The Payoff of Appeasement

Japan is being forced to confront some fallout from its decades of excessive tolerance toward the Stalinist regime in North Korea, and anger is growing over the ugly and embarrassing revelations that are emerging.

There is now clear evidence that North Korea was behind the disappearance of at least nine and probably more Japanese who were abducted so that agents of Pyongyang could assume their identities and carry out espionage in Japan. There is also strong reason to suspect that North Korea has allied itself with a Japanese crime syndicate to market smuggled drugs in Japan. North Korea has a history of such enterprises. In the 1970s and 1980s some of its diplomats were expelled from a number of countries for conducting smuggling operations aimed at earning hard currency for their cash-strapped homeland.

About 660,000 ethnic Koreans live in Japan, many the descendants of laborers brought to the country over the 40 years when Japan ruled Korea. Until recently this group was largely sympathetic to North Korea, providing hundreds of millions of dollars in remittances that Japan’s government made no effort to halt. Now signs are growing that Koreans in Japan are turning against Pyongyang. Yet Japan still refuses to join the United States and other countries in applying sanctions against North Korea. Tokyo’s support has contributed to the viability of a dangerously aggressive regime.

The lesson once again emerging is that appeasement can be a costly and humiliating policy. In this case Pyongyang is also paying a price. Disclosures of its kidnappings make it impossible for Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto’s government to heed pleas for food aid to help avert the starvation facing hundreds of thousands in North Korea. Tokyo insists on honest answers from North Korea’s government before it acts. But it is simply not in the nature of the Pyongyang regime to meet that demand.