Fisherman reels in mystery of a man off coast of Japan

TOKYO – Hidekazu Kakoi was looking for a fishing spot about six miles off shore when he noticed something bobbing on the horizon. He pulled his boat closer and discovered a man, grasping a duffel bag.

That was the start of the mystery.

Now recovering on the tiny island of Tanegashima, off Japan’s southern coast, the mystery man has refused to speak to authorities since his rescue Sept. 2. The duffel bag floated away, and local officials say all they have to go on is the fact that he’s Asian, wore a tank-top with a Korean label, and fell, jumped or was pushed into the water with his shoes on.

“He’s still not talking and we have no idea where he came from,” Shoji Nakamura, an official on the island, said Wednesday. “We’ve never seen anything like this before.”

The mystery has the island buzzing.

Is the man a North Korean spy? A Chinese drug-runner? A hapless Japanese landlubber?

“There’s all kinds of rumors going around,” Kakoi said by telephone from his island home. “Of course, he wasn’t in much condition to tell me anything when I pulled him in.”

Amid the otherwise frustrating lack of clues, one fact is raising eyebrows – the Korean label on the man’s shirt.

Tanegashima is home to Japan’s main space center. Virtually all of Japan’s rockets are launched from pads on the island. Two years ago, Japan put up its first spy satellites from Tanegashima, the first of several intended to monitor missile deployments and a suspected nuclear weapons program in North Korea.

North Korean spies are known to have infiltrated Japanese waters, and in the late 1970s and 80s even kidnapped at least a dozen Japanese citizens and whisked them off to North Korea to teach their agents the Japanese language and culture.

Several abductees were finally returned to Japan two years ago, and their stories have become a well-known cautionary tale here to avoid beaches at night.

So, could the man rescued last week be a spy?

Police say that is a possibility. They also believe he might have been running drugs or was involved in some sort of smuggling. No fishermen or divers have been reported missing in the area.

The man has a reason he doesn’t want to talk, one official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Authorities, he said, can wait.

Police say the man appears to be in his 20s or 30s and is of average build. Police have tried to talk to him in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English, but to no avail. They do not believe he is deaf or unable to speak or write.

Kakoi said the man never called out for help when he was in the water.

“For a while we just looked at each other. I was scared,” he said. “But then I pulled him in. His hands were purple. I didn’t ask if he was a criminal – I just wanted to get him to a doctor.”

“But now I wish I would have gone back for the bag,” Kakoi said. “That might have answered all our questions.”