N. KOREA: North Korea Calls for Peace Treaty Talks With U.S.

January 12, 2010

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Monday proposed talks with the United States to reach a formal peace treaty that would replace the truce that halted the Korean War 57 years ago, indicating that it would not give up its nuclear weapons until Washington signed such an accord.

North Korea said peace talks should be held either as part of the six-nation talks that focus on ending its nuclear weapons program or as a separate negotiation. But the North also warned that it would not return to six-nation talks — from which it withdrew last April — unless the United Nations lifted sanctions imposed after the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile tests last year.

The North had previously proposed peace negotiations with the United States and South Korea. But its latest overture came as it was trying to shift the focus of the six-nation talks, where a peace treaty had been set aside until North Korea made significant progress toward dismantling its nuclear weapons program.

“If a peace treaty is signed, it will help resolve hostile relations between North Korea and the United States and speed up the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the North’s state-run news agency, K.C.N.A.

After years of unsuccessful talks with Washington, North Korea said it concluded that all agreements were bound to collapse unless the two sides built mutual “trust.” To build such confidence, the statement said, “It is essential to conclude a peace treaty for terminating the state of war, a root cause of the hostile relations.”

The statement reiterated North Korea’s contention that it would not have built nuclear weapons if the United States had assured it of peace.

Stephen W. Bosworth, President Obama’s special representative on North Korea, who visited the capital, Pyongyang, last month, said the United States could discuss a peace treaty and other incentives only when the process of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula had gained “significant traction.”

Last week, Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan of South Korea denounced what he called the North’s “unrealistic” demand that the United States negotiate a peace treaty before the North considers relinquishing its nuclear weapons.

“That’s like saying it will never give up its nuclear programs, or it is a delaying tactic” to buy time to further its nuclear programs, he said.

On Monday, North Korea suggested that peace talks be held among the signatories of the Korean War armistice: the American-led United Nations Command in Seoul, China and North Korea. South Korea refused to sign the truce, but Seoul and Washington insist that any peace talks include the South.

Between 1997 and 1999, the two Koreas, the United States and China held six rounds of peace talks that produced no agreement because the North insisted on the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea and an end to joint United States-South Korean military exercises.

“With its peace proposal, North Korea is trying to gain the initiative as it prepares to return to six-nation talks,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea analyst at Dongguk University in Seoul. Mr. Kim expected some haggling between the governments in Pyongyang and Seoul over whether South Korea should be included.

Earlier Monday, Robert R. King, Mr. Obama’s envoy on North Korean human rights issues, said during a visit to Seoul that the North’s “appalling” human rights situation would impede any efforts to normalize ties.

He also called Monday for the release of Robert Park, a Korean-American missionary who crossed into North Korea last month to demand the release of an estimated 160,000 political prisoners held in labor camps, according to his supporters in Seoul.

North Korea has confirmed that it has detained an American citizen but has not identified him by name.

View Article in The New York Times

JAPAN: Japanese woman drives home with body in windscreen

(AFP) – 20 hours ago

TOKYO — A Japanese woman who drove home with the body of an 80-year-old pedestrian lodged in her windscreen has been arrested on charges of causing a deadly traffic accident and fleeing the scene, police said Monday.

The 23-year-old driver was believed to have struck the elderly woman in the early hours of Sunday north of Tokyo before driving seven kilometres (four miles) home with the victim's body wedged in the shattered windscreen.

Michiko Sato, a catering school student, was arrested after her boyfriend called police to report the accident, a police spokesman said.

When police called at Sato's home, they found the body of the elderly woman still stuck in the car's windscreen.

"The suspect said she was so shocked that she didn't know what to do," the police spokesman said. He added Sato was not under the influence of alcohol at the time of the accident.

She was charged with causing a traffic accident resulting in death and escaping after running over a person with a car and faces up to 17 years in prison or a fine of up to two million yen (22,000 dollars) if convicted.

Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved.

JAPAN: Etiquette by the numbers

The Japan Times: Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010

JAPANESE MANNERS

Bowing, bathing, greeting, eating — all manners of established codes of conduct

By MARIKO KATO
Staff writer

Have you ever tried to shake hands with a Japanese only to be bowed at instead?

Or have you suffered disdainful looks when you blew your nose in public, or dunked your towel in a hot springs bath, unaware you are breaking social codes?

Japan's many rules of etiquette may bemuse foreign visitors, while for long-term residents mastering them is a key part of embracing the culture.

So what constitutes Japanese etiquette, and how do foreign residents and experts view such manners? Following are questions and answers:

What is included in everyday etiquette?

Posted notices and warnings against various perceived antisocial behavior are commonplace. People riding trains are advised not to take up more than one seat and are urged to refrain from talking on a cell phone or playing loud music.

Most "onsen" (hot springs baths) ban swimsuits, advise guests to rinse themselves off before entering the bath and in cases of mixed bathing not to stare or flash oneself in front of others.

But many basic social codes provide no posted directions, requiring foreigners to learn by observation and that old standby, trial and error.

The handling of chopsticks can be a minefield of faux pas.

A guide put out by JAL Academy, a firm created by Japan Airlines to coach businesses on etiquette, directs users to first "hold the chopsticks horizontally and pull the chopsticks apart slowly, over your knees."

The book "Japanese Manners Read in English" advises never to use a chopstick to impale a food item, pass it from chopsticks to chopsticks or stick chopsticks into food in a bowl so the ends are pointing up. The latter is associated with the dead and food for the final journey.

Licking one's chopsticks is also taboo, as is waving them over food while deciding what to eat, or around while talking, the guide says.

Bowing is also a key practice, and the degree of bending depends on the occasion.

According to JAL Academy, a 45-degree bow is customary when meeting someone deemed to be superior, or to show gratitude or to apologize. A 30-degree bow is appropriate for greeting visitors or first-time acquaintances, while a 15-degree dip will suffice for a casual hello in the hallway, the book says.

Other advice found in the guide includes keeping conversations short during initial greetings and, when visiting someone's home, refraining from poking around in cupboards, bookcases and other personal areas — the latter taboos not being so uniquely Japanese.

What constitutes formal etiquette?

In addition to social codes of behavior for formal dinners and religious ceremonies, there is the practice by adults of gift-giving, which many in Japan actually consider a headache. Gourmet food, sweets or alcohol may be given to relatives and colleagues at the turning of seasons and on special occasions. There are informal guidelines on how much money to spend on initial offerings based on the importance of the recipient, and then on return gifts.

Gift-giving is not always simply a gesture of gratitude or thoughtfulness, as it can have parallels with bribery, according to Katherine Rupp, a lecturer in anthropology at Yale University.

"Not only do individual Japanese people spend a lot of time, worry and money on gift-giving, but gift-giving is also a crucial part of the overall workings of the macro-economy," she writes in "Gift-giving in Japan."

Rupp points to the subtle undertones that personal gifts to bosses or doctors, or presents given by industries to bureaucrats or politicians, may have in persuading the recipient to act to the giver's advantage.

How would social codes be characterized?

Like other countries, Japan's social codes "lie somewhere between conscience or self-expression and the law," according to Isao Kumakura, a professor emeritus at the research institute of the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka.

