For its public enemy number two Washington has chosen the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the relic ‘guerrilla state’ whose founding myths and national identity were forged in the thirties, through armed resistance to a brutal Japanese colonialism—and hardened over half a century of Cold War since it fought the US to a standstill, in 1953. Permeated by monolithism, xenophobia and leader-worship, the DPRK has never demobilized. It still maintains a standing army, nearly a million strong, deployed along the Demilitarized Zone barely 30 miles north of Seoul; among its conventional weapons alone it numbers over 3,000 tanks, 11,000 artillery pieces, 850 combat aircraft and 430 combat ships.footnote¹ Famously the most industrialized region of the peninsula prior to US carpet bombing during the Korean War, and surpassing the southern Republic of Korea in growth during the fifties and sixties, the DPRK’s failure to import or invest in capital goods over the past decades has left its plant rotting or obsolescent, with the energy and chemical-fertilizer sectors—the latter essential for food production in this largely mountainous country—especially hard hit. From the mid-1990s, floods and famine have compounded the social and economic misery.

Yet, like spring to a frozen river, change may come to a long immutable system with violent suddenness and in unpredictable ways. The election of Kim Dae Jung as president of South Korea in 1997—his pro-engagement Sunshine Policy breaking with decades of hostility towards the North—provided the beleaguered DPRK with an opportunity to seek openings for desperately needed capital investment. Pyongyang entered negotiations, proud yet nervously vulnerable, always mindful of its local military advantage as a bargaining chip. In June 2000 Kim Dae Jung travelled north for a historic summit with Kim Jong Il; both pledged social, economic and cultural cooperation and joint progress towards reunification, in an atmosphere of euphoric anticipation.

Hyundai began work on a Special Economic Zone near Kaesong, just north of the DMZ; a joint tourist development was opened at Mount Kumgang, a sacred site in Korean culture; mine-clearing work was started along the DMZ and railway lines repaired. The DPRK normalized relations with a series of countries, including most of Western Europe and Australia, and North Korean officials were dispatched abroad in search of development models and technical assistance. Kim himself travelled to Beijing in May 2001, Shanghai in January 2001 and Russia in August 2001. Another SEZ project was set in motion at Sinuiju, on the Yalu River frontier with China; it aimed to create a walled capitalist enclave for international finance, trade, commerce, industry, advanced technology, leisure and tourism, with the US dollar as its currency and its own independent legislature, judiciary and administration. The existing population, some half a million people, would be relocated.footnote² In July 2002 a lurch towards Chinese-style economic reforms abolished rationing, raised wages and prices eighteen-fold (the purchase price to farmers for rice rose five-hundred-fold), introduced the first housing rents and utility charges, and devalued the currency to one seventieth of its (purely nominal) rate—from the fixed 2.20 won to the dollar rate to something closer to the 150-won black-market value.footnote³

Yet the thickening mesh of relationships between the two Koreas—a few of the many separated families had also been united—was taking place within an increasingly fraught international context: a deteriorating world economy, heightened competition between China and Japan, and an incoming American administration already seeking a more direct assertion of Washington’s primacy in the region. With the sharpening of US policy after 9.11 North Korea was declared one of the three members of the Axis of Evil in Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union address; and, with Iraq, was one of the two named ‘rogue states’ in the September 2002 National Security Strategy document. Meanwhile in Seoul, Kim Dae Jung’s five-year presidency staggs to its end in the December 2002 elections through a mire of corruption. Of the candidates looking set to replace him, the conservative Lee Hoi Chang of the Grand National Party, in particular, espouses a much harder rhetoric on North Korea.

Within this hostile forcefield, the Pyongyang leadership seems to have concluded that normalizing its relations with Tokyo and Washington—its former occupier, on the one hand, and the devastator of its civilian infrastructure, on the other—was now an essential goal. In October 2001, tentative feelers were sent out to Japan, seeking negotiations. Quiet diplomatic exchanges, involving at least thirty meetings between North Korean and Japanese diplomats over the following year, explored the outstanding issues: for Pyongyang, apologies and reparation for the atrocities committed during Japan’s four-decade occupation of the peninsula, from 1905 to 1945; for Tokyo, the encroachment of North Korean spy ships into Japanese waters, and the suspicions that a dozen or so of its nationals had been abducted by the DPRK. Broad principles were agreed over the summer of 2002 and the stage set for Koizumi’s 17 September visit to Pyongyang.

The meeting was tense. Koizumi is reported to have taken his own bento lunchbox with him. That night, on the plane back to Tokyo, it was still unopened. Kim Jong Il and his guest came together only to talk, not to eat. Nor, it seems, had they performed the deep ritual bow.footnote⁴ Instead, the summit was marked by a highly unequal exchange of apologies. Koizumi issued a formulaic expression, asserting that

The Japanese side regards, in a spirit of humility, the facts of history that Japan caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of Korea through its colonial rule in the past, and expresses deep remorse and heartfelt apology.footnote⁵