The Invitation-Only Zone

by Robert S. Boynton

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  Junichiro Koizumi became Japan’s prime minister in April 2001 with an 85 percent approval rating, based largely on his vow to reverse Japan’s decade-long economic decline. To do so, he proposed the kind of privatization and market reforms that, though conventional wisdom in the West, were anathema to the Japanese public. The immediate result of the reforms was more economic pain, and one year later his approval rating had plummeted.

  Koizumi needed to make a bold move to take people’s minds off the economy, and normalizing relations with North Korea seemed ideal. However, his plan for engaging with that country was complicated when President George W. Bush included North Korea (along with Iran and Iraq) in his 2002 “Axis of Evil” speech. Could Japan normalize relations with a country on which its closest ally had all but declared war? Tanaka saw an opportunity to show the United States that Japan was capable of making its own foreign policy. “We are not a protectorate of the United States!” he protested when a U.S. diplomat cautioned him. Such sentiments earned Tanaka the nickname Kokutai-san, or “Mr. National Interest,” among U.S. diplomats. Koizumi instructed Tanaka to keep the negotiations secret, limiting information to a small group. Even the minister of foreign affairs was kept in the dark. If the talks succeeded, Koizumi would notify the United States and the rest of the Japanese government before signing an agreement.

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  Tanaka took the early morning commercial airline flight from Tokyo to the coastal Chinese city of Dalian so that he’d have time to explore the city before the first meeting with his North Korean counterpart. The Japanese colonists had designed Dalian’s wide roads and elegant circular plazas to create an Asian version of Paris. “Dalian was the ideal city the Japanese saw in their dreams,” architectural historian Yasuhiko Nishizawa writes. It was showcased as an example of how Japanese rule would bring modernity to its colonies. The city also provides a palimpsest of Asia’s contested history. The Han dynasty staged its invasion of Korea from here in the second century AD. Between 1850 and 1950, Dalian was controlled by Britain, Russia, Japan, and finally the Soviet Union, before being returned to China in 1950. Tanaka visited the elegant Yamato Hotel, built in 1914 by Japan’s South Manchuria Railway Company, whose company logo even today adorns the city’s manhole covers.

  The ritual of exchanging business cards is a crucial element of East Asian culture, and the fact that the North Korean negotiator didn’t offer one at the first meeting was a cause for suspicion. “Kim Chul,” as he called himself, claimed to be a high-ranking member of the National Defense Commission, the division from which Kim Jong-il ruled. Tanaka assumed that the name was a pseudonym (Kim Chul being the Korean equivalent of John Smith) and noted that the other members of the North Korean delegation referred to him simply as Mr. General Manager. Tanaka took to referring to him as Mr. X.7

  The troubled relations between Japan and Korea hung heavily over the negotiations. “Tanaka-san. My grandmother was forced to take a Japanese name,” Mr. X said, as a way of introduction. “Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula, and abducted millions of Koreans to work for slave wages in Japan. I want to know how you will compensate us for these acts.” Tanaka tried to bring the conversation closer to the present day. Schooled in the British art of understatement, he was not the sort of person given to sharing personal experiences. In this case, however, he sensed that doing so might ease the tension. He recounted the efforts he’d made over the past fifteen years to heal the wounds Japan had inflicted on Korea, and he mentioned the agreements he’d worked on, including Prime Minister Murayama’s 1995 apology. “My desire has always been for peace on the Korean Peninsula. I don’t consider making peace to be easy work. Why don’t we put our misgivings aside and talk straight to each other, with open minds,” he said.8

  A plan for the clandestine negotiations emerged. The meetings took place mainly in Dalian and other Chinese cities. Because using a conference room might cause suspicion, the sessions were held in ordinary hotel suites, the beds and dressers pushed to the side. The North Koreans always sat with their backs to the windows and asked that the shades be drawn, no matter how high up the room. They would arrive one by one, with Mr. X entering last. The Koreans never presented a proposal, letting the Japanese side produce draft after draft, which they would edit.

