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Pyongyang trip unlikely to boost Koizumi

TOKYO: Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is unlikely to get a boost from his trip to North Korea ahead of July polls even though Japanese kidnap victims were finally reunited with their children, pundits said on Sunday.

Meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il on Saturday, Koizumi won the release of the five children of two Japanese couples kidnapped by Pyongyang in 1978, after promising generous food and medical aid. “The trip itself was neither good not bad ... But I think it would not help raise his support,” Pyon Jin-Il, who issues the Korean Report newsletter on Korean affairs, told AFP. Pyon said Koizumi had failed to bring the family of a fifth kidnap victim and get new information on 10 other Japanese whom Tokyo says were also abducted by Pyongyang to train its spies in Japanese language and culture. “The public could consider this disappointing,” he said, noting they expected Koizumi would retrieve all the relatives of the five kidnap victims who returned to Japan as a result of the landmark September 2002 Japan-North Korea summit. Koizumi also did not manage to draw any “concrete words” from North Korea over abandoning its nuclear programme, Pyon said, while adding it was possible Kim had given Koizumi a message for the United States over the nuclear standoff.

Koizumi is to meet with US President George W Bush in June for Group of Eight summit talks. Hideshi Takesada, professor at the National Institute for Defence Studies, said there was a 50-50 chance the visit would increase support for Koizumi.

His ratings had been on a mild decline, standing at around 45 percent ahead of the upper-house elections in July.

The visit “was not perfect but should be appreciated” for the release of the five, Taeksada said. “But it may still have a negative impact” on the administration depending on how the remaining abduction and nuclear issues develop, given expectations had been too high before the summit, he said. Television footage showed the two couples and their children, aged 16-22, thanking government officials in the emotionally charged reunion late Saturday, and Tokyo won praise from Seoul, Washington and Moscow.

The media however accused Koizumi of being too soft on Pyongyang.

The two couples and another Japanese abductee returned to Japan for the first time in 24 years in October 2002, a month after Koizumi’s historic first summit with Kim. “The latest meeting made no headway in resolving the abduction, nuclear, missile or any other issues related to Northeast Asia’s peace and security,” Japan’s best-selling Yomiuri Shimbun daily said in its editorial.

Efforts to normalise relations with North Korea stalled after a backlash from the Japanese public to Pyongyang’s shock admission at the 2002 summit that it kidnapped 13 Japanese, eight of whom it said had died. After his second meeting with Kim, Koizumi did not return with the US husband of one of the five abductees who returned in 2002, Hitomi Soga, and the couple’s two daughters. The husband, Charles Robert Jenkins, 64, is listed as a deserter by the US Army and fears being handed over to the United States for prosecution.

Shigemura Tomomitsu, North Korean affairs expert and professor at Waseda University, told the Asahi private network that the visit was “a diplomatic defeat” for Tokyo. He noted a lower-ranking vice foreign minister greeted Koizumi at the airport Saturday. “Japan was being ridiculed,” Shigemura said. afp

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