Japan makes most of potential crack in North Korean monolith

LETTER FROM TOKYO:IS JAPAN looking for a backdoor diplomatic route to Pyongyang?

Take a bow North Korea. As a proportion of GDP, the isolated Stalinist backwater is one of the top medal earners in London.

The awesome sight of weightlifter Kim Eun-guk heaving three times his own body weight over his head may be the perfect image for the North’s gravity- defying Olympic campaign, straining every sinew to trounce its western rivals.

Few surprises about who is responsible for the medal haul, at least according to the North’s florid propaganda machine.

State media credits the “deep concern of leader Kim Jong Il and strength, courage and deep trust from the dear respected Kim Jong Un”!

Om Yun Chol, winner of the men’s 56kg weightlifting gold, added the “warm love” of the Kim duo as the key motive for his success.

The North’s government is of course less successful at feeding its people and keeping the lights on. Pyongyang has again requested emergency food aid from the United Nations, after 200,000 people reportedly lost their homes in summer flooding.

New evidence this week suggests the average North Korean is using less electricity now than in the early 1970s.

The World Food Programme is predicting a very difficult season until harvest in October, in a country where one in three children are reportedly chronically malnourished or stunted. Nobody, not even the western hawks waiting patiently for the eventual implosion of the Kim regime, wants a repeat of the devastating famines of the 1990s, when anywhere from one to 2.5 million people died.

So all eyes are on the young, untested Kim Jong Un, who took over from his father, Kim Jong Il, when he died last December.

In style at least, the son is a different man. Recent pictures of him and his new wife clapping along to a Disney-themed concert and enjoying a funfair rollercoaster ride are a clear attempt to show a leader with a lighter, more popular touch than his aloof father. More substantively, his sacking of the head of the North’s million-strong army seems to suggest that he is wrestling with the military for the balance of power.

So could Kim be trying to mollify the old guard while signalling Chinese-style economic liberalisation? No, says Leonid Petrov, professor of Korean Studies at the University of Sydney.

“It would be suicidal for Kim Jong-Un to start reform. He simply wants to create the illusion of reform. North Korea can only surrender. And this is what this ‘liberalisation’ will turn into.”

Still, the signs of change “are not insignificant in the North Korea context”, insists long-time Pyongyang watcher Aidan Foster-Carter, honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Leeds University. “But Kim has got to stress continuity.”

He sees his recent speeches, praising his father’s achievements while stressing his determination to allow the North’s citizens to finally “enjoy the wealth and prosperity of socialism”, as important.

The British ambassador to North Korea, Karen Wolstenholme, agrees. “It is certainly interesting to observe that there seems to be a change, with more openness in the regime under Kim Jong Un than his father – and local people seem to welcome this.”

Japan is making the most of this potential crack in the North’s monolithic facade. The most talked-about development this summer has been the return to Pyongyang of Kenji Fujimoto, former Japanese sushi chef to Kim Jong Il from 1982-1991.

Fujimoto, who was invited by Kim Jong Un, has long been suspected of carrying backchannel messages from Tokyo to the Kim regime, a claim he again denied on his return last week: “I did not visit North Korea to conduct government business.”

But Tokyo is almost certainly quietly looking for a way into the Kim camp, says Haruki Wada, one of the most respected North Korean experts in Japan.

One likely route between two countries that have no diplomatic relations is humanitarian. This week, Japanese and North Korean Red Cross officials met for the first time in a decade. Ostensibly, they discussed the remains of Japanese war dead. But some predict movement on the key obstacle in bilateral relations – accounting for all the Japanese citizens North Korea abducted in a bizarre spy programme in the 1970s and 80s.

“The contact will begin if only Japan’s ministry of foreign affairs reaches North Korea,” says Wada. “The government of [Japanese] prime minister Yoshihiko Noda probably has a back route, but we are at a point when we have to make the first contact.”

The last time a Japanese prime minister tried to normalise relations with the North the plan blew up in his face. Ten years ago Junichiro Koizumi went to Pyongyang hoping for a breakthrough but came back with the startling news that Japanese citizens had been kidnapped and possibly killed by the Kim regime, sparking a nationalist backlash that has yet to abate. Only time will tell if Noda has better luck.