http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501050404-1042508,00.html

Bones of Contention
Pyongyang returned to Japan the cremated ashes and bone fragments of
the abductee

BY DONALD MACINTYRE

Monday, Mar. 28, 2005

In 2002, Kim Jong Il deep-sixed relations with Japan by admitting
that North Korea kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and held
them for decades. He tried repairing the damage by sending five of
the abductees home in the following months. The remaining eight,
according to North Korea, had died. Last November, Pyongyang returned
to Japan the cremated ashes and bone fragments of Megumi Yokota, who
was kidnapped in her hometown of Niigata in 1977 at the age of 13,
and allegedly committed suicide in 1994. Tokyo ran DNA tests on the
remains and announced they weren't Yokota's. Public anger ran white
hot: conservative politicians and Yokota's parents called for
sanctions against North Korea and the government blocked rice
shipments. Pyongyang angrily disputed Japan's DNA test, but nobody
paid any attention.

It turns out the remains might have been Yokota's after all. In
February, the British scientific journal Nature published an article
in which the scientist who did the tests admitted they were
inconclusive?and that the remains could have been contaminated with
foreign DNA. "The bones are like stiff sponges that can absorb
anything," Teikyo University DNA analyst Yoshii Tomio told a Nature
interviewer. The technique Yoshii used, known as "nested PCR," also
raised doubts: professional forensics labs in the U.S. don't use it
because of the high risk of contamination, according to Terry Melton,
a DNA expert at Pennsylvania-based Mitotyping Technologies. Yoshii
has declined comment and Japan won't release his results. A Foreign
Ministry spokesman says the remains were consumed in the tests, so
there is no way to redo them. Yokota's father, Shigeru Yokota, tells
TIME he doesn't really understand the issues surrounding the DNA
tests but that he's "angry that Japan now looks foolish in its
negotiations with North Korea." In a toughly worded editorial in its
March 17 issue, Nature said an inconclusive test result might be
"uncomfortable," but urged the Japanese government to get serious
with its science. "Dealing with North Korea is no fun," it wrote,
"but it doesn't justify breaking the rules of separation between
science and politics."

-With reporting by Michiko Toyama/Tokyo

From the Apr. 04, 2005 issue of TIME Asia Magazine

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