The controversial passage reads: “The two nations confirm that they will abide by all international agreements related to the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula.” Pyongyang’s nuclear confession last week made it clear that the North Koreans had been violating nonproliferation agreements since the late 1990s. The problem for Japan’s leader is that the United States briefed him on its evidence of North Korea’s covert uranium-enrichment program prior to his trip to Pyongyang. In other words, the Japanese leader signed a joint declaration he knew to be false, only to be caught when North Korea unexpectedly came clean. Last week the Tokyo Shimbun declared Japan’s summit strategy to be “haphazard and without solid principle,” adding that the declaration’s falsehoods amounted to “putting a lid on some-thing smelly.”
Tokyo argues that it was all for a noble cause. Priority one for the summit, say Koizumi aides, was to seek information on a handful of Japanese nationals kidnapped and taken to North Korea before 1990. Pyongyang obliged, claiming that eight of them had died and allowing the surviving five to visit Japan–an outcome that bolstered Koizumi’s approval ratings and reinvigorated his 18-month-old administration. Those gains could now be eroded. “I am afraid that the government has been putting too much emphasis on the abduction issue and not giving enough to the nuclear and missile problems,” says Motoi Tamaki, a North Korea specialist in Tokyo. “Japan lost face by signing the declaration while knowing that Pyongyang was continuing its nuclear program.”
North Korea, too, could lose out. Before its bombshell disclosure Pyongyang had hoped for fast-track normalization with Japan, a development it calculated would win up to $10 billion in war reparations. Now Tokyo is under pressure from Washington to withhold any funds and make regional security a top priority. “North Korea’s behavior–that is, signing the declaration while hiding the truth–can only be called abject,” read a Yomiuri Shimbun editorial last week. “Under the circumstances, we can- not expect North Korea to uphold the declaration.”
Tokyo will demand that Pyongyang halt its nuclear program when the two sides open normalization talks in Malaysia on Oct. 29. Not everyone forecasts a breakdown. “Many analysts mention how the normalization talks will be overshadowed by the nuclear issue,” says Noriyuki Suzuki, director of the monitoring service Radiopress in Tokyo. “On the contrary, I think that Japan can play an important role as a channel between the North and Washington.” Provided Tokyo pays more attention before it puts pen to
