The Invitation-Only Zone (24 page)

Tanaka’s most significant experience at Oxford had little to do with academics. During his second year, he fell
in love with a Polish student from Warsaw. They spent weekends in the Sussex countryside and traveled throughout Europe. He was moved when their train passed through Germany and she began shaking uncontrollably, a response to her country’s wartime victimization. She told him she feared returning to Poland, where family members and friends spied on one another. They planned to marry, but when Tanaka
consulted with the Japanese ambassador, he was told that doing so might hurt his career, as some would think his wife was a Communist spy. Offended, he considered quitting the foreign service. His first post after Oxford was Jakarta, which he suspects was part of the Japanese government’s plan to thwart his relationship by putting as much distance as possible between him and his girlfriend. Indonesia
refused to grant her a visa to join him, and she eventually returned to Poland.

The 1950s and ’60s were the years Japan proved to the world that its wartime behavior had been an aberration. It joined the United Nations in 1956, hosted the 1964 Olympics, and normalized relations with South Korea in 1965. Tanaka was a rising star when he returned to Japan in 1974, moving swiftly through the ranks
of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, helping Japan craft a new role for itself on the world stage. He developed a reputation as a lone wolf in a culture that prizes consensus and cooperation. He was handsome, fiercely intelligent, and wore exquisitely tailored English suits. These qualities served him well during the decade he worked in the United States overseeing Japan’s North American affairs,
and during the fraught trade negotiations of the 1980s. Tanaka valued Japan’s strong alliance with the United States, but lamented its unintended effects, especially the way it enabled Japan to avoid uncomfortable facts. “Japan has lived in a rather peaceful world since the end of the war. The United States guaranteed Japanese security, so anything to do with military action was quite remote. Although
there was a clear threat from a country like North Korea, we tried not to see it, because of Japan’s history,” he tells me.
⁵

Having excelled in the United States, Tanaka was given his choice of jobs. The head of the Bureau for Northeast Asian Affairs wasn’t a particularly coveted position. With a military regime in the South, a Stalinist autarky in the North, and Japan’s hands tied by the limitations
of the Cold War, it was considered a career-ender. But Tanaka chose it because the Korean Peninsula was central to his worldview. Given Japan’s long and intimate history with Korea, he believed the peninsula was the route through which Japan could mend its relations with the rest of Asia. He thought it was disgraceful Japan had taken so long to normalize relations with the South, and that
a similar resolution with the North was long overdue. “We colonized Korea, so the least we can do is help create a peaceful peninsula. Peace in Japan is threatened by instability on the Korean Peninsula,” he says. As head of the bureau, Tanaka was determined to address the two countries’ unequal relationship. “Korean diplomats speak excellent Japanese, so we normally worked in our language. I didn’t
think that was fair, and insisted that we do business in a third language, English,” he explains. In addition, Tanaka challenged the cultural assumption that Japan’s northeast neighbors were too “emotional” to negotiate with rationally. “One of my senior colleagues, a China specialist, advised me to use
heart
when dealing with Korea, because they are so emotional.” The colleague believed that
the only way to get diplomatic work done was for officials to visit the sauna together, and then to drink and sing. “I told him I had no intention of doing that. I want to conduct crisp business in English, and thought it was a mistake to appeal too much to emotions. I wanted our negotiations to be rational.”
⁶

*   *   *

Junichiro Koizumi became Japan’s prime minister in April 2001 with an 85
percent approval rating, based largely on his vow to reverse Japan’s decade-long economic decline. To do so, he proposed the kind of privatization and market reforms that, though conventional wisdom in the West, were anathema to the Japanese public. The immediate result of the reforms was more economic pain, and one year later his approval rating had plummeted.

