How can it happen that a person who probably no longer exists can keep an entire nation, North Korea, in poverty for more than twenty years, and the rest of us under prolonged nuclear threat? The story is complicated.

In 2001 Tokyo sent a senior foreign ministry official to North Korea to chase up rumours that the communist country had been abducting Japanese citizens for suspicious purposes. After a year of secret negotiations Pyongyang finally came clean and agreed to return two married couples it had abducted in the late seventies and the Japanese wife of a US Korean War deserter it was holding. All others were listed as having died from accidents and other causes.

Tokyo was happy with that result and in 2002 agreed to issue a Pyongyang Declaration in which Japan promised finally to normalise relations with North Korea and provide significant economic aid (valued at a mouth-watering 100 million USD by North Korean sources). Pyongyang in return would continue its moratorium on missile testing.

Both would apologise for past wrongs. Japan’s then prime minister,........

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