FOR Shigeru and Sakie Yokota, their daughter seems at once far away and tantalisingly near. Megumi Yokota was kidnapped in 1977, at the age of 13, as she walked home from school. North Korean agents walked up the beach near her home and dragged her back to their boat. Her parents, now elderly, know that she married a South Korean who had also been abducted, and that they have a granddaughter. They now hope Megumi may soon come home. Last week Isao Iijima, chief fixer for the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, showed up unexpectedly in the North Korean capital, to talk with the regime about Japanese abductees.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s North Korea abducted at least 17 mainly young Japanese, and possibly many more. Typically, they were seized by frogmen emerging out of the Sea of Japan. They were brought to North Korea to teach Japanese ways to North Korean spooks.

For Mr Abe, these awful kidnappings have been a long-standing and reliable source of political capital. He made his name in 2002 when accompanying his boss, the then-prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, on a trip to Pyongyang to meet the late Kim Jong Il and normalise ties.

Until then, many Japanese had dismissed the rumours of kidnappings as a conspiracy theory. But quite unexpectedly, Kim admitted to them. It galvanised Mr Abe, who convinced Mr Koizumi of the issue’s importance. Kim allowed five abductees brief family reunions back in Japan. When cabinet members wanted to keep a pledge to send them back again, Mr Abe refused to let them go.

Several abductees are still unaccounted for, and ties with the North are severed. The North says the victims are dead, though much of Japan is convinced Megumi is alive. Over 10m Japanese have signed the Yokotas’ petition for the abductees’ rescue. Mr Abe met the families, says Mr Yokota, days after he became prime minister in December. He pledged to visit North Korea to resolve the issue of the remaining abductees. A breakthrough before a July election for the upper house of the Diet would be a coup. However improbable, should Mr Abe bring home the schoolgirl whose image (wearing her mother’s red-and-white kimono) has inspired anime films, he would be unassailable.

The North would demand rewards for any breakthrough—even to provide proof of abductees’ deaths. That would dismay America, keen not to reward North Korea after its recent nuclear posturing. In Japan a breakthrough would bolster the far right, which has long latched on to the abductee cause. In late April the Yokotas marched with other families to present their petition to Mr Abe. Militant right-wingers joined the march, says Mrs Yokota, shouting racist slogans against Japan’s own Korean population. “They use us,” she says simply.