ASIA / PACIFIC
August 17, 2015
Ex South Korea first lady returns
from North without meeting Kim
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 3
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EOUL, South Korea — The 92-year-old widow of
former South Korean President and Nobel Peace
Prize laureate Kim Dae-jung returned to Seoul
after a four-day visit to North Korea that ended without a
meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Lee Hee-ho told reporters that she wasn’t carrying out
any official duty on behalf of South Korea during her trip.
There was no contact from Kim Jong Un during her stay in
North Korea, although he sent a message of welcome
through a North Korean official who met Lee at the
airport in Pyongyang, according to Lee’s aides.
Her itinerary released to the media included visits to a
maternity clinic, orphanage, and children’s hospital, but
not any formal meetings with senior North Korean
officials. Some analysts had speculated there could be a
chance Kim Jong Un might meet her or try to send a
message to Seoul through her.
Lee described meeting children at facilities in
Pyongyang as an emotional experience that reinforced her
belief that the Koreas “must not pass the pain of division
to the next generation.”
Relations between the rival Koreas have been testy
following the recent opening of a U.N. office in Seoul
tasked with monitoring North Korea’s human-rights
situation and the North’s refusal to release several South
Koreans detained there.
Before she left for Pyongyang, Lee expressed hope that
her visit would pave the way for more exchanges between
the countries. Kim Jong Un’s failure to meet Lee during
her North Korean stay raises further questions about his
skills in diplomacy and his enthusiasm for improving
inter-Korean ties, said Cheong Seong-Chang, a North
Korea expert at South Korea’s Sejong Institute.
Kim Jong Un decided against travelling to Moscow to
attend the May celebrations marking the 70th anniver-
sary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany and
sent the country’s nominal head of state, Kim Yong Nam,
in his place. Kim Jong Un also snubbed Mongolian
President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj when he travelled to
North Korea in 2013 and has been rarely seen with
high-profile foreign visitors other than former U.S.
basketball star Dennis Rodman.
Kim Dae-jung, who died in 2009, backed a policy of
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UNOFFICIAL DIPLOMACY FAILS. Lee Hee-ho, the widow of
former South Korean President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kim Dae-
jung, receives a bouquet of flowers from a supporter at Gimpo Interna-
tional Airport in Seoul, South Korea, upon returning from North Korea.
Lee returned to Seoul after a four-day visit to North Korea that apparently
ended without a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Lee told
reporters that she wasn’t carrying out any official duty on behalf of South
Korea during her trip. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
rapprochement with Pyongyang and held a landmark
summit with Kim Jong Un’s father and late North Korean
leader Kim Jong Il in 2000. He won the Nobel Peace Prize
later that year for his efforts.
The summit talks spawned a flurry of cooperation
projects, but most of them have been put on hold since
conservatives took power in Seoul in 2008 and ended big
aid shipments to North Korea.
North Korea is particularly keen on reopening the
country to South Korean tourists, along with pursuing
business and investment deals with its more affluent
southern neighbor.
Last year, Kim Jong Un invited Lee to visit after
thanking her for sending condolence flowers on the third
anniversary of the death of his father. Kim Jong Un and
Lee briefly met in December 2011, when Lee visited North
Korea to attend the funeral of Kim Jong Il.
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Japanese girl’s World War II job: Waving goodbye to kamikaze pilots
Give blood.
Continued from page 2
views made in the late 1980s.
Reiko Akabane, a Nadeshiko who died in 2006, said in
the video that she went up to one of the pilots before his
departure, to return change from the money he had given
her to mail a letter to his parents. Instead of taking the
coins, Shinji Sakaguchi took out his wallet and handed it
to her as a keepsake.
Another pilot who was standing by, Nobuo Taniguchi,
regretted that he had nothing to give her. He stooped
down and picked up two small smooth rocks.
“These are the last stones that were under my feet,”
Akabane recalled him as saying.
The wallet and rocks are on display at a small
cottage-like building called Firefly Hall in Chiran. It’s a
replica of a restaurant run by Tome Torihama, a woman
many pilots came to see as their mother figure, and it was
built by Torihama’s grandson in 2000.
The source of the building’s name is a 19-year-old pilot
named Saburo Miyagawa. He had promised Torihama he
would come back as a firefly, and right about the time his
plane sank into the ocean, a particularly big glowing bug
flew into the garden of Torihama’s restaurant.
The firefly is an image often used in Japan to symbolize
the kamikaze and death because of its association with
love, poetry, and a very short life.
“They were all people who went straight to heaven,”
said Torihama in the museum video. “They were all
gentle. I wanted to make them all my children.”
The pilots confided their deepest fears to Torihama and
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SAYING SAYONARA. In this image taken from Associated Press
Television video, Akihisa Torihama shows a 1945 photograph of his
grandmother, Tome Torihama, center, with tokko pilots in Chiran in
Kagoshima prefecture, southwest of Japan. Chiran served as a takeoff
spot for Army pilots on a suicide-attack mission in the closing days of
World War II. Torihama, who died in 1992, was a mother figure for
many of the pilots. (AP Photo/APTN, Miki Toda)
some Nadeshiko. Torihama died in 1992, at 89.
According to the museum, when the girls went to pick
up the pilots’ pillowcases to wash, they found they were
drenched in tears.
But when they took off to their certain death, they put
on brave fronts. Kuwashiro thought they resembled living
angels.
“They looked brave,” she said. “They didn’t have sad
faces.”
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