Hima desu

I have decided to start attending an extra class on Mondays and Wednesdays because I have the whole morning free. Now I will be learning about North-east Asian International Relations from Kenneth Quinones, who has quite an impressive background:

" Dr. Quinones has lived and worked in South and North Korea,as well as Japan. As a U.S. diplomat, he witnessed South Korea's democratization during the 1980's and was directly involved in North Korea's opening to the outside world during the 1990s. He was the first U.S. diplomat to visit North Korea, was a member of the US negotiating team that resolved the first Korean nuclear crisis,and served as the State Department's liaison officer while living at the Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center and in Pyongyang for 9 months in 1995 and 1996. After retiring from the U.S. Foreign Service in 1997, he arranged US-North Korea educational and agricultural exchanges for the Asia Foundation and Mercy Corps. Between 2001 and 2005, he concentrated on writing and commenting about US relations with Northeast Asia, particularly the Korean Peninsula. Since 2000, he has published three books: The North Korea Nuclear Crisis - Off the Record Memories, (translated into Korean and Japanese in 2000; Beyond Diplomacy: Implementation of the Agreed Frame Work(published in Japanese in 2003), and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding North Korea, published in English by Penguin Publishers' Alpha Books in 2004."
This was taken from the National Committee on North Korea website.

Today, apart from learn about various agreements made between the US and North Korea in 1991-1994, I learned that Bill Richardson isn't really the great ambassador that he portrays himself to be. According to Quinones, Richardson has been involved in several situations were he has done inappropriate things in an attempt to claim responsibility for resolution of a conflict. For instance, he was in Pyongyang when an agreement was signed to allow the US Army into North Korea to search for remains of soldiers from the Korean War. He was a US Congressman at the time, and jeopardized this agreement by offering the North Koreans a substantial amount of food aid in return for them giving him credit for the agreement. He was then reminded by a Foreign Service man that he did not have to the power to make such an offer, since congressmen don't have any power to negotiate, so he was forced to withdraw the offer, which infuriated the Koreans. In response they took him hostage until an actual US diplomat called Pyongyang and encouraged them to release him and not make the situation worse. Now that is glory-hungry.

I have also learned things about Korean geography and North South economic cooperation. The city of Kaesong is the site of the North Korean army headquarters, and also where the Kaesong Industrial Complex is located. This is the official site for economic cooperation and 500 South Korean companies have factories in this town near the DMZ. North Koreans are employed in KIC, but for export purposes the ambiguous label "Made in Korea" is used on products and shipped all around the world, avoiding sanctions.

Aomori, the city near here that I want to visit because the name means "Blue Forest," is the site of the world's largest plutonium nuclear reactor and is a storage spot for used plutonium from around the world. Currently they have misplaced 250 kg of plutonium.

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