Dwindling dot

Megumi Yokota was a 13 year old schoolgirl who disappeared from a beach near her home in Japan in 1977. When President Koizumi visited Pyongyang 2 years ago, Kim Jong Il apologised for abductions of Japanese nationals, of whom she was one. After years of teaching Japanese language and culture in North Korea, Megumi allegedly committed suicide. Eight of the dozen or so abductees are allegedly dead. (One of the survivors married the defector Charles Jenkins.) If the story of abduction is incredible, so too is the aftermath.

Disgusted by the return of cremated remains which it claims (according to DNA tests) cannot be hers, Japan has already halted food aid. It seems only a matter of time before other sanctions. What would they achieve, though?

Trade sanctions hit the poorest. The élite are the last to suffer. Kim Jong Il's record gives little cause for hope that he would take steps to protect the powerless from starvation if it will cost him loss of face.

What outcome would satisfy the Japanese? Over 70% are in favour of sanctions. The motive seems to be punitive - understandable, but unlikely to get the world much further forward.

Not everyone is in favour of sanctions. Masao Okonogi, who teaches Korean Studies at Keio University, argues on asahi.com that sanctions should be used as a last resort. Even then, it's not clear from the article what they are supposed to achieve. Everyone wants DPRK to return to the nuclear negotiating table. This doesn't seem to have much to do with Megumi, but it's right there in his article.

And the western press is talking up the instability of the régime. There seems to be no way, yet, of knowing the truth.

I don't begin to understand this. It seems rather like bashing an old-fashioned TV set in the hope that it will make it work.

Fieldwork

Antti Leppänen is a Finnish anthropologist studying neighbourhood shopkeepers and entrepreneurs in Korea. He has just been blogging about Grandfather Kwôn, a widowed laundryman whose frank account of his life brings home how differently people can live. He has had many jobs in his time, and many women. His was an arranged marriage. It is hard to imagine their relationship:

She was so sunbakhada (simple, honest, unspoiled etc.) that she could even have a room prepared in their home if he got to know a nice girl. It actually happened once. At that time a woman couldn’t pack her things and leave (pottari ssaji ank’o), a woman couldn’t make even a sound.

Antti's blog is worth reading regularly for the light he sheds on ordinary lives.
(I wonder what an anthropologist would make of the entrepreneurs in the village where I live: the cobbler, the baker, the butcher who opens at 7am every day but Sunday, the Indian, Chinese and Turkish restaurateurs, the Pakistani newsagent, the successful car dealer whose father was a wartime Czech refugee?)

Defectors speak

There's an interesting post at NKZone today, in which a teacher working with North Korean defectors reports on his students' perceptions of the possibility of change in the DPRK.

The questions posed seem based on many unspoken assumptions - most seriously, a suggestion that everyone wants reform, and that armed uprising might be a good way of achieving it.

It seems a missed opportunity to ask more open questions about their perception of the political structure of DPRK and reform. For example, what is their attitude to inward investment? And how autonomous can regions be in practice?

I'd like to know more about what it's actually like living there - where do people live, what work do they do, what do they eat, are they able to form frank friendships or is everyone always suspicious? Are ordinary people cynical about the government, do they want reform? Do people readily spot the discrepancy between what's reported and what they know? What about Ryongchon -what if anything did they hear about that, and where from? How much do they know about the rest of their country? Does anyone really love Kim Jong Il? Does anyone believe that stuff about the star and the two rainbows?

And above all, why did they defect? These are all questions to which we may think we already know the answers, but it would be good to hear from people who really know.

I trust that these students (whose English isn't good enough to read NKZone) knew that the information they gave would be used in this way.

Weapons of Mass Distraction

A cogent article by Selig Harrison on the Council on Foreign Relations website argues that the US exaggerates the threat from Pyongyang with regard to nuclear weapons capability whilst overlooking the more tangible threat from re-processed plutonium which it can sell on to other powers. It suits DPRK to be cagey about their capability. But it is very dangerous for the US to proceed on a worst-case scenario basis. He accuses the US administration of misrepresenting the intelligence and ignoring the one real threat.

One Fat Man

Two recent articles in The Christian Science Monitor merit reading. It's not a magazine I'd normally pick up, but Google alerts drew my attention.

Much has been written recently about the removal of Kim jong Il's posters, and the dropping of the Dear Leader honorific in some newscasts. This seems a pretty good summary of the state of knowledge about the back-pedalling on the personality cult, and possible unrest.

And today, Steve Knipp gives a vivid account of his tourist trip to the Diamond Mountains in North Korea. He describes how their bus is checked by lean and hungry young North Korean soldiers (every NK male is by law required to spend 10 years in the army), and how a South Korean woman was reportedly detained for several days for asking why Kim Jong Il was the only fat man in the country. He concludes:

While in the country, I desperately tried to talk to some actual North Koreans. But all outsiders travel in a virtual bubble, as a way to just about eliminate contact between North Koreans and outsiders. Except for the hotel's doormen, all the staff we encountered were recruited from ethnic Korean communities in China - and they are rotated back to China every three months.

Still, I must wonder what those rail-thin young soldiers boarding the buses each day think, as they come face to face with hundreds of South Koreans, whose round smiling faces and vivid, fashionable clothing convey prosperity. Maybe they will start to ask themselves: Why is there only one fat man in this land, yet so many from the South?

For other accounts of trips to North Korea:
Tan Wee Cheng's 8 day visit, many photographs and telling details, and not a little sarcasm.
The BBC's Caroline Gluck visits the DMZ briefly -some good links in the sidebar
Ron Gluckman casts a jaundiced eye on the "schoolyard antics" of both sides of the DMZ show, like who has the bigger flagpole.

All in all, it was like wrestling night at the forum. Only not nearly as much fun. For all the boasting about the superiority of the American Way, sad to say, the North Koreans throw a better border party.

A Palin fan visits the DMZ and garners some unguarded responses on the message board.

The Paranoid State, an article, not online elsewhere, gacked from The Observer.