Don't Shoot! We're Only Shopping
By James Brooke
New York Times
January 2, 2002MAIZURU, Japan, Dec. 28 - Framed by freshly unloaded stacks of Siberian lumber, thousands of used Japanese bicycles were loaded onto a ship here today, their tires flat, their chains rusted and their once-prim plastic shopping baskets cracked and faded. They are headed to North Korea, gifts from Kim Jong Il, the "Dear Leader," to his nation of 23 million people, in honor of his birthday.
"Kim Jong Il's birthday is in six weeks, and he has promised a ration of one bicycle for every household," a Japanese dealer of second-hand goods who is of Korean descent said with a wave to the old bicycles that already covered every possible surface of the Su Song Chon, a low and rusting North Korean coastal ship that was pressed into service for foreign trade.
When Mr. Kim shopped for the masses to perk up his 60th birthday festivities, on Feb. 16, it was only natural that he would turn to this mist-shrouded port, 500 miles across the Sea of Japan from North Korea. Here, in Maizuru, a lovely natural harbor where glassy waters are cupped by forest-covered mountains, the number of North Korean trading ships has increased fivefold in five years, reaching 295 last year.
Recently, a bitter war of words has erupted between Japan and North Korea over a mystery boat that sank after an intense gun battle with Japan Coast Guard ships in the Sea of China on Dec. 22. All 15 crew members of the boat apparently died. North Korea, while denying ownership of what the Japanese news media call "the spy ship," accused Japan of "brutal piracy."
But here on Japan's quiet coast, the northwest shore that faces the Korean Peninsula, it was business as usual today, with seven North Korean boats tied up at wharves here. Because Japan and North Korea do not have diplomatic relations, the North Koreans do all their trading without setting foot on land. Standing on a wooden gangplank, a yard from Japanese soil, the leader of one boat's crew was not happy to see visitors.
"No pictures, give me the film, you have no right to take pictures inside the port," the North Korean man, who sported a gold watch and designer sunglasses, said as his crew froze in their loading tasks, glaring with suspicion at the unexpected visitors. He ceremoniously dropped the film into the salt water.
Much of North Korea's notorious prickliness may come from an acute awareness that it has badly lost the development race.
With a state farming system that does not produce enough food and a military that eats up as much as one- quarter of its gross national product, North Korea relied in 2001 on food donated by Japan, South Korea and the United States to help feed a third of its people. Although the donations averted a recurrence of the famines of the late 1990's, North Korea directed its harshest political vitriol last year at those three donor nations.
Half a century ago, North Korea's living standards were not much lower than postwar Japan's. Today, North Korea's per capita income is $760 and Japan's is $32,000. The gap is comparable to that between the United States and Honduras.
A rare intersection appears in this out-of-the-way port, known to Japanese tourists as the starting point for pleasant summer drives along a coastline of craggy cliffs, white beaches and bobbing fishing boats.
"Wonsan, Chongjin, Nampo," said Fumio Kitai, the local Japanese customs director, reading down a shipping list of home ports for 24 North Korean ships that have come here in December. From his office, a crane could be seen lowering a used Japanese car into the hold of an ancient freighter, the Nampo Two. Its port side was streaked with long fingers of rust.
"Used bicycles, refrigerators, televisions, radio-cassette players, second-hand beds, sofas, tables," he said running down the list of Japanese castoffs that flow through here to North Korea. In 2000, with Japanese recycling laws raising disposal costs, the surge in used goods helped triple Japan's exports to North Korea from Maizuru, Japan's busiest port for trade with North Korea.
In turn, Japan imports fish, snow crabs and matsutake mushrooms from North Korea.
Some of Japan's hand-me-downs are too expensive for North Korea's pinched consumers. Most of the Japanese cars are smuggled into China, evading China's high taxes on imported cars.
"Guided by flashlight signals, Chinese smugglers carrying bags of cash enter the North to test the quality of cars," Chosun Ilbo, a South Korean newspaper, wrote recently of the cross-border trade. "North Korean drivers take them across the Tumen River, driving through shallow streams."
