You are here:
Home / Lingerie Events
TOKYO — Charles Jenkins, the U.S. Army sergeant who defected to North Korea in 1965 and remained there for almost four decades, has died in Japan at the age of 77.
Jenkins had been living on Sado Island, off Japan’s west coast, with his wife Hitomi Soga, a Japanese citizen who was abducted by North Korea in 1978, since he was freed in 2004.
Japan’s Kyodo News agency and broadcaster NHK both reported his death Tuesday, but the cause was unknown.
Since their return, Jenkins had lived a quiet life on Sado Island, not far from where his wife was taken by North Koreans, working in the gift shop at the local museum and becoming some kind of a celebrity. Their 34-year-old daughter Mika lives at home and teaches at a nearby kindergarten, while 32-year-old Brinda lives on the closest mainland city, Niigata.
“I’d like to go back to the U.S., but my wife don’t want to go, and I have no means to support her there,” Jenkins told the Los Angeles Times in an interview during the summer, retaining his thick North Carolina accent. “So I figure might as well stay where I’m at.”
One night in 1965, when he was 24 and serving in the U.S. Army in South Korea, Jenkins drank 10 beers and stumbled across the world’s most heavily militarized border and into North Korea.
“I was so ignorant,” he told The Washington Post in an interview in 2008. He had deserted the Army for what became a self-imposed life sentence in a “giant, demented prison.”
[ A U.S. soldier who defected to North Korea in 1962 has died, his Pyongyang-born sons say ]
He was taken into the North Korean system, playing a ruthless American in propaganda movies and teaching English. He memorized the teachings of President Kim Il Sung and killed rats that crawled out of his toilet.
Then, in 1980, his North Korean minders brought him a woman who had been kidnapped from Sado Island when she was 18 years old, stuffed in a black body bag and taken by boat to North Korea.
They got married and had two daughters in North Korea who, Jenkins said in 2008, were in training to become multilingual spies for North Korea.
Then, in 2002, under a deal between the Japanese and North Korean governments, Soga was released, along with four other Japanese abductees. Jenkins hobbled off the plane with a walking stick, looking much older than his years, with their daughters in 2004.
Later that year, Jenkins was found guilty of desertion during a court-martial on a U.S. Army base in Japan. He was sentenced to 30 days in prison but was released early.
He told his story in an autobiography, titled “The Reluctant Communist,” released in 2008.
Another American soldier who defected to North Korea died late last year, but in Pyongyang.
James Joseph Dresnok, who was 21 when he ran through the demilitarized zone and into North Korea in 1962, died of a stroke at the end of 2016, his two sons said in an interview broadcast in August by the state-run Uriminzokkiri website.
Read more:
North Korea’s prisons are as bad as Nazi camps, says judge who survived Auschwitz
North Korea is a nuclear state. But can the U.S. accept that?
North Korea has shown us its new missile, and it’s scarier than we thought
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news
Share and Enjoy
Mayor Ed Lee, who oversaw a technology-driven economic boom in San Francisco that brought with it sky-high housing prices despite his commitment to economic equality, died suddenly early Tuesday at age 65.
A statement from Lee’s office said the city’s first Asian-American mayor died at 1:11 a.m. at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.
“It is with profound sadness and terrible grief that we confirm that Mayor Edwin M. Lee passed away,” the statement said. Lee was surrounded by family, friends and colleagues. No cause of death was reported.
San Francisco Board of Supervisors President London Breed became acting mayor and planned a late morning news conference.
Supervisors and other public officials were stunned and saddened by his sudden death. They praised the low-key mustachioed mayor who was better known as a former civil rights lawyer and longtime city bureaucrat than a flashy politician.
“I am floored. I can’t believe he’s gone. I just held a press conference with Mayor Lee yesterday … He was his normal friendly and jovial self,” state Sen. Scott Wiener told KTVU-TV. “He wasn’t the flashiest guy in the world, but he worked hard and it was an honor to work with him.”
Former Mayor Willie Brown and the late political power broker Rose Pak talked Lee into filling out the rest of Gavin Newsom’s term when he was elected California’s lieutenant governor in 2010. He was appointed interim mayor by the Board of Supervisors in 2011 after professing no interest in taking on the job permanently.
“We won based on our political shenanigans and our political skill sets. He got elevated to our mayor-ship under our charter and got re-elected twice,” Brown said.
Brown said Lee will be known as the man who “stepped up and made it possible for Silicon Valley to almost relocate to our city.”
U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who lives in San Francisco, said Lee’s background as a community organizer and civil rights lawyer served the city well.
“He knew the rhythms and the workings of San Francisco at the most granular level, and dedicated decades to improving the lives of all San Franciscans,” she said in a statement.
Lee changed his mind about taking the job permanently and won a four-year term in 2011. He was re-elected in 2015. Lee was an advocate for the needy, but in 2015, he ran against a slate of little-known candidates who criticized him as doing more for tech leaders than for poor people.
Detractors claimed he catered too much to Silicon Valley, citing his brokering of a tax break in 2011 to benefit Twitter as part of a remake of the city’s downtown. Meanwhile, housing prices have surged in San Francisco with modest homes now topping $1.5 million.
Lee, who is survived by his wife Anita and daughters Brianna and Tania, was a civil rights lawyer who became the San Francisco city administrator before taking over as mayor.
He was a staunch supporter of San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy toward immigrants, a stance he reiterated last month when a Mexican man who had been repeatedly deported was acquitted of murder in the 2015 killing of Kate Steinle.
The case became a flashpoint in the nation’s immigration debate, with then-candidate Donald Trump repeatedly referencing it as an example of the need for stricter immigration policies and a wall along the Mexican border.
Flags were lowered at City Hall early Tuesday. The last mayor to die in office was George Moscone, who was murdered by a disgruntled former Board of Supervisors member in 1978, leading to the ascension of then-Board of Supervisors President Dianne Feinstein to mayor. Feinstein is now California’s senior U.S. senator.
Lee’s death now will likely upend the race to replace him, which had been scheduled for 2019. Former state Sen. Mark Leno, a onetime member of the Board of Supervisors and longtime political figure, has already announced his candidacy.
Share and Enjoy
