http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/11/news/japan.php
Japan intends to press Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state, during her visit Tuesday for American help in resolving the cases of Japanese citizens kidnapped decades ago by North Korean agents, a government official said Monday.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20050712a4.htm
Officials of the U.S., South Korea and Japan will meet before the six-way talks to coordinate their policies, Hosoda said, adding that Tokyo in the six-way forum will again demand that Pyongyang account for the Japanese nationals the North's agents abducted in the 1970s and 1980s.
And then conveniently forgets about the hundreds of thousands it forced to come to Japan as slaves.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20050712zg.htm
A fight to the death
One of Japan's longest-running legal feuds reignites amid worsening ties with Korea
One of Japan's longest-running social disputes, Utoro has been largely forgotten here, but across the Japan Sea this community of 230 people is seen by many as a living symbol of the hardships of Korean immigrants.
Now, against a background of soured bilateral relations, the village is back in the media spotlight.
With the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II approaching, the South Korean TV networks plan Utoro specials, along with several major publications, including the progressive weekly Hankyoreh 21, which will run a series of two-page articles every week calling for donations to save the village.
One television company plans a five-hour live broadcast including a solidarity concert on Aug. 15, the anniversary of the end of the war.
And the plight of Utoro residents has also drawn the attention of The United Nations. Doudou Diene, special rapporteur of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, spent nearly three hours in Utoro on July 5 hearing the stories of the residents and visiting the rickety homes.
Utoro's story begins in the 1930s and 1940s when Kan was among millions who came from the Korean Peninsula -- many of them forcibly made to do so -- to work in Japanese factories, mines and military installations.
When the war ended and the local Nissan factory switched from making warplanes to cars, many of the villagers stayed and began working for a Nissan subsidiary.
"Naturalization is a process rooted in racism" it says before warning that bulldozers will have to "run over" the residents before they'll leave.
"The issue has some momentum in Korean society now," says Professor Han Hong Koo, who teaches modern Korean history at Sungkonghoe University and who believes Utoro is probably the last collective residential area in Japan for conscripted Koreans.
Kang Je Suk, secretary general of the citizens' group Peace Project Network believes the movement to protect Utoro is "only beginning," and is critical of how it has been ignored in Japan.
"While the abduction of a few Japanese to North Korea was a big topic, the kidnapping of thousands of Koreans to Japan was not. Utoro is not in the news either."
The Utoro homepage
http://www02.so-net.ne.jp/~utoro/index_tr.html
Even Doudou Deine agrees.