Written on March 29, 2017, this continuation traces North Korea’s covert operations from the 1974 assassination attempt on President Park to the escalation of Japanese abductions, revealing an unbroken chain of terror, infiltration, and strategic destabilization.

How North Korea’s Cold War Terror Never Ended

A 2017 exposé linking assassination, abduction, and academic infiltration to an ongoing North Korean strategy threatening Northeast Asia.

2017-03-29
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The Cost of Leaving It Unchecked
Three years after the presidential assassination attempt, in Showa 52 (1977), North Korea’s abductions of Japanese nationals entered a full-scale phase.
What is particularly shocking is the confession of a former operative that the Zainichi covert organization “Rakudōkō,” directly controlled by the Workers’ Party of Korea and believed to have carried out the abductions, was also involved in the assassination attempt.
Regarding Minoru Tanaka, a government-recognized abduction victim who worked at a ramen shop in Kobe and was 28 years old at the time of his abduction, the National Police Agency states that he was abducted in Showa 53 (1978) by a Zainichi Korean who was the owner of the ramen shop where Tanaka worked.
According to the book Chongryon Operatives published in Heisei 11 (1999) by the late Jang Yong-un, who confessed that he himself had been a member of “Rakudōkō,” the former ramen shop owner was a member of “Rakudōkō,” and the abduction of Tanaka involved even the organization’s top leadership.
This top leader is said to have hinted at involvement in the assassination attempt on President Park.
Jang asserted that the top leadership “either guided or issued instructions” to Mun Se-gwang, the executed assassin, and inferred that the “Chongryon branch political department chief” whom Mun identified as the person who directed him was in fact this top leader.
According to the March issue of Shinchō 45 this year, an associate professor is the son-in-law of this top leader.
The darkness surrounding this top leader is unfathomable.
In May last year, this newspaper reported that among those subject to Japan’s re-entry ban imposed after travel to North Korea—an independent sanction over nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches—were Chongryon executives and members of the Association of Korean Scientists and Engineers in Japan suspected of cooperating in nuclear and missile development, and that this list included a male associate professor at the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute.
According to the March issue of Shinchō 45 this year, this associate professor is the top leader’s son-in-law.
In Heisei 15 (2003), the top leader was criminally accused by the Hyogo Prefectural Police for the abduction of Minoru Tanaka, but the accusation remains shelved.
Mun Se-gwang stated that his motive for shooting President Park with a handgun stolen in Japan was to drive a wedge between Japan and South Korea.
This aligns precisely with North Korea’s strategy of isolating South Korea from the free world and pushing it toward communization.
And now, as pro-North forces in South Korea inflame anti-Japanese sentiment by exploiting the comfort women issue, Japan’s ambassador to South Korea remains temporarily recalled, with no prospect of returning to post.
The scheme behind North Korea’s assassination attempt on President Park at the height of the Cold War is steadily becoming reality.
The Cold War has not ended.
Tensions have risen to the extreme, and the possibility of a crisis on the Korean Peninsula is being pointed out.
Is Japan prepared for this threat?
Shinichi Kojima, Head of the Osaka Seiron Office.