"Even if you are alone, there is a feeling that somewhere someone might be watching," and this feeling is particularly strong in Japanese, he writes in "Manners as Culture" ("Bunka to Shite no Manaa").

According to Kumakura, Japanese etiquette has roots in the rituals of tea ceremony and martial and creative arts, although such customs were exclusive to the upper class until Japan opened its doors to the West in the mid-19th century.

To appear sophisticated in Western eyes, commercial centers like Tokyo, Yokohama and Osaka established regional laws that imposed codes of conduct between samurai and commoners, he writes.

These laws prevented men from urinating in public, and workers from walking naked to public baths carrying a change of clothes, a common habit as they did not want to change while they were still dirty from the day's work, Kumakura explains.

In modern times, instruction manuals on manners tend to focus on business situations rather than the home or society.

How do foreign residents and experts view Japanese manners?

Helmut Morsbach, an adjunct professor of psychology at Temple University Japan Campus and a long-term resident, writes in his book "Customs & Etiquette of Japan" that many Japanese drastically change their attitudes once they are outside their comfort zone.

Such a strict adherence to social codes may indicate that, as Morsbach says, "traditional etiquette continues to be extremely important, despite whatever outward appearances of 'Westernization' the visitor may experience."

But Ronald Dore, a professor at the London School of Economics specializing in Japanese society, stresses that foreigners should not feel compelled to master Japanese etiquette, only demonstrate an attempt at it in a relaxed, open manner.

"It is a perfectly viable strategy to profess a combination of total ignorance of Japanese manners and a total willingness to be instructed, and sometimes it can even be the best strategy," rather than becoming anxious and creating tension, he says in the foreword to Morsbach's book.

For business settings, a common scenario for foreign visitors, Morsbach's tips include don't make eye contact too strong during a conversation, don't point with a finger and don't mistake a smile camouflaging hesitation to mean an agreement.

Does everyone adhere to these codes?

No, says columnist Takashi Matsuo, who insists many Japanese find such strict rules stifling.

"Although it's a country that values manners, many Japanese themselves in fact feel a kind of stiffness, and perhaps (Morsbach) isn't aware that there are many people who want to forget such social rules and interact with people in a frank and open way," he writes in a commentary inside Morsbach's book.

But some observers see an antisocial side to this relaxed mind-set, and claim anonymity in large cities and online is making people less concerned about appearing rude.

"Modern Japan has been eliminating society from around them," Kumakura says.

"The fun of anonymity and the fear of losing manners are in conflict with each other. Now this has become a daily norm, and with the rise of the Internet, we ignore manners because of anonymity and abuse our rights."

(C) All rights reserved

To Reconcile the Koreas, Teenagers Show a Way

Ju Jin-ho (second from left) and Park Sung-eun (third from left) discussing how to make dumplings during a camp last year where North Korean defectors and teenage South Korean students cooked and compared each other’s food in a get-to-know session.  Citizens All for North Korean Human Rights

January 12, 2010

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL — When Ju Jin-ho arrived here from North Korea in 2006, it was as if he had come to an alien continent, not just the southern end of the peninsula.

Even though the 14-year-old defector was placed in a school with children a year or two younger than he, most of his classmates were a head taller. They teased him as a “red.” They were far ahead of him in subjects like mathematics. As desperate as he was to make friends, he had trouble communicating.

“During class breaks, they talked about nothing but computer games,” said Mr. Ju, now 17. “I started playing them so I could join their conversations. I became addicted. My eyesight deteriorated. My grades got worse.”

Since last summer, however, he’s been enrolled in a new program that seeks to overcome the yawning cultural gap that has developed during the six-decade divide between the Communist North and capitalist South, which have yet to sign a formal peace since the 1950-53 Korean War. It brings together teenage South Koreans and North Korean defectors in a rare experiment here in building affinity — and preparing for possible reunification.

Just how far the two sides have drifted apart, how radically different their frames of reference are, was evident when Park Sung-eun, a 16-year-old South Korean, met Mr. Ju last summer through the program in Seoul’s bustling Sinchon district.

“When I asked him, ‘How do you get here?’ I expected him to say by bus or subway,” Ms. Park said.

Instead, she recalled, “He gave me the whole story of his journey from North Korea through China and Myanmar,” when he fled with his family in 2005.

The “Weekend Program for South and North Korean Teenagers Together” was begun last August by the Rev. Benjamin H. Yoon, 80, head of the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights.

“Although we share the same genes, South and North Koreans live like completely different peoples, with different accents, different ways of thinking and behaving,” said Mr. Yoon. “We forgot that before Korea was divided, we lived in the same country, marrying each other.”

Under the program, the Citizens’ Alliance, a civic group founded in 1996, has brought together students from Kyunggi Girls’ High School in Seoul with young North Korean defectors for extracurricular activities.

They have attended concerts together. They have cooked and compared North and South Korean dishes. The North Koreans, adept at farm work, have shown the South Koreans how to harvest yams and make scarecrows. The Southerners have given the Northerners tips on how to succeed socially as well as academically. They have made friends.

One October evening, when the students had gone camping and stayed up late, Moon Sung-il, a 14-year-old North Korean, brought tears to the South Koreans’ eyes when he recounted his two-and-a-half-year flight with other defectors that took him through China, Myanmar and a refugee camp in Bangkok. But he stunned them when he said that none of this was as daunting as a South Korean classroom.

“I could hardly understand anything the teacher said,” he said. “My classmates, who were all a year or two younger than I was, taunted me as a ‘poor soup-eater from the North.’ I fought them with my fists.”

More than 17,000 North Koreans, one-tenth of them teenagers, have fled to the South since famine hit their homeland in the mid-1990s. The average journey to the South takes 35 months, mostly through China and Southeast Asia. Not all who start make it; some have been caught and returned to the North, where they often end up in labor camps.

When they are placed in South Korean schools, these Northerners start nearly from scratch. In the North, they had spent as much time learning about the family of their leader, Kim Jong-il, as they did the rest of Korean history. Few learned English, a requirement in South Korean schools. Dropout rates among defectors are five times the South Korean average, according to the Education Ministry.

With the number of North Korean refugees rising about 10 percent annually, how to integrate them has become an early test for possible unification.

“Whenever something bad about North Korea came up during class, everyone turned to look at me,” said Mr. Ju, who now attends an alternative school for defectors after failing to advance to a regular high school. “When teachers and students spoke disparagingly about North Korea, I felt like they were insulting me.”

Ms. Park said she used to look down on North Koreans. “I associated them with something poor, dark and negative,” she said.

Although many successful South Koreans have their roots in the North — the country’s first president, Syngman Rhee; the founder of the Hyundai business empire; the family that built the South’s influential Chosun newspaper; founders of some of the biggest Christian churches — an image has developed of Northerners as second-class Koreans, needy and starving but surly and belligerent. They have taken food aid from the South but threatened it with war, run prison camps and built nuclear weapons. They are friendly toward China but have rejected talks with the South.

The mistrust is mutual. In the North, teachers tell children that South Korea is an American colony, a springboard for a future invasion, defectors say.

