Nahoko Takato

"I think I'll go back. There is a lot of unfinished business there for me," Nahoko Takato said at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo. "I feel as if I have left a kettle on the fire."

Takato, who had been helping street children in Baghdad since April 2003, was captured April 7 with photojournalist Soichiro Koriyama and Noriaki Imai by insurgents who threatened to burn them alive unless Japan withdrew its troops from the southern city of Samawah.

Although the government refused to withdraw its troops, the three were released April 15.

Takato and the other hostages were widely criticized in Japan and accused of endangering Japan's foreign policy by going to Iraq without appreciating the danger danger, danger, danger.

But she insisted that she had fully thought out the risks of such work before going to Iraq.

"I feel that whatever happens, I will not complain," she said. "Even if I die, I will not complain."

The Japan Times Weekly: Sept. 18, 2004
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