I read that around 1978 these Japanese teenage girls were kidnapped by the North Koreans and taken back to North Korea in order to teach Japanese to North Korean spies etc.

I never understood how that would work. I mean, unless the girls were fluent in North Korean, how could they possibly teach Japanese to North Koreans?

Anyone know any details of this story?

Aaaah, North Korea. A fascinating subject. I came very close to actually visiting the country, but my application fell through at the last moment. Oh well. But on back on topic

My guess is that North Korean spies already knew a modicum of japanese, most likely through textbooks. From then on, the abductees could serve as walking dictionaries and conversation buddies.

However it's unlikely that this was the real, or at the very least the only reason why those people were abducted. It's North Korea we're talking about --- history has shown that it's hard to take everything they say at face value. Another prevalent theory is that those people were abducted because they witnessed North Korean spies doing spy stuff. Other reports say that some women were abducted so that they could be married to high-ranking NK officials.

And the funniest part is that the real reasons might even be stupider ; after all, Kim Jong Il ordered the capture of a south korean filmmaker so that he could help the Dear Leader make a movie he had in mind...

I read a few years ago that one of the girls kidnapped in 1978 who was allowed to return to Japan had married an American military deserter and he got to go with her (lucky him--his fellow deserters are apparently still stuck there).

I'd love to look up her story (if there is one) about what it was like to live in that place all those years.

I've thought from time to time it might be interesting to go there as a tourist just to see but I never seem to get around doing anything serious about it.

I've been listening to the audio book autobiography of Kim Hyun-hee, the North Korean terrorist/spy who bombed the Korean Airlines plane back in 1988. She spent about three years, I believe, living with one of the abductees before being taught Chinese and later bombing the plane.

Basically, she took language classes in school (with North Korean teachers) growing up and attended a language college for Japanese for two years before being recruited by whatever the North Korean spy agency is, whereupon she was sent to live in a "guesthouse" with one of the Japanese women who had been kidnapped. The two of them lived together with an older female caretaker, but spoke only Japanese with each other. Basically, the Japanese woman spent all day every day with Kim and was tasked with teaching her how to pretend to be Japanese, so there was language instruction but also a great deal of cultural instruction, including movie viewings and guidance on how to apply make-up. Even Kim's "ideological studies" (study of the writings of Kim Il-sung, etc.) at the time were conducted in Japanese, though not by the Japanese woman.

All of this apparently worked very well, as Kim was able to successfully pretend to be Japanese in Europe, China, and elsewhere. Kim, however, describes how sad (obviously) the Japanese woman was most of the time, especially because she had two kids back in Japan, and how she could not understand that sadness at the time (because, I mean, who wouldn't want to dedicate their life to the Kims?). Anyway, she also mentioned that the woman had picked up some Korean while living in North Korean and conversed with certain handlers in Korean.

It's a really odd, sad tale. The English title of the book is "The Tears of My Soul" if you're interested, though the bulk of it is about things other than Kim's time at the guesthouse learning Japanese, of course.