“Back in the North, we seldom heard teachers talk about unification. We seldom thought about it,” said Choi Hyok-chol, a 19-year-old defector. “I still don’t think it’s possible. The two economies are much too different.”

In a survey last June of 1,000 South Koreans aged 19 to 59 conducted by the Korea Peace Institute, a Christian research institute, half the respondents said unification was not necessary as long as the two sides lived in peace. In a survey in September of 1,000 people aged 19 to 39, the National Unification Advisory Council for the South Korean president found that 67 percent wanted any unification to be gradual to avoid political and economic chaos.

Although a spirit of unification persists in the South, many people balk at what is expected to be the prohibitive cost of integrating the economies. The North’s per capita income amounts to just 6 percent of the South’s, according to the Bank of Korea.

“I used to oppose unification because I thought we’d lose more than we’d gain,” said Hur Ji-young, a freshman at Kyunggi. Her friend Lim Hyo-jeong, however, said she supported it because she saw an economic advantage in a larger domestic market.

After mingling with the North Korean teenagers for a semester, hearing about their hardships and their concerns for relatives left behind, the South Koreans said they believed more strongly in unification, but now less for economic reasons than something closer to good will.

“Before I joined this program, I considered unification with a calculator, not with my heart for fellow Koreans in the North,” Ms. Hur said.

View Article in The New York Times

RUSSIA: Ruble Jumps as Russia Returns From Holidays

January 12, 2010

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

MOSCOW — The ruble had its best day against the dollar in more than a decade on Monday when it rose 3.1 percent.

The jump was partly a result of a fluke in Russia’s trading calendar that closed the markets for 10 days, bottling up beginning-of-the-year trends unfolding elsewhere and allowing them to hit at once.

Russian markets were closed after the New Year for Eastern Orthodox Christmas. During that time, oil prices rose above $80 a barrel because of cold weather, a weakening dollar and signs of growth in China.

Thus, when markets opened, the ruble went from 30.25 rubles to the dollar at the opening to 29.25 at the close. That was the biggest jump for Russia’s currency since March 1999, when the country was pulling out of an economic crisis, according to Bloomberg News.

The Micex index of major Russian stocks, meanwhile, rose 5.5 percent. The gas giant Gazprom, a company that is sensitive to oil prices, rose 6.23 percent. Norilsk Nickel, the Siberian miner of this alloy of stainless steel, gained 10.61 percent. Rosneft, the state oil company, rose 7.80 percent. The gains were less marked in light of the unusual trading schedule. Russian global depository receipts that trade in London, where the market was open all week, had risen to 5.7 percent by Friday.

That was more than the 2.7 percent gain by the MSCI Emerging Markets Index of all emerging market stocks, suggesting pent-up interest in Russia.

“The Russian markets today were just catching up with everything that happened when they were on vacation,” Rory MacFarquhar, chief economist at Goldman Sachs in Moscow, said in a telephone interview. Still, Goldman is expecting further ruble appreciation.

The appreciating currency is an added benefit for investors in Russian stocks. The currency and equity markets then tend to spiral upward together with rising commodity prices but crash just as hard when the tide turns, as it did in 2008.

Still, even accounting for that crash, Russia’s gross domestic product grew the most of any major economy in dollar terms over the last decade, followed by Indonesia and Vietnam, according to a report released last week by Goldman Sachs.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Hatoyama to Nanjing, Hu to Hiroshima?

Very interesting food for thought on future Sino-Japan relations and the implications for the US.

-HHC

January 12, 2010

By Kosuke Takahashi

TOKYO - With the world economy's center of gravity shifting from the West to the East, led by China's rising economic and corresponding political power, the year 2010 may witness a series of epoch-making events in Asia.

A grand rapprochement between Japan and China could be one such happening, and the idea has been recently floated through the media by some anonymous diplomatic sources in Tokyo and/or Beijing, attracting a lot of attention among experts worldwide.

The French newspaper Le Figaro reported from Tokyo last Wednesday that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had delivered to the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) the script of a spectacular reconciliation this year between the two countries. The report said the CCP had proposed that Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama begin the process by going to Nanjing, where a mass killing of Chinese civilians by the Japanese Imperial Army took place in December 1937 and subsequent months.

This first visit to Nanjing by a Japanese prime minister since the war would present to the Chinese people Tokyo's official apologies without ambiguity, easing lingering anti-Japan sentiment among the Chinese public. In return, some months later, on August 15, the anniversary of the Japanese surrender in 1945, Chinese President Hu Jintao would go to Hiroshima, the first city to experience atomic bombing, and declare the three non-nuclear principles: China will not make a nuclear first strike, will not attack any non-nuclear country and will not export nuclear arms.

The French paper named as its source only "our information".

Meanwhile, the Yomiuri, Japan's largest daily newspaper, also reported from Beijing on Wednesday that China had unofficially sounded out Japanese government sources on a visit by Hatoyama to Nanjing, likely around the time he goes to the Shanghai Expo's Japan Day on June 12, with Hu visiting Hiroshima around the time of the November Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit to be held in Japan. The Japanese paper said reciprocal visits would aim at improving feelings between the two peoples. Still, unlike Le Figaro, the Yomiuri mentioned nothing about apologies or nuke promises. It cited "several Japanese and Chinese sources".

China's Foreign Ministry denied the Yomiuri report on Thursday, with a ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, saying the media rumors of a Nanjing trip were "groundless". But she also said, in what sounded like a non-denial-denial, "It is too early to confirm the details." On the same day, Japan's chief cabinet secretary, Hirofumi Hirano, also denied the reports, saying "at this point, we are not considering" a visit by Hatoyama to Nanjing.

"I have not heard of any such plan," a top Foreign Ministry official also told Asia Times Online, speaking on condition of anonymity. "My guess is that some persons involved might have presented their wish list to have better relations. There is nothing concrete about it." This official's comment suggests that such talks are still going on either at lower government-to-government levels or through party-to-party channels.

The reports by Le Figaro and the Yomiuri, however, followed a similar report in November by the Japanese business magazine, Weekly Toyo Keizai. It reported a secret diplomatic schedule being prepared by relevant Chinese and Japanese players. It predicted that the visit to Beijing one month later by Ichiro Ozawa, secretary general of the DPJ, accompanying more than 600 people, including 143 DPJ lawmakers from the upper and lower houses of the Diet (parliament), would be the first of several Japan-China exchanges. The visit was conducted as part of regular exchanges between the DPJ and the CCP, whose general secretary is Hu.

The media reports have triggered strong reaction. After Le Figaro's report, China's Global Times posted a questionnaire about this possible Japan-China grand rapprochement on its Chinese-language website. More than 30,000 Internet users have responded.

When asked whether the Japanese leader should apologize at the Memorial for Compatriots Killed in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Forces of Aggression, 95.1% said "yes". Only 1% said "no". When asked whether the Japanese leader's apology would lead to Japan-China reconciliation, 24.7% said "yes" and 29.5% said "no".

