Destiny: The Secret Operations of the Yodogō Exiles

In 1970, nine members of a Japanese New Left group called the Red Army Faction hijacked a domestic airliner to North Korea with dreams of acquiring the military training to bring about a revolution in Japan. The North Korean government accepted the hijackers—who became known in the media as the Yodogō group, based on the name of the hijacked plane—and two years later they announced their conversion to juche, North Korea's new political ideology. Little was heard from the exiles until 1988, when a member of Yodogō was unexpectedly arrested in Japan, and communications with the group opened up in the context of his trial.

As a former Red Army Faction member, journalist Kōji Takazawa made several trips to North Korea, reestablished his ties to the group's leader Takamaro Tamiya, and helped to publish the group's writings in Japan. After Kim Il Sung revealed that Yodogō members had Japanese wives, Takazawa published a book of interviews with the women, but in the...