Kim Young-nam was a teenager living on the coast of South Korea when he disappeared in 1978, only to turn up in North Korea. There, he met and married Megumi Yokota, a Japanese national abducted by North Korean agents on her way home from school a year earlier.

They lived together and had a daughter. Yokota later committed suicide, North Korean officials have said, although Japan has not accepted that account of her fate. Kim was last heard of living in North Korea.

The contrast in how they are remembered in their home countries is stark.