Any Japan Economic Penalties Mean ‘War,’ N. Korea Says

TOKYO — North Korea’s dictatorship lashed out at the Japanese government Wednesday with a warning that any move to impose economic sanctions on Pyongyang would be seen as a “declaration of war.”

The statement by an unnamed Foreign Ministry spokesman reflected the hardening relations between the countries at a time when Japan and its allies are trying to woo Pyongyang back to talks over its suspected nuclear weapons program.

North Korea also said it might call for Japan to be removed from the six-party nuclear weapons talks.

Negotiations have not reconvened since a planned September session was canceled when Pyongyang said it would not show up. Restarting the talks has been complicated by simmering fury here over the uncertain fate of more than eight Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korean agents in the late 1970s and the 1980s.

North Korea says eight are dead and two unaccounted for, but has yet to produce evidence to allay Japanese suspicions that some may be still alive.

In last week, the Japanese public and some senior politicians have clamored for sanctions against Pyongyang as the only way to resolve the dispute. A poll for the conservative daily Yomiuri Shimbun found three-quarters of respondents in favor of economic sanctions.

Japanese anger has been stoked by the revelation that DNA testing on partially cremated bones that allegedly were those of Megumi Yokota, who was kidnapped in 1977 as a 13-year-old and reportedly hanged herself in the early 1990s, showed they came from several other people.

The news triggered national outrage, with liberal and conservative commentators united in denouncing North Korea’s “web of lies.” Yokota’s family, which has led the crusade to find out what happened to their daughter and other abductees, dominated news coverage here for days, insisting that economic sanctions were the only way to get the truth out of North Korea.

“Today is the day we, the people of Japan, should really get angry,” her brother, Takuya, said at a news conference.

A parliamentary committee recommended suspending a second installment of 125,000 tons of food aid to the country, and other politicians joined the call for imposing at least some sanctions.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has been more cautious, calling North Korea’s handling of the abductees issue “abominable” but warning that it was too early to jettison the two-pronged strategy of “dialogue and pressure.”

On Wednesday, he refused to heighten the war of rhetoric with Pyongyang, telling reporters in Tokyo that “we will have to examine where their true intent lies.”

Koizumi is in an uncomfortable situation, caught between a public obsessed with North Korean “duplicity” over the abductees and the determination of Japan’s allies not to drive North Korea into deeper isolation.

Washington and South Korea urged Koizumi to avoid sanctions, for now at least. The State Department issued a statement warning Koizumi against allowing the North Koreans to exploit the dispute to avoid returning to the six-way nuclear negotiations, which also involve the U.S., China, Russia and South Korea.

The South’s foreign minister, Ban Ki Moon, was quoted by a South Korean news agency as saying sanctions would complicate discussions on the nuclear talks.

“It is not desirable for the issue to develop in a direction that affects efforts to reopen the six-party talks and resolve the nuclear issue,” he said. “We believe it won’t.”