KEY POINTS:
A cruel, biting wind is blowing in from the Sea of Japan, as waves crash on to the breakwaters lining the shore of the Japanese fishing port of Niigata.
It was a day like this that 13-year old Megumi Yokota vanished 30 years ago, on her way home from badminton class in the school gym.
Her disappearance set off the biggest search for a schoolgirl ever launched in Japan.
Investigators have confirmed she was one of several Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea in its revolutionary zeal to reunite the Korean peninsula. They were bundled on to ships to North Korea, where they were used as language teachers for North Korean spies, who then planned to infiltrate South Korea using Japanese identities.
Even today, the chief superintendent of Niigata prefecture finds the notion hard to believe. As a young man, Masayuki Obata was involved in the search for Megumi. Now aged 54, he still feels a personal responsibility.
"I have a daughter too, we often speak about the Yokota case. I know what her parents must have gone through," he says.
Four other Japanese disappeared from Niigata prefecture in 1977 and 1978, a couple and a mother and daughter, who were carried in sacks to a waiting boat.
Why did the police never suspect the communist North Korean regime in the midst of Cold War intrigue?
"Never, in our wildest dreams, would we ever have imagined that North Koreans would want to abduct Japanese citizens," he says.
In September 2002, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, stunned the world by admitting to the abduction of 15 Japanese and apologised. He told Junichiro Koizumi, who was Japan's Prime Minister, at their first summit in Pyongyang, that only five had survived. Eight - including Megumi - had died and there was no record of the two others having entered North Korea. But there was no proof of the deaths.
Five of the surviving Japanese abductees have since returned.
In 2006, after the fate of the stolen citizens became a national cause, Shinzo Abe, Koizumi's successor as Prime Minister, confirmed his country would not normalise relations with North Korea until the abduction issue had been resolved.
But a wind of change is blowing after a landmark denuclearisation deal last October, which could lead to the establishment of relations between Washington and the hermit state with which it remains technically at war.
The families fear the Bush administration may be preparing quietly to shelve the abductee issue in the interests of a deal with North Korea that would shore up President George W Bush's legacy as a man of peace before he leaves office next January.
Since 2002, a fuller picture of the abductions has emerged, from witness statements, defectors and the returnees themselves.
It was dark when Megumi set out at 6.30pm on her regular walk home, accompanied by two friends. One peeled off at the first set of traffic lights, while the other left her after they crossed the road.
During her transfer to North Korea, her bloodied fingernails were broken off in her struggle to escape from her confinement in the ship.
It is now known that Megumi married a South Korean who was himself an abductee, with whom she had a daughter, Kim Hye Gyong. But although Japanese media have been allowed access to the girl, Megumi's parents, Sakie and Shigeru Yokota, have never met their grandchild.
In addition to the 15 cases acknowledged by the North Koreans, two more have been added to the Japanese list, although some estimates put the number as high as 100 or more.
Meanwhile, the official version of events is strewn with lies and inconsistencies. According to Pyongyang, Megumi committed suicide in 1993. But the death certificate was a forgery. DNA tests carried out on her purported remains concluded the ashes were not hers.
Nor have Japanese authorities been convinced by the official explanations of the deaths of other abductees.
Now the families are bracing themselves for more disappointment, despite a White House visit by Megumi's Yokota's mother, which Bush described as "one of the most moving meetings" of his presidency.
Yokota, 72, says Bush described the kidnapping of her daughter as "unforgivable". "But he is a public person and has national interest related to the nuclear issue," she says.
The Yokotas say they have not given up hope. They still believe their daughter, who would now be 43, is alive.
15 Japanese citizens seized by North Korea in 1977.
5 Have returned to Japan.
8 have died.
2 Unaccounted for.
- INDEPENDENT
