Japan Aims Both Barrels at North Korea

Just one week after the reelection of President Bush, Japan is moving toward a much harder line that threatens to isolate North Korea economically and South Korea diplomatically.

Today’s Yomiuri Shimbun directly quotes Japan’s Foreign Minister threatening to impose sanctions against North Korea:

In a meeting with South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun on Saturday in Seoul, Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura suggested he was considering measures to put pressure on North Korea, including economic sanctions, if there was no progress at the bilateral talks over reinvestigations into the 10 Japanese that Pyongyang has said died or never entered the country.

‘There’s anger in Japan at Pyongyang’s attitude during the working-level talks. Some stress the need to impose economic sanctions on North Korea immediately. We have to think about measures dealing with North Korea after seeing how it acts at the next working-level meeting,’ Machimura said. Machimura’s firm stance is supported by the Liberal Democratic Party and the public. In the last two meetings, North Korea failed to produce any information on the fate or whereabouts of the 10 missing Japanese, provoking an angry response.

Emphasis mine. You read that right–Machimura made the statement during a meeting with Roh Moo Hyun himself. It’s difficult to see this unusually direct statement as anything other than a stunning diplomatic rebuke of Roh and his policies. It’s completely understandable, of course, that the Japanese public and government are furious at North Korea for bundling its citizens off to hell-on-earth for no greater crime than simply walking around in their own neighborhoods at night.

The bad news for Pyongyang gets even worse from there. A group of Japanese lawmakers is about to propose a Japanese version of the North Korean Human Rights Act. This is not, as one might initially suspect, the work of a rightist fringe group of Japanese politics–the source is none other than the Democratic Party of Japan, the country’s second largest political party, which is also the leftist opposition to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and a traditional supporter of closer ties with North Korea. Diet Member Shu Watanabe decided to propose the bill after talking with Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback, one of the authors of the North Korean Human Rights Act, and its tougher ancestor, the North Korean Freedom Act. Watanabe’s words are unlikely to please many South Korean officials (or North Korean officials, for that matter):

[Watanabe] said the Korean government and Koreans appeared to be too indifferent to the human rights of North Koreans, and it seemed Seoul was disarming itself although there was still the threat from North Korea. He added that reunifying like Germany by taking in more and more North Korean defectors would pose much less risk to the country, and it was the best method for getting North Korean residents to change the North Korean regime themselves.

This is the first strong indication that two nations involved in the six-party talks are forming a united front. That could have a powerful influence on South Korea, forcing it to shift its own policies or accept diplomatic isolation. The passage of the U.S. North Korean Human Rights Act has already spurred a similar proposal in the South Korean Assembly. Passage of a North Korea human rights law in Japan could force South Korea to accomodate the concerns in these laws, or even to pass a human rights bill of its own.

By forcing South Korea to shift away from unconditional appeasement of North Korea, Japan could help shift the balance against the teetering Sunshine experiment–the foundation of Roh Moo Hyun’s presidency–and mark its effective end. That, in turn, could further split Roh’s coalition and render him a de facto lame duck just two years into his term.