The Country Where Big Brother Is Watching

Sept. 18 -- When North Korean leader Kim Jong Il admitted that his country had kidnapped Japanese citizens, he opened the gates — just a crack — to the inner workings of the hermit East Asian nation.

In an admission that shocked the international community, Kim confirmed this week that North Korean agents had kidnapped Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 1980s and that four of them were still alive.

The admission came during a historic meeting between Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Kim — or the Dear Leader, as he is officially known in domestic circles — in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang on Tuesday.

For more than two decades, a number of Japanese families have maintained that their missing relatives were snatched by North Korean spies as they went about their daily lives — while returning from badminton classes, taking a coffee break or after a romantic date.

The families have maintained that North Korea kidnapped their loved ones to steal their identities for international travel, to help train its spies in Japanese customs, or to be brainwashed and become spies themselves.

Initially, their claims were dismissed as too fantastic to be true, and the North Korean authorities have, until recently, consistently denied the claims.

But in a bizarre chapter of North Korean history, the world's most reclusive and arguably most iconoclastic head of state did an about-face when he apologized for Pyongyang's abduction of Japanese citizens and promised to prevent similar acts in the future.

North Korea Watching

More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, North Korea has the dubious distinction of being the world's most isolated nation and the last standing Stalinist state.

Experts studying the reclusive communist nation have had to frequently resort to what is called "North Korea watching," a complex quasi-science whose methodology for the most involves grabbing at the shreds of information released — or more often leaked — from the secretive state and worrying about its likely import.

But late last month, North Korea watchers received a particularly delectable morsel in their perennial quest for information, when a refugee fleeing to China brought with him an officially printed phone book bearing approximately 50,000 names and numbers.