Regulating Its Scrap With N. Korea
SAKAIMINATO, Japan — It's the last chance for these old bikes. Bent and abandoned by their owners, they are being piled aboard boats in this western Japanese port, a tangle of spokes and handlebars rescued from the scrap heap.
Their unlikely saviors are North Koreans. For the last 20 years, fishing boats from the secretive communist country have made the overnight run across the sea separating the two countries, chugging into Sakaiminato and a few other Japanese ports to swap cargos of crab and clams for anything that might have value back home.
These days, that means even Japanese garbage. Broken refrigerators and old kerosene stoves. Blackened bananas. Busted cassette players.
It is a scratchy trade from the Japanese perspective, though all that shellfish coming into Japan and all those tired goods going to North Korea add up to $160 million a year, according to official figures. But now Tokyo aims to choke off the flow as punishment for what it says is North Korea's implausible explanation of what happened to at least eight Japanese citizens kidnapped by Pyongyang's agents in the 1970s and '80s.
The issue of the abductees is an emotional one in Japan, with polls showing that as much as three-quarters of the public favors using economic sanctions to force North Korea to reveal the fate of the victims. (North Korea says the abductees are dead but Japan lists them as missing.) The United States and other countries are urging Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to avoid antagonizing North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as they try to convince him to give up his nuclear weapons program.
Koizumi has tried to ease the domestic pressure for action against North Korea by backing new regulations to curtail boat traffic between the countries. On Tuesday, Japan began requiring all boats weighing more than 100 tons to carry expensive insurance against oil spills and other environmental damage.
The regulations do not single out North Korea by name, but they affect many of the North Korean fishing vessels that dock in Japan, of which less than 3% have carried insurance. Japanese lawmakers have made it clear in media interviews that the new requirements are aimed at cutting off the flow of used consumer goods to North Korea.
The North Koreans are aware that the measure targets them. Last week, the government issued a statement warning of "counteraction" if Japan went ahead with any tough steps to restrict their trade.
