On 11 November 1977, thirteen-year-old Yokota Megumi went missing on her way home from badminton practice in the Japanese coastal city of Niigata. Despite extensive searches, no trace of her was found. Two decades later, in 1997, her family learned that Megumi might still be alive – one of several Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean agents and transported to North Korea. This revelation began the family’s decades-long campaign to secure her return.Footnote 1 While North Korea has claimed that Yokota Megumi committed suicide and that her cremated remains have been repatriated, her family rejects this, and the Japanese government shares their doubts, claiming discrepancies in the DNA data and records of her death.Footnote 2 Yokota Megumi was only one of at least a dozen Japanese abductees, and at this point, only five of these have returned to Japan.
The abduction issue (known as rachi mondai in Japan) remains very prominent within Japanese foreign policy and domestic politics, despite the abductions having occurred several decades ago and amid other pressing security concerns, such as North Korea’s missile and nuclear programmes. The Japanese government maintains that between 1973 and 1983, North Korean agents abducted at least seventeen Japanese citizens, though it has also suggested that as many as 873 additional disappearances could be linked to North Korea – claims that remain unverified.Footnote 3 Motivations for the abductions are thought to include identity theft and the recruitment of Japanese-language and cultural trainers for North Korean operatives during the tense post-war decades following the Korean War.Footnote 4 In the particular case of Yokota Megumi, it is possible that she was abducted because she unwittingly came across a North Korean landing team who kidnapped her to prevent their discovery.Footnote 5
The emotional and political resonance of the rachi mondai continues to shape Japanese policy. Soon after becoming prime minister of Japan in late 2024, Ishiba Shigeru met with family members of the abductees and ‘conveyed to them the resolve of [his] Cabinet to solve the abduction issue’.Footnote 6 At a subsequent meeting, he recalled the scene when the news was shared that North Korea had announced Yokota Megumi to be deceased: ‘I vividly remember the scene where Ms. Yokota Sakie…heard the news and cried out, “I do not believe that, I do not believe such a thing. Megumi is alive”.… Her words have remained ringing in my ears ever since. At that time, I sat next to the late Mr. Yokota Shigeru. As I have said before, I will never forget that cry, and I believe it must be shared by the entire Japanese nation.’Footnote 7
In this paper we examine the experiences of Yokota Megumi’s family as a window onto the political role of the abductees’ families. Families are rarely considered actors within international relations and are generally not perceived as major political players.Footnote 8 We believe, however, there is one context in particular in which families assume a very significant political role: when one or more of their members are subject to politicised captivity. In such instances, the family members can and do become prominent actors agitating for the release of their captive kin. The question thus motivating this paper is how do we conceptualise the political status and resources of families as actors in situations of politicised captivity?
Crucially, the families involved in most cases lack the traditional power resources of wealth or official status that would normally be understood to influence outcomes within international politics. What they do possess, however, is a different set of emotional–political resources stemming from the emotions and emotional politics of their compelling narratives of love, loss, anguish, and hope. While there are other similar situations – such as when families lose members to terrorist attacks – politicised captivity is especially emotionally salient because the captivity is ongoing and the possibility for resolution may still exist.
Granted, there already exists a large literature on emotions within international relations,Footnote 9 although still relatively little has sought to understand emotional experience as a political power resource.Footnote 10 In offering a conceptualisation of emotional–political resources, we seek to further contribute to the growing work on the intersections of emotion and international politics. Precisely, we conceptualise emotional–political resources as experiences and circumstances that provoke emotional reactions and invoke social rules and expectations surrounding emotion in ways that can be leveraged for political influence. In the case of these families, their emotional–political resources involved the ways in which their personal experiences elicited vicarious emotional identification with, expectations of feeling, sympathy, and deference for, and emotional reactions towards others on their behalf. Emotion motivates, moves, and provides felt significance as well as possessing social meaning and being always inextricable from a thicket of social expectations and norms that guide and restrict behaviour. We are positing that the major political resource families of politicised captives have is their ability to both evoke emotion and invoke a diverse set of social rules concerning emotional experience. This only can occur, however, through making their own personal experiences publicly accessible – through narration, expression, and display in ways that speak to social shared templates of emotion. Importantly, in doing so, they also make these resources vulnerable to appropriation by other political actors as well.
Consequently, our aim for this paper is to offer a theoretical exploration of the characteristics of emotional–political resources – both their potential to influence and the limits thereof – by looking at the experiences of the families of the Japanese abductees, and Yokota Megumi in particular. There are certainly numerous other cases of families publicly grappling with the political captivity of loved ones, including those of the Iran Hostage Crisis;Footnote 11 human shields during the 1991 Gulf War;Footnote 12 kidnappings of Westerners in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen amidst the ‘war on terror’;Footnote 13 or Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. The experiences of Japanese families share certain similarities to these cases in terms of having to navigate complex international, political, and media landscapes. They also differ in that the Japanese abductees were for many years simply presumed missing and their captors levied no financial or political demands. What most crucially links all of these, however, are the ways in which the public involvement of the families invoked the personal and the emotional.
In what follows, we begin by clarifying our terms – families, politicised captivity, and emotion. We then offer a theorisation of the significance and limits of familial emotional–political resources in situations of politicised captivity. We highlight how these are multifaceted resources that also can be co-opted by other actors for various ends. We then turn to the story of the family of Yokota Megumi specifically to illustrate our claims.
Families and the context of politicised captivity
At the heart of this piece is the role of families. Families, more than collections of individuals, function as unique relational units that transcend the boundaries of personal lives, intimacy, and kinship. For the purposes of this piece, we define families as constellations of actors seen as closely related through socially recognised relations of parentage or marriage. Morgan argues that families inhabit a distinctive conceptual space where overlapping dimensions of social life – time, emotions, and bodies – intersect, creating a relational whole greater than the sum of its parts.Footnote 14 Unlike frameworks that focus on individual relationships, families evoke a profound sense of ‘connectedness’ and ‘we-ness’, sustained through shared narratives, obligations, and histories.Footnote 15
The language of family itself serves as a vital cultural and personal signifier, embodying aspirations for belonging and connection while simultaneously reflecting fears of vulnerability and exclusion. Hence, individuals often invoke the concept of family in ways that resonate deeply with everyday experiences of togetherness and relationality.Footnote 16 This makes family a powerful anchor for both personal identity and collective social meaning, capable of bridging intimate, private struggles and collective concerns.