  It mattered less who Mr. X was than whether he was the right person for Tanaka to be negotiating with—a crucial question in an authoritarian state where only one opinion, Kim Jong-il’s, ultimately carries any weight. Could Mr. X bring his promises to fruition? Tanaka wondered. In order to find out, he devised a series of tests to gauge his influence in Pyongyang. In 1999 a retired reporter for the Japanese financial daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun was arrested in North Korea and accused of spying. He had been in jail for two years when Tanaka asked Mr. X to show good faith by getting him released. On February 12, 2002, with no explanation, the reporter was put on a flight from Pyongyang to Beijing. Tanaka knew he was talking to the right man.

  Meanwhile, in Japan, the abduction issue was heating up. Word of the negotiations leaked, forcing Koizumi to meet with the family members and promise not to normalize relations unless the abduction issue was settled satisfactorily. But after twenty meetings, negotiations stalled. Tanaka knew that the possibility of a Koizumi visit to North Korea was the most important card he could play and was ultimately more important to the North than a monetary settlement. So every time Mr. X tried to get him to commit to Koizumi’s visit, Tanaka held firm and repeated Japan’s basic requirements. The negotiations wouldn’t progress until the North agreed to acknowledge and apologize for the abductions, provide information on the victims’ whereabouts, and release any survivors. Tanaka made it clear that anything less would cause him to leave the table. Mr. X was visibly unnerved by the ultimatum. “What you must understand is that, while the worst that could happen to you is dismissal, my situation is much more serious. My life might be at stake,” he said.

  Koizumi met with Tanaka in early June to take stock of the negotiations. He and Mr. X were going around in circles, Tanaka explained: the North Koreans demanded a specific amount of money and a guaranteed visit before they would provide information about the abductees. With his popularity sinking, Koizumi needed a grand gesture more than ever. He hadn’t come this far simply to walk away. “I am prepared to visit North Korea, even though they haven’t provided us with satisfactory information about the abductees,” he told Tanaka. “If they will provide that information only if I visit them, then I can go along with that.”

  How many Japanese had been abducted? How many were still alive? Tanaka wouldn’t find out until after he and Koizumi arrived in Pyongyang.

  18

  KIM AND KOIZUMI IN PYONGYANG

  The prime minister’s plane departed at 6:46 a.m. on September 17, 2002, headed west from Tokyo, and continued due north, across the demilitarized zone.1 The plane was full, with fifty journalists from twenty-five Japanese news organizations. Among them was Asahi reporter Tsutomu Watanabe, who had been covering Koizumi for the past two years.2 Watanabe was the perfect person to chronicle this trip. It was his third time in the North, and he spoke Korean, which he’d learned while working in the paper’s Seoul bureau. Koizumi was something new in Japanese politics: a maverick who promised to jolt the country out of its complacency by opening up markets to competition, privatizing state operations, and weakening the power of the bureaucrats who had run Japan for the past fifty years. He was more conservative and promilitary than his predecessors, and his regular visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, whose dead included more than a thousand Japanese convicted of war crimes, had offended China and both Koreas. He was a gambler who took large risks for large rewards, and nothing was riskier than being the first sitting Japanese prime minister to visit the North since the end of the the Second World War. As the plane crossed the DMZ, Watanabe noted that the landscape faded from green to brown. The rivers that South Korean industrialists had straightened to ease navigation became twiste
d and haphazard.

  Watanabe had been surprised when Koizumi had announced the trip two weeks earlier. The history of negotiations between Japan and North Korea wasn’t pretty. Over the years, several Japanese politicians had made unofficial trips to Pyongyang, with dreams of signing mining or construction contracts, only to return empty-handed. All the press attaché told Watanabe was that Koizumi intended to sign an agreement—a prelude to normalization—and clear up the mystery of the Japanese allegedly abducted by the North. This might be too big a bet, Watanabe thought, even for a gambler as good as Koizumi.

