Can Japanese Foreign Aid to North Korea Create Peace and Stability?

Abstract

the end of the Cold War, whenever the prospect of a normalization of relations between and North Korea has been brought forward, foreign aid or the expectation of such aid has been mentioned as one of the central ingredients.1 It was also raised in the Pyongyang Declaration, issued in connection with the meeting between Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro and Chairman Kim Jong II of North Korea in September 2002. This might be quite natural considering the immense economic need in North Korea. The fact that Japan, one of the world's largest donors of official development assistance (ODA),2 provides huge amounts of aid to most other Asian countries enhances these expectations; so do the large sums received by South Korea in connection with its normalization of relations with Japan. Peace building and peace preservation are new key concepts in Japanese foreign aid policy. According to the revised ODA Charter of 2003,3 Japan aspires for world peace ... actively promoting the aforementioned effort with ODA, which will carry out even more strategically in the future. Asia, and especially East Asia, is pointed out as a priority region. North Korea, with which has not yet normalized relations, is one of Japan's closest neighbours geographically, and from a logical point of view would therefore seem like an important starting point for the ODA effort. However, according to the main Japanese aid agencies, such as JICA (Japan