The context of politicised captivity offers a powerful lens through which to examine how these dynamics operate in practice. In such situations, families’ emotional and relational power intersects with broader political forces, and personal grief becomes a key resource for public causes. As tangible representations of the captives’ humanity and individuality, families act as advocates for their loved ones, even as their stories are often appropriated for political ends. Narratives of familial love, loss, sacrifice, and resilience are powerful tools of moral and emotional persuasion. These narratives provoke empathy, encourage collective identification, and humanise abstract political disputes. This ability to transform intimate suffering into collective meaning highlights the dual nature of emotion as both a deeply personal and profoundly political resource, positioning families at the centre of the relationship between emotion and power.
Emotional–political resources
As noted above, when considered from the perspective of traditional metrics of political power, the resources at the disposal of families of captives generally would rank quite low. They do not have direct access to the levers of the state, they do not hold any political office, they do not represent any major political constituency, and they do not command any significant material or financial resources that could be leveraged to exert influence on relevant decision-making parties. What they do have, however, is the emotional power of their circumstances by virtue of the empathy and sympathy – both felt and socially constituted – they provoke and invoke.
Emotions have a dual nature – they are simultaneously deeply personal as well as deeply social. To elaborate, our experience of emotions as subjective, felt responses is extraordinarily personal. This personal, felt dimension of emotional experience plays a crucial role in making us who we are as individuals, informing our attitudes and desires, motivating us to action, and generating the difference between our apathies and concerns. As the psychologist Nico Frijda has observed, ‘cognitive reasoning may argue that a particular event could lead to loss of money or health or life, but so what? What is wrong with death, other than it is disliked?’Footnote 17 It is our feelings and emotions that provide a vital guide to what is subjectively valued and meaningful.Footnote 18 No one will ever exactly share or know how we feel, just as we can never hope or expect to know exactly how others feel. Our feelings are ours alone.
Yet even if our feelings are ours alone, we do have the capacities for empathy with and sympathy for the feelings of others. Empathy, highlighted by a number of international relations scholars,Footnote 19 is a prosocial ability to think and feel into what we perceive as the perspective of another. It does not mean we can ever feel exactly as another, but it does mean that we can feel emotions on the basis of what we imagine the position of the other to be. Sympathy – while often co-occurring with empathy – is an emotional engagement with the undeserved distress or suffering of others.Footnote 20 So while empathy is to feel with others in what they feel, sympathy is to feel for others for how they feel. Sympathy also contains a tendency towards action: ‘the suffering of the other person is experienced immediately as something to be alleviated’.Footnote 21 When confronted with suffering, empathy can engender feelings of shared distress, anguish, and even indignation at the cause of the suffering; sympathy, in contrast, gives rise to concern for the other in their suffering.
Both sympathy and empathy are inextricably social, and not just for the reason that we experience these emotions within the context of our relationships with others. For one, shared social understandings inform whom we view as potential objects of empathy and sympathy. As Head writes, ‘Who and what we feel for and with is shaped by dynamics of belonging, identity, and community structured by relations of power’.Footnote 22 What is more, when and how we should display these emotions, to whom they are owed, the moral status of those who do or do not express such emotions, and the deference we should show to the feelings of others – all these are guided by socially shared rules and norms concerning what within our emotional lives is expected and appropriate, rewarded and punished, to be expressed or suppressed.
Indeed, as Koschut writes – building on the work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild – there exist within international politics ‘“feeling rules”: rules about the verbal and non-verbal expression of emotions in given situation’ and ‘“feeling structures”: institutionalised sets of emotions that show a regular pattern that constrains and compels the affective experience of subjects, thereby producing and solidifying hierarchies’.Footnote 23 These rules and structures are not static and can be subject to significant debate and contest. And as Gustafsson and Hall argue, there exists a ‘politics of emotion’ that surrounds struggles over ‘who can or should feel what and whose feelings matter’.Footnote 24 All the same, many of these rules and structures may also go unnoticed – treated as self-evident expectations reproduced through myriad daily interactions.
Emotions thus possess both personal and social lives: they are individually felt yet socially recognised, shaped by regimes of governance and political contestation. The personal experience of emotions captures us, moves us, constitutes certain elements of our lives and encounters with felt significance. The social dimension of emotions renders their experience, display, and significance inextricable from the shared structures of rules, norms, and relationships within which they emerge.
The political influence that the families of captives possess thus derives from this dual nature of emotions. The feelings of empathy and sympathy that their narratives and circumstances provoke in others are a powerful political resource. Families present a concrete and ongoing manifestation of the human price and significance of the captives. The stories the families offer invite us to imagine ourselves in their situation. What if it were our son, daughter, spouse, sibling, or parent? How would we feel in their place? These are people who are suffering because of the actions of actors outside their control. The vicarious, empathetic identification with their suffering, anger, resentment, anxiety, and even hope can generate larger public support; the sympathy for their plight shapes both how they are treated and the priority attributed their cases.
At the same time, families of captives can also invoke the feeling rules and structures of their societies to lay claim to the emotions others are expected to feel and the deference that should be shown their own feelings. In many cases, the families of politicised captives appear to fit what Christie has famously called the ideal victim: ‘a person or a category of individuals who – when hit by crime – most readily are given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim’.Footnote 25 Christie outlines five criteria for what is frequently seen as the ideal victim: (1) they are weak; (2) they were engaged in respectable behaviour; (3) they could not possibly be blamed for their plight; (4) the perpetrator was ‘big and bad’; and (5) the perpetrator was unknown and in no personal relationship with the victim.Footnote 26 While Christie’s description derives from the context of individual criminal victims and the listed attributes are likely culturally variable, the circumstances of the families of captives arguably also match all these criteria – they have lost a family member through no fault of their own by the actions of some ‘big and bad’ external actor. Moreover, as family members, they have an emotional link to the captives that is immediately socially recognisable; their emotional pain is unlikely to be challenged, regardless of what their actual relationship to the captive family member may have been before the abduction.
