Korea Future op-ed published in Nikkei Asia

Note: The following op-ed by Jiwon Kim, Korea Future's Japan Lead, was first published in Nikkei Asia on 8 May 2024.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has repeatedly expressed strong interest in holding a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

North Korea, however, has so far been cool to the idea. Kim Yo Jong, Jong Un's sister, has cited as an obstacle Japan's insistence on bringing up the "already settled" issue of the fate of 17 Japanese kidnapped and taken to North Korea in past decades.

Pyongyang's stance is that the issue of the abductees was closed in 2002 when it allowed five of the kidnapped Japanese to return home and told Tokyo that eight others had died, while maintaining the other four people listed as missing had never been in its territory. Yet the Japanese government has never accepted that as the end of the matter.

To break through this stalemate, Japan needs to create a new dynamic in its interactions with North Korea. Paradoxically, the key may be to make new demands on Pyongyang.

The place to start could be the 93,000 residents of Japan who moved to North Korea under a program called Paradise on Earth between 1959 and 1984.

The program, spearheaded by Pyongyang's ruling Workers' Party of Korea and the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, known as Chongryon, promised that migrants "returning" to the Korean Peninsula would receive free food, housing and education, among other benefits. In the schools it ran for ethnic Korean children and its community programs, the Chongryon portrayed North Korea as a true workers' paradise.

When the program began, North Korea was short of workers due to heavy casualties incurred during the Korean War. Japan, for its part saw the program as reducing the budgetary burden of providing social welfare benefits for low-income residents.

The group who migrated included around 6,800 Japanese citizens and 1,800 Japanese spouses of ethnic Koreans. But Pyongyang's promises to the migrants never materialized, and indeed those who moved to the North were discriminated against due to suspicions over their exposure and connections to the outside world. Yet they were also denied the freedom to go back to Japan.

Last October, four former migrants who had managed to escape and make their way back to Japan over the years won a lawsuit in the Tokyo High Court against the North Korean government.

The court found that the migrants had been "robbed of their lives" by Pyongyang's false promises and that they were entitled to compensation, yet to be calculated, for the harsh and miserable conditions they had been forced to live under.

Given this court judgment, it is incumbent upon the Japanese government to press Pyongyang to allow surviving migrants to return to Japan if they choose. By making this demand, Tokyo will also add a new dimension to its interaction with Pyongyang and open a path for the North to take actions that would benefit the relationship and human rights.

A careful examination of the comments of Kim Yo Jong and other key figures in the North Korean leadership shows that there is an underlying interest in resuming high-level contact with Japan. This is because the authorities in the North believe they could get something out of a summit, whether in terms of sanctions relief, complicating the growing cooperation between Japan, South Korea and the U.S., or normalizing relations with Tokyo.

In order to secure such benefits, Pyongyang is well aware that it must put something on the table as well.

For years, the regime has signaled that there is nothing tangible it can offer if Tokyo focuses only on the abduction issue. This is where Japan has an opportunity to bring in an issue like Paradise on Earth to give North Korea a new bargaining chip.

If this approach then helps to restore high-level engagement between Japan and North Korea, Tokyo will get a fresh opportunity to explore creative solutions to the abduction issue.

Among the U.S., South Korea and Japan, Tokyo is the only partner to have managed to get Pyongyang to acknowledge human rights abuses, namely its 2002 revelations regarding Japanese abductees, and still seems the partner Pyongyang is most open to talking to.

In February, the trio issued a joint statement to "call for a reinvigorated effort to bring justice to victims of human rights violations and abuses" in North Korea on the 10th anniversary of the issuance of a U.N. Commission of Inquiry report on human rights conditions in the North. It makes sense to make the Paradise on Earth campaign part of this discourse.

Pyongyang naturally has no particular interest in discussing Paradise on Earth, especially with the threat of a pending Japanese court award of damages to victims of the program. But at the same time, the issue has the potential to create room for maneuver to bring about renewed dialogue.

Both sides have things they want to get out of a leaders' summit. For the two to even sit down and start to discuss what they seek from each other, they must first establish the premise that they each can bring something to the table to exchange for what they want.

That is why Japan has to send a clear signal that it has more it wants to discuss than the old abduction cases. Only when North Korea believes there is something it can practically put on the table will it come out to talk.