Japanese drug dealers invade North Korea

It appears that South Korea is not the only Korea with foreigner and drug problems.  Our own Steve Herman (Voice of America) reports that:

On the Wednesday evening North Korean newscast, an announcer read a communiqué about the detention, in the port city of Rason, of three Japanese nationals on charges of drug trafficking and counterfeiting.

The trio, the announcer says, admitted its crimes and the gravity of the offenses. One man, Masaki Furuya, has already been expelled from the country. The communiqué says, however, the two others, Hidehiko Abe and Takumi Hirooka, will face trial stemming from their arrests on March 14.

Evan Ramstad for WSJ reports pretty much the same thing.  But the Shenzhen Daily had this to add:

The three had entered the Rason free trade zone to work for Japanese firms, the agency said without giving further details of the charges.

    The trio visited Rason to check machines at a food processing factory, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported last month.

    The paper said they were detained on charges that they hid drugs in canned goods to be exported to China.

    KCNA named the two still in detention as Hidehiko Abe of Realize Co., and Takumi Hirooka of Sugita Industrial Co. It said Masaki Furuya, former representative managing director of JP Dairin Co., had been expelled.

What wasn’t really explained was the additional charge of using counterfeit money in the North Korean free trade zone. I thought everyone used counterfeit dollars in North Korea.  Of course this isn’t the only time the sneaky Japanese have tried to smuggle drugs in North Korea – the mecca of bliss.  As blogged by Mr. Marmot in 2003:

Yoshiaki Sawata, a director at Enterprise Co. is now under investigation by a competent institution for his attempted drug smuggling,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
It said Sawata was trying to bribe a North Korean into buying drugs from a third country and smuggle them into Japan by Mangyongbong-92, a ferry sailing between North Korea and Japan. Although it did not specify the date of arrest, the news service said the man entered North Korea on Oct. 14.

The North’s state-run news agency said it suspected a political manipulation behind the drug smuggling. “The case comes at a time when hostile forces in Japan are calling for checking the ship at Japanese ports, dubbing it a ‘ship for illegal remittance,’ ‘a ship transporting missile parts,’ and ‘a spy ship’ in a bid to push the DPRK-Japan relations to the worst state.” DPRK is the official name of North Korea, standing for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“What is clear is the political purpose intended through the case,” it added.

Not quite sure what the political purpose was but North Korea decided to take mercy upon his poor politically misguided soul.  According to the earlier Shenzhen Daily article,North Korea allowed him to return home on humanitarian grounds in 2009.  This is what the Japan Times (January 16, 2009) had to say about Yoshiaki Sawada (seems his name is spelled in a number of ways) when he arrived home:

Sawada told reporters at the airport that he was a member of a major yakuza crime syndicate and had gone to North Korea to “check out a drug deal.”

KCNA said Sawada had confessed “to his crime.” It also said Sawada was part of a plot to back accusations that North Korea used its Mangyongbong-92 ferry to smuggle drugs to Japan.

Sawada said he collaborated with a Japanese national living in Pyongyang in the plan to smuggle illegal drugs out of North Korea. He did not identify his supposed accomplice.

Kiuchi said airport police officials had no plans to arrest or question Sawada immediately. Kodama added that Japanese authorities did not know what Sawada’s alleged crime was and were not aware that he had violated Japanese law.

I guess the Japanese authorities figured he suffered enough.  Acutally he and the other Japanese drug smugglers (accused) chose the right country to get caught - imagine if they had been caught in China.