If North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's summit with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi this weekend is supposed to indicate a thaw in relations, the North's state-run media hasn't gotten the hint.
Days after the summit was announced, they have slammed the Japanese as hysterical, threatened that talk of economic sanctions is tantamount to a declaration of war, and warned of "grave consequences" for Tokyo's "ultra-right."
It is the "unshakable will and determination of all the Koreans to force Japan to pay generation after generation for all the crimes the Japanese imperialists committed in the past," the official news agency KCNA blustered this week.
The North's belligerent rhetoric isn't aimed only at Japan; the US and South Korea are also targets. Such attacks are intended to fire up the public, and are fiercer than the official positions North Korea expresses in diplomatic forums.
But with few formal statements from a country that maintains little international contact, the dispatches, broadcast to the world in English by KCNA, offer insight on the regime's worldview.
"We don't have to take North Korea's media rantings that seriously -- they have been doing this forever," said Tomio Okamoto, an analyst with Radio Press, which monitors the broadcasts in Japan. "But if they say anything new, we should pay attention."
North Korea media watchers note that shortly after a huge train explosion killed 161 people and injured thousands more last month, KCNA issued an uncharacteristically candid report, confirming the damage was "very serious" and expressing appreciation for promises of humanitarian aid.
But it also used the accident to heap praise on the heroics of the North Korean military.
Along with a steady flow of stories praising diligent workers, valiant soldiers and selfless farmers, three recurring topics stand out: Washington's efforts to overthrow the North Korean government, South Korea's failure to stand up for itself and Japan's refusal to take responsibility for its militarist past.
Though often predictable, the dispatches can at times be puzzling as well.
The recent tirade against Japan came as Kim and Koizumi were preparing to meet for a summit important to both. Kim needs access to Japanese aid to help feed his impoverished nation, and Koizumi is looking to end a two-year standoff over the families of Japanese citizens abducted by the North decades ago.
Koizumi and his aides have said the summit comes amid increasing signs that the North is willing to compromise. But that mood is hard to detect in recent dispatches.
Earlier this month, the agency accused Japan of using the focus of international concern over North Korea's nuclear weapons program as a smoke screen so that it could pursue one of its own.
"There are ample conditions for the descendants of samurais, buoyed by fever for reinvasion, to have access to nuclear weapons at any moment," KCNA said.
This week, in a rare commentary on the abductions issue, the Minju Joson newspaper accused ultraconservative forces in Japan of trying to use a recent rally in Tokyo for the return of the abductees' families to "fan hostility" against the North.
Masao Okonogi, a North Korea expert at Tokyo's prestigious Keio University, said the purpose of the media's inflammatory attitude is "simply to attract attention."
"Otherwise," he said, "Japan won't pay any attention at all."
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