Japanese Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa

If you look at the region in very abstract terms, close defense cooperation between South Korea and Japan seems like a no-brainer. In practice, however, the relationship between the two countries is actually quite chilly, as detailed in Chico Harlan’s article about efforts to increase defense and intelligence cooperation between Tokyo and Seoul.

The difficulties are attributed largely to the fact that Koreans, especially older ones, feel “intense bitterness over the 35-year Japanese occupation of Korea that ended in 1945.” That’s quite understandable. It’s also the case, however, that if you look at 20th century Europe, the practical imperative to move forward with defense cooperation served as an important driver of reconciliation between Germany and its neighbors.

The danger here for the United States is that while it’s obviously good for our two main allies in the region to cooperate, especially vis-à-vis the DPRK, I don’t think we really want to become the offshore sponsors of an anti-Chinese military alliance. One can easily imagine some future state of the world in which it does make sense for the US to be the patron of a grouping like that, but one can also easily imagine steps in that direction becoming self-fulfilling. Our main concrete interest in the area is simply that war and destruction in Northeast Asia would be very economically disruptive. We want to be preventing trouble, not starting it.

Pam Belluck offers a South Korea story that’s not all about the confrontation with the DPRK:

South Korea is training thousands of people, including children, as “dementia supporters,” to recognize symptoms and care for patients. The 11- to 13-year-olds, for instance, were in the government’s “Aging-Friendly Comprehensive Experience Hall” outside Seoul. Besides the aging simulation exercise, they viewed a PowerPoint presentation defining dementia and were trained, in the hall’s Dementia Experience Center, to perform hand massage in nursing homes.

“ ‘What did I do with my phone? It’s in the refrigerator,’ ” said one instructor, explaining memory loss. “Have you seen someone like that? They may go missing and die on the street.”

As is often the case, I think too much of the discussion in the United States about population aging is about the purely budgetary aspects of it. More elderly people plus a commitment to give money to elderly people = higher taxes or benefit cuts. True enough, but the harder questions concern real resources. More people with the distinctive problems of the elderly, and more need to find better ways of coping with them.

I’ve been reading stories about the skyrocketing cost of kimchee—given by rising prices for napa cabbage—for a couple of weeks now. And I think it’s a sign of how screwy policies toward agricultural trade are that it’s only as of yesterday that “the government has suspended tariffs on imported cabbage and radishes from China.”

Of course the good people of South Korea might want to reconsider the whole idea of sales taxes on Chinese vegetables on a permanent basis. This is a regressive tax on the poorest South Koreans, it disadvantages super-poor Chinese farmers relative to their richer South Korean counterparts, it promotes an inefficient allocation of labor and land resources in South Korea, does nothing for public health, etc.

Meanwhile, though America’s sales taxes on foreign-grown food are lower than those prevailing in most of the developing world we’re not entirely free of this kind of bone-headed policymaking ourselves.

I wouldn’t try to make a prediction about the likely future course of North Korean affairs, but clearly the state could collapse rather suddenly which raises the question of what would happen next. Minxin Pei says the world is unprepared:

What is most worrying about a possible North Korean collapse is that the key players in the region are not talking to each other, even informally, about such an eventuality. It’s almost certain that these powers—China, the United States, Japan, South Korea and, possibly, Russia—have all drawn up their own contingency plans for Pyongyang’s quick collapse. However, they’ve done nothing to explore a collective response to what is without doubt a geopolitical game-changer.

It seems to me that if there were such talks they would be secret and not just “informal” so it’s hard to know if this is right. But I agree with Robert Farley that in many ways the harder case is if the DPRK doesn’t collapse, but instead finds itself with a post-Kim leadership that just comes to the world hat in hand looking for help:

Collapse is certainly a possible outcome, but it’s also possible that the North Korean state could survive, at least for a while, under some sort of non-Kim military dictatorship. The attitudes of Seoul and Beijing would be particularly important in this respect; the health of a post-Kim North Korea would be greatly affected by China’s willingness to underwrite the regime, and by South Korea’s approach to manifesting claims on Korean national identity. In the German case, the Russians had no interest in continuing to prop up the Berlin regime, and West Germany was happy to advance the claim that it was the only legitimate German national regime. It’s also worth noting that nationalist sentiments could override such a pedestrian concern as the utter economic disaster that incorporating North Korea would wreak upon South Korea.

South Korean elites are certainly aware of how difficult German reunification proved to be and how much more difficult Korean unification would be. But I have no idea whether this is understood by a mass public in Korea or if there would be a strong initial drive to push for unification irrespective of the practical problems.

Akamai’s latest “State of the Internet” report is out. The news that average Internet speed in the United States lags behind many other countries should be familiar by now:

In that light, it’s interesting to note that if you look at the world’s fastest cities the United States actually dominates. Here’s a list I made of the top ten cities:

The difference is that these are all relatively small places. The fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth fastest internet cities in Asia are all in South Korea and they include places like Seocho-gu and Masan that have many more residents than Sandy or Charlottsville.

Also note that the generally prevailing speeds in the Northeast are higher and comparable to the faster European countries, though not to the fastest Asian countries:

And just to reiterate, if population density and/or urbanization is the reason the US needs to be slower than Japan and Sweden you need to explain why internet speed in the District of Columbia is also slower than the internet in those countries.

Had some conversations early today with a minister in the government of Saxony that touched on some of the economic difficulties inherent in the transition from being a province of East Germany to being part of the united Germany state. Viewed from one direction, the transition has been quite successful. The West Germans ponied up a huge amount of money to help do adjustments, and the Saxony government quite smartly spent the bulk of it on infrastructure investments—and you can really see very high-quality roads, transit, etc. in the parts of the province I’ve seen. Everything looks quite spic-and-span, even moreso in many ways than in richer parts of the country. And as a consequence, average incomes in Saxony are now around 70 percent of what’s found in the West compared to less than 40 percent at unification. And an unemployment rate of 16 percent (compared to 12 in the West) is way lower than the 25 percent or so that immediately followed reunification.

Another way of looking at it, of course, is that West Germany invested a ton of money, East Germany was fortunate to be integrated into a big capital-rich country with access to all the markets of the EU, and 20 years later there’s still much higher unemployment and much lower incomes.

What this makes me think of most of all is the dilemmas that will be facing the government of South Korea if the DPRK ever collapses. The DPRK is much poorer and more backwards than the GDR ever was. They’ve been separated for longer. South Korea is smaller relative to North Korea than West Germany was to East Germany. And South Korea is also poorer than West Germany. All told, I think there’s ample reason to believe that the South couldn’t really manage a reunification process. Which is something their government seems to realize without quite admitting—their official policy is reunification, but in practice they fear a DPRK collapse. And they’re right to fear it. But political debates about North Korea policy aside, the fact of the matter is that that horrible regime can’t last forever. And I think it would make sense for a broader international community to start thinking about what we can do to support a transition process that’s going to be too big a task for South Korea to shoulder on its own.