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Kim Hye-gyong (19), wearing a black skirt and a white traditional Korean jacket, wiped her tears with a handkerchief when she watched from a distance as her father and grandmother met for the first time in 28 years on Wednesday. Born to South Korean abductee Kim Young-nam and Japanese kidnap victim Megumi Yokota, North Korea now gives her name as ¡°Eun-gyong¡±, not ¡°Hye-gyong¡± as in earlier press reports.
Kim has just started studying at Kim Il Sung University. Her existence became public knowledge when Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro visited Pyongyang in October 2002. The Asahi Shimbun says Eun-gyong may be her real name and Hye-gyong a pseudonym.
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Kim Young-nam and his family weep as they are reunited in North Korea¡¯s Mt.Kumgang on Wednesday, 28 years after he was kidnapped by the North.
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Kim prostrated herself on the carpet meeting her grandmother for the first time. She smiled sometimes but looked confused. She seemed little different from an ordinary college student in South Korea, with her hair tied at the back and parted at one side -- except for the Kim Il-sung badge on her chest. According to North Korean authorities, Kim does not clearly remember her mother, Megumi Yokota, who was abducted from Japan when she was only 13 and, according to Pyongyang, committed suicide in April 1994, when Hye-gyong was seven years old. It is likely that she discovered the story of her birth only recently: born to a father abducted in 1978, when he was a high school student, and a mother kidnapped a year earlier. Kim now lives with her stepmother and half brother.
The Japanese government wants her in Japan, but North Korea refuses. Because of her extraordinary background, Kim Hye-gyong looks set to become a new symbol of the tragic division of the two Koreas and the North¡¯s bizarre abduction policy in the 1970s and 80s, just like her mother when she was kidnapped from a beach as a girl.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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