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Considerable attention focused last week on the visit to Pyongyang by Isao Iijima, special assistant to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. As I observed in a post last week, the Japanese public places marginally greater concern on abductees than on the North Korean nuclear program and the abductee issue has been a focal point of [...]
By now, the satellite pictures of North Korea at night have become a virtual cliche; nonetheless, they are always worth a second look and we append a new one including Japan and more of China that we had not seen. However, we found the attached photo from Mark Manyin at the Congressional Research Service to [...]
We were recently asked by a reporter whether it was possible that products from Kaesong are leaking into Korea’s trade with third countries. We were initially dismissive, and then decided that we actually didn’t know. What does Kaesong export, anyway? And where is final demand? The data we present here are pretty aggregated (the so-called [...]
At the end of last week, there was mounting evidence that the Park Geun-hye government was trying to lower the temperature on the peninsula and that humanitarian assistance would play a central role. On Thursday, Minister of Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae made the mistake of admitting that the closure of Kaesong was causing pain to [...]
In any contest of resolve, weaker parties seek to show they can bear costs. If that signal was missed by anyone over the last several weeks, Kim Jong Un has just delivered it again. A statement by Kim Yang Gon, secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, announced the withdrawal of [...]
The “Sunshine Policy” of South Korean President Kim Dae-jung derived its name from Aesop’s fable of the North Wind and the Sun in which the Sun and Wind compete to see which can strip the coat off a traveler. While the Wind fruitlessly attempts to blow away the coat off, the Sun uses its warmth [...]
You have to hand it to the North Koreans: sometimes they come up with really clever wheezes to extract money from others. Last week the Ministry of Unification announced that they had been informed that on 30 December the Supreme People’s Assembly had added 2-3 January to the list of public holidays for 2013. No [...]
To welcome in the new year, let’s see that’s Juche 102. I thought that I would take a quick stroll through some of the stories we blogged on or at least meant to blog on in the past year. First, as even the most casual reader of this blog knows, we have a thing for [...]
Back in mid-September, Yonhap reported on a little-remarked insurance program that speaks volumes about the risky nature of North-South trade. Although easily understood in political economy terms, the program suggests how hard it is to put North-South relations on a commercial footing given the political stakes—and risks–involved. In the wake of the sinking of the [...]
October is parliamentary inspection season in South Korea, which means overtime for ministry officials as they scramble to provide answers to questions from National Assembly committees and members. An item in Yonhap (in Korean) reported on questions about Kaesong posed by members of the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs, Trade and Unification Committee; the answers from [...]
