The abductee issues continues to complicate Japan’s approach to North Korea.
After visiting Pyongyang, U. S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Tokyo for a trilateral meeting with Japan and South Korea. On Sunday, Pompeo, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono, and South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha held their second trilateral meeting in less than a month. The three countries agreed to bolster cooperation in dealing with North Korea.
At the trilateral meeting, Pompeo’s most important task was to push back against accusations that the United Staes had “softened” on North Korea. At the joint news conference, Pompeo insisted that the new U. S. phraseology – “final, fully verified denuclearization” – is the same as the Japan-U. S.-South Korea agreed-upon language: “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization.” In the midst of U. S. news reports that North Korea is continuing work on its nuclear facilities, Japan and South Korea are anxiously trying to gauge how sincere North Korea is about “denuclearization of the Korean peninsula” as Kim Jong Un committed to at the June 12 U. S.-North Korea summit. Words are cheap and can be spun to mean whatever political leaders want them to mean for their domestic political purposes, and the United States’ inability to extract either a timeline or any real concessions from North Korea is leading even U. S. allies to question what Washington is really aiming for through these talks.
This pessimism is widely shared in Japan: according to a joint survey by The Yomiuri Shimbun and The Hankook Ilbo, 83 percent of Japanese respondents do not think the complete denuclearization of North Korean will be realized in the near future.
North Korea has long been a thorn in Japanese security – not just because of the direct existential threat its weapons pose to Japan, but because of the implicit threat its weapons development poses to Japan-U. S. coordination. Japan has lived with the threat of North Korea for decades now. The game-changer this time is North Korea’s acquisition of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which puts the United States’ extended nuclear deterrence into play and threatens to “de-couple” the Japan-U. S.
