Review: The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project by Robert S. Boynton

2 stars for The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project by Robert S. Boynton.

I feel bad giving this book a 2-star rating given that it is deeply reported and thoroughly researched and that the author has invested countless hours of hard work fact-checking to get this book published.

The thing is, this book reads very much like a boring history lesson, albeit perhaps a necessary one for better understanding as it alternates between the abductees' stories and history of Japan and North Korea.

Regardless of unexciting historical events, this book does address political and social issues such as:

- Why did North Korea go to the trouble of snatching ordinary Japanese people from beaches and small towns?

- Why did Kim Il-sung invite Japan’s Koreans to move to North Korea? With all the challenges it faced in the wake of the Korean War, why would North Korea want such an enormous infusion of people?

- Anyone who is born and raised in the North knows that identity within the society determines fate. It does not matter how smart one is or how hard one works. If identity or public image or presentation is not correct, one will never marry well, will never get the right job and will never succeed.


Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: 12 Jan 2016

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For decades, North Korea denied any part in the disappearance of dozens of Japanese citizens from Japan’s coastal towns and cities in the late 1970s. But in 2002, with his country on the brink of collapse, Kim Jong-il admitted to the kidnapping of thirteen people and returned five of them in hopes of receiving Japanese aid. As part of a global espionage project, the regime had attempted to reeducate these abductees and make them spy on its behalf. When the scheme faltered, the captives were forced to teach Japanese to North Korean spies and make lives for themselves, marrying, having children, and posing as North Korean civilians in guarded communities known as “Invitation-Only Zones”—the fiction being that they were exclusive enclaves, not prisons.

From the moment Robert S. Boynton saw a photograph of these men and women, he became obsessed with their story. Torn from their homes as young adults, living for a quarter century in a strange and hostile country, they were returned with little more than an apology from the secretive regime.

In The Invitation-Only Zone, Boynton untangles the bizarre logic behind the abductions. Drawing on extensive interviews with the abductees, Boynton reconstructs the story of their lives inside North Korea and ponders the existential toll the episode has had on them, and on Japan itself. He speaks with nationalists, spies, defectors, diplomats, abductees, and even crab fishermen, exploring the cultural and racial tensions between Korea and Japan that have festered for more than a century.

*Blurb from Goodreads*

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