Destiny: The Secret Operations of the Yodogō Exiles

by Kōji Takazawa, Lina J. Terrell (Translator), Ryoko Yamamoto (Translator)

In 1970, nine members of a Japanese New Left group called the Red Army Faction hijacked a domestic airliner to North Korea with dreams of acquiring the military training to bring about a revolution in Japan. The North Korean government accepted the hijackers—who became known in the media as the Yodogō group, based on the name of the hijacked plane—and two years later they announced their conversion to juche, North Korea’s new political ideology. Little was heard from the exiles until 1988, when a member of Yodogō was unexpectedly arrested in Japan, and communications with the group opened up in the context of his trial.As a former Red Army Faction member, journalist Kōji Takazawa made several trips to North Korea, reestablished his ties to the group’s leader Takamaro Tamiya, and helped to publish the group’s writings in Japan. After Kim Il Sung revealed that Yodogō members had Japanese wives, Takazawa published a book of interviews with the women, but in the process became suspicious about the romantic stories they told. He also wondered about the members who were missing and learned more details in long, private conversations with Tamiya. After Tamiya’s sudden death in 1995, Takazawa launched his own investigation of what the group had actually been doing for two decades, even traveling to Europe to follow traces there. An example of superb investigative journalism, The Secret Operations of the Yodogō Exiles offers Kōji Takazawa’s powerful story of how he exposed the Yodogō group’s involvement in the kidnapping and luring of several young Japanese to North Korea, as well as the truth behind their Japanese wives’ presence in the country. Takazawa’s careful research was validated in 2002, when the North Korean government publicly acknowledged it had kidnapped thirteen Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 1980s, including three people whom Takazawa had connected to the Yodogō hijackers. Embedded in his pursuit toward what truly happened to the Yodogō members is Takazawa’s personal reflection of the 1970s, a decade when radical student activism swept Japan, and what it meant to those whose lives were forever changed.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Japan

473 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 31, 2017

Reviews

[Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book tells, in surprising detail, one of the strangest stories of the independent left of the Cold War era: a group of privileged leftists who hijacked a plane to North Korea, despite knowing literally nothing about the country, out of the vague idea that such a bombastic event would aid the international revolution.

Unfortunately it is not a pleasant story at all. The hijackers are self-absorbed, stupid men who end up damaging a great number of innocent lives. But the interesting thing about this book is that most of it is actually a spy story, revealing top-secret details of global North Korean intelligence missions known to practically no one in the West. The original Japanese book was written in 1998, after years of hard work assembling evidence by the author Takazawa, but it is being released in English in 2017, in a rather different climate, when North Korea has become a walled-off rogue state, the internal life of which is unclear even to most people interested in politics.

This is a great read for anyone interested in North Korea because it reveals how their “juche" ideology works in the East Asian context, how it differs from Japanese understandings of communism, and how different people reacted to it over the period 1970-1990. It also has a lot of spy stuff, although much of it is very sad and unpleasant to read. The Yodogo faction are objectively criminals and liars, but Takazawa, himself a onetime New Leftist, ends the book offering them a gesture of sympathy for their situation.

[Pamela Conley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I need to open my review of this book by stating that the Editor of this book, Patricia Steinhoff, is my aunt and the translators were among some of her graduate students at the University of Hawaii. I read a PDF version as a proof reader, looking for English fluency fumbles, before it went to press. With all of that as a preface, this book is fascinating. It reads like a high drama spy novel and would be thrilling if it weren't an actual historical account of the actions of Japanese radicals and the North Korean Government. While the action in the story takes place from 1970 through the 1980's the mind set of the leadership of DPRK is useful and prescient. The story includes: hijacking, kidnapping, and international espionage as it actually occurred. The research is through but it doesn't detract from the fast pace of the story line. I highly recommend this books for anyone interested in international affairs or real life political thrillers.

[Anastasia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly mindblowing. An important read for everyone on the left. Leaves lots of unanswered questions that lead to follow-up research of what has happened in the 20 years since this came out in Japan.

[Hrithik]

9 south korean college students hijack plane and go to north korea