BOSTON, Massachusetts: North Korea keeps on surprising. While Pyongyang is busy erasing all references to unification with South Korea, it is extending an olive branch to Japan.
It all began early in 2024 when North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sent a rare message of sympathy for a deadly earthquake in central Japan to Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Kishida welcomed the message, saying that he felt a “strong need” for the two countries to improve their relations.
Kim’s sister Kim Yo Jong responded to Kishida’s remark positively. She went as far as welcoming Kishida to visit Pyongyang as long as Japan did not lay a “stumbling block” – a subtle reference to the issue of past abductions of Japanese nationals by North Korean agents. Kishida is personally supervising high-level discussions with North Korea to make a Kim-Kishida summit a reality.
North Korea’s outreach to Japan after more than four years of silence is causing much speculation about Pyongyang’s true intention and whether such a summit would materialise.
Four years ago, I wrote about the prospect of a Japan-North Korea summit between Kim and Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe on the precipice of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. At that time, North Korea had already met leaders from the United States, South Korea, China, Russia, Singapore and Vietnam. It was thus natural that Abe would be next on Kim’s list.
However, two factors ended the prospect of a Japan-North Korea summit in its infancy. First, neither country was able to overcome the abduction issue. Abe previously declared the return of the remaining abductees would be the precondition for normalisation and sanctions relief per the 2002 Pyongyang Declaration.
After the failed Hanoi summit in February 2019, Abe softened the precondition in an offer of dialogue to Kim, but the North Korean leader was not interested because Kim understood that so long as the United States did not agree to sanctions relief, there was little Japan could provide North Korea.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. While North Korea had to close its borders to fight the virus, Japan had to cancel the 2020 Summer Olympics. There were no sparks like the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics that could rekindle a Japan-North Korea dialogue.