The newspaper estimated that a five-year-old Toyota Crown or Nissan Cedric bought in Japan for $3,000 would fetch twice the price at the Chinese border. The newspaper reported, though, that the number of North Korean groups pursuing this lucrative trade had increased to more than 100 from 6 in the early 1990's.
Japanese companies have also discovered that producing their goods in North Korea allows them to pay some of northeast Asia's lowest wages without fear of labor unrest.
Earlier this month, Daiei, a struggling Japanese supermarket chain, was selling men's suits for $80, a promotional price made possible by North Korean labor. In 2000, imports of clothing from North Korea through Maizuru totaled $2.4 million, a nearly 1,000-fold increase over 1999 levels.
"Japanese companies export textiles to North Korea, they process the cloth, and then it comes back through here," Mr. Kitai said. Leafing through his 2,795-page customs manual, Mr. Kitai found, on Page 1,667, that Japan's only major export restrictions to North Korea concerned military equipment and fishing boats.
In October, a Tokyo court gave suspended jail sentences to four men convicted of selling used fishing boats to North Korea without government permits. As the Dec. 22 clash showed, Japan remains deeply concerned about North Korean "spy ships." According to the Japanese news media, the ship that sank was one of three North Korean "spy ships" tracked by United States military satellites after leaving Nampo, North Korea, in early December.
In the past, Japan says, North Korean boats have landed spies on Japanese beaches, and the crews have smuggled drugs into Japan and kidnapped about a dozen Japanese young people, presumably to use as Japanese language instructors.
During the last two years, almost one-third of all illegal amphetamines seized in Japan have come from North Korea, according to Japan's National Police Agency. North Korea, which has refused to join the International Narcotics Control Board, raised international suspicions in 1998 when its diplomats in Thailand exported from Bangkok to Pyongyang 2.5 tons of ephedrine, a major ingredient for the manufacture of amphetamines.
Reports by North Korean defectors of industrial-scale state amphetamine factories now seem increasingly credible. Over the last two years, Japanese seizures of amphetamines from other Asian countries have averaged 80 pounds. Japanese seizures of amphetamines from North Korea have averaged 670 pounds.
"They need drug smuggling to get hard currency," said Hajime Izumi, an international affairs professor specializing in Korea at Shizuoka Prefectural University. He said that with a reduction in remittances from Koreans in Japan, North Korea had sought to earn hard currency through drug sales and counterfeiting.
"We haven't had any problems with them here," Hisao Nishiyama, the local deputy director of the Japan Coast Guard, said after peering through powerful binoculars from his harbor front office at two North Korean ships. North Korean flagged ships do not have insurance and tend to be in worse shape than Liberian or Panamanian flagged vessels, he said.
But, he conceded, the high-seas battle last week, about 800 miles southwest of here, so rattled local fishermen that Coast Guard officials have given security talks to the Maizuru fishermen's association.
With geography dictating who will use this port, Akira Ono, the manager of Maizuru's port promotion association, said: "We hope this incident is not going to damage our trade. Trade brings benefits to both sides."
Still, the latest confrontation put another dent in North Korea's already battered image in Japan. Tallying up 577 e-mail messages received in the four days after the confrontation, the Coast Guard reported that 98 percent of the messages supported their conduct. Although autopsies on two of the bodies indicated that the two men had drowned, few people have criticized the Coast Guard for not rescuing the boat's crew members from the water; Japanese officials said Coast Guard officers were concerned at the time that the men were armed.
The conflict came only days after the United Nations World Food Program made a worldwide appeal for $400 million worth of food to feed North Koreans next year. With Japan gearing up to host a major Afghanistan aid conference in Tokyo in January, aid officials worry that Japan may lose interest in feeding North Korea.
"Now the Japanese public mood is quite negative to helping North Korea," Mr. Izumi said. Moreover, Japan is trimming its overall foreign aid budget as part of a recession-driven austerity. "Even though it is humanitarian aid," he added, "it is now quite difficult in Japan to get public support for North Korea."