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American Freed by N. Korea Relishes Celebrity in Japan
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Pain of another kind occurred when Jenkins was forced to study, up to 11 hours a day, the teachings of Kim Il Sung, the founding "Great Leader" of North Korea. To this day, he said, he recites this "gibberish" in his sleep, in both English and Korean.
There were three other American deserters in North Korea, and for many years they lived miserably together. In the early 1970s, their minders gave them each a female cook.
They were divorced, infertile North Korean women who spied on the Americans and were under orders to have sex with them.
The first woman selected for Jenkins hated him. "I am not cooking for any American dog," she told him. A U.S. soldier, it turned out, had killed her father in the Korean War.
Jenkins recalled that he did not particularly want to have sex with this woman twice a month, as his minders said was the required minimum. Jenkins told them "to go to hell" and stay out of his private life.
As punishment, his hands were tied behind his back and he was repeatedly punched in the face -- by one of the other American soldiers.
Thanks to his Caucasian face, Jenkins was drafted to become an actor in propaganda films. He played the captain of a U.S. aircraft carrier in a film glorifying North Korea's capture in 1968 of the USS Pueblo, a Navy spy ship.
Jenkins devoted the bulk of his time, though, to survival -- an endless grind of shoveling coal for heat, scrounging for food, hauling water and standing guard at night so hungry, marauding soldiers wouldn't steal his peaches, his corn, his chickens or his kimchi.
Freedom, and Then the Brig
The beginning of the end came when Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited North Korea in 2002, and Kim Jong Il unexpectedly said he was sorry for stealing away Japanese people. Soon, Jenkins's wife was on a plane back to Japan.
She had been, he said, the rock that kept him alive, healthy and reasonably sober in North Korea. When she flew off, Jenkins began guzzling Chinese ginseng liquor, which was 80 proof and cost $2.50 for a five-liter jug. He spent the better part of a year passed out on the floor of his house.
During that lost year, he convinced himself that Japan was holding his wife against her will. The Japanese government, meanwhile, was leaning on North Korea to release Jenkins and his daughters.
Koizumi returned to North Korea in 2004 and met personally with Jenkins and his daughters, asking them to come back with him on his airplane. The prime minister handed Jenkins a handwritten note that said the premier would "do the utmost that you can live together happily with Mrs. Jenkins in Japan."