Consequently, as authentic ‘ideal victims’, families of captives have a clear social claim on empathy, sympathy, and deference to their feelings. Even those that may not personally feel for the families may find themselves needing to act as if they did or face social opprobrium as ‘lacking a heart’ or being morally corrupt. To contradict or dismiss the feelings of families would be to demonstrate a lack of moral and emotional competency. The feelings of families also in this manner can assume political significance, with the question of ‘how would this make the families feel?’ becoming a metric for evaluating political choices.
Mobilising emotional–political resources
But, as Christie notes, there is also a potential sixth condition for being a victim, namely that they ‘are powerful enough to make your case known and claim the status of an ideal victim’.Footnote 27 Being able to provoke the feeling and invoke emotional rules and regimes requires making the personal public through narration, expression, and display. To convert their emotional status into political influence, families need to draw attention to their plight. They must render up their stories, their personal grief, their most intimate relationships for others to recognise, identify with, and feel for. Some families may proactively do this as a form of advocacy. Others may find themselves thrust into this position by political entrepreneurs or an aggressive popular media seeking to generate news stories.Footnote 28 (And not all families may make use of these resources; in certain cases, families may choose or be counselled to remain quiet).Footnote 29 Regardless, the mobilisation of emotional–political resources by families of politicised captives hinges on their personal grief being transformed into collective narratives and public performances that circulate to provoke empathy and sympathy, inspire solidarity, and compel political action.
Emotional–political resources, encompassing relational and embodied dimensions such as love, empathy, and grief, serve as intangible sources of influence that families can strategically leverage to shape political dynamics. Love, particularly familial or maternal love, is often rendered as a moral emotion, elevating its status as a recognisable and powerful force.Footnote 30 As Solomon observes, love manifests in various political dimensions – whether for family, community, or nation – yet its role often remains underexamined in political discourse.Footnote 31 For families of politicised captives, framing their struggles through the lens of love lends their narratives moral legitimacy and resonance.Footnote 32 In many cases, women play a central role in being the face of this.Footnote 33 Maternal love in particular has a special significance in many contexts – and much work has been done on the role of women engaging in political action in their role as mothers.Footnote 34 Examples include maternal activist groups in Latin America who have mobilised around issues of disappearance and political violence, whereby ‘The public display of maternal pain reminds us that the victims of catastrophic violence had a name and a story and that belonged to a family and a community’. As Orozco Mendoza observes, ‘maternal activism functions as the archetype of a universal ethic of care and love in search of rightful retribution’.Footnote 35
The politicalisation of captives dehumanises them, renders them tools, symbols, leverage, bargaining chips, or pawns in a larger political game.Footnote 36 Their families, however, present a link to their existence as individuals that are potentially experiencing personal suffering and whose loss is generating familial suffering. The existence of families works against treating political captives as simply one of any number of abstract issues within an international relationship, creating a persistent locus for vicarious feeling and sympathy. By aligning their trauma with universally recognisable experiences, such as a mother’s unconditional love or a spouse’s profound pain of loss, families bridge the personal and the collective. This relational framing generates moral pressure, compelling policymakers and the public to respond with empathy and action. In doing so, families position their grief as a collective concern, mobilising love as both an emotional and political resource to legitimise their claims and expand the reach of their narratives.
The exchange rate – between vulnerability and power
The families of politicised captives occupy a paradoxical position, defined by the interplay of agency and dependency, as well as the duality of power and vulnerability. Their emotional resources grant them influence, yet these same resources expose them to appropriation. Heaney highlights how emotional capital, like other forms of capital, functions as a scarce and valuable resource. Its ‘exchange rate’ into political capital has risen alongside the increasing ‘emotionalisation’ of politics.Footnote 37 For families, this means that their deeply personal grief and love, transformed into emotional influence, become both a source of empowerment and a tool susceptible to external manipulation.
Families derive power from their vulnerability. The love and longing they express for the captives – often framed as an unyielding effort to rescue their family members – resonate deeply with societal values of care and justice. This love, as Hartnett argues, can mask power,Footnote 38 functioning as a potent force in shaping public discourse and moral imperatives. By leveraging their grief and love as emotional capital, families legitimise their claims, galvanise action, and reshape political debates. However, this transformation involves an inherent ‘exchange rate’: families expose their private pain to public scrutiny in exchange for empathy and solidarity. While this exchange amplifies their voices, it simultaneously renders their narratives vulnerable to appropriation by governments, media, and advocacy organisations.
As noted earlier, lacking the means to pursue diplomacy, set policy, or impose sanctions, families depend on political intermediaries and the state to advance their cause. In some cases, political actors may voluntarily adopt and champion the families’ cause – sometimes out of genuine conviction, but also because it offers political capital. Supporting the families allows these actors to demonstrate moral credibility, gain publicity, attract donations, and repurpose the issue to advance their own policy agendas. As families’ stories are amplified, they risk losing control over their narratives. External actors often reframe these narratives to align with broader political agendas, creating tensions between personal ownership and public appropriation. For instance, in the case of the Iran hostages, ‘the Carter Administration recognised that the families could have a powerful effect on public discourse and diplomacy’, and thus sought to leverage them to its advantage.Footnote 39 In this sense, love becomes politicised – not merely a private emotion but also a strategic resource that legitimises action, provokes empathy, and mobilises collective support. Unlike military power, which asserts dominance through force, love as an emotional–political resource exerts influence through its ability to inspire. However, this relational power carries risks: it instrumentalises deeply personal experiences for political ends, introducing a form of symbolic violence that diminishes families’ agency over their narratives.
In other cases, the families of captives may seek political influence by directing sympathetic media and popular pressure against political actors they deem to be obstructing or harming their family member’s release. They can become fierce critics of those policy and policymakers that they see as preventing the return of their loved ones.Footnote 40 They can impose political costs and constraints on policies that would deviate from their objectives, framing them as a sacrifice of their loved ones. They can place governments and other actors in a situation of being embarrassed or ashamed for inaction or revealed hypocrisy. Their authenticity as grieving relatives lends credibility to their activism, allowing them to leverage their position as tangible human evidence of the consequences of political choices.
