US-Japan-North Korea Security Relations

Irrepressible Interests

Anthony DiFilippo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136659812
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the major security and related issues between the United States, Japan and North Korea (officially, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea - DPRK).

Although focusing mainly on current issues, this book also provides sufficient historical background to enable readers to appreciate the many nuances that have been ignored by policymakers, analysts and the media. Where appropriate, the book examines the security interests of other nations in Northeast Asia, specifically South Korea, China and Russia.

The central purpose of the book is to objectively analyze the policymaking processes of Washington, Tokyo and Pyongyang with respect to the DPRK's nuclear weapons and other important security issues, and ultimately to provide practical ways to improve the security environment in Northeast Asia. Ongoing security-related issues include nuclear missile testing by the DPRK; its removal from the U.S. list of states sponsoring terrorism, and the abduction of Japanese nationals by North Korean agents that occurred during the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike other books, which typically take the position that North Korea is a rogue state run by an irrational, belligerent and autocratic leader, this book reveals the fundamentals of Pyongyang's security concerns in the region.

This book will be of great interest to students of North East Asian politics, Asian security studies, US foreign policy and Security Studies/IR in general.

1 Introduction

This book mainly examines the recent security-related policy issues involving Japan, North Korea, whose official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and the United States. When appropriate and necessary, however, the security interests of South Korea, China and Russia are incorporated into the analysis. Although the relationship between the United States and Japan, which is built on a more than half-century-old bilateral security alliance, remains in good shape, serious problems still exist between Tokyo and Pyongyang and between the latter and Washington. Because each of these governments have perceived security interests and objectives, the security environment of Northeast Asia very remains unsettled. To better understand the recent problems that have shaped the security policies of Japan, North Korea and the United States, we will first briefly look at some historically important background issues.

The historical context

Apart from the few exceptions where analysts have questioned how the Korean War (1950–53) started,¹ the typical thesis is that in June 1950 North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea.² Less known, particularly in the West, is that the DPRK maintains that in the early morning hours of June 25, “The south Korean puppet army, under the direct command of the ‘AMAG’ [American Military Advisory Group], launched an armed invasion all along the 38th parallel on a preconceived war plan.”³ That each side has blamed the other for the onset of the Korean War, and that there is arguably no scholarly or political consensus on this matter, is far less important than stressing that the Cold War created fierce animosity between the advocates of capitalism and communism. It was this fundamental problem that led to the heightened military environment on the Korean Peninsula and the readiness to use force on both sides. This readiness inevitably resulted in a war that caused millions of deaths, both combat and civilian. Also important to understand is that the armistice agreement that ended the actual fighting made clear that Cold War politics created barriers so high that a permanent peace treaty was then not possible.⁴ Without a permanent peace treaty, the Korean Peninsula has technically been in a state of war for more than a half a century, and during this time the United States and the DPRK have remained – quite often bitter – adversaries.

Japan’s annexation of the Korean Peninsula by its imperial forces from 1910 to 1945 left permanent scars on South and North Korea, causing both countries to harbor strong resentment toward the Japanese. Formally established in 1953, South Korea’s security alliance with the United States, though not the political equivalent of the US–Japan military arrangement,⁵ eventually made it easier for some tolerable amount of amity to exist between

Tokyo and Seoul, with normalized relations taking place between them midway through the 1960s. That Tokyo and Pyongyang maintained opposite political allegiances during the Cold War ensured that a condition of mutually enmity prevailed in Japan and North Korea.

The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc created serious economic problems for the DPRK.⁶ Exacerbating North Korea’s economic problems, severe flooding and drought crippled the country during the 1990s and led to widespread starvation and loss of life.

