How Shinzo Abe Can Help Trump Understand Kim

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is in Washington talking with U.S. President Donald Trump. The pair will talk about trade, but also about Trump’s prospective meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

With respect to trade, the issue is updating a trade agreement to limit Japan’s trade surplus with the United States. Abe will also want to know why Japan hasn’t been given a waiver on new U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs like other American allies and partners have received.

Abe will press Trump to include North Korea’s short- and medium-range nuclear missiles in discussions with Kim. Those missiles are already in place and can hit Japan. Washington intends to limit discussions to Pyongyang’s new intercontinental ballistic missiles, since the U.S. mainland is threatened for the first time. 

But there’s another issue of abiding interest to the Japanese when Trump meets Kim. Abe wants Trump to raise concerns about North Korean kidnappings of Japanese citizens, usually young people, in the 1970s and 1980s. These were among dozens of foreigners kidnapped by North Korean agents in various countries. 

In Japan last year, Trump met with family members of the kidnapped Japanese and he mentioned the case of one such woman in a speech at the United Nations. Japan says at least a dozen people abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s may still be alive in that country. In 1992, then-leader Kim Jong Il admitted that Japanese citizens had been abducted, but Kim insisted that none are still alive in the country.

The issue of these unresolved kidnappings deserves a new hearing because Pyongyang’s sordid international history is background for understanding the political culture in which Kim Jong Un grew up. Kim is not his father and times have changed in North Korea, at least somewhat. But Jong Un’s upbringing is not irrelevant to his own view of the world.

What was the point of these abductions?  

The story is told by a high-level North Korean defector writing under the pseudonym Jang Jin Sung in his 2014 memoir, “Dear Leader.”  Jang worked in a top-level department dedicated to counter-intelligence and psychological warfare. As a sign of his prestige, he was one of the “Admitted,” an honorific for people who had spent at least twenty minutes alone with Kim Jong Il -- the Dear Leader in question. 

The historical record shows that Kim Jong Il was worse than ruthless. His totalitarian regime was sealed even more tightly than the North Korea of today. With his “military-first” policy and his obsession with building the North’s nuclear program, the leader presided over the great famine of the mid-1990s, when perhaps 10 percent of the North Korea people -- well over 1 million -- starved to death. And this was in peacetime. Aid from the Soviet Union dried up quickly when the latter collapsed in 1991. Rather than feed his people even a bare sustenance, Kim Jong Il fed military development.      

The policy of kidnappings started in the 1970s under Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il’s father and North Korea’s founding leader. The point was espionage and political-psychological warfare. Civilians would be abducted from target countries for three purposes, Jang writes. 

One was to recruit teachers who would provide knowledge of their country, thus improving the education of North Korean spies. A second goal was to facilitate identity fraud, meaning North Korean spies could be given genuine foreign identities. Third, kidnapped children, if they could be brainwashed, were to be sent back to their home country as North Korean agents. The principal target country was Japan, although dozens of young people were kidnapped in various countries.

In the 1980s, Kim Jong Il added a new form of penetrating other countries, the “Seed-bearing Strategy.” The idea was to raise children who looked foreign but were completely North Korean. There were two ways to do this. One was to abduct foreign women, bringing them to North Korea to have children with a North Korean father. The second was to send attractive North Korean women abroad to have children with foreign men with different skin colorings and features. 

These bi-racial children grew up in special secluded compounds in Pyongyang. 

One of Jang’s school-girl friends was such a child. He writes that, “her mere presence as a hostage in Pyongyang provided leverage against her (Japanese) father, giving him a greater incentive to encourage (Japanese) foreign aid to North Korea and advocate for engagement strategies favorable to the DPRK.”  The girl said her father was the most important leader in the Japanese Socialist Party. 

Prime Minister Abe wants Trump to support Japanese pressure on Pyongyang for resolution about whether any Japanese are still alive in North Korea. 

But the history of Korean-Japanese relations is more complicated still. South Korea demanded and received apologies and reparations from Japan for so-called “comfort women,” i.e. Korean women, a few of them still alive in their 90s, forced into brothels used by Japanese occupation forces during the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula. 

In short, to understand what historical baggage Kim Jong-un will bring to meetings with the South Korean President, Moon Jae-in, and President Trump, you need to know its past.