanese police investigations turning fruitless, Sakie and Shigeru Yokota believed their daughter was lost forever. Only the truth was to prove even more tragic than this black possibility.
Megumi woke up at some point and saw that she was trapped inside a rusty fishing boat. In the direction of North Korea.
Unfortunately she would not be the only one. We have at least 17 confirmed abductions of Japanese citizens by the North Korean regime, and Japanese officials sometimes even refer to the hundreds of young people found in this creepy way living in the Hermetic kingdom.
The mysterious disappearances of young Japanese women between 1977-1983 were numerous and frequent because they did not form a pattern of action. Why did so many disappear in seven years and the numbers plummet afterwards?
The case of little Yokota, an endless thriller for her parents and relatives, would bring to light North Korea's so-called "kidnapping industry", a secret mass kidnapping operation carried out entirely by Kim Jong Il's agents.
But what did the North Koreans want from all these Japanese? Here the thing becomes even scarier…
The beginnings of the conspiracy plan of his regime Kim Jong Il does not start with the disappearance of Megumi, but goes even further back in time.
In the years of the founder of the Hermetic kingdom, Kim Il Sung, father of Kim Jong Il and grandfather of the current leader Kim Jong Un.
As early as 1948, North Korean dictator launches a plan to replenish the lost scientific and intellectual potential of all those intellectuals and scientists who had fled en masse to South Korea.
At first, South Korean fishermen and teenagers were abducted en masse, lost magically from beaches and coastal cities. Hundreds of such disappearances were counted by South Korea in the first years of the Great Leader's rule.
After the Korean War (1950-1953) and its absolute dominance, however, Grandpa Kim found himself facing more pressing needs, both in specialized technical staff and in terms of propaganda against his southern neighbor.
He no longer had enough of the commentators and fishermen, nor the South Koreans who were trapped in the adventures of the 38th parallel and the demarcation of the new borders. Another tragic story in itself.
Kim Il Sung dreamed of extending the revolution beyond its borders, and for that to happen, he knew exactly how.
1970 was the year that the focus of the abduction program shifted from South Korea to Japan.
The Japanese Red Army Faction, a far-left paramilitary organization (also known as the Japanese Red Army) that once hijacked a Japanese Airlines flight and landed in Pyongyang, sought asylum.
The intention of the terrorist organization was to train its members in the guerrilla war and to return to Japan to start their "red" revolution.
Kim was happy with all this. His anti-Japaneseism and his dream of a communist Japan may have finally come to fruition.
It may sound strange, but it was a pressing problem of the Faction members that pushed him to the kidnappings. At one point the companion of a member of the armed sect went and found him in Pyongyang and the rest protested that they also wanted Japanese women.
It was Kim Il Sung's son, Kim Jong Il, who decided to send his agents to Japan to recruit brides for the guerrillas. Father and son agreed that Japan should be the next target of their abductions, as it only had benefits for the regime.
Aside from women terrorists, nearby Japan would supply North Korea with fresh and why not specialized personnel. But also people who would learn Japanese from the North Koreans.
The agents could adopt their identities and penetrate the country more easily. But also in every other country in the world, as in 1970 the Japanese passport entered without a visa in almost every state of the universe, an incomparable benefit for every agency job.
There was another aspect to Grandpa Kim. He had long sought to extend his philosophy, the "ideology of national self-sufficiency" (Juche), to the rest of East Asia, and the Japanese language was seen as a decisive factor in such propaganda purposes.
Everyone was shouting Japan and that is exactly what they would do…
The only problem; How Japan had no idea that its citizens had become a central target of the Hermetic kingdom. He would soon find out, however, as North Korean companies developed a typical method of abducting their victims.
They crossed it with big ships Sea of Japan, so as not to arouse suspicion, boats carrying several speedboats disguised as fishing boats. With these they reached the shores to transport the victims to the open.
This is how the abductions like that of Megumi Yokota took place. How many? There is no consensus here. The Japanese state officially recognizes 17 abductions (8 men and 9 women) and the North Korean regime has admitted to stealing 13.
