The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project, January 25, 2016
DATE OF EVENT
Monday, January 25, 2016 - Evening
LOCATION
World Affairs Council of Philadelphia
One South Broad Street, Suite 2M
Philadelphia, PA 19107
Throughout the late 1970s and early '80s, dozens of Japanese citizens were abducted from coastal Japanese towns by North Korean commandos. In what proved to be part of a global project, North Korea attempted to reeducate the abductees and train them to spy on the state's behalf. When the project faltered, the abductees were hidden in a series of guarded communities known as "Invitation-Only Zones"--the fiction being that these were exclusive enclaves, not prisons.
In 2002, Kim Jong Il admitted to kidnapping thirteen Japanese citizens and returned five of them (the other eight, he said, had died). From the moment that Robert S. Boynton first saw a photograph of these men and women, he became obsessed with the window their story provided into the vexed politics of Northeast Asia. In The Invitation-Only Zone, he untangles the logic behind the kidnappings and shows why some Japanese citizens described them as "their 9/11."
