11 February 2005 Blog Home : February 2005 : Permalink
Japan, meanwhile, performed a deft political kabuki today, urging his bellicose neighbor to join disarmament talks, while letting the clock run on a new law that will bar most North Korean ships from Japanese ports starting March 1.
"I understand calls for imposing sanctions are growing," Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told reporters in Sapporo, about 600 miles across the Sea of Japan from North Korea. "But we have to urge them to come to the talks in the first place."
But of the five nations seeking to disarm North Korea, only Japan is taking new steps that will punish North Korea economically.
An amended Liability for Oil Pollution Damage law requires that all ships over 100 tons calling at Japanese ports carry property and indemnity insurance. A seemingly bland piece of legislation, this law was drafted with North Korea in mind. In 2003, only 2.5 percent of North Korean ships visiting Japan had insurance.
Japan is North Korea's third largest trading partner, after China and South Korea. The insurance barrier is expected to hit North Korea's ports on the Sea of Japan, a dilapidated, economically depressed area, far from Pyongyang, the nation's showcase capital. In recent weeks, only one North Korean ship, a passenger-cargo ferry, is known to have bought insurance.
This will hurt Korea more than almost anything other than China cutting off food or oil. Not only does it make the Eastern part of N Korea suffer because they lose what opportunities they have for legal trade it also makes it harder for N Korea to do the smuggling that is assumed to have taken place using the trips to Japan as a cover.I don't really know how this will all play out but I do expect N Korea to discover that Japan is not going to react to threats by giving in. The news coverage on NHK is continually mentioning the N Korean kidnapping of its citizens and its refusal to account truthfully for their current whereabouts. From what I can see Japan as a nation has reached the point where it has decided that there is no point in being nice anymore. I suspect that, despite the N Koean rhetoric about Japan's behaviour in Korea before 1945, the N Korean leadership have never really believed that Japan would turn nasty. That looks like it was a big miscalculation.A debate has begun in policy circles as to whether Beijing should go further and propose an amendment to the 1961 mutual security treaty, to remove pledges of military assistance in the event of attack.
The treaty's second article says both sides "promise to jointly take all possible measures to prevent any country from invading either of the contracting parties. Whenever one contracting party suffers a military attack by one state or several states combined and therefore is in a state of war, the other contracting party should do all it can to offer military and other aid".
The undercutting of China's defence guarantee is part of a delicate carrot-and-stick approach by Beijing to edge North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-il, into verifiable nuclear disarmament in return for a new security deal with the US and its regional allies, along with economic aid.