Koizumi needed to make a bold move
to take people’s minds off the economy, and normalizing relations with North Korea seemed ideal. However, his plan for engaging with that country was complicated when President George W. Bush included North Korea (along with Iran and Iraq) in his 2002 “Axis of Evil” speech. Could Japan normalize relations with a country on which its closest ally had all but declared war? Tanaka saw an opportunity
to show the United States that Japan was capable of making its own foreign policy. “We are not a protectorate of the United States!” he protested when a U.S. diplomat cautioned him. Such sentiments earned Tanaka the nickname Kokutai-san, or “Mr. National Interest,” among U.S. diplomats. Koizumi instructed Tanaka to keep the negotiations secret, limiting information to a small group. Even the minister
of foreign affairs was kept in the dark. If the talks succeeded, Koizumi would notify the United States and the rest of the Japanese government before signing an agreement.

*   *   *

Tanaka took the early morning commercial airline flight from Tokyo to the coastal Chinese city of Dalian so that he’d have time to explore the city before the first meeting with his North Korean counterpart. The
Japanese colonists had designed Dalian’s wide roads and elegant circular plazas to create an Asian version of Paris. “Dalian was the ideal city the Japanese saw in their dreams,” architectural historian Yasuhiko Nishizawa writes. It was showcased as an example of how Japanese rule would bring modernity to its colonies. The city also provides a palimpsest of Asia’s contested history. The Han dynasty
staged its invasion of Korea from here in the second century AD. Between 1850 and 1950, Dalian was controlled by Britain, Russia, Japan, and finally the Soviet Union, before being returned to China in 1950. Tanaka visited the elegant Yamato Hotel, built in 1914 by Japan’s South Manchuria Railway Company, whose company logo even today adorns the city’s manhole covers.

The ritual of exchanging
business cards is a crucial element of East Asian culture, and the fact that the North Korean negotiator didn’t offer one at the first meeting was a cause for suspicion. “Kim Chul,” as he called himself, claimed to be a high-ranking member of the National Defense Commission, the division from which Kim Jong-il ruled. Tanaka assumed that the name was a pseudonym (Kim Chul being the Korean equivalent
of John Smith) and noted that the other members of the North Korean delegation referred to him simply as Mr. General Manager. Tanaka took to referring to him as Mr. X.
⁷

The troubled relations between Japan and Korea hung heavily over the negotiations. “Tanaka-san. My grandmother was forced to take a Japanese name,” Mr. X said, as a way of introduction. “Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula, and
abducted millions of Koreans to work for slave wages in Japan. I want to know how you will compensate us for these acts.” Tanaka tried to bring the conversation closer to the present day. Schooled in the British art of understatement, he was not the sort of person given to sharing personal experiences. In this case, however, he sensed that doing so might ease the tension. He recounted the efforts
he’d made over the past fifteen years to heal the wounds Japan had inflicted on Korea, and he mentioned the agreements he’d worked on, including Prime Minister Murayama’s 1995 apology. “My desire has always been for peace on the Korean Peninsula. I don’t consider making peace to be easy work. Why don’t we put our misgivings aside and talk straight to each other, with open minds,” he said.
⁸

A
plan for the clandestine negotiations emerged. The meetings took place mainly in Dalian and other Chinese cities. Because using a conference room might cause suspicion, the sessions were held in ordinary hotel suites, the beds and dressers pushed to the side. The North Koreans always sat with their backs to the windows and asked that the shades be drawn, no matter how high up the room. They would
arrive one by one, with Mr. X entering last. The Koreans never presented a proposal, letting the Japanese side produce draft after draft, which they would edit.

It mattered less
who
Mr. X was than whether he was the right person for Tanaka to be negotiating with—a crucial question in an authoritarian state where only one opinion, Kim Jong-il’s, ultimately carries any weight. Could Mr. X bring
his promises to fruition? Tanaka wondered. In order to find out, he devised a series of tests to gauge his influence in Pyongyang. In 1999 a retired reporter for the Japanese financial daily
Nihon Keizai Shimbun
was arrested in North Korea and accused of spying. He had been in jail for two years when Tanaka asked Mr. X to show good faith by getting him released. On February 12, 2002, with no explanation,
the reporter was put on a flight from Pyongyang to Beijing. Tanaka knew he was talking to the right man.

