Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH


	January 26, 2002	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH
North Korea vs Japan: Ne'er the twain shall meet?
By Aidan Foster-Carter

All is not well between North Korea and Japan. Nothing new there, then. Yet things are even worse than usual, thanks to two incidents, both of which suggest a new toughness in Tokyo.

Credit unions affiliated to pro-DPRK Koreans in Japan are being probed on suspicion that false loans are being used as a cover to send funds to Pyongyang. And last month, the Japanese navy pursued and sank a suspected Democratic People's Republic of Korea spy ship.

High time, then, to take a look at this oddest of bilateral relationships, across a sea whose name they can't even agree on. (What your atlas probably calls the Sea of Japan - but South Korea, never mind the North, has an official campaign to get the world's geographers to change that - is the East Sea to Koreans.) Nothing here should be taken at face value, so some background is necessary.

Few states in the modern world, let alone neighbors, have so weird a relationship as that between North Korea and Japan. Good, it ain't: that goes without saying. Yet there's more to it than meets the eye, and always has been. Formally, there are no relations. The DPRK is the only state on Earth that Japan doesn't recognize, and Japanese passports are stamped as not valid for North Korea. Yet that hasn't prevented a steady flow of visitors, including some senior politicians, from crossing the, er, Sea of No Agreed Name.

As for Pyongyang, its rhetoric obsessively lays into Japan as if nothing had changed since 1945. Did you know that Tokyo still plans on reinvading Asia, starting in Korea? If not, you can't have been listening to KCBS, North Korea's radio, recently - or any time in the past half-century, as the message hasn't changed. So you'd never guess that in real life Japan has long been the DPRK's No 2 trade partner and main earner of hard currency, plus intermittently a major source of rice aid. The rhetoric belies the reality.

In truth, it would be hard for two adjacent states, however hostile, not to have some kind of working ties. For years, Japan's socialist party (the JSP) acted as a semi-official conduit. JSP leaders regularly visited Pyongyang, met Kim Il-sung, mostly agreed with him - the communist party (JCP) was far more critical - and then trooped home to be debriefed by the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo. This channel enabled practical matters of mutual interest to be sorted out, such as regularly renewed agreements on fishing rights.

There were two moments when this awkward pair could have snuggled closer. In the early 1970s trade and visits multiplied. In 1972, Japan recognized China, so why not the DPRK? Japanese media portrayed North Korea as neat, orderly, and fast-growing.

South Korea by contrast was seen negatively - especially after its dictator Park Chung-hee had the dissident Kim Dae-jung kidnapped from a Tokyo hotel in 1973. But then Pyongyang defaulted on Japanese loans, the US lost in Vietnam, and Tokyo got cold feet.

Then in 1990, legendary Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) kingmaker Shin Kanemaru went to Pyongyang and got on famously with Kim Il-sung. (Perhaps too well; in 1993, when Kanemaru quit amid a raft of scandals, North Korean gold was Exhibit B.) Still, this launched the first ever talks toward diplomatic ties. Eight rounds were held in 1990-92, but eventually foundered on charges that years earlier North Korea had kidnapped a dozen or so young Japanese, often from isolated beaches; wafting them off in speedboats so they could train DPRK special agents - like "virgin bomber" Kim Hyong-hui, a main source for this story - to pass as Japanese.

Even by North Korean standards this is a strange tale, and the facts are murky to say the least. Naturally Pyongyang denies all knowledge, though it did offer to investigate (surprise: it "found" nothing). But the families and right-wing papers such as the Sankei Shimbun have assiduously kept the issue alive. So in 1990, when, after an eight-year gap the two sides finally got around to meeting again, abductions were still top of Tokyo's list - and predictably torpedoed the talks again.

By contrast South Korea, which has hundreds of confirmed kidnap cases, doesn't even put this on its agenda with the North - so far. Families of the victims are suing the Republic of Korea (ROK) government for negligence, and from 2003 after Kim Dae-jung priorities may change.

Not that abductions were the only stumbling-block. The year 2000 was the sunshine year, and the three rounds of Japan-DPRK talks were cordial enough. But the two sides' agendas were on different planets. Tokyo also wanted to talk missiles, having been well rattled when - with no warning - a mighty North Korean rocket whizzed across its airspace in 1998. Pretty reasonable, really, to ask your neighbor to let you know if he plans on letting off any more big fireworks in your direction. But Pyongyang wouldn't discuss that either.

For them, by contrast, the really important stuff was what happened before 1945, when Japan occupied a then undivided Korea for 40 years. It was all horrible (true enough), and this history had to be settled first before anything merely present-day could be discussed.

As such, this was neither new nor unreasonable. The precedent of compensation for the colonial past was set with the US$800 million in grants and loans extended to South Korea when it opened ties with Japan - which wasn't until 1965. Allowing for inflation, North Korea could be in line for a cool $10 billion - about half its annual gross domestic product. You'd imagine that would be quite a carrot. Yet Pyongyang seemed to prefer self-indulgent rhetoric to serious talking. Not sensible, surely.

Next, PART 2: Bones of contention