For some we also know their stories. As for the then 20-year-old law student Kaoru Hasuike and his wife Yukiko Okoda, who disappeared from their home on July 19, 1978.
They were made to live in a house surrounded by fences and armed guards, in special zones closed to the public, and spent all day translating documents and learning Japanese with North Korean agents.
They also received a small salary, with which they bought food for their growing family on the black market. But they did not live "normally". Their freedom was very limited.
They were obliged to attend Kim's ideological schools, brainwashing them to Juche's ideals, and to record their thoughts daily in diaries to judge their degree of compliance with the regime.
According to the couple's testimony, the real reward they offered for their work was the promise that one day they would be returned home.
What would that day be like? When the communist ideology would have prevailed in Japan and they could now live according to the new ideals they were supposed to embrace.
The couple returned to Japan in October 2002, along with a few more abduction victims, when the regime allowed them to leave. Kaoru and Yukiko did not think about it for a moment, despite the fact that their children were still trapped in North Korea.
Diplomatic fever eventually persuaded Kim Jong Il to let them go in 2004. Hasuike's autobiography "Abduction and My Decision" remains one of the main sources for what the abduction victims experienced in the Hermetic kingdom.
In a second book of victims' testimonies, Robert Boynton's "The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project," another abductee said he was told of his release:
"You will return to Japan, where your experiences here will help you secure a place in the upper echelons of the new Japanese regime." Again, they were talking about the "red" Japan that would have emerged in the meantime.
With no escape, the abductees had no choice but to live the life they had arranged: in new homes, with new women, in new jobs δουλει
Throughout the 1980s, the families of the victims received letters from the abductees. The letters did not contain essential information about where and how, but trivial things, such as weather news or impressive industrial projects.
The families, however, kept the dream alive for their missing members, considering the letters. Some, such as Megumi Yokota's parents, campaigned for her return and pressured the Japanese government to intervene.
But again, the issue was murky. We had to get to 1995 to play the issue on Japanese television and find the man whom the Japanese secret services called the No. 1 kidnapping suspect: the infamous North Korean agent Sin Gwang-su.
The Japanese now had a lot of information in their hands about what was happening to any citizen of the country who had the misfortune to meet him. North Korea, meanwhile, was facing an acute food crisis, with rapid agrarian reforms leading to tragedy and real famine.
Kim Jong Il, who had just taken power (his father died in 1994) and without his once powerful ally on the side, the USSR, was forced to seek humanitarian aid.
And Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has been very willing to help him. Through a labyrinth of diplomatic routes, the two leaders arranged to meet, and the first item on the agenda was the abduction of Japanese citizens.
In September 2002, Koizumi and Kim came to Pyongyang four-on-four, and the North Korean leader offered an unexpected apology. He was even willing to leave victims to leave. Five of the 12 who admitted to being abducted (he later admitted to being 13).
The rest; Kim said the others (7 still accepted) were dead. Among them was Megumi Yokota, who said she had committed suicide. While her parents were holding recent photos of her.
Two years later, Kim Jong Il let 5 abducted children born in North Korea return to Japan. Although the Japanese political establishment appeared satisfied with the development, there was an awkward detail.
The families of the 800 missing were now seeking to know if their own members had been abducted.
After 2004, there is no development in the tragic story. Neither Japan confirms new casualties nor has anyone else been repatriated.
The North Korean regime may have felt it had made a fatal mistake in admitting and accepting responsibility, legitimizing what once seemed like a pure conspiracy theory in Japan.
In the coming years, moreover, the growing hostility of Kim Jong Il and his successor to West could not leave ground for such assumptions to the enemy.
Only now Japan had taken the issue very patriotically and the fate of the other abductees became a central pre-election slogan for the prime minister as well. Shinzo Abe and for his successor, Yoshihide Suga.
Despite the fact that the repatriated victims have made history globally, it now seems increasingly unlikely that the truth will shine. Are there other victims and how many are there?
As the abductees and their families grow older, as the world progresses and Kim's grandson becomes more and more hostile, the victims of North Korea's "kidnapping industry" are imagining losses in a war that never really ended.