Relatives of Japanese abducted by North Korea decades ago place hope in Trump
In 1970s and 80s North Korea abducted over a dozen people to teach spies Japanese. The families hope the US president can finally secure their release
Shigeo Iizuka always refused to believe that his sister had walked out on her young son and daughter in the summer of 1978 to start a new life.
The discovery, a decade later, that he had been right meant little when he learned the grim truth behind her disappearance – that she had been a victim of North Korea’s cold war abductions of Japanese citizens.
Yaeko Taguchi was a 22-year-old hostess at a club in Tokyo when she was seized by spies and spirited away to North Korea.
She was not alone. Well over a dozen Japanese nationals – and perhaps many more – were abducted in the 1970s and 1980s and put to work teaching North
