Japan Lifts Some North Korea Sanctions Amid Report of Surviving Abductees

Tokyo, Japan: Japan decided on Thursday to ease some sanctions on North Korea in return for its reopening of a probe into the fate of Japanese citizens abducted by the reclusive state decades ago, as a fresh report emerged that some of them were alive.

Japan will lift travel curbs to and from North Korea and end restrictions on the amount of money that can be sent or brought to the impoverished North without notifying Japanese authorities. It will also allow port calls by North Korean ships for humanitarian purposes.

"This is just a start," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has made the fate of the abductees a focus of his political career, told reporters. "We will make every effort to achieve a complete resolution of this issue."

Easing the sanctions will likely have only a minimal economic impact, but it could be a first step towards repairing long-chilled ties between Tokyo and Pyongyang. The decision comes at a time of persistent international concern about the volatile North's nuclear and missile programmes.

Abe said the government had determined that North Korea took an unprecedented step in establishing a new entity to investigate all Japanese nationals involved.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, however, told reporters separately that Abe was not considering a visit to Pyongyang in the autumn, as some media have speculated.

The Nikkei business daily said on Thursday that North Korea had handed Japan the names of at least 10 of its nationals said to be living in that country, including some of those believed to have been abducted.

Proof that some of the missing Japanese are alive would almost certainly boost Abe's popularity. Suga however said the government had not received any report of such a list.

Tokyo will analyse the list to see if any names match those of reported abductees, and Pyongyang is expected use the list to confirm their whereabouts, the daily said.

Japan has stressed that its decision does not mean it is out of step with the United States and South Korea on dealing with Pyongyang, but some analysts said cracks were starting to show.

"It seems to me that it's going to become harder and harder for the U.S. to pretend that everything is fine in terms of coordination on DPRK (North Korea) policy as Japan moves down this road," Joel Wit, a former U.S. State Department official and visiting fellow at the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, told Reuters in an e-mail.


PRIORITY ISSUE

North Korea agreed in May to reopen the probe into the status of Japanese abductees, who were taken in the 1970s and 1980s to help train spies. In return, Japan promised to lift some of its sanctions when the investigation was launched.

Pyongyang, however, has a history of reneging on deals.

It admitted in 2002 to kidnapping 13 Japanese citizens, and five abductees and their families later returned to Japan.

North Korea said the remaining eight were dead and that the issue was closed, but Japan pressed for more information about their fate and others that Tokyo believes were also kidnapped.

In 2008, Pyongyang promised to reopen the probe of Japanese abduction victims but it never followed through. It also reneged on promises made in multilateral talks aimed at ending its nuclear weapons programme and declared the negotiations had ended.

Japanese diplomats met their North Korean counterparts in Beijing on Tuesday to assess Pyongyang's latest plan.

Some critics have said that North Korea already knows the fate of the missing Japanese and that the promised reinvestigation was largely a diplomatic ploy.

Even after the planned lifting of part of Japan's sanctions against North Korea, Tokyo will still have a ban in place on export to and imports from North Korea, on flights to Japan of chartered planes from North Korea and on port calls by North Korean ships for non-humanitarian purposes.

Suga has said the lifting of a ban on visits by North Korean ships would not include the Mangyongbong-92, a cargo-passenger ship once used to carry people and goods between the two nations. The steps are to be formalised by the cabinet Friday.

The Japanese sanctions to be lifted are separate from those imposed by Japan and other UN members under UN sanctions that followed Pyongyang's first nuclear test in 2006. The North is banned from conducting atomic and missile tests, and U.N. member states are barred from weapons trade with Pyongyang and from financial transactions that facilitate them.

Analysts said the sanctions easing was unlikely to trigger a flood of cash to North Korea from Japan. Ethnic Koreans living were once an important source of such funds, but the flow had ebbed even before Japan tightened reporting requirements.

"Basically, Japan's planned steps are little more than nominal ... They are not substantive. They are not something that would benefit North Korea greatly," said Hajime Izumi, a professor at the University of Shizuoka. "There is no telling whether they can make substantial progress from here."