Japanese leaders' visits to this memorial are nothing new. Hiromu Nonaka, then acting secretary general of the Liberal Democratic Party, visited the victims' memorial in Nanjing on May 9, 1998, laying flowers at the site and becoming the first leader from his party to do so. In the same month, former Japanese prime minister Tomiichi Murayama visited the site.

Even if speculation over Hatoyama's visit to Nanjing and Hu's visit to Hiroshima turns out to be nothing, it is still intriguing, as it may indicate that Japan's shift toward Asia, especially China, and away from the United States, is taking shape.

China seems to have refrained from using the Japan historic card to control its own people since 1996, when then-prime minister Shinzo Abe chose Beijing for his first overseas visit out of a desire to strengthen ties with the leaders of Japan's important neighbor. Historically, the CCP's one-party regime has been legitimized, in part, by its struggle against the Japanese invader.

Why then does China want Hatoyama to visit Nanjing? There are conflicting views among Japanese experts. Some say that in preparation for a succession of power in 2012 and beyond, Beijing's secret battles are intensifying. A faction of ex-president Jiang Zemin, who annoyed Japanese leaders by bringing up the history issue during a banquet with the emperor, has been gaining ground recently. Others believe Beijing wants to settle historic issues once and for all, to enable the two nations to build a future-oriented relationship of mutual trust, much like the Franco-German reconciliation that president Charles de Gaulle of France and West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer started by signing the Elysee Treaty in 1963, a foundation of Franco-German cooperation that led to European integration.

Some US officials and experts, especially right-leaning military planners, may be displeased to see Tokyo's approach to Beijing at a time when the relocation issue of the US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa prefecture has been deadlocked.

In a commentary titled "Japan's risky rapprochement with China" published on December 21 by The Wall Street Journal, Kelly Currie, a non-resident fellow of the Project 2049 Institute, a think-tank in Washington, wrote:
Prime Minister Hatoyama will likely continue his promised efforts to "rebalance" Japanese relations with the US and China, but now that he's actually responsible for governing, Mr Hatoyama needs to ask himself: Which country would ultimately keep the Japanese people's best interests at heart - democratic America or authoritarian China? If the prime minister answers the latter, then the Japanese public - and the Obama administration - really will need to start worrying.

Well, the relationship between Japan and China has been rapidly improving since Hatoyama's China-friendly administration was inaugurated last September, as is the relationship between Beijing and Taipei since the mainland-friendly administration of President Ma Ying-jeou took office in Taiwan in May 2008. The US administration of Barack Obama has followed suit.

Every country, driven by economic and political pragmatism, is rushing to cash in on China's huge consumer market. Japan is no exception. As a result, Japan-China-US trilateral relations are giving off a lot of heat in the unsettled state of affairs of Northeast Asia.

Kosuke Takahashi is a Tokyo-based journalist. Besides Asia Times Online, he writes for Jane's Defence Weekly as Tokyo correspondent. He can be contacted at letters@kosuke.net.

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

CHINA, JAPAN & US: Clinton Points to Possible Tensions With China

January 12, 2010

By MARK LANDLER

HONOLULU — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, embarking on her first diplomatic trip of 2010, will try to ease tensions with Japan, America’s most important Asian ally, over a stalled agreement to relocate a Marine base on the island of Okinawa.

But she acknowledged that relations with the region’s other major power, China, may be entering a rough period, as the United States pledges to sell weapons to Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province, and President Obama plans a meeting with the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, over the objections of Beijing, which considers him a separatist.

Mrs. Clinton, speaking to reporters Monday on her plane, said the United States and China had a “mature relationship,” which she said meant that “it doesn’t go off the rails when we have differences of opinion.”

“We will provide defensive arms for Taiwan,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We have a difference of perspective on the role and ambitions of the Dalai Lama, which we’ve been very public about.”

Mrs. Clinton was traveling to Hawaii, her first stop in a nine-day trip that will include Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Australia. In Honolulu, she is scheduled to give a speech on United States security strategy in Asia, and to meet the Japanese foreign minister, Katsuya Okada.

Japan has frustrated and angered the Obama administration with its refusal to carry out a 2006 agreement to move a Marine Corps air station in Okinawa to a less populated area of the island.

Mrs. Clinton sought to play down the dispute, saying the alliance was “much bigger than any one particular issue.”

Japanese-American relations have been unsettled since August, when voters in Japan swept out the long-entrenched Liberal Democratic Party in favor of the slightly left-leaning Democratic Party, led by Yukio Hatoyama. Mr. Hatoyama spoke of forging closer ties to Asian neighbors like China, prompting concerns in Washington that Japan was pulling away from its close relations with the United States.

President Obama tried to reduce tensions when he visited Tokyo in November. But after he left, Mr. Okada pushed for a government inquiry into secret agreements with the United States in the 1960s and 1970s that allowed American aircraft and ships with nuclear weapons to enter Japan.

Most of the tension is rooted in the dispute over Marine Corps Air Station Futenma. The Obama administration wants Japan to honor a 2006 agreement to move the base to a less populated part of Okinawa. But Mr. Hatoyama campaigned to move it off the island or even out of Japan.

Mrs. Clinton said the bumps were aftershocks from Japan’s political earthquake. “You can imagine what it would be like in our own country, if after 50 years a party that had never held power, actually held it,” she said.

In her first visit to Beijing as secretary of state last February, Mrs. Clinton played down human rights concerns and emphasized cooperation on issues like trade and climate change. But on Monday, she took a tougher line, saying that Washington was a necessary counterweight to Beijing.

“People want to see the United States fully engaged in Asia, so that as China rises, there’s the presence of the United States as a force for peace and stability, as a guarantor of security,” Mrs. Clinton said.

She also called on China to use its influence to force North Korea back into negotiations on relinquishing its nuclear weapons. North Korea said Monday that it would not return to those talks unless sanctions against it were lifted, and it was able to negotiate a formal peace treaty with the United States to replace the 1953 truce that ended the Korean War.

Returning to those multiparty talks, she said, was a precondition for dealing with other issues.

Starting her second year as the nation’s chief diplomat, Mrs. Clinton spoke more about pressure than diplomatic engagement.

Speaking of Iran, she said the United States and its allies were discussing financial sanctions that would appear to be aimed at the Revolutionary Guards and other political players in the country, should diplomacy fail.

“It is clear that there is a relatively small group of decision makers inside Iran,” she said. “They are in both political and commercial relationships, and if we can create a sanctions track that targets those who actually make the decisions, we think that is a smarter way to do sanctions.”

But she added, “All that is yet to be decided upon.”

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

CHINA: Coal Is Linked to Cancer in China Province

January 12, 2010

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

Nonsmoking women in an area of China’s Yunnan province die of lung cancer at a rate 20 times that of their counterparts in other regions of the country — and higher than anywhere else in the world.

A group of scientists now say they have a possible explanation: the burning of coal formed during volcanic eruptions hundreds of millions of years ago.

Coal in that part of China contains high concentrations of silica, a suspected carcinogen, the scientists reported in a recent edition of the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Like others in rural China, the families of Xuanwei County use coal for heat and for cooking. As the coal burns, particles of silica are released with the vapor and inhaled. Women, who do the cooking, face the greatest exposure.

