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On the evening of 7 July 1978, Yasushi Chimura and his fiancée, Fukie Hamamoto, drove in a small truck to a lookout point above the craggy coast that marks the city of Obama's meeting with the Sea of Japan. The waters were placid, and the couple were excited about their wedding in November.

They were not alone. Agents from North Korea were on the hillside. They overpowered the couple, took them to a waiting boat on Wakasa Bay and transported them nearly 500 miles to the Communist country where they were to spend the next quarter of a century.

The disappearance of the couple was a local mystery and might well have remained so had it not been for a seemingly unrelated event thousands of miles away in the Middle East.

Nearly a decade after the Chimura abduction, two North Korean agents stepped on to a Korean Air flight in Baghdad bound for Bangkok. In Bahrain the agents disembarked, leaving a bomb on board. The Boeing 707 took off again, exploded in flight, and 104 passengers and 11 crew were killed. The agents were subsequently arrested while trying to leave the country. One, a 70-year-old, killed himself with a poison capsule. The other, 26-year-old Kim Hyon Hui, attempted suicide in the same fashion but was stopped.

Kim was later flown to Seoul where a trial revealed a fact that would cause diplomatic reverberations: North Korea had been regularly abducting Japanese citizens to help train special agents. Those agents would then pass themselves off as citizens from Japan, take part in terrorist plots and blacken the name of that nation.

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/28/japan-free-abductees-north-korea

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