US deserter to live in Japan

2004-12-08 14:16

Tokyo - United States army deserter Charles Jenkins, now settling in northern Japan after his release from a military prison and four decades in North Korea, has expressed hopes of becoming a Japanese citizen, a news report said on Wednesday.

The Asahi newspaper said Jenkins, who abandoned his US army unit in 1965 and defected to North Korea, would soon apply for permanent residency in Japan on the remote island of Sado, where he arrived on Tuesday.

Jenkins' wife, Hitomi Soga, is Japanese, and their two North Korean-born daughters, Mika, 21, and Brinda, 19, received Japanese citizenship soon after their arrival in Japan in July.

The North Carolina-native, who served 25 days in a US military jail after being convicted of desertion, said on Tuesday that he would like to spend the rest of his life in Japan, but did not publicly mention the possibility of Japanese citizenship.

Well-known in Japan

The Asahi report did not cite the source of the information. A local government official in Sado, Tatsuya Ando, said Jenkins had not taken any legal action to become a citizen.

Jenkins, 64, Soga and the daughters were greeted by cheering crowds in Sado on Tuesday, 300km north-west of Tokyo.

The family's plight has been closely followed in Japan, where Soga has won an outpouring of public sympathy. Soga met and married Jenkins in North Korea after she was kidnapped as a 19-year-old in 1978 by northern agents.

She returned home to Japan in 2002 after Pyongyang admitted to kidnapping her and 12 other Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s, but left her family behind in North Korea.

A diplomatic offensive launched by Tokyo finally won the release of Jenkins and their two daughters earlier this year. The former sergeant later turned himself into the US military.

- AP