“There is more silica in this coal than in 99.9 percent of all the samples we analyzed,” said an author of the study, Robert B. Finkelman, a professor of geology at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Dr. Finkelman and his colleagues found that quartz, of which silica is the primary component, made up 13.5 percent of the coal samples taken from Xuanwei County. In normal coal samples, quartz and other minerals are found only in trace amounts.

The grains of quartz were so small they were only visible through an electron microscope, Dr. Finkelman said. Strikingly, the coal found in neighboring villages did not contain quartz at the same high levels or with such fine grain.

When the volcanic eruptions occurred 250 million years ago, they set off a mass extinction and released acid gases, leading to a variety of changes in the earth’s environment, including acid rain. Dr. Finkelman speculated that the rain might have dissolved surface rocks composed of silica, which then might have worked its way into developing formations of coal.

The high cancer rates in Xuanwei have attracted the attention of scientists for decades. Dr. Qing Lan, an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Md., is completing two studies involving hundreds of women and families there. While her team is confident that coal burning is causing the high rates of cancer, they are not certain it is due to silica.

She and Dr. Nathaniel Rothman, another epidemiologist at the institute, expect to finish collecting data this year and begin the tedious, multiyear process of analyzing it in hopes of isolating just what it is about the coal in Xuanwei that causes the high rates of cancer.

“You can never say any study is the last study,” Dr. Rothman said. “But we hope this really nails it.”

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Acid attacks are 'easy' in Hong Kong

By Pauline Chiou, CNN

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
* Attacker hurled two bottles of acid on shoppers at busy market, police say
* 30 people, including children, injured in attack, police say
* Police rule out man arrested over weekend as acid attack suspect

Hong Kong, China (CNN) -- Another mysterious acid attack took place during the weekend in Hong Kong. It was the sixth such incident in the past year.

The target is always a crowded street full of shoppers and the weapon of choice: plastic bottles filled with acid.

The attacker (or attackers) throw the bottles from an upper floor or roof of a building overlooking the crowded street. Police have no suspects and no motive for the attacks.

I went to the scene of the latest attack at the famous Temple Street Night Market -- an area that is usually busy with local families and tourists.

Shopkeeper Khan Mohammed Bilal runs an electronics store, and he was working Saturday night when he heard the commotion. He stepped out into the intersection of Temple Street and Nanking Street and saw chaos.

Someone had just thrown two plastic bottles of acid into the intersection. He saw one person's red bag soaked with acid. He said he couldn't imagine what would've happened if the acid had splashed onto the person's head. He saw injured people crying.

"We do get nervous. We do feel scared. When this happens, it affects our business... I don't know the purpose of this, why this person is throwing this liquid."

Most witnesses believe the attacker was inside one of the old apartment buildings lining Temple Street.

My photographer, producer and I decided to see just how easy it is to get to the top of one of these buildings.

Most of the old apartment buildings have no front door to the entryway that leads into a stairwell.

We walked up 10 flights past individual apartments until we reached the roof. Again, the roof entryway had no door. There was only a line of laundry hanging across the doorway.

It was clear just how easy it is for anyone to walk off the street, get to the roof and throw objects off the top of the building. And the getaway? Easy.

In fact, there are many options: the stairwell we walked up, another stairwell that exits the other side of the building... or the roof of the next building.

The buildings are so close together a daring person can jump from roof to roof and descend another building's stairwell.

Of course, we don't know for sure if the attacker(s) used the roof, but it is a realistic possibility.

Tourists who were strolling through the area seemed either unaware or unconcerned. Ghadjar Siavoche of Geneva, Switzerland, comes to Hong Kong often for business. He already knew about the attack.

"It doesn't disturb me because it's a very isolated incident. It's a pity for Hong Kong because it's a very nice city. People here are so charming and so nice."

The city of Hong Kong is hoping to maintain that image despite the acid attacks. The police have no solid leads at the moment. They're hoping a $40,000 reward will motivate someone to hand over some information that can help them make an arrest.

© 2008 Cable News Network

China Surges Past West in Autos and Exports

January 12, 2010

By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING — As much of the world struggles to clamber out of a serious recession, a gradual flow of economic power from West to East has turned into a flood.

New high points, it seems, are reached daily. China surged past the United States to become the world’s largest automobile market — in units, if not in dollars, figures released Monday show. It also toppled Germany as the biggest exporter of manufactured goods, according to year-end trade data. World Bank estimates suggest that China — the world’s fifth-largest economy four years ago — will shortly overtake Japan to claim the No. 2 spot.

The shift of economic gravity to China has occurred partly because growth there remained robust even as the world’s developed economies suffered the steepest drop in trade and economic output in decades.

But that did not happen by chance: China’s decisive government intervention in the economy, combined with the defiant optimism of its companies and consumers, has propelled an economy that until recently had seemed tethered to the health of its major export markets, including the United States.

Beijing’s state-run news media, indulging in a moment of self-congratulation, have hailed China’s new economic prominence as proof of national superiority.

The country’s economic miracle, the People’s Daily newspaper boasted last week, exists because its rulers — unlike those in other unnamed nations — can make quick decisions and ensure underlings carry them out. The Great Recession, the newspaper said, has laid bare cracks in plodding Western-style capitalism.

Yet China confronts a number of challenges about its recent surge, including whether its formula for growth is sustainable, and how it will manage its increasingly strained economic relations with the outside world. Those are likely to prove challenging issues for a leadership unaccustomed to making policy under an international spotlight.

Sustaining a global-size economy is nowhere near as simple as building one, some Chinese and Western economists say. As the Chinese navigate toward a bigger role in the world financial system, they are already running into diplomatic and political headwinds.

At home, ordinary citizens and economists alike worry that the government’s decision to flood the economy with cash has created speculative bubbles — in housing, in lending — that could burst with disastrous effect. But curbing speculation requires moves, such as raising interest rates, that could crimp the spree of investment and industrial expansion that are the main contributors to growth.

Abroad, the pressure on China to revalue its currency, the renminbi, is strengthening, and it seems sure to intensify after trade statistics released Monday showed that China’s yearlong downturn in export growth reversed in December. Keeping the renminbi fixed at a low rate against the dollar boosts China’s exports and its economy. But increasingly, it angers its trade partners.

China once could wave off complaints about its currency policies, arguing that it was a developing nation entitled to a bit of slack from its Western customers. But with the world’s fastest-growing economy — and more than $2 trillion in foreign reserves — that argument looks increasingly untenable.

“At a time when you’ve got 10 percent unemployment in the U.S. and a very slow and gradual global recovery — and China seems to be skyrocketing — the pressure on the Chinese to change some of these policies, including the exchange-rate policy, is really going to grow this year,” said Nicholas Consonery, a China analyst at Eurasia Group, the New York-based political risk research firm.

In theory, China’s growing economic clout should benefit everyone: in an interconnected world, growing trade creates jobs and money everywhere.

“China’s extremely important, no doubt about it. And overall, the more important China becomes, the better it is for the American economy,” Scott Kennedy, who heads the Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business at Indiana University, said in an interview.