To navigate this tension, families must carefully frame their stories to maintain agency while leveraging their vulnerability as a source of power. This process is fraught with complexities: exposing private grief to public view entails a constant negotiation between agency and appropriation. Emotional–political resources are both powerful and fragile – they inspire collective action and shape public discourse, yet they remain susceptible to external control and reinterpretation.
Families and the abduction issue in Japan
To examine the political roles of families in the context of politicised captivity and how emotional–political resources can be mobilised to empower seemingly powerless actors, we turn to the case of Yokota Megumi, one of the most famous faces of the rachi mondai between Japan and North Korea. As introduced earlier, the rachi mondai refers to a series of disappearances of Japanese citizens, later attributed to abductions by North Korean agents between 1977 and 1983. Understanding this issue requires situating it within the broader historical tensions of Japan–North Korea relations, shaped by the legacy of Japan’s colonial rule and the contested processes of repatriation after World War II. Following Japan’s 1945 defeat, repatriation of Japanese nationals from northern Korea was obstructed by the creation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in 1948. Many Japanese residents were effectively trapped within North Korean borders, and unresolved questions about the remains of those who died there continue to fuel political tensions.Footnote 41 Migration complexities also affected Korean residents in Japan: about 93,000 were repatriated to North Korea between 1959 and the mid-1980s under a controversial programme.Footnote 42 Tensions resurfaced in the 1980s when Japanese women married to North Korean men sought to return home, further straining relations.Footnote 43 Against this backdrop, rumours of North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens began circulating in the late 1970s. Initial reports received little attention until key incidents – such as the 1985 arrest of a North Korean agent carrying a missing Japanese citizen’s passport and the 1987 testimony of a detainee who had been taught Japanese by an abductee – prompted renewed public and political urgency.Footnote 44 The disappearances were then officially recognised by the Japanese government as the rachi mondai.
Although the rachi mondai has been studied for its impact on Japan–North Korea relations, Japan’s identity politics, and foreign policy,Footnote 45 the role of families in shaping its narrative remains relatively underexplored. This oversight is surprising, given the families’ centrality to public discourse and their remarkable ability to sustain attention on the issue over decades. Over time, the rachi mondai evolved from a narrow set of cases into a defining element of Japan–DPRK relations. Given the enduring resonance of familial narratives in shaping public and political responses, the rachi mondai serves as an ideal case to explore how families can mobilise emotional resources and how these resources are contested in the context of politicised captivity.
We focus in particular on the experiences of the family Yokota Megumi, as the age, gender, and other attributes of the abductee combined make it most likely to generate substantial emotional–political resources, thus illustrating both their utmost possibilities and outer limits. Other abductees were generally much older, and some were taken as couples (a fact that contributed to police often assuming they had simply eloped). As a thirteen-year-old girl abducted on her way home from school, Megumi represents what Christie describes as the archetypal ‘ideal victim’.Footnote 46 What is more, unlike the five who were returned after the North Korean revelations,Footnote 47 Megumi’s case remains officially unresolved.
The families of abductees are fundamentally powerless in terms of decision-making and diplomatic engagement with North Korea. As Yokota Sakie, Megumi’s mother, writes, ‘If it was running away from home, leaving without a trace, or kidnapping, the families can do everything in their power to look for them. However, for Megumi and others, they were forcefully ripped away from us by a huge power that families had no power to do anything about.’Footnote 48 This ‘huge power’ – the distant and unaccountable state – embodies the ‘big and bad’ perpetrator that defines the families’ victimhood. Unable to communicate with North Korean officials or negotiate directly, they must depend on the Japanese government and international bodies to act on their behalf. This reliance leaves them passive participants in a process they cannot control. Despite their visibility and sustained advocacy, they have had no formal means to directly influence negotiations with North Korea or secure the return of their family members, even to this day.
A personal story of family tragedy
In her memoir, North Korea Kidnapped My Daughter,Footnote 49 Yokota Sakie recounts how their deeply personal tragedy, once confined within the walls of their home, eventually became a catalyst for a national reckoning. Sakie describes how a seemingly ordinary day in November 1977 turned into a nightmare. That evening, thirteen-year-old Megumi failed to return home from badminton practice. Hours turned into days as the Yokotas searched desperately for any trace of their daughter. Patrol boats, helicopters, and countless volunteers combed the shoreline, but no evidence emerged.Footnote 50 For two decades, the Yokotas were simply left not knowing what happened to their daughter, their lives forever altered by Megumi’s sudden disappearance.
In January 1997, their private grief collided with what was for them a shocking revelation. A phone call urged Yokota Shigeru to contact Diet member Atsushi Hashimoto of the Japanese Communist Party.Footnote 51 For the first time, the family was confronted with evidence that Megumi was alive – in North Korea. ‘It was like a thunderbolt out of a blue sky’, Sakie later said.Footnote 52 In her memoir, Sakie describes how this revelation brought both clarity and anguish. She learned that Megumi had been taken by North Korean agents and transported across the sea to North Korea. Megumi's hands, raw and bloodied from clawing at the walls, bore witness to her desperation.Footnote 53 Coerced into learning Korean under the guise of a promise to return home, she clung to hope – until the moment she realised that hope had been a lie. By then, the emotional toll had shattered her, leaving her devastated and broken.Footnote 54 ‘I felt so profoundly sad and humiliated when I think about why we still cannot rescue her’, Sakie reflected.Footnote 55 This passage conveys the depth of helplessness and hope that accompanied the revelation – an emotional rupture that would later become a source of strength.
With these revelations, the Yokotas’ experiences became linked to not only those of other families but also the much larger issue of state-sanctioned abductions. What had been perceived as a missing persons case became one of international captivity and, very quickly, also politicised captivity. This also marks the beginning of the Yokotas’ emotional–political journey, where their private grief transforms into a shared, compelling source of political influence, resonating with the public to generate sympathy and empathy, prompting action.
From family trauma to collective responsibility
So what began as a deeply private tragedy for the Yokotas was transformed into a national moral obligation as activists recognised the power of their story to mobilise public sentiment and drive political change. This progression – where the personal intersects with the political – demonstrates how families like the Yokotas became central to grassroots activism that leveraged emotional narratives to gain political influence and attract public attention.
