Kidnapping of Kim Dae-jung

The South Korean dissident leader Kim Dae-jung, later president of South Korea, was kidnapped on August 8, 1973, in Tokyo, Japan.

In the South Korean presidential election, 1971, Kim represented the Democratic Party, challenging incumbent President Park Chung-hee of the Democratic Republican Party (South Korea). Kim won 45.3% of the popular vote but narrowly lost to Park's 53.2%, by about 900,000 votes. Following the election, Kim was involved in a car accident which left him with a permanent injury on his hip joint. Believing the accident to be an attempt on his life, Kim fled to Japan where he eventually began an exile movement for democracy in South Korea, following Seoul's declaration of the Yushin Constitution in October 1972. With widespread allegations of corruption and manipulation of the results, Park turned his regime into a military dictatorship.

Around noon of August 8, 1973, Kim was attending a meeting with the leader of the Democratic Unification Party held in the Room 2212 of the Hotel Grand Palace in Tokyo. At around 13:19, Kim was abducted by a group of unidentified agents as he walked out of the room after the meeting. The entire rest of the floor of that hotel was rumored to have been rented out by a notorious yakuza syndicate run by the South Korean national Machii Hisayuki, a man long known to have extensive ties to the KCIA. He was then taken into the empty Room 2210 where he was drugged and fell unconscious. Later Kim was moved to Osaka and later to Seoul, South Korea.

...
Wikipedia