That Shanghai-assembled iPod, Mr. Kennedy said, is the product of American research and design and marketing, and most of the proceeds from its sale go back into American coffers. But China’s rise also poses new risks both for Beijing and for its trading partners.

Its largely bruise-free journey through last year’s economic crisis aside, not everyone is convinced that Beijing has eliminated threats to its financial and economic health.

Hit hard by an initial drop in exports that was frighteningly steep for a leadership that has long promised and delivered fast growth, China poured $585 billion in stimulus money into its domestic economy. Officials also ordered state-run banks to increase their lending by double that amount, triggering a spree of easy money that created jobs for migrant factory workers and fueled rises in the price of assets, like stocks and real estate.

Some experts fear that too much of the stimulus money was dumped into unprofitable projects and bad loans that will surface in a few years. In that view, China’s 2009 boom, in which automakers sold nearly 14 million cars and trucks, and housing prices doubled, is really a sign of an overheated economy at risk of serious recession down the road.

Judged by the numbers, China’s economy still looks robust. In Beijing, officials said, per capita gross domestic product is expected to exceed $4,000 this year, a 10 percent jump from 2009. Last month, the value of China’s exports leaped by nearly a third over the same month in 2008 — and imports jumped 55 percent, pointing toward growth in manufacturing.

But a Chinese economic crisis, which could have been shrugged off a few years ago, would be a considerably more serious event in a world where Beijing runs the second-largest economy.

The government appears concerned. Last week, the central bank edged up the rate on a often-watched interbank loan, the first such hike in five months. That seemed to signal concern that the economy is expanding too quickly.

Many experts see few signs of immediate danger. After all, they note, China has gone on splurges before — building too many steel mills, and too many office buildings — only to see the nation’s breakneck growth sop up the excess capacity. With nearly a billion people still clawing to advance beyond peasant status, they say, China’s growth story has many chapters ahead.

Mr. Kennedy, the Indiana University expert, said he was less certain that endless growth is such a panacea. “No one defies economic laws,” he said. “Eventually you get it, whether you want it or not.”

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

JAPAN: Airbase angst

Published: 2010/01/12 00:43:29 GMT

By Roland Buerk
BBC News, Tokyo

It seems a minor matter - whether or not to go ahead with a previously agreed plan to move an American military base on the island of Okinawa.

Hardly something, you might think, that could cause tension in the alliance between Japan and the United States, 50 years old this month and critical to the balance of power in Asia.

But Marine Corps Air Station Futenma has become the first test of Japan's intent to forge a new relationship with America and the world.

It is the key issue as Japan's Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada meets US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Hawaii on Tuesday.


The base is in the middle of a city and many local people have long been irritated by noise, as well as the fear of accidents and crime.

Okinawa is home to most of the 47,000 American troops based in Japan.

It was to ease the pressure on residents that the American and Japanese governments agreed in 2006 to move the base to a less populated area on the island's coast, despite concerns about the impact on the marine environment.

But everything was thrown into confusion last year.

The deal had been reached by the Liberal Democratic Party which dominated Japan for half a century.

In the elections in August the voters gave a landslide victory to the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) led by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

The new government believes Japan has been too subservient towards the United States in the past. It still values the alliance but wants it on more equal terms.


“ The spat with the Americans will have to be resolved because Japan's new government has wider ambitions ”


During the election campaign there was talk by the DPJ of moving the Futenma base off Okinawa, some even said it could be moved out of Japan altogether.

Adding to the complication is the fact that despite its commanding position in the lower house of the Diet, or parliament, the DPJ relies for its majority in the upper house on tiny coalition partners who oppose concessions to the US.

US reluctance

For the Americans the change of partner in Japan is clearly a big adjustment, after decades of dealing with the Liberal Democratic Party.

In the past Washington could view the relationship as a constant framework in East Asia within which to manage its response to the emergence of China and an unpredictable North Korea.

So far the Americans have been deeply reluctant to revisit the issue of the base.

The original negotiations took years and, going back to them, Washington says, would undermine broader security arrangements.

Back in October when he came to Tokyo, US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates said it would be "immensely complicated and counterproductive" to look at the issue again, and it was "time to move on".

The Americans had hoped the matter would be resolved by the time President Obama visited Japan in December.

Prime Minister Hatoyama has refused to be rushed, and his latest deadline is May.

Last week,

.
The spat with the Americans will have to be resolved because Japan's new government has wider ambitions.

Yukio Hatoyama has been making efforts to get closer to China.

Last month he was even willing to break with usual Imperial Household Agency protocol to insist an audience with the Emperor was granted at short notice to visiting Chinese Vice President Xin Jinping.

Mr Hatoyama has spoken of creating an East Asian Community, even of a common currency along the lines of the Euro.

But for now the unanswered question of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma leaves him in a bind, between Washington and the expectations he has helped to build up at home.

© BBC MMX

CHINA: 'Black Jails' Shove complaints into the Dark

January 11, 2010

The illicit detention facilities are a way for authorities to deal with a flood of petitioners seeking justice before regional panels. Human Rights Watch says detainees face rape and other abuses.

By John M. Glionna
Reporting from Beijing

Using a crude sawed-off stick as a cane, Shi Yaping waited outside a government office, competing with a throng of petitioners to air her grievance over a neighborhood dispute.

The 59-year-old had traveled here from the central province of Hubei to take advantage of a centuries-old Chinese custom that grants citizens the right to bring unsettled complaints to a regional panel of inquiry.

Yet Shi knows well the perils of speaking her mind in China, where undercover police and mercenary thugs wait to pounce. She has twice been snatched off the street, held incommunicado on the assumption that she would eventually abandon her cause and go home.

Shi is a victim of the secretive realm of "black jails" -- unlawful detention facilities that have sprung up across China to discourage persistent petitioners considered pests by government officials.

Each year millions of rural Chinese bring their problems to functionaries in Beijing and other cities. Yet very few of their cases are ever resolved, and most end up in legal limbo, activists say.

But the torrent of cases clogs the civil system, and puts political pressure on administrators to settle them. Activists say lower-level officials have responded with organized kidnappings in which petitioners -- many plucked from the streets outside government offices -- are held in clandestine jails in state-owned hotels, nursing homes and psychiatric centers.

The theory: You can't lodge a complaint if you don't show up.

"The Chinese petitioning system is completely broken," said Phelim Kine, an Asia researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch. "And the government is outsourcing its problems to a thuggish black industry."

Since 2003, the illegal jail network has grown as top Communist Party officials looked the other way, and thousands of petitioners disappeared.

Shi arrived in Beijing months ago hoping officials would resolve her complaint that local police had illegally arrested her nephew. Instead she has found nothing but trouble.

Shi has been imprisoned twice, taken first by security forces to an isolated stockroom and held for days with 100 other people. She was eventually released with her ailing husband, and then was abducted last summer and held for several weeks at a shabby private home.

Jailers denied her requests for water and a piece of paper to swat away the maddening mosquitoes, Shi said.

Today she continues a petitioning process that dates to China's feudal times.

"The government doesn't want us to speak out about these jails," Shi said. "They're afraid the truth will come out."

In November, Human Rights Watch released a 51-page report titled "An Alleyway in Hell: China's Abusive Black Jails." It cites rapes, beatings, intimidation and extortion as among the abuses.

