The Washington Post has a long article on Charles Robert Jenkins, the American defector to North Korea – he is now a celebrity in Japan.
At age 24, while serving in South Korea, Jenkins drank 10 beers and stumbled northward across the world’s most heavily militarized border. He surrendered his M-14 rifle to startled soldiers in North Korea.
“I was so ignorant,” he recalled. He had deserted the Army for what became a self-imposed life sentence in a “giant, demented prison.”
There, over the next four decades, he acted in propaganda movies and raised chickens. He taught English and made the Korean food staple kimchi. He memorized the teachings of President Kim Il Sung and killed rats that crawled out of his toilet.
After 15 years, his keepers delivered a lovely Japanese woman to his house and urged him to rape her. She had been kidnapped from Japan. Jenkins was gentle with her, she came to love him and they were married. They had two daughters who were in training to become multilingual Stalinist spies — when something happened that was truly nutty.
North Korea let them go. His wife got out in 2002, he and his daughters in 2004. Source
Jenkins works as a curiousity in a gift shop on Sado Island.
It seems his wife, Soga, is not at all happy with his celebrity:
The national obsession with abduction has made Soga, like Jenkins, famous. But she does not talk to the press and neither do the four other Japanese abductees who were released six years ago.
Soga is not pleased that her American husband does talk, and talk and talk. Jenkins said that over the past four years, she has warned him not to write an autobiography, not to grant interviews and not to put his signature on the cookie boxes he sells.
She is now warning him, he said, not to write a second volume of his life’s story.
“She said that in the end North Korea is going to get fed up. I am going to walk out my garage one morning to walk the dog, and I am going to get a bullet in the head. Very possible.”
