Japan and North Korea

Economist.com: "Japan warned North Korea that it might impose sanctions after human remains provided by North Korea turned out not to be those of two kidnapped Japanese women. North Korea said that sanctions would amount to a declaration of war.

A MACABRE cock-up or a calculated insult? Japan's discovery that two sets of remains handed over by North Korean officials were not, as claimed, those of Megumi Yokota and Kaoru Matsuki, two of 13 Japanese citizens that North Korea's boss, Kim Jong Il, has admitted were abducted in the 1970s and 1980s, says a lot about Mr Kim's brutal regime.

Mr Kim knows well Japan's sensitivity over the abductees. His readiness to apologise publicly for their kidnapping brought Mr Koizumi to North Korea for a first visit in 2002. Five of the abductees were brought back to Japan. But efforts to prise more information out of the North about eight others who Mr Kim said had died (plus two others not on his list) were getting nowhere. So in May, Mr Koizumi visited Mr Kim a second time. The price for further and better particulars turned out to be 250,000 tonnes of food aid and $10m-worth of medical supplies. Half the food and about a third of the medical aid has yet to be disbursed and is now frozen. Japan's parliament is demanding sanctions.

Why provoke Japan like this? North Korea is notorious in its disregard for human life: perhaps 2m died of famine and related diseases in the 1990s (out of a population of some 22m), and up to 200,000 political prisoners and their families are confined in harsh labour camps.

Mr Kim may have hoped the apology would end the matter. It didn't (and anyway Japan has scores of other cases it has not yet even raised with North Korea). "