The report documents 43 cases of petitioners who the authors say were held without official charges or access to their families or legal counsel.

"As China tries to build a functioning legal system, this gnawing black hole for human rights grows right there on the side," said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch.

After at first denying the jails' existence, the Chinese government recently acknowledged the problem. An article in the December issue of Outlook magazine, which is owned by the official New China News Agency, cited at least 73 black jails in Beijing alone.

The article says an estimated 10,000 people at a time have been detained in hundreds of jails.

The black-jail system reportedly sprang up years ago, after the government abolished another system that allowed officials to jail petitioners they considered threats.

Under the current for-profit system, private jail operators receive $22 to $44 a day per person, increasing the incentive to prolong captivity, according to the Human Rights Watch report. The fees are paid by local officials.

There were "locked steel doors and windows," according to a 53-year-old detainee quoted in the report. "We never left our rooms to eat. [Instead] we were given our meals through a small window space."

For some, being freed brings new trouble.

"You go to Beijing to claim wrongdoing by province officials but you are abducted and sent home," Bequelin said. "Well, who's waiting for you there -- the very people you tried to denounce, which brings on another round of unpleasantness."

The plight of black-jail detainees received more attention last month when a guard at an unofficial detention facility in Beijing was sentenced to eight years in prison for raping a college student who was being held.

Xu Zhiyong, a Beijing law professor and activist who has investigated the jails, said the facilities have evolved to accommodate more detainees and generate more profits.

"We have gone to videotape these places when we learn about them," he said. "We challenged the operators that they were violating the law and were beaten several times."

But Xu keeps up the pressure to help petitioners, who he says have filed 10 million cases in the last few years alone.

"I'm not optimistic," he said. "Millions come to the government for justice. What they get is confinement."

Zheng Dajing, a petitioner and activist who has spoken out about the jails, said he was held for four days last month in a shed attached to a run-down motel in west Beijing.

"I was held in a small room with the door locked from the outside. There was a big iron gate that cut us off from the outside world," he said. "There were guards keeping an eye on us all the time. They didn't beat me. But I was just given green pepper with rice every day for food."

Days after Zheng's release, a nervous-looking motel manager denied that petitioners had been kept there. A provincial official in an office on the top floor said he had never even heard of black jails.

"There are help centers to assist petitioners with no transportation to get back to their homes," said the man, who refused to give his full name. "They're not jails."

On a cold December morning, the government complaint office in south Beijing was besieged by a mass of petitioners, each with a compelling tale of human tragedy.

There was the woman who said she was illegally fired from her construction company job, the man who said he had been cheated out of his savings, the retiree beaten by village police.

And there was Wu Changlian. Wearing a dirty dishrag as a scarf, she produced a sheaf of papers she said documented the abuse by local officials that drove her husband to commit suicide. As she spoke to a reporter, a man identified by others in the crowd as an undercover policeman reproached her. "Do you think they will solve your problems?" he jeered. "Use your head."

Spotting a foreigner, many produced their papers with pleading looks, offering to write down their cellphone numbers. One man said nothing but stuffed his documents into a reporter's knapsack.

Nearby, Shi Yaping was tailed by two imposing men in dark clothes she knew to be state security officers. She also knew that the dreaded freelance bounty hunters could arrive at any moment to whisk her away again.

But Shi didn't care. She wasn't going home, she said. She wasn't going anywhere.

"I'll keep coming back," she said. "They can't chase me away."

john.glionna@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

CHINA: China faces growing gender imbalance

Published: 2010/01/11 14:34:18 GMT

More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses by 2020, says the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The gender imbalance among newborns is the most serious demographic problem for the country's population of 1.3 billion, says the academy.

It cites sex-specific abortions as a major factor, due to China's traditional bias towards male children.

The academy says gender selection abortions are "extremely common".

This is especially true in rural areas, and ultra-sound scans, first introduced in the late 1980s, have increased the practice.

Forced prostitution

The latest figures show that for every 100 girls born in China, 119 boys are born, the academy says in a new book.

Researcher Wang Guangzhou, quoted by the Global Times newspaper, said the implications were that men in poorer parts of China may remain single throughout their life.

CHINA'S GENDER IMBALANCE

119 boys born per 100 girls. Rises to 130 boys per 100 girls in some rural areas
Total population 1.3 billion
Expected peak 1.6 billion in 2050
One child policy written into constitution in 1978
Many rural couples allowed second child if first is a girl

"The chance of getting married will be rare if a man is more than 40-years-old in the countryside. They will be more dependent on social security as they age and have fewer household resources to rely on," he said.

In some provinces, 130 boys are born for each 100 girls, the book says.

Experts at the academy also predict the gender imbalance will lead to more inter-generational marriages, where a wife is older than her husband.

A reluctance among young urban Chinese to have a first or second child is exacerbating the problem.

Academy sociologist Yan Hua said: "People's minds have changed a lot during the last 20 years.

"Young couples either don't want to have a second child, or would prefer to live a DINK (Double Income No Kid) life."

The growing imbalance means that forced prostitution and human trafficking has become "rampant" in some parts of the country, according to the researchers.

While analysts admit there is definitely a pronounced gender imbalance in China, they also say that exact information is difficult to obtain because some families are thought to avoid registering female babies in order to make it easier for them to have a second child.

© BBC MMX

THE KOREAS: Koreans Stand Face to Face to Address Cultural Gap

January 12, 2010

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL — When Ju Jin-ho arrived here from North Korea in 2006, it was as if he had come to an alien continent, not just the southern end of the peninsula.

Even though the 14-year-old defector was placed in a school with children a year or two younger than he, most of his classmates were a head taller. They teased him as a “red.” They were far ahead of him in subjects like mathematics. As desperate as he was to make friends, he had trouble communicating.

“During class breaks, they talked about nothing but computer games,” said Mr. Ju, now 17. “I started playing them so I could join their conversations. I became addicted. My eyesight deteriorated. My grades got worse.”

Since last summer, however, he’s been enrolled in a new program that seeks to overcome the yawning cultural gap that has developed during the six-decade divide between the Communist North and capitalist South, which have yet to sign a formal peace since the 1950-53 Korean War. It brings together teenage South Koreans and North Korean defectors in a rare experiment here in building affinity — and preparing for possible reunification.

Just how far the two sides have drifted apart, how radically different their frames of reference are, was evident when Park Sung-eun, a 16-year-old South Korean, met Mr. Ju last summer through the program in Seoul’s bustling Sinchon district.

“When I asked him, ‘How do you get here?’ I expected him to say by bus or subway,” Ms. Park said.

Instead, she recalled, “He gave me the whole story of his journey from North Korea through China and Myanmar,” when he fled with his family in 2005.

The “Weekend Program for South and North Korean Teenagers Together” was begun last August by the Rev. Benjamin H. Yoon, 80, head of the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights.

“Although we share the same genes, South and North Koreans live like completely different peoples, with different accents, different ways of thinking and behaving,” said Mr. Yoon. “We forgot that before Korea was divided, we lived in the same country, marrying each other.”

