Tomoyuki Sugimoto, the 39-year-old Japanese tourist who was detained in North Korea and was deported to China on the morning of Aug. 28, has left Beijing and is on his way back home within the same day.
Sugimoto was detained in North Korea early this month. He traveled the country through a tour arranged by a travel agency based in China.
The specifics of his arrest remained vague as of press time but North Korea had officially announced that he was expelled back to his country "on the principle of humanitarianism." The Japanese tourist had been imprisoned while the investigation into his unspecified crime had been ongoing.
On Aug. 27, North Korea decided to "leniently condoned" Sugimoto, The Japan Times reported, citing a report from state-run Korean Central News Agency.
Reports on Sugimoto's flight to Japanese indicated that the Japanese tourist was made comfortable and assured of his safety. The plane had many Japanese tourists on board; of those were university students who participated in academic events in Pyongyang.
Japanese authorities have been investigating the events that led up to Sugimoto's arrest. Negotiators are keeping communication lines with North Korea open.
Earlier this month, various media reported that an unidentified man in his 30s was apprehended in North Korea for allegedly taking videos of a military facility in the elusive country. Specifically, the said man, who has yet to be confirmed as Sugimoto, was allegedly caught shooting video of the western port city of Nampo, which is known to be the location of one of North Korea's naval bases and weapons factories.
Pyongyang is known to be overly watchful of the tourists that it welcomes in the country. In fact, there have been tourists who were detained before for arbitrary reasons.
The most controversial case was Otto Warmbier, a student from the United States who was apprehended for stealing a signage from one of the hotels in North Korea. The student was also released on humanitarian grounds. Warmbier died a few days after arriving home.
BBC noted that North Korea has also a history of using its tourist prisoners as a bargaining chip during negotiations with the prisoners' country of origin.
As for Japan, it has no diplomatic relationship with Pyongyang. The two countries, had, in fact, shared extremely tensed geopolitical relations.
Pyongyang had allegedly abducted Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 80s and forced them to teach their language and culture to North Korean personnel. There had been no information about these abducted people up until the present. Hence, Japan is not keen on fostering relations with North Korea until the issue was resolved.
More so, North Korea had unlawfully used Japanese borders several times during some of its missile tests. Tokyo, therefore, remained to be one of strongest critics of North Korea's nuclear programs.
