Creator: Ulv Hanssen, Soka College
Twenty years have handed since North Korea formally admitted to abducting Japanese residents within the Seventies and Eighties. Since this admission, Japan–North Korea relations have been chilly. Tokyo and Pyongyang’s frosty relations will seemingly proceed on account of their irreconcilable positions on the kidnapping problem and North Korea’s deepening worldwide isolation.
On 17 September 2002, Junichiro Koizumi grew to become the primary Japanese prime minister to go to North Korea and meet with its chief, Kim Jong-il. Accompanying Koizumi was a younger Shinzo Abe, who had taken an curiosity within the rumours about North Korean abductions of Japanese residents within the Seventies and Eighties. Whereas the official objective of the go to was normalisation talks, Koizumi and Abe wished North Korea to confess to the abductions and return the abductees.
Desperation seemingly led Kim to take a seat down on the negotiation desk with the Japanese. North Korea had simply skilled a extreme financial disaster and famine. To many North Korea watchers, the nation seemed to be on the point of collapse. Kim hoped that the normalisation of diplomatic relations with Japan would function a springboard for financial restoration, eyeing Japanese compensation for colonial rule in Korea in addition to financial help and funding.
In the course of the negotiations, Kim ultimately admitted to and apologised for the kidnapping of 13 Japanese residents. Nonetheless, North Korea claimed solely 5 of the abductees had been nonetheless alive. The first motive for the abductions is alleged to be espionage or spy coaching in Japanese language and tradition.
By admitting to the abductions, Kim wished to show his good intentions and facilitate the possibly profitable normalisation negotiations. Initially, it appeared just like the technique had labored. The assembly was concluded with the signing of the Pyongyang Declaration wherein Japan promised ‘financial cooperation after the normalisation’.
However when Koizumi and his delegation returned to Tokyo, the information of the North Korean abductions outraged the Japanese public. The Japanese media printed a stream of tales concerning the horrors of Kim Jong-il’s North Korea. Underneath such circumstances, normalisation grew to become unattainable. The Koizumi authorities was fast to guarantee a livid public that Japan would by no means normalise relations with North Korea with out a resolution to the kidnapping problem. However to this present day, Japan and North Korea can not agree on what constitutes an answer.
North Korea insists that the kidnapping problem is already resolved as Kim Jong-il made an official apology and the 5 survivors had been ultimately returned to Japan.
Japan’s official place is that so long as North Korea doesn’t current irrefutable proof for the loss of life of the opposite abductees, they’re presumed to be alive and the difficulty stays unresolved. Though North Korea has supplied the cremated stays of some abductees, the Japanese Authorities insists, based mostly on DNA checks, that the stays usually are not of the Japanese abductees. Japan additionally claims that North Korea has kidnapped 17, not 13, Japanese residents.
These incompatible positions have prevented Japan and North Korea from bettering, a lot much less normalising, their relations.
Although each Japanese prime minister since Koizumi has mentioned {that a} resolution to the kidnapping problem is a prime coverage precedence, there was no progress on the kidnapping problem for the previous 20 years. Even the late Shinzo Abe, who spent extra political capital on the difficulty than anybody else, did not ship significant outcomes. Japan’s unilateral and multilateral sanctions towards Pyongyang haven’t labored.
This diplomatic freeze is sort of sure to proceed for a really very long time as neither facet has any incentive to make concessions to the opposite. An annual ballot by the Japanese authorities reveals that yearly since 2002, the Japanese public has been extra within the abduction problem than in North Korea’s nuclear weapons. This makes it nearly unattainable for the Japanese authorities to make any concessions towards North Korea with out some type of resolution to the kidnapping problem.
North Korea has good purpose to be silent on the kidnapping problem. Kim Jong-un is sufficiently old to recollect how admitting to the abductions backfired towards his father in 2002. For Kim Jong-un, the kidnapping problem is a political minefield finest prevented. There isn’t a incentive to make concessions towards Japan and danger reopening outdated wounds.
The present worldwide context additionally makes bilateral engagement nearly unattainable. Twenty years in the past, Japan and North Korea had been comparatively free to have interaction with one another on a strictly bilateral foundation. However North Korea’s improvement of nuclear weapons has led to an worldwide sanctions regime that Japan is obliged to uphold. The sanctions stop just about any financial engagement with Pyongyang.
Even within the unlikely occasion of an answer to the kidnapping problem, Japan couldn’t ignore the sanctions regime and return to the promise of financial cooperation as stipulated within the 2002 Pyongyang Settlement. With out the hope of Japanese funding, North Korea has even much less incentive to cooperate with Japan on the kidnapping problem.
Incompatible positions on the kidnapping problem and increasing worldwide sanctions imply that the Japanese–North Korean freeze will proceed with no thaw in sight.
Ulv Hanssen is Affiliate Professor at Soka College.