Under the program, the Citizens’ Alliance, a civic group founded in 1996, has brought together students from Kyunggi Girls’ High School in Seoul with young North Korean defectors for extracurricular activities.

They have attended concerts together. They have cooked and compared North and South Korean dishes. The North Koreans, adept at farm work, have shown the South Koreans how to harvest yams and make scarecrows. The Southerners have given the Northerners tips on how to succeed socially as well as academically. They have made friends.

One October evening, when the students had gone camping and stayed up late, Moon Sung-il, a 14-year-old North Korean, brought tears to the South Koreans’ eyes when he recounted his two-and-a-half-year flight with other defectors that took him through China, Myanmar and a refugee camp in Bangkok. But he stunned them when he said that none of this was as daunting as a South Korean classroom.

“I could hardly understand anything the teacher said,” he said. “My classmates, who were all a year or two younger than I was, taunted me as a ‘poor soup-eater from the North.’ I fought them with my fists.”

More than 17,000 North Koreans, one-tenth of them teenagers, have fled to the South since famine hit their homeland in the mid-1990s. The average journey to the South takes 35 months, mostly through China and Southeast Asia. Not all who start make it; some have been caught and returned to the North, where they often end up in labor camps.

When they are placed in South Korean schools, these Northerners start nearly from scratch. In the North, they had spent as much time learning about the family of their leader, Kim Jong-il, as they did the rest of Korean history. Few learned English, a requirement in South Korean schools. Dropout rates among defectors are five times the South Korean average, according to the Education Ministry.

With the number of North Korean refugees rising about 10 percent annually, how to integrate them has become an early test for possible unification.

“Whenever something bad about North Korea came up during class, everyone turned to look at me,” said Mr. Ju, who now attends an alternative school for defectors after failing to advance to a regular high school. “When teachers and students spoke disparagingly about North Korea, I felt like they were insulting me.”

Ms. Park said she used to look down on North Koreans. “I associated them with something poor, dark and negative,” she said.

Although many successful South Koreans have their roots in the North — the country’s first president, Syngman Rhee; the founder of the Hyundai business empire; the family that built the South’s influential Chosun newspaper; founders of some of the biggest Christian churches — an image has developed of Northerners as second-class Koreans, needy and starving but surly and belligerent. They have taken food aid from the South but threatened it with war, run prison camps and built nuclear weapons. They are friendly toward China but have rejected talks with the South.

The mistrust is mutual. In the North, teachers tell children that South Korea is an American colony, a springboard for a future invasion, defectors say.

“Back in the North, we seldom heard teachers talk about unification. We seldom thought about it,” said Choi Hyok-chol, a 19-year-old defector. “I still don’t think it’s possible. The two economies are much too different.”

In a survey last June of 1,000 South Koreans aged 19 to 59 conducted by the Korea Peace Institute, a Christian research institute, half the respondents said unification was not necessary as long as the two sides lived in peace. In a survey in September of 1,000 people aged 19 to 39, the National Unification Advisory Council for the South Korean president found that 67 percent wanted any unification to be gradual to avoid political and economic chaos.

Although a spirit of unification persists in the South, many people balk at what is expected to be the prohibitive cost of integrating the economies. The North’s per capita income amounts to just 6 percent of the South’s, according to the Bank of Korea.

“I used to oppose unification because I thought we’d lose more than we’d gain,” said Hur Ji-young, a freshman at Kyunggi. Her friend Lim Hyo-jeong, however, said she supported it because she saw an economic advantage in a larger domestic market.

After mingling with the North Korean teenagers for a semester, hearing about their hardships and their concerns for relatives left behind, the South Koreans said they believed more strongly in unification, but now less for economic reasons than something closer to good will.

“Before I joined this program, I considered unification with a calculator, not with my heart for fellow Koreans in the North,” Ms. Hur said.

Copyright 2010

NORTH KOREA: Calls for Peace Treaty Talks With U.S.

January 12, 2010

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Monday proposed talks with the United States to reach a formal peace treaty that would replace the truce that halted the Korean War 57 years ago, indicating that it would not give up its nuclear weapons until Washington signed such an accord.

North Korea said peace talks should be held either as part of the six-nation talks that focus on ending its nuclear weapons program or as a separate negotiation. But the North also warned that it would not return to six-nation talks — from which it withdrew last April — unless the United Nations lifted sanctions imposed after the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile tests last year.

The North had previously proposed peace negotiations with the United States and South Korea. But its latest overture came as it was trying to shift the focus of the six-nation talks, where a peace treaty had been set aside until North Korea made significant progress toward dismantling its nuclear weapons program.

“If a peace treaty is signed, it will help resolve hostile relations between North Korea and the United States and speed up the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the North’s state-run news agency, K.C.N.A.

After years of unsuccessful talks with Washington, North Korea said it concluded that all agreements were bound to collapse unless the two sides built mutual “trust.” To build such confidence, the statement said, “It is essential to conclude a peace treaty for terminating the state of war, a root cause of the hostile relations.”

The statement reiterated North Korea’s contention that it would not have built nuclear weapons if the United States had assured it of peace.

Stephen W. Bosworth, President Obama’s special representative on North Korea, who visited the capital, Pyongyang, last month, said the United States could discuss a peace treaty and other incentives only when the process of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula had gained “significant traction.”

Last week, Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan of South Korea denounced what he called the North’s “unrealistic” demand that the United States negotiate a peace treaty before the North considers relinquishing its nuclear weapons.

“That’s like saying it will never give up its nuclear programs, or it is a delaying tactic” to buy time to further its nuclear programs, he said.

On Monday, North Korea suggested that peace talks be held among the signatories of the Korean War armistice: the American-led United Nations Command in Seoul, China and North Korea. South Korea refused to sign the truce, but Seoul and Washington insist that any peace talks include the South.

Between 1997 and 1999, the two Koreas, the United States and China held six rounds of peace talks that produced no agreement because the North insisted on the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea and an end to joint United States-South Korean military exercises.

“With its peace proposal, North Korea is trying to gain the initiative as it prepares to return to six-nation talks,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea analyst at Dongguk University in Seoul. Mr. Kim expected some haggling between Pyongyang and Seoul over whether South Korea should be included.

Earlier Monday, Robert R. King, Mr. Obama’s envoy on North Korean human rights issues, said during a visit to Seoul that the North’s “appalling” human rights situation would impede any efforts to normalize ties.

He also called Monday for the release of Robert Park, a Korean-American missionary who crossed into North Korea late last month to demand the release of an estimated 160,000 political prisoners held in labor camps, according to his supporters in Seoul.

North Korea has confirmed that it has detained an American citizen but has not identified him by name.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

JAPAN: Coming-of-age ceremonies held nationwide

Coming-of-age ceremonies were held nationwide Monday, a national holiday, to celebrate the accession to adulthood of those who have reached 20 years old. In Urayasu, Chiba Prefecture, a ceremony was held at Tokyo Disneyland, with Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters congratulating some 1,100 young people on their official arrival to adulthood.
It was the ninth Disneyland ceremony by the municipality, in which 70 percent of its citizens who have newly reached adulthood took part.