Politics & Power Quote by Robert Jenkins

The line reads like a man trying to sound grateful while carefully dodging the moral trapdoors under his own story. Robert Jenkins, a U.S. soldier who defected to North Korea in 1965 and decades later resurfaced in Japan, is speaking from inside a geopolitical machinery where every adjective can become evidence. “Not my intention whatsoever” is the tell: an overbuilt denial aimed less at truth than at optics. It’s the language of someone who knows his fate has depended on governments, not just on law.

The subtext is a plea to be seen as passive rather than calculating. If Japan “tried to get me out of trouble,” that implies agency, coordination, maybe even collusion. Jenkins needs the opposite frame: that he didn’t engineer a rescue, didn’t manipulate Japanese sympathy, didn’t use his marriage to a Japanese abductee as leverage. He’s signaling to U.S. authorities, too, that he isn’t thumbing his nose at military justice. Gratitude becomes strategy.

Context sharpens the tension. Japan, scarred by the North Korean abductions issue, had turned Jenkins’ family into a national story. Bringing him in, protecting him, or even appearing to protect him, carried enormous domestic political weight. His praise of the “Japanese government” functions like diplomatic repayment: he offers public humility so Japan can claim humanitarian decency without looking like it interfered with an ally’s discipline.

It’s a sentence built for survival. The emotion is real enough, but the real audience is power.