Despite growing evidence of North Korea’s involvement in the abductions, it was years before the Japanese government acknowledged the disappearances as part of a broader pattern of state-sanctioned abductions. Critics would later argue that Japanese politicians, eager to normalise relations with North Korea (in no small part for economic reasons), had intentionally ignored the plight of the abductees. Indeed, for most of the 1990s – up until North Korean missile tests in 1998 – large portions of the political class and public supported engagement with North Korea with an aim to normalise relations.Footnote 56 The press – with the exception of the conservative newspaper, Sankei Shinbun – also largely stayed away from the issue.Footnote 57
Against this backdrop of political indifference, grassroots activism became the main force amplifying the families’ voices. The Association of Families Kidnapped by North Korea (Kazoku-kai), launched in March 1997 by seven abductee families, including the Yokotas,Footnote 58 initially faced significant challenges. These included limited media access and public scepticism, with critics accusing them of seeking attention for themselves.Footnote 59 These challenges pushed the families to turn their deeply personal stories into a rallying cry, using emotional appeals – often posing with photos of their missing relatives – to garner local support.Footnote 60
Activists and concerned citizens quickly stepped in to support the families. In Niigata, Kojima Harunori, a long-time advocate for Japanese women in North Korea (Nihonjin-zuma), founded the Group of Promoters of an Inquiry into Yokota Megumi’s Abduction.Footnote 61 Kojima worked closely with the Yokotas to distribute flyers and collect petition signatures, ensuring that Megumi’s story resonated beyond their immediate community.Footnote 62 Similarly, in Fukui, the families of abductees Chimura Yasushi and Fukie mobilised alumni networks to generate support, while in Tokyo’s Ginza district, relatives conducted petition drives despite public reluctance.Footnote 63 These actions marked the early conversion of emotion into mobilisation, where empathy evolved into organised solidarity and familial grief became a shared public responsibility.
The grassroots movement gained further momentum through the involvement of activists like Sato Katsumi, a former supporter of Japan–DPRK ties who had grown disillusioned with North Korea.Footnote 64 Sato recognised the emotional power of the families’ stories and played a pivotal role in formalising the movement. He helped establish Kazoku-kai and later facilitated the creation of the National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North Korea (Sukuu-kai) in 1998.Footnote 65 Sukuu-kai unified these local rescue efforts into a national coalition, providing families with a platform to lobby politicians, organise public events, and produce publicity materials.
Despite initial struggles, activists and families achieved a breakthrough when prime ministers Obuchi Keizo and Mori Yoshiro met with them in 1999 and 2000. While these meetings produced no tangible outcomes, they provided crucial media exposure, spotlighting the families’ plight and lending legitimacy to their cause. The visibility of their emotional–political resources led to broader public attention, with large-scale rallies, such as the 2000 event in Tokyo, attracting 2,000 attendees.Footnote 66 This demonstrates how the public display of suffering can trigger wider public empathy, which in turn fuels political action and engagement. Their personal loss was no longer just a family tragedy; it was mobilised as a tool to demand state action and support.
But the truly pivotal moment came in 2002 when North Korean leader Kim Jong Il publicly admitted his country’s involvement in the abductions, sparking widespread outrage in Japan. It caused a massive shock within domestic Japanese discourse about North Korea and triggered a significant reorientation of media attention – possibly in part because many in the media had ignored the issue up until that point.Footnote 67 This admission vindicated the families and activists, solidifying the abduction issue as a cornerstone of Japan’s political and social discourse.
In the aftermath, Sukuu-kai played a crucial role in sustaining and amplifying the families’ activism through organised events and extensive media coverage. It disseminated the message that, without a sincere resolution from North Korea, negotiations should cease and sanctions should be imposed.Footnote 68 After the 2002 Kim–Koizumi summit, Pyongyang permitted five abductees to return to Japan on the condition that they would later be sent back. However, amid intense public outrage and political pressure, the Japanese government refused to comply.Footnote 69 Responding to demands for a tougher stance, Foreign Minister Kawaguchi Yoriko called for the repatriation of the abductees’ remaining families still in North Korea and for clarification regarding the number of abduction-related deaths.Footnote 70 During the 2004 controversy over Megumi Yokota’s ashes, Sukuu-kai and Kazoku-kai mobilised press interviews and television appearances, intensifying public calls for sanctions.Footnote 71 They also globalised the issue by fostering international support, highlighting the Yokotas’ meetings with foreign families and their outreach to other nations affected by North Korean abductions.
However, key figures like Sato Katsumi pursued a broader agenda, advocating for a more hawkish approach to North Korea and aligning with right-wing politicians. As Samuels observes, ‘The Rescue Association gave senior posts to conservative politicians and worked with them to use the abductee issue to derail normalization talks and shift the government’s overall approach to North Korea.’Footnote 72 While the families, particularly the Yokotas, were aware that their emotional narratives were strategically utilised for political gain, they were willing to exchange their emotional suffering for the public visibility their cause needed. As Yokota Shigeru, Megumi’s father, stated, ‘“We know Sato is a right-winger but we need all the help we can get from whoever we get it from”, he said. “We just want the country to help us get our loved ones back”.’Footnote 73 Although this could come from a place of hope, this very much reflects the ‘exchange rate’ of emotional–political resources: the families accepted the manipulation of their personal stories, as long as it served the greater purpose of advancing their cause. Their suffering, though appropriated by external political actors, became a politically valuable asset, driving the movement forward.
This transformation of personal grief into a collective cause illustrates how intimate emotions can be leveraged for political mobilisation. The families’ trauma became the bedrock of a movement that reshaped public discourse and pressured policymakers to respond. By sharing their emotional experiences, the families generated empathy that fostered identification and sympathy that spurred action. Yet, this emotional resonance also opened space for political actors to appropriate their suffering, using it to legitimise hardline policies and calls for sanctions against North Korea.
