Description
In the 1970s and 1980s, North Korean agents abducted 15 Japanese citizens, as confirmed by Kim Jong-il in 2002. This so-called “abductions issue” has since been given equal status to - and at times priority over - Pyongyang’s military developments within Japan’s North Korea policy. The extant literature has pointed towards two key drivers of its prominence: the emotive aspect of the issue and the driving force of Japanese conservatives. However, investigations into the form and function of either category and how they are linked are limited. This paper seeks to establish the relationship between the conservative attachment to the issue and emotional representations of both the abductions and resolution attempts. By examining the “abductions issue” through an emotive lens, I demonstrate how notions of pain and suffering are heightened through the centralisation of the figure of Yokota Megumi, a thirteen-year-old girl abductee, and attributed to North Korea thus rendering it a maximal object of such emotions. This then creates space for the writing of a maximally protective – and thus virtuously masculine – Japan, which is the “true” Japaneseness for conservatives and so contributes to their pursuit of ontological security, a broader concern of theirs which shapes and enables their wider foreign policy.
