In the summer of 2004, an American student named David Sneddon went hiking in China’s Yunnan Province. He stopped to spend the night in the village of Shangri-La before continuing on. The next day, he left his guesthouse, had lunch at a Korean restaurant, and disappeared.

What happened? As Keiji Furuya, Japanese Minister of State for the Abduction Issue, recently told Melanie Kirkpatrick of the Wall Street Journal: “It is most probable that a U.S. national has been abducted to North Korea.”

Or, is it? North Korea has admitted to kidnapping Japanese citizensover the years, in a number