Institutionalisation and cultural production: Emotional resources and national agenda
The institutionalisation of the abduction issue, supported by mass cultural production, transformed the families’ emotional narratives into a politically potent resource. What began as personal tragedies became a national moral crisis, deeply tied to Japan’s sovereignty and identity as a protective state. This shift was strategically amplified by hardliners within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), who recognised the issue’s potential to highlight concerns about national sovereignty and security.Footnote 74 The abduction issue evolved from a personal grievance to a national responsibility, officially described as ‘a grave concern that affects the national sovereignty of Japan and the lives and safety of its people’.Footnote 75 This shift turned emotional–political resources into a rallying cry for political action, with future prime minister Abe Shinzo leveraging the families’ suffering to advocate for sanctions and reject diplomatic compromise.Footnote 76 By aligning himself with the Rescue Association and amplifying public agitation, Abe transformed the issue into a political platform, galvanising national sentiment and consolidating support, ultimately culminating in an unexpected LDP victory in 2003.Footnote 77 Thus, deeply personal grief, when aligned with political interests, can be harnessed as a powerful driving force for political agendas.
The pursuit of these agendas, in turn, led to policy changes and the institutionalisation of the issue within Japanese politics. As Hagström and Hanssen outline, the government created the position of a special advisor, later expanded to a minister and headquarters for the abduction issue, strengthening sanctions against North Korea and raising the issue in multilateral forums.Footnote 78 Government-backed initiatives worked to institutionalise emotional narratives, ensuring they reached a broad audience and maintained public engagement. As Arrington notes, ‘The Japanese Abductions and North Korean Human Rights Act – passed in June 2006 and amended in July 2007…required national and local officials to raise public awareness about the abductions and North Korea’s other human rights violations, especially during a week in December every year.’Footnote 79 Video messages from abductees’ families conveyed their enduring pain and hope, transforming abstract political conflicts into deeply relatable human stories, strengthening the empathy of the public and driving the cause forward.
Initiatives like the North Korean Human Rights Abuses Awareness Week Essay CompetitionFootnote 80 further institutionalised the families’ emotional narratives within Japan’s social structures of feeling, particularly among younger generations. Students were encouraged to empathise with the families and reflect on the moral implications of the abductions, framing the issue as both a national responsibility and an ethical lesson in compassion. Through this process, empathy was socially cultivated – not merely an individual emotional response but also a guided emotional practice aligned with state-sponsored narratives of moral duty. Winning essays, widely circulated through educational and governmental platforms, exemplify how emotional–political resources are reproduced through education. One student reflected on the motivation for collective action, writing: ‘In a world where compassion often fades amidst daily routines, the story of the Yokota family stands as a poignant reminder of the fragility of happiness and the need for unwavering empathy. Their heartrending experience serves as a call to action for each of us to transcend our own concerns and engage earnestly with issues that shape lives beyond our own.’Footnote 81 Similarly, a junior high student described the physical empathy felt when imagining Megumi’s situation: ‘My chest tightened just imagining myself in her place.’Footnote 82 Such responses illustrate how embodied empathy is elicited through narrative and visual media – such as the anime Megumi – that personalise political conflict and make emotion a vehicle for civic engagement. In this way, education and media together reinforce shared feeling rules that define empathy and compassion as desirable emotional performances, ensuring the abduction issue’s continued moral and political resonance.
Media coverage played a crucial role in amplifying the families’ emotional narratives, transforming private grief into a collective national concern. Following the 2002 Kim–Koizumi summit, heightened media attention on families like the Yokotas humanised the abduction issue,Footnote 83 evoking widespread empathy and outrage. Newspapers and magazines became saturated with coverage, particularly after Kim Jong Il’s public admission that North Korea had carried out the abductions, cementing the issue at the centre of Japan’s public discourse. The intensity of media focus was reflected in popular weekly magazines in August and September 2003, which devoted more pages to North Korea than to significant domestic topics such as the LDP elections or the retirement of a celebrated Japanese baseball player, despite their typical public appeal.Footnote 84 The media coverage was imbued with the trauma and tragedy of families torn apart by North Korean agents, amplifying empathetic public anger towards both North Korea and the Japanese government.Footnote 85
The Yokota family, in particular, emerged as the emotional core of the campaign. Through public appearances, books, and interviews, they sustained media attention. Recognising the enduring emotional resonance of their story, the Japanese government institutionalised this focus in 2013 by establishing the Headquarters for the Abduction Issue, which aimed to keep the issue central to the political agenda. A poster distributed nationwide by the Headquarters, featuring Sakie Yokota’s handwritten message, ‘Megumi, mother will definitely save you’,Footnote 86 exemplified this effort. The poster framed maternal love and determination as universal and urgent, transforming private loss into a matter of national moral responsibility.
These emotional narratives not only elicited sympathy and empathy but also cultivated a sense of national shame and collective responsibility. Yokota Sakie’s letters to her daughter, such as those in the ‘Letter to Megumi’ series,Footnote 87 appealed to the Japanese public’s shared sense of duty, urging them to view the abduction issue as a national crisis. In one letter, she wrote:
Even in these challenging times, please keep in mind the children still waiting for rescue in North Korea. Without the support of the public, the abduction issue will not progress. Politicians and bureaucrats, it is your duty to tackle the resolution with the determination to erase this national shame.Footnote 88
This framing elevated the abduction issue from an individual tragedy to a national moral failure, compelling the public to view it as a reflection of Japan’s responsibility to protect its citizens. Appealing to shared parental instincts, Yokota Sakie transformed private grief into a mobilisable emotional resource – one capable of generating both empathy and sympathy across society. These emotions created political pressure, as citizens demanded decisive action from their leaders. During Diet meetings, politicians often amplified the families’ frustrations, criticising the government’s lack of transparency and slow progress.Footnote 89 Grounded in the families’ narratives, these performances of empathy became mechanisms of moral accountability, illustrating how emotional resources operate simultaneously as moral capital and political leverage.
Through such appeals, the families’ grief was not only made visible but also institutionalised as an enduring source of influence. Public empathy, once cultivated, reinforced the abduction issue as a moral and national concern that transcended generations. The mobilisation of emotional resources – across media, education, and state discourse – transformed the abductions into a collective emotional narrative, demonstrating how emotion can both sustain public engagement and redefine the moral boundaries of state responsibility.
