TOKYO — Japan on Thursday brushed off threats by Pyongyang that it would torpedo relations between the two countries unless Tokyo eased up on maritime restrictions against North Korean vessels.
"We have conducted such inspections in line with our law," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda told reporters, adding that he hoped North Korea would judge Japan's newly tightened inspection procedures against the communist state in a "reasonable and cool-headed manner."
North Korea suspended the only ferry service to Japan this week in response to the tough talk from Tokyo on ship inspections. Japanese officials say the crackdown is needed in part to prevent shipment of consumer goods that could be converted to military hardware. These include everything from high-end Japanese golf clubs -- extracted titanium carbon fibers are used in missile housings -- to off-the-shelf global positioning system hardware capable of steering missiles; to electronic fish finders that can be converted to sonar devices.
Even the lenses of store surveillance cameras can find a second life as submarine periscopes, experts said, and something as mundane as high-quality shampoo can be filtered for its triethanolamine and used in making chemical weapons.
"Any time they order huge amounts of anything, or buy expensive things, that should make us suspicious," said Shigeharu Aoyama, director of Japan's Independent Institute, a think tank based in Tokyo. "There are a lot of difficult judgment calls."
While many of these items are widely available around the world, Japan's close geographic proximity, the ferry service between the two nations and a sizable population in Japan with ancestral ties to North Korea means that Japan is Pyongyang's shopping center of choice.
Japan -- which has various export-control laws and protocols in place, including a version of the 1991 U.S. "catch-all" Enhanced Proliferation Control Initiative it passed in 2002 -- has neither the inclination nor the time to block shampoo shipments. But it does have more authority to stop some sophisticated dual-use items.
Exports of more than two Sony PlayStation 2 video game players, for instance, are subject to Japanese export licenses, given their potential use in missile guidance systems. Also subject to review are airtight beer fermentation tanks of over 100 liters, given their potential use in incubating large quantities of biological hazards.
