11 March 2009

JAPAN WILL GO TO THE SECURITY COUNCIL if North Korea tests a missile. If they’re shivering in Pyongyang, it’s probably just cold there.

ARBEIT NICHT FREI: If the prospects for the Kaesong Slave Labor Park were bleak enough already, briefly imprisoning its South Korean business managers there can’t have helped matters.

UH OH: The new U.S. Trade Representative calls the U.S.-ROK FTA “unfair” as negotiated. Pretty much as I’d predicted — South Korea let the issue become toxic in the press and on the Korean Street, and probably made tacit use of public anti-Americanism to support its negotiating position. The result was that South Korea got itself a deal so great that no U.S. Congress would ever ratify it. About two months ago, a senior South Korean official personally insisted to me that renegotiation was out of the question. Expect a lot of behind-the-scenes acrimony … followed by a long renegotiation that the U.S. side won’t be in a big hurry to conclude.

BARACK OBAMA, WARMONGER: Somebody still isn’t feeling the love.

N. KOREAN TERRORIST CLAIMS ABDUCTEE WHO TAUGHT HER IS STILL ALIVE:

A tearful former North Korean agent met Wednesday with relatives of a Japanese woman abducted to the North decades ago, saying she knew the abductee as her language teacher and does not believe Pyongyang’s account of her death.

Kim Hyon-hui — convicted of bombing a Korean Air jet in a 1987 act of sabotage that killed all 115 people aboard — claims her spy training included coaching on Japanese language and culture by Yaeko Taguchi, who vanished in Tokyo in 1978. [AP, via IHT]

Although I question the recency of Kim’s information, this issue isn’t going away until either North Korea deals with it, or until Japan is completely excluded from the entire discussion. Neither event seems very likely.