Media accounts have focused on inconsistencies in North Korean accounts of Yokota's death: changing dates, alleged contradictions in hos-pital records and suspicions that, as an attractive young woman, she was associated too closely with North Korea's elite to be allowed to leave.
"I imagine she had been very close to Kim Jong-il. I hear people say she had been his teacher and so on," said Kaneko Tomiyama, a 51-year-old Tokyo woman. "I think she was not allowed to return to Japan because she knew too much about the North."
The man identified as her husband also reportedly refused to provide hair and blood samples that would prove he fathered the girl identified as their daughter.
Her family is still clinging to hope she is alive.
"I know that everything in that country is a lie," Yokota's mother said. "I'm praying that the DNA tests on the remains will show they are not Megumi's."
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