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Japan

Feb 15, 2005

Japan back to wait-and-see on North Korea
By Oscar Johnson

TOKYO - North Korea's timing for spurning talks on its nuclear ambitions and boasting that it possesses nuclear weapons is an unlikely coincidence. It came as Japan was poised to defy Pyongyang's December threat to regard sanctions "as a declaration of war" warranting "effective physical action". Pyongyang's gambit gives Tokyo little choice now but to re-adopt a wait-and-see approach, while possibly undermining its only leverage to uncover the fate of Japanese kidnapped by North Korean agents more than two decades ago.

Japanese officials played down Pyongyang's announcement last Thursday, while steeling themselves for more domestic demands to use its own stockpiled arsenal of political arms. These include a law amended last year to allow for blocking cash remittances and ferry services to North Korea and others deemed a threat to Japan's security. What remains to be seen is the will to use them.

"We must calmly assess North Korea's intentions," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda told a news conference. North Korea "has made similar announcements in the past. We need to closely examine North Korea's true intentions ... [We] will have to watch the development for a little longer."

Short of a change of heart or regime in Pyongyang, that the waiting and watching can only last until the ripeness and appropriateness of leveling sanctions is hard to deny. North Korea's years of saber-rattling now carry the weight of a first-time public admission to having nuclear weapons. And pressure from its six-party-talks partners to go easy on North Korea has already forced Japan to turn a deaf ear to increasingly loud domestic calls for sanctions over the issue of abductees.

The six-party talks aimed at dissuading North Korea of its nuclear ambitions and getting it to dismantle its nuclear program comprise North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States. These talks - and the hope they will eventually succeed - are behind the pressure from Washington, Beijing and Seoul. They have so far been a key factor in Japan's strategy with its Stalinist neighbor.

"The Japanese government does not want to play its trump card," Pyon Jin-il, chief editor of Korea Report Tokyo, told the Japan Times last week, just days before North Korea's announcement. In addition to crippling the six-way framework, he said, "it could also give North Korea an excuse to scrap the Pyongyang Declaration" to work toward normalizing bilateral ties. In the Pyongyang Declaration of September 2002, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il pledged to improve relations, work toward normalization of diplomatic relations, and expand economic, cultural and political ties.

Even before Pyongyang bolted, however, the talks had been on hold since the third round in June after North Korea boycotted a planned September meet. That its latest self-described departure is not permanent but "indefinite" is likely to intensify US and regional calls for Japan to be patient. That is an increasingly tall order now that Tokyo has been included in North Korea's familiar complaint about Washington's "hostile policy".

The North Korean Foreign Ministry's February 10 statement issued by the official Korean Central News Agency blasted Tokyo for following the US lead in "obstinately clinging to a hostile policy toward our republic". The accusation refers to the widening rift over Japanese civilians abducted by North Korea.

Key for Tokyo has been the fate of 13 of its citizens that North Korea in 2002 admitted snatching in the 1970s and 1980s in order to teach Pyongyang's spies the Japanese language and culture. The outrage it has ignited in Japan's public is second only to the anger over how Pyongyang has since handled the issue. Five of the abductees were allowed to return to Japan in 2003, but North Korea claims, without offering any convincing evidence, that the remaining eight died or never entered the country.

Cremated remains claimed by North Korea to be those of Megumi Yokota, abducted at age 13 in 1977, are the latest bone of contention. Sent to Japan in November as "proof" of death, Tokyo claims subsequent DNA tests prove they are not Yokota's. North Korea now accuses its neighbor of falsifying the test results, adding that to its reasons for bailing out of the six-party talks.

"How can we sit across from Japan in one place and hold talks with it when it is saying it will nullify the DPRK-Japan Pyongyang Declaration and will not normalize diplomatic relations, while going so far as to fabricate the false-remains issue over the abductions issue, which has already been settled completely?" Pyongyang asked.

Pyongyang's snub and repudiation of talks came a day after Japan sent a statement through diplomatic channels in Beijing, chiding North Korea for what most Japanese see as its brazen disingenuousness in the matter. Tokyo warned of unspecified but "harsh measures" if North Korea did not come clean on the issue of the abductees. Given the onus that was already on Japan, however, sanctions would now likely be seen as nailing the lid on the coffin of future talks. In other words, Pyongyang may have turned the threat of sanctions into a bluff that it can now boast it has called.

"I understand calls for imposing sanctions are growing," Koizumi told reporters a day after North Korea's statement on possessing nuclear weapons and suspending participation in the talks. It was also just two days after advocates lead by Megumi Yokota's father submitted a petition with 5 million signatures demanding sanctions. "But we have to urge them [the North Koreans] to come back to the talks in the first place."

The six-way talks are not all Koizumi has to bear in mind when considering sanctions, according to University of Tokyo professor of political thought Kang Sang-jung: "Before any action is taken," he wrote in the Asahi Shimbun on December 31, "it is vital that timing and methodology be considered. But more important, Japan needs to look ahead and discern what it could lose by imposing economic sanctions.

"First, sanctions will not have the desired effect without the cooperation of China and South Korea," Kang noted. "The North Korean leadership could [also] use sanctions against Japan to tighten [its] nation from the inside and give momentum to its domestic 'forces of resistance' opposing reform and liberation."

There are clear signs, however, that Tokyo not only has been carefully considering sanctions, but also planning to implement them. The government has already unofficially devised a timetable to phase in economic sanctions starting in the spring, the Daily Yomiuri newspaper has reported.

Japan's Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Control Law was amended last year to allow it to halt trade with and block cash remittances to North Korea, while banning its ships from making port calls. In addition to holding back half of the 250,000 tones of food aid it pledged to North Korea, Japan also has been taking the tacit approach of mulling, revising or passing new legislation it could use to goad its neighbor to be more cooperative.

Not least of these is the amendment of an oil-pollution-damage law to require ships of more than 100 tons to be insured. An estimated 97.5% of North Korean ships ferrying clams, sea urchins and snow crabs to Japan do not have such liability insurance and would be hard pressed to buy it. While acting as a de facto sanction, Tokyo could cite the US$6.4 million it spent to clean up a recent North Korean oil spill in its waters to argue otherwise. However, the amended law, slated to go into effect next month, would also adversely affect Japan's seafood market.

Similarly, Koizumi's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, just five days before North Korea pulled out of talks, announced an outline for a bill to protect the rights of North Korean defectors - in essence making assisting them part of Japan's official policy. It's apparently modeled on a similar US-North Korean human-rights bill passed last year, incensing Pyongyang.

Pro-sanction politicians, and what media polls show are roughly 75% of the population, are already champing at the bit to impose such sanctions against North Korea. They can be expected to point to Pyongyang's loud and arrogant strut from the negotiating table as yet more proof that stronger medicine is required. But Japan's close allies in Washington are likely to want Tokyo to shoulder even more of the burden of bringing North Korea back to the six-party talks.

Whether North Korea is counting on such pressure to urge Japan to ease up on the abduction issue and forgo sanctions is hard to say. The chances are even slimmer, however, that Tokyo will drive a wedge between Pyongyang and other six-party members with unilateral sanctions.

Oscar Johnson is a freelance writer in Tokyo.

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