Meanwhile, in Japan, the abduction issue was heating up. Word of the negotiations leaked, forcing Koizumi to meet with the family members and promise not to normalize relations unless the abduction issue was settled satisfactorily. But after twenty meetings, negotiations stalled. Tanaka knew
that the possibility of a Koizumi visit to North Korea was the most important card he could play and was ultimately more important to the North than a monetary settlement. So every time Mr. X tried to get him to commit to Koizumi’s visit, Tanaka held firm and repeated Japan’s basic requirements. The negotiations wouldn’t progress until the North agreed to acknowledge and apologize for the abductions,
provide information on the victims’ whereabouts, and release any survivors. Tanaka made it clear that anything less would cause him to leave the table. Mr. X was visibly unnerved by the ultimatum. “What you must understand is that, while the worst that could happen to you is dismissal, my situation is much more serious. My
life
might be at stake,” he said.

Koizumi met with Tanaka in early June
to take stock of the negotiations. He and Mr. X were going around in circles, Tanaka explained: the North Koreans demanded a specific amount of money and a guaranteed visit before they would provide information about the abductees. With his popularity sinking, Koizumi needed a grand gesture more than ever. He hadn’t come this far simply to walk away. “I am prepared to visit North Korea, even though
they haven’t provided us with satisfactory information about the abductees,” he told Tanaka. “If they will provide that information only if I visit them, then I can go along with that.”

How many Japanese had been abducted? How many were still alive? Tanaka wouldn’t find out until after he and Koizumi arrived in Pyongyang.

18

KIM AND KOIZUMI IN PYONGYANG

The prime minister’s plane departed at 6:46 a.m. on September 17, 2002, headed west from Tokyo, and continued due north, across the demilitarized zone.
¹
The plane was full, with fifty journalists from twenty-five Japanese news organizations. Among them was
Asahi
reporter Tsutomu Watanabe, who had been covering Koizumi for the past two years.
²
Watanabe was the
perfect person to chronicle this trip. It was his third time in the North, and he spoke Korean, which he’d learned while working in the paper’s Seoul bureau. Koizumi was something new in Japanese politics: a maverick who promised to jolt the country out of its complacency by opening up markets to competition, privatizing state operations, and weakening the power of the bureaucrats who had run Japan
for the past fifty years. He was more conservative and promilitary than his predecessors, and his regular visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, whose dead included more than a thousand Japanese convicted of war crimes, had offended China and both Koreas. He was a gambler who took large risks for large rewards, and nothing was riskier than being the first sitting Japanese prime minister to visit the
North since the end of the the Second World War. As the plane crossed the DMZ, Watanabe noted that the landscape faded from green to brown. The rivers that South Korean industrialists had straightened to ease navigation became twisted and haphazard.

Watanabe had been surprised when Koizumi had announced the trip two weeks earlier. The history of negotiations between Japan and North Korea wasn’t
pretty. Over the years, several Japanese politicians had made unofficial trips to Pyongyang, with dreams of signing mining or construction contracts, only to return empty-handed. All the press attaché told Watanabe was that Koizumi intended to sign an agreement—a prelude to normalization—and clear up the mystery of the Japanese allegedly abducted by the North. This might be too big a bet, Watanabe
thought, even for a gambler as good as Koizumi.

The plane touched down at Pyongyang’s Sunan International Airport at 9:14 a.m. and Watanabe craned his neck, peering through the window to see who would greet the prime minister. Two years before, Kim Jong-il himself had greeted South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. But this morning Koizumi was met by
the president of the Supreme People’s Assembly, the second-highest-ranking official in North Korea, a calculated slight. The journalists were bused to the Koryo Hotel, where a pressroom was waiting for them. After checking into his room, Watanabe tried to sneak out a side door to wander the streets of Pyongyang on his own. It was an old reporter’s trick, but the North Koreans had anticipated it
and positioned minders at every exit. To learn what was going on, Watanabe would have to wait for the afternoon press conference like all the other reporters.