TOKYO: Five Japanese kidnap victims returned to Japan after being held for 24 years in North Korea are at the center of an increasingly bitter tug of war between the two countries.

Japan has said the five, who came to Japan on Oct. 15 for what was supposed to be a two-week visit, are not permitted to return to Pyongyang, where all have teen-age or young adult children and one has a spouse waiting.

“It’s too early for us to let them make up their own mind freely,” said a Japanese official, in justifying the government’s refusal to let the five rejoin their families.

North Korea has turned sharply critical of that position, as diplomacy between Japan and the Stalinist regime has soured. Promises by Japan to normalize relations with North Korea and give it economic aid have foundered on Pyongyang’s attempts to develop material for a nuclear bomb. The abductee issue has left matter further stuck.

Pyongyang admitted on Sept. 17 to kidnapping 13 Japanese more than two decades ago, and said all but five are dead. Those five came to Japan without their families to visit relatives, and Pyongyang had been ambivalent about their return. But that changed this week, when North Korea berated Japan for “breaking an agreement” that the five would return, and said normalization talks would be delayed until the five rejoin their families in Pyongyang.

“They will stay in Japan,” Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi retorted on Thursday.

Prominently missing from this debate are the voices of the abductees themselves. They have not publicly said if they want to remain in Japan, risking separation from their families, or to go back to North Korea with the chance they might not again be allowed to leave the closed regime.

Apparently fearful of offending either government, the abductees have been determinedly circumspect as they stay with relatives in the hometowns they disappeared from in 1978. They have granted no individual interviews, and at press conferences the Japanese media has promised not to embarrass them and has offered questions in writing.

At one such press conference Friday, televised from the northern island of Sado, abductee Hitomi Soga was asked about the weather, about shopping and about Japanese songs, but was not asked about the government’s ban on travel to see her family.

Such tentative press treatment is part of a blanketing silence in Japan on the issue of restricting the abductees’ return to their families. Furious criticism has greeted the only press accounts to have covered the abductees’ North Korean families.

All five of the kidnapped Japanese have children raised largely as Koreans, and had made lives for themselves in North Korea after they were snatched by agents from the Japanese seaside.

Kaoru Hasuike, now 45, and Yukiko Okudo, 46, and another couple, Yasushi Chimura, 47 and Fukie Hamamoto, 47, were kidnapped while on beachside dates, and later married in North Korea. Between them they have five children, ranging in age from 15 to 21. Soga, 43, abducted while walking with her mother when she was 19, met and married Charles Jenkins, an American soldier who had deserted to North Korea in 1965.

The magazine Shukan Kenyobi (Weekly Friday) reaped a storm of condemnation Friday for publishing an interview with Soga’s husband and two daughters in Pyongyang, in which they said they missed their wife and mother. A local assemblyman said the magazine was acting as “an agent of North Korea” and a mainstream television network complained the magazine had “ignored the rules.”

In the magazine interview, Jenkins, 62, 2, said he has “lived happily in Korea for 37 years. I’m a citizen of Korea; my daughters are freely studying in school. We received a car from the country. We’re living without anything lacking. All I want now is my wife to come back.”

Their daughters Mika, 19, and Brenda, 17, told the magazine they were promised their mother would return to Pyongyang in 10 days.

“Japanese officials told us that my mother will return with lots of souvenirs. But I don’t need souvenirs. I want her to come back quickly,” Mika told the weekly. Her sister added, “Please give our mother back.”

Koizumi on Thursday lashed out at the article, condemning reporters “using the freedom of the press as a shield,” who “don’t think about the trouble” caused by what they report. Three weeks ago, similar intense criticism followed a Fuji Television Network interview in Pyongyang of the 15-year-old daughter of Megumi Yokota, a Japanese woman who apparently committed suicide in Pyongyang in 1993.

There has been almost no debate about the government’s authority to prevent the abductees from returning to their families.

The abduction issue has further complicated attempts by Japan to mediate a solution to the diplomatic standoff between the United States and North Korea over Pyongyang’s attempt to acquire machinery to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post