Feeling threatened because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which provided both economic and military assistance to North Korea,⁷ Pyongyang became increasingly concerned about the security of the DPRK. The first North Korean nuclear crisis during the early 1990s brought Pyongyang and Washington into a bitter dispute. The DPRK’s plutonium production and threatened withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1993 noticeably heightened problems existing between Washington and Pyongyang. However, these problems abated somewhat when they signed the Agreed Framework in October 1994, the bilateral accord that froze five of North Korea’s plutonium-related production facilities, four at Yongbyon and one at

Taechon.⁸

Still, all was not well. In August 1998, the DPRK, without giving prior notification, launched a rocket, a Taepodong-1, which had a longer range than the Rodong missile that it launched in 1993. Although Pyongyang stated that it had launched an artificial satellite, the Kwangmyŏngsŏng-1, because the rocket flew over Japanese territory, bilateral relations between Japan and the DPRK were adversely affected.

By the end of the Clinton administration’s second term in office, relations between Washington and Pyongyang had improved somewhat. Identified by the US State Department in 1983 and again in 1988 as a country sponsoring terrorism, Pyongyang wanted very much for the DPRK to be removed from this list by the Clinton administration.⁹ In early October 2000, Washington and Pyongyang issued a joint statement on global terrorism. The Clinton administration’s position in this document was that “as the DPRK satisfactorily addresses the requirements of U.S. law, the U.S. will work in cooperation with the DPRK with the aim of removing the DPRK from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.”¹⁰ Less than a week after this, the United States and the DPRK agreed to the Joint Communiqué, which stipulated that both countries will “work to remove mistrust, build mutual confidence, and maintain an atmosphere in which they can deal constructively with issues of central concern.”¹¹ Later in the month, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made an unprecedented trip to the DPRK.

In the meantime, Japanese conservatives, many of whom were nationalists, were ratcheting up the abduction issue in Japan. In the 1970s and 1980s, North Korean agents abducted a small number of Japanese nationals, flagitious acts intended to gain knowledge about Japanese ways and to learn the Japanese language so that the DPRK could gain some political advantage during the turbulent times that characterized the Cold War. For a number of years, Pyongyang repeatedly denied the DPRK’s involvement in the abductions, claiming that it knew nothing about them. Pyongyang was much more concerned with the large number of deaths and the widespread destruction, plundering and human rights violations, including the use of Korean “comfort women” or juugun ianfu, as the Japanese called them, perpetrated by Japan during its imperial colonization of the Korean Peninsula. Largely ignoring these concerns, Japanese nationalists and their conservative sympathizers continued to press the abduction issue. By 2000, with the help of the Japanese media, which increasingly sensationalized the kidnappings, the abduction issue was Japan’s major foreign policy concern with respect to North Korea, noticeably surpassing both the missile and nuclear issues. After North Korean leader Kim Jong Il admitted to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi during their summit in September 2002 that unauthorized DPRK agents – said by Pyongyang to be “people in special organizations [who] by themselves kidnapped the Japanese [because] they believed that there was no problem kidnapping people from an enemy state”¹² – were responsible for kidnapping Japanese nationals, things changed. Japan’s Cabinet Office surveys showed that a very big majority of Japanese respondents indicated that they were concerned about the abduction issue, more so than the nuclear and missile issues.

Before the abduction issue made its way to the top of the Japanese foreign policy agenda, Tokyo had embarked on a course to make Japan a “normal country,” or futsu kokka, in the mid 1990s. Having Japan become a normal country would free it from the restraints of its pacifist constitution, permit involvement in international security, legitimate its growing military power, including its strengthened security alliance with the United States, and make easier the efforts to employ ancillary actions, such as the imposition of economic sanctions. The strengthened US–Japan security alliance that started to take shape in 1996 created additional worries in North Korea.¹³ Already very concerned about the overwhelming military power of the United States, Pyongyang increasingly railed at what it saw as Japan’s intention to launch a “reinvasion” of Korea.