  The plane touched down at Pyongyang’s Sunan International Airport at 9:14 a.m. and Watanabe craned his neck, peering through the window to see who would greet the prime minister. Two years before, Kim Jong-il himself had greeted South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. But this morning Koizumi was met by the president of the Supreme People’s Assembly, the second-highest-ranking official in North Korea, a calculated slight. The journalists were bused to the Koryo Hotel, where a pressroom was waiting for them. After checking into his room, Watanabe tried to sneak out a side door to wander the streets of Pyongyang on his own. It was an old reporter’s trick, but the North Koreans had anticipated it and positioned minders at every exit. To learn what was going on, Watanabe would have to wait for the afternoon press conference like all the other reporters.

  Koizumi was whisked by limousine to the Hundred Flowers Guesthouse, near the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where Kim Il-sung lay in state. Designed for honored foreign guests, the guesthouse had been used by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter when he brokered a nuclear deal in 1994, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000. While Koizumi settled in, Tanaka was taken to a distant building for a last-minute briefing. He was nervous. Would Kim Jong-il apologize for the abductions, as Mr. X had promised? Would enough of the victims be alive to justify Koizumi’s trip in the eyes of the Japanese public? North Korea’s normalization wish list was virtually identical to the South’s in 1965: it wanted the money and investment that normalization would bring, and it wanted Japan to apologize for colonizing Korea. The knotty question was precisely how North Korea would apologize for the abductions, given its past attempts to avoid the word apology. As they drafted the Pyongyang Declaration in the weeks leading up to the summit, Mr. X had begged Tanaka to exclude such language from the historical document, which would provide a road map for the new era in Japan–North Korea relations. The compromise left both sides unhappy. The Koreans translated the Japanese word for “apology” into the Korean word for “atonement,” and the text referred to the abductions as “regrettable incidents, which took place under the abnormal bilateral relationship, and would never happen in the future.” In return for allowing the Koreans to employ diplomatic euphemisms, Tanaka had insisted that Kim Jong-il apologize for the abductions to Koizumi in person.

  It wasn’t until Tanaka’s last-minute meeting that the North’s calculations suddenly became clear. North Korea had deliberately waited until the very last second to hand over the list of surviving and deceased abductees, which Tanaka had spent months trying to wrangle from Mr. X. As Tanaka scanned the document, the reason for the North’s deceptiveness became apparent. On it were the names of thirteen Japanese whom the North admitted kidnapping, eight of whom the regime claimed were dead, including Megumi Yokota and Keiko Arimoto. The circumstances of their deaths—suicide, swimming accidents, asphyxiation, heart attack, and a car crash in a country with few cars—were suspicious, and the evidence the regime presented was questionable. All the death certificates had been issued by the same hospital, and it was said that no remains existed for any of the abductees, the graves having been washed away by floods. The North claimed that only five of the abductees—two couples and a single woman—were alive. Tanaka had been trapped. By agreeing to a Koizumi visit without first learning the fate of the abductees, he had lost his leverage. Although he and Koizumi had assumed that some of the abductees might have died, the fact that the deceased outnumbered the living, and that the evidence of death was so flimsy, wasn’t something they had anticipated. How would the Japanese public react when it learned that the prime minister was normalizing relations with a regime that had kidnapped and perhaps killed or was still holding so many fellow citizens?

  With barely thirty minutes to go, Tanaka ran several hundred yards to the guesthouse. Had the Koreans intended to deliver the news in a place where he would have difficulty reaching the prime minister? he wondered. Koizumi was shocked by the news Tanaka brought him. But what had he expected? Diplomats must be coldly realistic in their calculations in ways the public can’t be expected to be. He knew that some of the abductees must be alive—otherwise Kim Jong-il wouldn’t have invited him to Pyongyang in the first place. But the North had been so unforthcoming that he’d suspected some were dead. It was common knowledge that the regime seldom admitted its mistakes. Its national pride depended on everything going according to plan, or at least seeming to, despite evidence to the contrary. The Japanese had assumed the North would announce the names of the surviving abductees and report the others as “missing,” the euphemism the two sides had used in previous negotiations. But they departed from the text and delivered the bad news with unseemly directness. North Korea’s definitive, if not honest account—since nobody knew if all the abductees were accounted for—made it all but impossible for the Japanese to save face.

