POLITICS-JAPAN: Cool on Warmer Ties With North Korea

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Jun 6 2000 (IPS) - The historic inter-Korean summit on Jun 14 has become a diplomatic headache for Japan, whose icy relations with North Korea have become an embarrassment for Tokyo, say analysts here.

“Japan is the odd man out in the history that is being made in East Asia,” says Kazuhiro Araki, an expert at the Modern Korea Institute, a private think tank. “The government is feeling the international pressure to develop better relations with Stalinist North Korea.”

Indeed, Japanese media highlighted North Korean leader’s Kim Jong Il’s secret trip to Beijing last week, a visit that has taken Japan with surprise.

“It is well-known that North Korean dictator Kim was not happy with China’s economic liberalisation. The pictures of him smiling with his Chinese counterpart President Jiang Zemin symbolises a new force for Japan to reckon with,” explains Professor Haruhisa Ogawa of Tokyo University.

So, while the ground-breaking bilateral summit is being hailed as an important breakthrough for peace and security in East Asia, Japan, despite being the economic leader in Asia, has an uneasy relationship with its neighbours, the two Koreas and China.

Analysts point out that despite past overtures such as Japan’s emergency food aid for North Korea, a major stumbling block is the country’s past harsh colonisation of the Korean peninsula in the early 20th century for until Japan’s defeat in World War II.

A still contentious issue between the North Korea and Japan is Pyongyang’s demand that Tokyo pay war reparation. Tokyo insists otherwise, arguing that the state of colonisation is not war.

In addition, Pyongyang’s missile programme — under which two North Korean ballistic missiles landed on Japanese territory in 1998 — and the abduction of Japanese nationals by North Korean agents remain thorny issues for the Japanese.

In fact, these problems have sunk bilateral relations to an all- time new low.

Japan’s latest round of negotiations on normalisation with North Korea began in April, but hit a wall last month when Pyongyang turned its back on a new schedule that was set for May 22.

The decision to postpone the 10th round of talks — resumed after an eight-year lapse — to perhaps after North Korea’s summit with South Korea has been a bitter blow to Japan’s diplomatic overtures to the communist nation that it sees as the biggest threat to its security.

While Pyongyang has not extended an official reason for the postponement, Japanese media has quoted officials as explaining that the North Korean government may have wanted time to consider the outcome of the North-South summit and the results of Japan’s elections set for Jun 25.

Hajime Izumi, a professor of Korean studies at the University of Shizuoka, explains that the North wants to use the upcoming summit to exert leverage over Japan.

“Pyongyang may be expecting Seoul to endorse part of its demand for Tokyo to apologise and pay economic compensation for the last war,” he said in a recent interview with the Japanese media.

Warmer relations with North Korea is crucial for Japan, but also for North Korea which is facing economic hardships that are forcing it to enter into diplomatic ties with Italy in January and re-establishing diplomatic ties with Australia in May.

In addition it is preparing to join the Association of South- east Asian Nation’s Regional Forum (ARF), the largest security grouping in the Asia-Pacific, in a move endorsed by Japan.

“North Korea is Japan’s biggest fear,” says Araki. “Japan is in a different position to the United States when it comes to dealing with Pyongyang because we are neighbours.”

Japan, feeling the heat brought by the ground-breaking Korea summit, is now putting the restoration of bilateral relations on the top burner.

“Japan’s soft approach may not be the best thing for Japan, which needs to clear up the threat to its security as a condition for shaking hands. But still the government is going ahead,” explains Araki.

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori visited Seoul for one day on May 30 to consult with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung on Japan’s policy toward North Korea, with the goal of advancing progress.

Japan has asked Kim to bring up the issue of the North’s nuclear missile programme in the June 14 summit — a request that Kim prefers to leave out in case his North Korean counterpart takes offense.

“Kim Dae Jung is keen to make the summit a success which marks a crucial landmark in his political future,” points out Ogawa.

Ogawa heads a human rights group demanding the protection of Japanese nationals and first and second-generation Koreans who moved to North Korea several decades ago, and are now believed to be missing under the North Korean leadership. As such, he wants the inter-Korean summit to address these issues.

But South Korea, wary of the North’s reaction, seems keen to keep prickly issues in the background.

This makes the June summit a bag of mixed blessings for Koreans who were removed from their families when the peninsula was divided, and for overall peace in Asia, which hinges on stability on the security flashpoint that is the Korean peninsula.