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Yomiuri Shimbun file photo Akihiro Arimoto, right, and his wife Kayoko with a picture of their daughter Keiko in Kobe in March 2017
The Yomiuri Shimbun
18:09 JST, February 17, 2025
Akihiro Arimoto, whose daughter Keiko Arimoto was abducted by North Korea at the age of 23, died of old age. He was 96.
The funeral has already taken place.
Akihiro’s death leaves Sakie Yokota, the 89-year-old mother of Megumi Yokota, as the only parent of an abductee recognized by the government who continues to engage in rescue activities. Megumi was kidnapped at the age of 13.
Keiko attended a Kobe City University of Foreign Studies and was studying in London when she was abducted by North Korea in July 1983. In 1988, information that Keiko was alive in North Korea was conveyed in a letter from Toru Ishioka, who was abducted at the age of 22, to his family.
Akihiro thought Keiko had likely been abducted, so he and his wife Kayoko asked the Foreign Ministry and political parties to investigate and seek to rescue her. Kayoko died at the age of 94 in February 2020.
Akihiro was the oldest among the relatives of abductees. Keiko’s 65th birthday was on Jan. 12 this year.
The government officially recognized Keiko as an abductee in 2002, nearly 20 years after her disappearance.
Then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited North Korea in September 2002, and North Korea officially acknowledged Keiko’s abduction.
North Korea told the government that Keiko died of gas poisoning. However, Akihiro believed his daughter was alive and worked with Kayoko to collect signatures and make speeches.
Then U.S. President Donald Trump, who visited Japan in 2019 for a Japan-U.S. summit, sent a letter telling Akihiro that he would win and that Trump was doing his best for him. Akihiro felt his feelings had been conveyed and believed there would be progress.
However, he became depressed after Kayoko died in February 2020. “We tried together to bring Keiko back, but my wife run out of strength. I’m completely unable to sort out my feelings at the moment,” Akihiro said.
However, he never stopped trying to rescue his daughter. He attended a joint conference held in Tokyo by the Association of Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea and the National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North Korea in February 2024.
Around autumn of that year, Akihiro was briefly hospitalized due to a heart condition. However, he used a wheelchair to visit an exhibition in Kobe on abductees in December.
“My physical strength is nearing its limit. Resolving the abduction issue requires the support of the United States and other countries around the world,” he said.
According to Takeshi Nagase, a member of the Hyogo prefectural assembly who leads the Hyogo prefectural association for kidnapped Japanese, Akihiro’s legs and back had weakened, and his physical strength had declined recently. When he met the association’s members in late January, he seemed to lack his usual vigor.
“I heard that Akihiro was hopeful because of the change to the Trump administration, which has a more proactive stance on the abduction issue,” said Nagase, reflecting on Trump’s meeting with families of abductees during his first presidency. “It’s too bad.”