The ‘perpetually innocent’ child: Familial love and protection
A central feature of the abduction issue’s institutionalisation lies in the construction of the ‘ideal victim’, exemplified by both the abductees and their families. Yokota Megumi, abducted at the age of thirteen, is consistently portrayed as a ‘perpetually innocent’ child in need of familial love and protection. This enduring portrayal draws on cultural templates of emotion surrounding motherhood and filial duty, translating familial love into a mobilisable emotional resource. Campaigns have repeatedly reinforced Megumi as a symbol of innocence, vulnerability, and unfulfilled potential. Even in 2024, when Megumi would be sixty years old, her narrative continues to depict her as a ‘child’ needing rescue and protection.Footnote 90 This deliberate framing is evident in the campaign materials, which prominently feature images of Megumi as a teenager, despite the availability of updated photos and belongings provided by North Korea since 2004.Footnote 91 Reflecting on these, Yokota Sakie remarked: ‘The two adult photos appear calm and cannot detect any trouble, but the photo from the time Megumi was abducted makes me feel very sad… Her eyes were trying to appeal something to me, reflecting loneliness and uncertainty of her future.’Footnote 92 For Sakie, and by extension the public, Megumi remains frozen in time as the vulnerable child taken from her family.
The official 2013 poster from the Headquarters for the Abduction Issue exemplifies this strategy. Featuring Megumi in a traditional Japanese kimono,Footnote 93 it situates her within cultural scripts of innocence, filial devotion, and purity, amplifying her symbolic resonance. By fixing her in adolescence, the campaign draws on shared emotional norms that associate childhood with moral worth and national virtue. This framing ensures the issue’s emotional durability, sustaining public empathy and political attention. This portrayal also extends to the families, particularly Yokota Sakie, casting them as equally ‘ideal victims’ whose desperation to rescue their loved ones is justified through the perpetuation of Megumi’s childlike image.
Yokota Sakie’s public appearances position her as a symbol of maternal resilience and unconditional love. Her commitment reframes maternal love as a moral force, aligning affective expectations of motherhood with national identity and duty. Over the years, Sakie’s writings and appearances have reframed maternal love as a collective moral ideal, positioning her as both a grieving parent and a moral agent. Her first book, めぐみ、お母さんがきっと助けてあげる [Megumi, Mother Will Definitely Save You],Footnote 94 elevates maternal devotion to a public ethic of care and resilience. Unlike its English adaptation, North Korea Kidnapped My Daughter, the Japanese title foregrounds the intimate mother–child bond, framing the abduction as a violation of something sacred and inviolable. When her personal vow became the slogan for the Megumi poster,Footnote 95 it transformed into a national call to action, turning individual anguish into collective mobilisation.
Sakie’s latest book, 愛は、あきらめない [Love Never Gives Up],Footnote 96 reinforces this theme by framing love and maternal devotion as a universal principle – the ultimate source of strength against overwhelming odds. This interweaving of private emotion and public morality illustrates how the social rules of emotion, particularly those surrounding motherhood and sacrifice, generate moral legitimacy for the families’ activism. This steadfast hope, despite decades without resolution, reinforces the moral heroism of her struggle and aligns Japan’s diplomatic posture with a broader narrative of righteous perseverance and justice.
By maintaining Megumi’s image as a ‘perpetually innocent’ child and recasting maternal love as a moral ideal, the families reveal how emotional–political resources can reshape public discourse and state agendas. In doing so, the families exemplify how emotional narratives can institutionalise moral authority and redefine the boundary between private suffering and political responsibility.
Agency and appropriation: Navigating emotional resources
The families of abductees have transformed their grief into a form of political agency, leveraging emotional narratives as mobilisable resources to shape public discourse and policy. However, this agency is a double-edged sword; while emotional resources empower, they are also subject to appropriation and constraint by actors pursuing broader political or ideological goals. This dynamic reflects the ‘exchange rate’ of emotional–political resources – the process by which families trade vulnerability and trauma for visibility and influence, often at the cost of control over their narratives.
The families’ emotional experiences are a key source of their ability to influence political discourse, and their emotional status means also that it is difficult to challenge their positions. The Yokota family, for instance, has consistently rejected North Korea’s claim that Megumi died, particularly after DNA testing revealed that the supposed remains did not match her DNA, although this has been challenged as politicised.Footnote 97 In 2014, the historic reunion between Yokota Megumi’s parents and her daughter, Kim Eun Gyong, in MongoliaFootnote 98 marked a rare moment for the rachi mondai, standing as the most significant event in many years and a focal point that reignited national and international attention. Despite being repeatedly told by Kim Eun Gyong during the meeting that Megumi had passed away, Yokota Sakie remained resolute in her belief that her daughter was still alive.Footnote 99 While defectors and former abductees reported sightings of Megumi up until 1994, no concrete evidence has since confirmed her survival, and most available information points to the opposite. As one Japanese scholar observes, ‘However, no matter how questionable the documents may be, the reality is that no information or evidence has been provided that is sufficient to deny the [North Korean] notification that Megumi had died’.Footnote 100 But as noted in the introduction, Ishiba stated that Yokota Sakie’s cry that ‘Megumi is alive!’ should be the ‘shared by the entire Japanese nation’.Footnote 101 Sakie’s hope remains non-negotiable: her refusal to accept closure is not an act of denial but an emotional form of resistance, sustained by the conviction that maternal love cannot be constrained by logic or political pragmatism.
Efforts such as the ongoing screenings of the animation Megumi – shown across Japan – or the 2021 movie The Pledge to Megumi (めぐみへの誓い) also illustrate how the sharing and retelling of the families’ narratives maintain public engagement and ensure the issue remains visible. The challenge of sustaining engagement becomes particularly apparent with the transition of leadership within the families. The passing of pivotal figures like Yokota Shigeru – Megumi’s father and a long-time leader of Kazoku-kai – underscores the perceived urgency of addressing the rachi mondai as time runs out for the ageing families of the abductees.Footnote 102 It also raises critical questions about the durability of emotional resources in maintaining momentum. As leadership shifts to the next generation, represented by individuals like Yokota Takuya, Megumi’s brother, the ability to sustain public and political support hinges on their capacity to preserve emotional resonance and ensure continued widespread engagement.
