Tokyo tries to keep a brave face on the agreements reached at last week's six-nation talks in Beijing aimed at putting an end to North Korea's nuclear development plans. But no amount of strong talk about refusing any direct participation in aid or other concessions to North Korea unless Pyongyang accepts Tokyo's demands on the "abductee issue" can disguise the fact that Japan is in breach of an important international agreement even before the ink has dried on it.
Nor can it disguise the extent of the embarrassing knockback it has suffered at the hands of its ally, the United States.
Tokyo had tried to insist that the U.S. and the other four parties to the talks should not make any concessions until Pyongyang had dropped its hardline refusal to discuss the abductee issue. For months it has been telling us about how the U.S. and South Korea agreed with this linkage. But it is now clear that the U.S. and the others have ignored Tokyo's linkage demands.
Japan has been told in effect to go and sort out its problems by itself, by talking directly with Pyongyang in a working group. Since Pyongyang denies that there is an abductee problem, and since Tokyo so far has been refusing direct talks with North Korea, prospects for a breakthrough are slim.
Prime Minister Abe has been reduced to issuing strongly worded instructions to negotiators to force North Korean concessions. As for the U.S. "betrayal" over the abductee linkage, he and most of the abductee-obsessed media here remain tight-lipped.
Two factors were involved in this Tokyo miscalculation. One was not realizing how easily U.S. policy toward Pyongyang could shift. Washington's hardliners had earlier used North Korea's rocket and nuclear developments as grounds to refuse any concessions.
But since it was fairly clear that the developments were the result of the U.S. refusal to drop its hostility to North Korea -- in particular, the U.S. volte-face on the promises for normalized relations that it had made in the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea and the subsequent refusal of the direct one-on-one talks sought by Pyongyang -- then it was highly likely that the illogicality of the previous policy would spur a Washington retreat.
Chastened by its Iraq setbacks, by the recent Congressional election defeats and by the three-year deadlock its hardline had imposed on the six-party talks, the U.S. inevitably began to want to make the concessions needed to extract North Korean concessions, regardless of the Tokyo linkage demands. When that happened, Tokyo was left high, dry and isolated at the Beijing talks.
The other factor was Tokyo's weak position on the abduction issue. The issue was supposed to have been resolved by former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, as a result of his successful 2002 efforts to persuade Pyongyang to release five abductees, with an apology, in exchange for a promise to normalize relations. But he was immediately finessed by Abe, then chief Cabinet secretary, who insisted there were more abductees and that they too had to be released before there could be any normalization of relations. But the evidence that there were more abductees seeking release is scattered.
In any case, normally one would have assumed that if there was a residual abductee problem, it could best be resolved by negotiations through Tokyo sticking to Koizumi's promise to normalize relations. But Abe, with strong rightwing backing, has insisted that the promise should be broken and that sanctions be imposed to force a Pyongyang guilty of "bad faith" to comply.
Even that unusual move could just possibly be seen as justified, given the intense public feeling in Japan on the abductee issue. But given the very flimsy evidence on which Tokyo based its claim of Pyongyang's bad faith over the issue -- in particular, the strange way Tokyo has insisted that its DNA analysis of the remains of an abductee that Pyongyang says died in 1994 (an analysis that most scientific opinion says is impossible) proves that Pyongyang is lying, the rest of the world can be excused for not quite sharing Tokyo's seeming fervor on the issue.
Tokyo's use of this rather contrived abductee issue to prevent the concessions that everyone else is seeking to ease the alleged North Korean rocket and nuclear threat from which Japan itself had claimed to be the main victim also made it inevitable that Tokyo's demands would be ignored. Tokyo may have been scoring points domestically, but international opinion was bound to be unimpressed.
None of this seems to have registered with the Tokyo planners at the time. They seemed to think that it was enough to say they had an abductee problem to get the rest of the world to jump to attention.
Several "Japanese" factors seem involved: One is the weakness in realizing how foreigners think. Another is the priority given to domestic opinion in foreign policy matters. Yet another is the consensus ethic -- the belief that if you get others to agree with you, then the seeming sincerity of your demands and the fact that you have the numbers will prove you are in the right even when your case is weak.
But in international affairs, nations only cooperate when it is in their national interest to do so. The moment that interest points in another direction, promises of cooperation quickly die, particularly when the reasons for providing that original cooperation are weak.
Japan's policies in the Northern Territory dispute with Moscow have been very similar. Despite having a rather weak claim -- there too it reneged on an earlier 1955 agreement, this time for a return of territory, and began to demand more territory -- Tokyo for decades seemed to think that if it insisted on a claim and could persuade others to support that claim, then that would somehow prove that the claim was valid.
During the Cold War, the Western powers were happy to oblige, to keep Japan on their side and at loggerheads with Moscow. But the moment the Cold War ended the support fizzled out. More than half a century has passed since the original dispute was aired and Japan is no closer to a resolution today than it was then.
It would be fine if these and other foreign policy defeats -- the recent failure to gain a permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council in particular -- would persuade Tokyo to think more deeply and less emotionally about its foreign policy strategies and tactics. But for the moment that seems unlikely.