Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH: Japanese MPs seek get-tough option



	July 27, 1999	atimes.com

Japan

PYONGYANG WATCH: Japanese MPs get tough
By Bradley Martin
Asia Times Online

Fed up with watching their country flail helplessly in the face of North Korean provocations, some Japanese lawmakers have formed a club to do something about it. Their main prescription: beef up the now tiny range of possible responses by passing a tough exports-control law. They want to give their government the tools to stop the flow to Pyongyang of items with widespread civilian applications, but which also can be - and are - used in North Korean-made weapons systems.

Upper house members Ichita Yamamoto of the Liberal Democratic Party and Keiichiro Asao of the Democratic Party, writing in the August issue of the prestigious magazine Bungei Shunju, recall the shock Japanese felt last year when North Korea lobbed a Taepodong missile right over Japan and into the sea beyond. Then, two months ago, came another reminder of the potential for aggression from Pyongyang: a couple of mysterious ships intruded into Japanese territorial waters; when Japanese naval ships chased them (a first for the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force), they retreated to a North Korean port.

As frustrating as the North Korean acts themselves have been is the way Pyongyang explains them - or, in the case of the mystery ships, fails to explain them. The North Korean claim that the Taepodong missile launch was merely for testing a satellite was "an obvious lie that would fool only children," write Yamamoto and Asao. "That announcement was nothing more than an attestation of how Japan is being belittled diplomatically by North Korea."

The problem, the two parliamentarians note, is that Tokyo has in place only a single, not very credible option for a response any stronger than asking, pretty please, for Kim Jong-il & Co. to stop it right now. That option is to halt Japanese contributions to the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), which Washington, Seoul, Tokyo and some others agreed to establish in payment for Pyongyang's agreement to abstain from nuclear weapons development.

Tokyo these days is threatening to stop its contributions to KEDO in retaliation if Pyongyang tests an even longer-range missile, the Taepodong II, as is considered likely. But the "agreed framework" of which KEDO was the key part had nothing to do with missiles per se. Its function was to bribe Pyongyang - by funding construction of an expensive, non-threatening addition to the North Korean nuclear energy infrastructure - to end a nuclear weapons crisis and refrain from making it flare up again.

For Japan to scuttle KEDO over a threatened non-nuclear missile launch would be to bite off its own nose to spite its face. And even talking about doing so puts Tokyo out of sync with Washington and Seoul, which don't want to jeopardize the fragile successes of the nuclear diplomacy earlier in the decade. They don't need to, because - unlike Tokyo - they have a range of other means of responding to Pyongyang.

The two Japanese lawmakers admire the flexibility that the United States and South Korea have built into their diplomatic arsenals. They note that the U.S. has been working on a "comprehensive" policy approach to encompass the nuclear and missile issues, politics and economics. They also note that Washington is encouraging exchanges between American and North Korean non-governmental organizations (leaving aside the question of where one might find a genuinely non-governmental organization in North Korea).

South Korea, the two lawmakers write in Bungei Shunju, has its "sunshine" policy, "which could be interpreted in Japan as a soft-line policy - but South Korea is also dealing very strictly with North Korea's spy operations against itself." South Korean forces fought a fierce naval gun battle with North Korean vessels in the Yellow Sea June 15 - whereupon vice-ministerial talks scheduled in Beijing were only postponed, not canceled. "If there is confrontation as seen in the gun battle, there is also dialogue," the impressed Japanese write. "The two are existing in delicate balance." Meanwhile, "there is neither acute confrontation nor effective dialogue existing between Japan and North Korea. But there is no way to protest against unilateral acts of intimidation, either."

Yamamoto and Asao are among the members of a "Club of People Who Think About Strategic Diplomacy," formed in October last year by members of parliament from various parties who want to develop some additional options for Japan, both hard-line and soft-line, to supplement the "KEDO card." They have zeroed in on high percentages of Japanese high-tech components reportedly built into North Korean weapons systems.

Several of the parliamentary club members, including the two authors, visited South Korea to get the lowdown on the weapons components. They were told, by sources they decline to identify, that the Taepodong I missile that passed over their heads last August 31 included Japanese-made semiconductors. And while the North Koreans had used French-made welding machines to build earlier missiles, for the Taepodong Pyongyang needed and acquired more advanced welding machines from Japan, the lawmakers were told. Many of the electronic and optical components on North Korean infiltration vessels - specifically, a Yugo-class submarine and a semi-submersible boat that South Korean forces captured - turn out to be of Japanese make, such brands as Furuno, ICOM and Canon. The lawmakers of course express dismay at the way Japan risks being threatened or attacked with weapons partly of its own making.

But they also exhibit some satisfaction in having hit upon what they believe is an opening for Tokyo to increase its leverage over Pyongyang. North Korea is dependent on its weapons trade for much of its hard-currency earnings. There are reports it has told the U.S. the price of halting its missile exports would be $1 billion a year. Possessing the ability to threaten a cutoff of the flow of Japanese components used in weaponry - and the ability to make the threat stick if push came to shove - would permit Tokyo to grasp Pyongyang by the short hairs.

That is much easier said than done. The items in question are dual-use technology, widely used in civilian applications and - like the U.S.-made Mercury motors found on the semi-submersible North Korean boat - relatively easy to acquire anywhere in the world. The Japanese manufacturers have offered assurances that they are not supplying such components directly to North Korea, so the question is how to find and cut off more complex routes.

Yamamoto and Asao say current laws are of no use. They propose a new export-control law that would include elaborate procedures for tracing not only the goods themselves but the money used to pay for them. That's already done by some countries' anti-drug agencies, they note. They want the law to permit naming specific countries as having been singled out for such treatment - something current law does not permit. Just the stigma of being officially named in such a context is leverage in itself, as seen by the North Koreans' eagerness to be removed from the U.S. list of terrorist regimes. A key provision would enable the government to act immediately once it discovered a suspect route, informing exporters that certain flows needed to be stopped.

How far are the "club" members likely to get with this approach? Note that those two are members of the less powerful "upper" house of parliament, which generally does not lead the way. And even assuming that the proponents were heavy hitters in the political establishment, if the question had been asked a year ago the answer pretty clearly would have been "nowhere." But when North Korea showed off its lengthened missile range nearly a year ago, it did trigger among many Japanese a stiff-spined response that Pyongyang almost certainly had not anticipated. Although people expressing views as strong as those of Yamamoto and Asao still risk being labeled "hawks" and "rightists," the inclination to get tougher is closer to Japan's mainstream than at any previous time since 1945.

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©1999 Asia Times Online Co., Ltd.