While families leverage their emotional narratives to secure public and governmental attention, they faced the challenge of having their stories appropriated for purposes beyond their original goals. For example, the Japanese media have been accused of exploiting the emotional nature of the abduction issue for commercial and political gain. As Lynn notes, the abduction issue offers ideal emotional material for television, offering sympathetic figures, easily recognisable villains, and a sustained sense of drama.Footnote 103 A former Japanese TV reporter revealed that media outlets consistently amplified the families’ narratives to vilify North Korea, frequently sensationalising unrelated information to fit this agenda. The reporter described an environment where dissenting views were stifled, noting that only a hardline stance against North Korea was acceptable. Media executives reportedly pressured journalists to portray North Koreans as ‘evil savages’, using the families’ suffering as a tool to justify Japan’s refusal to negotiate with Pyongyang.Footnote 104 This reflects a broader exchange imbalance: while the families gain exposure and public sympathy, they lose control over the framing of their stories. And as Arrington observes, ‘The media granted abductee families’ supporters – even if they were right-wing – unprecedented coverage because of their affiliation with the families. Leveraging constant and uncritical media coverage, Sukuu-kai and local rescue associations rendered questions about the movement’s motives and activities virtually taboo.’Footnote 105 The emotional–political resources that empower the families are thus simultaneously commodified – transacted in ways that strengthen institutional narratives but dilute the families’ agency.
The Japanese government, too, has strategically framed empathy as obligation, transforming emotional solidarity with the families into justification for its broader national security agenda. And various policy actors have arguably been able to leverage the families’ stories – former prime minister Abe included – to continue pressing a hard line against North Korea. So while political actors’ engagement elevated the issue on domestic and international stages, it often diverged from the families’ primary goal of securing their loved ones’ return. Abe identified resolving the abduction issue as his administration’s ‘highest policy priority’,Footnote 106 calling it his ‘life work’.Footnote 107 He expressed deep sorrow over Yokota Shigeru’s passing, stating, ‘I feel heartbreaking grief’.Footnote 108 Yet, in 2022, it was revealed by local news agencies that his government rejected a 2014–15 North Korean proposal to repatriate two abductees, fearing that a partial resolution might weaken Japan’s negotiating position and allow Pyongyang to prematurely close the issue.Footnote 109 This decision exposes the asymmetry of the emotional exchange: the government capitalised on the families’ moral authority to legitimise policy while withholding actions that might have advanced their cause.
At the same time, political actors who have advocated for dialogue with North Korea, such as senior Diet members Kato Koichi and Yamazaki Taku, have faced public condemnation, with accusations that ‘they ignored abducted victims and their families’, and have been labelled as traitors or spies for challenging hardline policies.Footnote 110 This climate shows how the families’ emotional narratives became socially coercive instruments, policing moral legitimacy and emotional competence. Following Kim Jong Il’s 2002 admission of the abductions, which Hagström and Hanssen describe as a ‘lynch-mob atmosphere’,Footnote 111 sympathy for the families became a moral boundary defining who could legitimately speak on North Korea policy. Their emotions effectively served as a metric of moral virtue – to question them was to risk being seen as ‘lacking a heart’ – narrowing the range of acceptable debate and entrenching Japan’s hawkish stance toward Pyongyang.
Internationally, the government has further utilised these narratives to frame the abduction issue as a significant human rights concern, hosting annual online symposia at the United Nations and engaging partners such as Australia, South Korea, the US, and the European Union.Footnote 112 High-profile meetings between Kazoku-kai and global officials, such as with George W. Bush in 2006Footnote 113 or 2024 with US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield,Footnote 114 exemplify how the families’ emotional stories are continuously deployed to secure international backing and sustain global attention on the issue and support for Japanese policies toward North Korea. But by amplifying the families’ suffering on a global stage, Japan not only positions the abduction issue as a universal violation, bolstering its victimhood narrative and reinforcing its diplomatic stance, it also conceivably limits its range of freedom on policy – what Ackert and Samuels (this issue) have referred to the ‘sorcerer’s apprentice effect’. Once the issue is framed as an absolute moral and humanitarian cause, compromise or partial settlement becomes far more difficult, as any concession risks being portrayed as a betrayal of the families. In this way, the very success of mobilising emotional narratives internationally both strengthens Japan’s stance and constrains its diplomatic flexibility.
Conclusion
One could argue that the families have been quite successful in transforming the issue of the abductees into central foreign policy concern within Japan. As Hagström and Hanssen observe, ‘There is consensus that constant lobbying efforts by Kazoku-kai…and its support organisation Sukuu-kai…have been instrumental in placing the abduction issue on the Japanese political agenda…’Footnote 115 But at the same time, certain families at the centre of this story – such as the Yokotas – still view the ultimate goal of their campaign as unfulfilled. Their circumstances have given them powerful resources in terms of empathy and sympathy, but these resources have their limits and can be appropriated for other ends.
The commodification of the families’ grief raises critical questions about the exchange rate of emotional resources for influence. While the families successfully mobilise their narratives to sustain public empathy and compel governmental action, they must continually navigate the fine line between agency and vulnerability. This process often requires families to repeatedly and publicly recount their most traumatising experiences – an endless cycle of reliving their loss to maintain visibility and evoke empathy. Annual events, media appearances, and government-backed campaigns ensure their stories remain at the forefront, but this comes at a significant emotional cost. Their deeply personal grief becomes a resource exchanged for public attention and political action, transforming private trauma into a public narrative largely controlled by external actors.
For their stories to reach a wider audience, dramatisation through media and governmental campaigns becomes inevitable, further diluting their control over these narratives – without necessarily achieving their original goal: the return of their loved ones. This dramatisation fragments narrative ownership, amplifying the stories for maximum emotional impact but often placing control in external hands. This paradox redefines power as deeply emotional, revealing how the politically powerless can shape events, though often on terms dictated by others. The families’ struggle underscores both the potential and fragility of emotions as political tools, as their suffering is perpetually exchanged to sustain a collective emotional obligation.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Karl Gustafsson and Richard J. Samuels for their leadership of the special issue and for their valuable guidance throughout the review process. We are also grateful to the fellow contributors, the editors of EJIS, and the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and constructive feedback, which significantly strengthened the article.
Funding statement
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interest
The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical standards
Ethical approval was not required.
Phuong Anh Nguyen is a research affiliate at the School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, and a teaching fellow in politics at SOAS University of London. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews.
Todd H. Hall is Professor of International Relations in the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations, Tutor for Politics at St Anne’s College, and Director of the University of Oxford’s China Centre.
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