With some giant balloons

A Japanese advocacy group said Tuesday it will use balloons to scatter flyers over North Korea, offering residents a US$10,000 cash reward for information on Japanese citizens kidnapped by the regime decades ago.

The Tokyo-based Investigation Commission on Missing Japanese Probably Related to North Korea plans to send the first batch of the balloons from near South Korea’s border with the North in late March, according to the group’s leader, Kazuhiro Araki.

The 5-meter-long balloons are fitted with simple timers and can be preset to release sacks of flyers over the Pyongyang region, Araki said.

The postcard-sized flyers, which are waterproof and printed in Japanese and Korean, call for details on Japanese citizens abducted by communist agents in the 1970s and 1980s.

The flyers also offer a cash reward of up to US$10,000 for information on Japanese abductees and urge residents to contact a hot line in Japan or tune in to a radio program the group transmits toward North Korea.

My concern is that they make pretty easy targets for North Korea’s anti-air guns. Seems like a good plan if it succeeds in dropping the flyers.

If you’re interested, here is the groups very outdated Japanese site.

Hide your hard currency

(Seoul, South Korea-AP) February 25, 2007 - North Korea’s chief nuclear envoy may be coming to the US.

South Korean media say Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan is to arrive in San Francisco Thursday before heading to New York for talks with Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill.

That meeting would be the first working group meeting on establishing diplomatic relations between the US and North Korea and is part of an agreement reached at six-party talks in Beijing less than two weeks ago.

In those talks, the North promised to shut down its nuclear facilities in exchange for economic aid and political incentives. Hill announced at the time that he had invited the North Korean envoy to the US.

It would be the first such trip since 2002.

San Francisco? Wonder what’s so interesting over there. Maybe he going to catch this premiere. It will be like he never left the country.

Andrei Lankov explores the history of North Korean abductions. Unlike other countries whose agents usually kidnap someone of importance, North Korean abductions seem random and target ordinary people. Abductees were mainly used to train North Korean agents on how to mix in South Korean and Japanese society. Younger abductees were considered still easy to indoctrinate.

I would like to add that by kidnapping ordinary people, North Korea may be trying to create a climate of fear in the two countries. Though with many abductions were revealed many years after the fact, I doubt that they were very successful.

Now most abductions occur in Northeast China, where most refugees hide.