  Koizumi and Kim (Associated Press)

  Kim Jong-il entered the room at eleven in the morning wearing his signature khaki-colored military jacket. Koizumi was careful to avoid the bonhomie that ordinarily occurs when two heads of state greet each other for the first time. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs had advised him to keep it simple: no smiles, use only one hand to shake, make sure not to bow. “As the host, I regret that we had to make the prime minister of Japan come to Pyongyang so early in the morning in order to open a new chapter in the DPRK-Japan relationship,” Kim said. Reading from note cards, Kim explained he wanted to become “true neighbors” and establish new relations with Japan. “I, too, hope that the opportunity that this meeting presents will greatly advance bilateral relations between our two countries,” Koizumi responded.

  After a few minutes of pleasantries, Koizumi had had enough and departed from his script. “I was utterly distressed by the information that was provided” about the abductees, he began. His tone was angry. “I ask that you arrange a meeting for us with the surviving abductees. And I would like you to make an outright apology.” Kim listened in silence, looking uncomfortable. Tanaka wondered if Mr. X had ever actually told Kim that Koizumi would require him to make a public apology. Kim neither acknowledged Koizumi’s remarks nor offered an apology. “Shall we take a break now?” he suggested, after a long pause.

  The meeting had lasted barely an hour. Discouraged, Koizumi and the delegation retreated to an anteroom to consider their options. The North had wanted to host a state visit, with banquets and performances, but the Japanese insisted it be an all-business one-day affair, and even brought along their own bento boxes for lunch. Koizumi didn’t want to be photographed toasting a dictator. In the anteroom, they watched the Japanese television news coverage of the talks, keeping the volume high on the assumption that the room was bugged. “If the North Koreans won’t acknowledge their wrongdoings, you have to push them,” Tanaka said. It pained him to think that a year of diplomacy might be for naught, but what else could they do? And if Kim refused to address the abductions and apologize? “You should not sign the joint statement,” said Cabinet Undersecretary Shinzo Abe. Koizumi’s bento went untouched, and he wondered if he had made a mistake.

  The afternoon session began at two sharp, and Kim, having eavesdropped on his guests’ lunchtime conversation, got right to the point.3 “We have thoroughly investigated this matter,” Kim read from a memo. “Decades of adversarial relations between our two countries provided the background of this incident. It was, neverthel
ess, an appalling incident.” Kim continued: “It is my understanding that this incident was initiated by special mission organizations in the 1970s and 1980s driven by blindly motivated patriotism and misguided heroism.” He explained that the purposes of the abductions were to find people to teach its agents Japanese and to steal identities with which to infiltrate the South. “As soon as their scheme and deeds were brought to my attention, those who were responsible were punished.” He claimed that the two people responsible for Megumi Yokota’s abduction had been tried and found guilty in 1998. Both were now dead: one was executed and the other died while serving a fifteen-year sentence. “I would like to take this opportunity to apologize straightforwardly for the regrettable conduct of those people. I will not allow that to happen again,” Kim promised.4

  The explanation was implausible on several levels. It was inconceivable to Koizumi that a covert program like this could have existed without Kim’s knowledge, especially as he was in charge of espionage operations during the years most of the abductions occurred. Despite his misgivings, Koizumi signed the Pyongyang Declaration at a 5:30 ceremony, an event immortalized on a North Korean postage stamp. What choice did he have? Kim had apologized for the abductions, even if his account was unsatisfactory. And what might happen to the remaining abductees if Koizumi refused to sign? After the ceremony, the Japanese delegation returned to the Koryo Hotel to announce the news to the world.