Takuya Yokota vividly remembers clutching a flashlight and running to the ocean with his mother and twin brother to look for his older sister in the dark, shouting her name.
Megumi, then 13, had disappeared on her way home from school on a cold November day 40 years ago, kidnapped — it emerged decades later — by North Korean agents to help train spies. None of them has ever seen her again, one of scores Japan believes were snatched away in the 1970s and 80s.
"Our house was thrust into a bottomless darkness," said Yokota, 9 at the time. "Every day after that was silent and hard."