Reporting from Sado Island, Japan — Charles Robert Jenkins is running late. He hurries into work at the souvenir shop to a chorus of approving calls that has become the foreign-language soundtrack to his life.
"Jenkins san!" shout two dozen tourists lined up to meet this diminutive man with jug-handle ears, a 69-year-old American who speaks only a few words of their native tongue.
With a weary smile, Jenkins poses for a frenzy of snapshots, awkwardly holding a box of specialty cookies. Everyone wants a piece of him, pressing in close to shake his hand and ask him to sign their souvenir snacks.
"One day I counted 300 pictures in the first hour alone," Jenkins recalls in the easy cadence of his native North Carolina. "Then I just gave up counting."
And so begins another day in the bizarre life of a man famous for "the stupidest decision of my life."
In 1965, Jenkins was a U.S. Army sergeant assigned to the demilitarized zone that divides the Korean peninsula, a skinny 24-year-old who was terrified of being sent to what he considered a sure death in Vietnam.
One night, after guzzling 10 beers for courage, he abandoned his sense of duty and freedom as he knew it to stumble across the border into North Korea, a desperate midnight maneuver that led to four lost decades in communist captivity.
Jenkins quickly became Pyongyang's most prized Cold War pawn. He starred in propaganda movies and memorized the inflated political tracts of "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung, enduring a life so dreary and deprived that "most days you wished you were dead."
Eventually, he married Hitomi Soga, a Japanese woman abducted in 1978 as a teenager by the North Koreans. They raised two daughters, eking out an existence on government- issued rice and the undersized vegetables they grew in their garden.
Soga was released by Pyongyang in 2002 but later reconnected with Jenkins and the children she left behind. The couple's emotional reunion, falling into each other's arms at an Indonesian airport, elevated them to the status of unofficial Japanese royalty -- their fairy-tale cross-cultural romance celebrated by an entire nation.
In 2004, Jenkins settled here on isolated Sado island off Japan's western coast, explaining that it was for the sake of his family. Soga, who was abducted from Sado, and daughters Mika and Brinda, who speak little English, have declined to discuss their captivity, which, for the daughters, ended along with Jenkins' in 2004.
