Japan’s Premier to Visit North Korea

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi announced plans Friday to travel to North Korea next month and meet with its leader, Kim Jong Il, in the first visit by a Japanese head of state to the secretive, authoritarian nation.

Koizumi said that during a one-day summit on Sept. 17 he will strive for a “breakthrough” in establishing formal diplomatic ties between the nations.

The visit is the latest sign that long-hermetic North Korea is opening, if just a tad, to outside influence. With its economy in tatters and many of its citizens ill-fed at best and starving at worst, the nation has been more receptive to establishing relations it long decried. Japan once ruled the Korean peninsula as a colony.

Koizumi said he spoke by telephone with President Bush and South Korean President Kim Dae Jung before committing to the visit, which grew out of high-level talks between Japanese and North Korean officials this week in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.

The U.S. and South Korean presidents praised the initiative, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda told reporters. The talks probably will be a topic of discussion when Koizumi visits Bush in Washington just before his North Korea trip.

Japan also informed the North’s historical allies, China and Russia, of the talks via diplomatic channels, Fukuda said.

Japan is a key ally of the United States, with which Pyongyang has long been at odds. The U.S. has been particularly concerned that North Korea may be trying to develop nuclear arms, and Bush has described the Communist regime as part of an “axis of evil.”

In the last few years, high-ranking delegates of several European Union nations have visited Pyongyang. Some countries, including Germany and Italy, have established embassies and trade ties there.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright both visited the nation in 2000. President Clinton considered, but eventually rejected, making the controversial journey.

In perhaps the most significant such trip, President Kim of South Korea visited two years ago. That summit turned into a seeming love fest between the leaders of the two Koreas, which fought an armed conflict from 1950 to 1953 and remain divided by one of the most heavily fortified borders in the world. The countries technically are still at war.

For the most part, world leaders and senior officials have come to Kim Jong Il. He has yet to make good on a promise to visit the South, although he has recently traveled by train to meet Putin and Chinese leaders.

North Korea has had a volatile relationship with Japan since the latter’s brutal rule of the peninsula from 1910 to 1945. Pyongyang wants an apology and compensation packages similar to ones Japan recently gave to South Korea and China.

One of the chief issues expected to be on the table when Koizumi and Kim meet is North Korea’s alleged kidnapping of Japanese citizens, although it has never been clear why they would have been abducted.

By Tokyo’s count, 11 people are being held, many of them fishermen, although activist groups put the number as high as 70.

Despite the animosity, Japan and North Korea do a sizable amount of trade through third countries. Several senior Japanese political leaders--including two who served as prime minister, although not at the time of their visits--have traveled to Pyongyang in recent years. Japan imports about $18 billion of North Korean fish, mushrooms, coal products and clothing annually, while North Korea imports about $1 billion of Japanese rice, rubber, paper and aluminum, according to Japan’s Finance Ministry.

Akihiro Arimoto, 74, whose daughter Keiko allegedly was kidnapped by North Koreans in 1983 at the age of 23, said in a telephone interview that he hoped the talks would help him see her again. She disappeared at an airport in Denmark, and her alleged kidnapper confessed to taking her to North Korea.

“It’s such a significant thing that the head of our country is going to visit North Korea,” Arimoto said. “I think that Koizumi is going to apologize for colonizing North Korea, and I expect that Kim Jong Il will accept the apology. And I want Kim Jong Il to apologize for the abductions soon.”

So Chung On, spokesman for the group known as Chosensoren that is the North’s unofficial consulate in Tokyo, said Japan should apologize and compensate Pyongyang for its past invasion.

“Based on the solution of that, we hope to establish diplomatic relations,” he said. “We are very near geographically, and we are very close historically, so we should be intimate with each other.”

The nations have been discussing the possibility of establishing official relations for a decade.