The White Peril 白禍

This is kind of old news by now for those who have followed the abductee issue, but President Bush met with the families of several abductees and a few North Korean defectors last week:

"It is hard to believe that a country would foster abduction. It's hard for Americans to imagine that a leader of any country would encourage the abduction of a young child," Bush said about the North Korean regime and its leader, Kim Jong Il.

Wearing a blue badge on his suit lapel to express solidarity with the families, Bush called on Pyongyang to return abductees, saying, "If North Korea expects to be respected in the world, that country must respect human rights and human dignity and must allow this mother to hug her child again."

In her press conference later Friday, Sakie Yokota expressed her hope that the U.S. president's first meeting with an abductee's family would encourage other world leaders to unite in pressuring North Korea to resolve the issue.

"I thanked the president for sharing time with us in his busy schedule. He said he was never too busy to find time to talk about human dignity and freedom. I really wish leaders of all countries would share that thought," Yokota said.

Of course, "solidarity" is a rather vague term. To judge by precedent, the abductee issue will be readily backburnered at future meetings with the DPRK once negotiations over nuclear development start getting sticky. That's not to cast aspersions on Bush's sincerity or sympathy; it's just to say that if the Yokotas and others expect a change in diplomatic approach, I'm not so sure they'll get one.

Just in case you need your memory jogged about what a vile hellhole North Korea is, Human Rights Watch gives the genteel version here. Note that while I focus on the thirteen Japanese abductees here, the number of South Korean abductees numbers in the thousands:

According to South Korea's Unification Ministry, a total of 3,790 South Koreans were kidnapped and taken to North Korea between 1953 and 1995, of whom 486 remain detained. Some of the abductees have been used in propaganda broadcasts to South Korea, while others have been used to train North Korean spies. North Korea has rejected repeated requests from families of the South Korean abductees to confirm their existence, to return them, or, in the cases of the dead, to return their remains.

It's not clear that having the US play policeman--a role for which it's usually criticized--will have much effect on the issue. At the same time Washington can hardly prove to be more impotent than, say, the UN:

The North Korea Human Rights Act, which the U.S. adopted in 2004, opens up the possibility for North Korean refugees to be admitted for resettlement in the United States. Thus far, however, little action has been taken, and it is unclear how many refugees could benefit or when. The U.N. Commission on Human Rights adopted a resolution for the third straight year calling on North Korea to respect basic human rights. In November 2005, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution against North Korea, citing "systemic, widespread and grave violations of human rights."

North Korea has largely shunned talks with U.N. human rights experts, except for a few meetings on children’s and women’s rights. It has not responded to repeated requests by Vitit Muntarbhorn, special rapporteur on North Korea, to engage in dialogue.

Dialogue only works as a problem-solving tool among people who can trust one another to be working from similar principles.

Japan Defense Agency chief Fukushiro Nukaga says Japan and the US Department of Defense have come to an agreement on the military restructuring issue:

Japanese Defense Minister Fukushiro Nukaga told reporters after his three-hour meeting Sunday with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that Japan wanted to have an appropriate sharing of costs in transferring 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to the Pacific island of Guam.

Japan has offered to pay $2.8 billion. It would also finance loans to the United States worth $3.3 billion, the remainder of its $6.1 billion share. Japan would shoulder 59 percent of the realignment cost.

"We have come to an understanding that we both feel is in the best interests of our two countries," Rumsfeld said after the meetings.

...

Japan and the United States are close allies. On Friday, Japan's Cabinet approved a six-month extension of its non-combat support for the U.S.-led anti-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan, officials said.

Of course, there are still some hurdles to be cleared, but they're mostly internal, related to NIMBY and environmental issues raised over proposed new sites for some military facilities to be relocated within Japan. None of the reports I've seen indicates that Nukaga gave word of any changes on those.

The Nikkei, BTW, says that Ambassador Thomas Schieffer was present for part of the negotiations in Washington. No statement from him that I've seen, though, which is as per usual. His presence hasn't really seemed to register much, at least compared to Howard Baker's. Interestingly--and I can't believe I didn't notice this before--the restructuring of US military presence is not listed as one of the "Issues in Focus" on the US Embassy homepage.

The government has denied that it has yet shared any DNA information about Megumi Yokota's possible husband with the ROK:

Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe made a statement the report in the South Korean press that the Japanese government has confirmed that the person reported to be DPRK abductee Megumi Yokota's husband was also a man who was abducted from South Korea at a press conference following an April 7 cabinet meeting. He denied the reports, saying, "We are moving forward diligently with the DNA evaluation, but at this point in time, the results are not yet in, and in our capacity as the government, we have not specified anything about the person said to be Megumi Yokota's husband." Minister of Foreign Affairs Taro Aso also stated emphatically, "It certainly isn't yet the case that word has officially come from among the professionals--scholars and such--that this is the man, or this isn't the man."