In the mid 1990s, shortly after Tokyo began working to make Japan a normal country, the DPRK launched songun, its military first policy. Coming in the wake of the first North Korean nuclear crisis, Pyongyang fully embraced songun, despite the DPRK coming on very hard economic times, including famine that led to many deaths between 1995–2000.¹⁴

Promoted mainly by nationalists and their conservative sympathizers, Japan’s quest to become a normal country and all that this entails eventually dovetailed with the abduction issue, something that has been ignored by some analysts who have simply connected the kidnapping problem to the strengthening of the US–Japan security alliance.¹⁵ The convergence of the abduction issue with efforts to become a normal state gave Japanese nationalists and their sympathizers the opportunity to identify North Korea as a real and impending threat to Japan’s national security, which they took advantage of as best they could,¹⁶ especially since they could also point to the DPRK missile issue and emerging new nuclear crisis. After getting over the initial reservations that missile defense violated Japan’s pacifist constitution, many Japanese policymakers began to accept the importance of increasing the country’s involvement with the United States in building a missile defense system.

The end of the Cold War prompted Tokyo and Pyongyang to hold several rounds of normalization talks. Because they remained far too apart with respect to their differences, these talks were unsuccessful.

Recent imbroglios

The second North Korean nuclear crisis broke out in October 2002, with US claims that North Korea was concealing a uranium-enrichment program to build nuclear weapons, which for years Pyongyang repeatedly said did not exist. With the support of traditional conservative hawks, the neoconservatives within George W. Bush’s first administration succeeded in getting the president to accept a hard-line North Korean policy.¹⁷ Pyongyang considered this policy very hostile to its national interests, particularly since it carried with it the possibility of a preemptive, perhaps even a nuclear, attack on the DPRK. Guided by the suppositions of the neoconservatives and hardliners, the Bush administration’s North Korean policy literally went nowhere for years. Because the political tides had changed by late 2006, the Bush administration adopted a relatively conciliatory North Korean policy that eventually was able to make some progress toward the goal of resolving the North Korean nuclear issue – at least until a major verification impasse emerged in the second half of 2008. Through all of this and to the present, the level of military preparation and readiness has remained high for the United States, Japan and North and South Korea.

By the fall of 2002, US–DPRK relations were visibly bad and remained this way for several years. As a result, the six-party talks between the United

States, the two Koreas, Japan, China and Russia, which had been created in the summer of 2003 to resolve the North Korean nuclear problem, made little progress, at best, for some time. During the second half of 2006, Pyongyang authorized a series of missile tests and eventually conducted its first underground nuclear test.¹⁸

Tokyo came to embrace fully the US hard-line policy, and the failure to make significant progress on the abduction issue combined inauspiciously with Pyongyang’s determination to develop songun to worsen Japan–North Korean relations.

Despite two visits by Prime Minister Koizumi to the DPRK, the first in 2002, which yielded the promising Pyongyang Declaration, and the second in 2004, Japan–North Korean relations continued to deteriorate. Poor bilateral relations brought a new wave of troubles to some zainichi Koreans, the name that applies to all Koreans who have resided in Japan for many years. While zainichi Koreans have long experienced discrimination in Japan, those that view the DPRK as their homeland, the zainichi chōsenjin have also had to contend with the repercussions of giving their political allegiance to the North. The Bush Administration’s change to a conciliatory policy offered an olive branch to Pyongyang. The DPRK would be removed from the US list of states sponsoring terrorism if it would give an account of its nuclear programs and disable its nuclear facilities. This was in addition to the assistance package that the participants of the six-party talks, with the exception of Japan, extended to the DPRK in exchange for denuclearization in February 2007. However, the transitio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Nuclear armed to the teeth
• 3. Unlikely bedfellows: US–North Korea inducements in the rearming of Japan
• 4. The Making of DPRK Policies in Washington and Tokyo
• 5. Caught in the crossfire: North Korean loyalists in Japan
• 6. Politics, partisanship, and the stalemate in Japan–North Korea relations
• 7. Conclusion: separate concerns and rapprochement possibilities
• Selected bibliography
• Index