Foes on the Field, and Now Beyond
Fans at Japan-North Korea Soccer Match Underscore Countries' Rising Tensions
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 10, 2005; Page A16
SAITAMA, Japan, Feb. 9 -- When 5,000 North Korea supporters started to beat drums, wave red flags and cheer at the top of their lungs at a World Cup qualifying match Wednesday night, many of the 60,000 Japanese soccer fans here leaped to their feet and responded with an uncharacteristic outburst of emotion.
They drowned out the North Korea fans -- who were protected by rows of blocked seats and police lines -- with loud boos 20 minutes before the start of the otherwise well-mannered match. Deafening shouts of "Nippon!", or Japan!, rose around the stadium, along with a flurry of unfurled banners of the Rising Sun, the Japanese flag.
"This is a sporting event, but in our own way the Japanese people are also expressing our anger at North Korea," said Munenobu Takahashi, 31, a law student in Tokyo who was draped in one of the flags. "Right now, we have a lot to be angry about."
The passionate display in this northern Tokyo suburb by the Japanese fans, who are renowned for their sportsmanship, was symptomatic of escalating tensions between the two countries. Analysts describe Japanese relations with North Korea as having reached the most tenuous point in years.
The Japanese government, along with the United States, is focusing on a dispute about North Korean nuclear ambitions. In addition, Japan and North Korea are engaged in an increasingly heated exchange concerning Japanese citizens abducted in the 1970s and 1980s by North Korea to work in spy training camps.
While opinion polls show Americans concerned about North Korea, Japanese public opinion is highly attuned to the threat, with the communist nation located only 350 miles across the Sea of Japan. North Korea is believed to be aiming 200 missiles on the power centers of Japan, the world's second-largest economy. In addition, intelligence specialists estimate the government of Kim Jong Il may have a stockpile of six to eight nuclear devices which the Japanese fear could be deliverable in a kamikaze-style air attack.
The most explosive issue in recent weeks concerns a Japanese announcement that DNA tests showed that human remains sent to Japan by North Korea were not really those of a Japanese schoolgirl kidnapped by agents from Pyongyang in 1977. Confronted with the information, North Korea broke off talks to resolve the fate of at least 10 other Japanese it has also admitted to have abducted. The Japanese are concerned that the victims are still alive and being held against their will.
Leading politicians, along with public opinion polls, have expressed support for imposing economic sanctions on North Korea, something the North Korean government has said it would interpret as an act of war. Japan has already moved to impose what it calls stealth sanctions: halting $35 million worth of promised food aid and enacting new laws that will dramatically curb visits by North Korean vessels to Japanese ports next month, cutting off a key source of North Korea's hard currency.
Analysts fear that direct sanctions by Japan may provide North Korea with a convenient excuse to permanently walk out of stalled disarmament talks, to which Japan is a party, along with the United States, China, Russia, and South Korea. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has so far refrained from imposing official sanctions, but he is under intense pressure from his ruling Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, to do so soon.
"Experience . . . has shown us that you cannot solve the North Korea problem with good will," Shinzo Abe, the party's acting secretary general who it is widely believed will be Koizumi's successor, said in an interview Wednesday. "We have no alternative but to impose economic sanctions." He later vowed that Japan "will not give them one yen until the abductee issue is resolved."
Meanwhile, outraged citizen groups are now encouraging consumers to stop buying inexpensive, imported North Korean seafood. With the Japanese eager to read about tales of North Korean evil-doing, the comic book "A Guide to Kim Jong Il Vols. I and II" -- depicting Kim as a red-booted superman of darkness -- has sold 800,000 copies nationwide.
The North Korea threat has become a main factor driving the redrafting of Japan's pacifist defense policy embedded in its 1947 constitution. Japan, along with the United States, is set to deploy a missile defense shield to protect against an attack from hidden silos near North Korea's rugged eastern shores. The ruling LDP has also introduced a bill in Japan's Diet, or parliament, which would allow for a quicker response from Japan's Self-Defense Forces in the event of a North Korean missile attack.
The LDP is also preparing a bill, similar to the North Korean Human Rights Act in the United States, which would grant assistance to people fleeing North Korea and support nongovernmental organizations seeking to improve human rights there.
The current tension marks a contrast from only 2 1/2 years ago, when Japan and North Korea appeared to be on the verge of a historic fence-mending following Koizumi's September 2002 summit with Kim in Pyongyang, the north Korean capital. The two nations were heading toward settling World War II compensation claims and normalizing long-severed diplomatic ties.
The deal fell apart after U.S. officials announced that North Korea had violated its agreement with the Clinton administration to end its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Over the course of the next months, North Korea ejected U.N. weapons inspectors, pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and, U.S. intelligence officials contend, began reprocessing 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into weapons grade plutonium.
Equally sensitive to the Japanese, however, was North Korea's admission after years of denials that it had secretly kidnapped Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 1980s to help teach its spies how to infiltrate Japan. Five surviving kidnap victims were flown back to Tokyo in October 2002. But after North Korea was found to have provided faked death certificates along with the false remains of Megumi Yokota, kidnapped in 1977 at age 13 in northwestern Japan, authorities here demanded further answers. Instead, North Korea withdrew from the talks.
North Korea's official media quoted Kim on Jan. 19th as calling Japan "the arch enemy of our people, an enemy against which our grudge reaches to the marrow of our bones."
Such statements set the tone for Wednesday night at the 66,000-seat Saitama stadium, at an event that sold out 30 minutes after tickets went on sale and to which scalpers charged $1,000 for decent seats. In the first Japan-North Korea World Cup qualifying match since 1994, Japanese police went on high alert, with 2,000 officers and 1,400 private guards brought in to keep the peace.
Most of North Korea's fans -- including about two dozen adorned in traditional outfits -- were Japanese-born ethnic Koreans who maintain allegiance to the government in Pyongyang although they live in Japan. The supporters, most of them students and alumni of private schools founded here by North Korea in the 1950s, say they have become the targets of threats and harassment by Japanese.
Newspaper and TV coverage portrayed the game as an epic grudge match that focused on the secretive and often bizarre regulations of the North Korean team. The team, for instance, allowed the Japanese news media only a 15-minute glimpse of practice, during which players from the North avoided using numbered shirts, apparently in an attempt to make it more difficult for outsiders to study them.
In a dramatic finish, Japan pulled out a 2-1 win over the North, which is to celebrate Kim 63rd birthday next week. "Let this be Kim Jong Il's birthday present," said Kazuhiko Nakamura, 46, a Saitama resident who attended the game with a large photograph of Yokota, the kidnap victim. "It is exactly what he deserves." |