Unlike a lot of diplomatic issues, the abductee problem has an obvious human interest angle, and the Japanese public has responded. One wonders whether the government isn't being so quick to deny that it's helped the ROK because of the loud complaints here at home that it's doing little to find out what happened to the Japanese abductees still not satisfactorily accounted for.

Apparently, Japan and the ROK are teaming up to try to find out the identity of Megumi Yokota's husband:

In February, the Japanese government took blood and other samples from the families of five South Korean abduction victims who were cited as possible husbands of Yokota, and had been testing the DNA of the samples.

In response, South Korean officials said that if the possibility of Yokota's husband being a South Korean abductee arose, it would ask Japan for DNA information from Yokota's daughter, Kim Hye Gyong, and conduct its own verification of the identity of Yokota's husband.

Five South Koreans who disappeared in 1977 and 1978 have been citied as possible husbands of Yokota. South Korea has acknowledged that all five were abducted by North Korean agents.

For Yokota's husband's sake, let's hope his affairs are settled more easily than hers have been. The poor woman's father has been on television so frequently over the last few years that a lot of us news watchers know him by sight now. The reason, of course, is that the DPRK keeps playing games about releasing her remains--who knows whether Pyongyang even knows where they are by this point? Some abductees have returned to more (Hitomi Soga, wife of US Army deserter Charles Jenkins) or less (several others who have returned to quiet lives in the provinces) publicity, but Yokota's case has become a symbol of North Korea's inability just to do something...anything...forthright.

The head of the Japan Defense Agency is still trying to get Nago residents to agree to a slightly adjusted proposal for relocating the helicopter facilities from Futenma:

JDA chief Fukushiro Nukaga met with Mayor Yoshikazu Shimabukuro of Nago, the site to which US military facilities now at the Futenma base (Ginowan City, Okinawa Prefecture) are slated to be moved, on 4 April. Nukaga once again sought Shimbukuro's understanding, conveying once again that, while [the government] will not make broad changes to the relocation to the coastline of Camp Schwab that has been agreed upon by Japan and the US, he is of a mind to respond flexibly to proposals for limited changes, such as in the orientation of runways. The focus was on the mayor's advocating that the runways be shifted more than 400 meters offshore [from their proposed location].

It had been hoped that an agreement would be reached by the end of last month.

On a not-entirely-unrelated note, the Yomiuri took a poll that found that 71% of those who responded believe that the constitution should be revised to clarify the role of the SDF:

Seventy-one percent of people think the Constitution should clarify the existence of the Self-Defense Forces, an organization that protects the nation yet is not mentioned in the supreme law, according to a Yomiuri Shimbun survey.

Fifty-six percent of respondents said the basic law should be revised, marking the ninth straight year since 1998 that a majority of pollees in similar surveys have favored revising the Constitution.

The interview survey was conducted on March 11 and 12 on 3,000 eligible voters in 250 locations across the country, with 1,812, or 60.4 percent, of them responding.

...

However, 32 percent of pollees opposed constitutional revision, the survey said.

Regarding the war-renouncing Article 9, a focal point of the constitutional amendment, 39 percent--the highest figure for five consecutive years--said it should be rewritten because there was a limit to interpreting the article and putting it into practice, the survey said.

Thirty-three percent said the article should be handled as it has been so far, but 21 percent said Article 9 should be strictly upheld and that its spirit should not be watered down through changing interpretations, the survey said.

Twenty-seven percent of respondents said the top law should be revised to allow the country to exercise the right to collective-defense and 23 percent said interpretation of the basic law should be changed to allow for the right to be exercised. This meant 50 percent favored exercising this right, the survey said.

Of course, you can't cite polls without the usual avalanche of disclaimers, but those results ring true to me. People like the way Article 9 makes Japan's involvement in NGOs seem more saintly (to those who pay attention to such things), and besides, this is, despite the economic upheavals of the last decade and a half, an extraordinarily prosperous country. Most people have little incentive to approach defense issues with a real sense of urgency. But they know, at the same time, that Japan is a resource-poor country with nearby enemies. There's almost always some current reminder--a little skirmish between a Japanese and a North Korean ship, news about the expansion of a Chinese military program of some kind--of the delicacy of its position.

It's interesting that 1998 was the first year the Yomiuri reports having a majority supporting the revision of the constitution. I wonder whether the poll was first conducted that year or, maybe, the DPRK's missile test over Japan jolted a lot of people. Of course, if the poll is always in the spring, that wouldn't explain anything, since the test missile was launched in summer.