Kuril Fishing Talks Break Off

TOKYO － South Korea and Japan failed to settle the dispute concerning the fishing rights in waters surrounding the Southern Kuril Islands, and both countries moved toward the next level of confrontation.

Twenty-six Korean saury fishing vessels finished their operation in open seas and began fishing in the Kuril waters at around midnight after processing simple paperwork with the Russian government, the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries announced.

Tokyo said it would ban Korean boats from saury fishing in Japanese grounds as planned in October.

"The Japanese government is dumping on us its territorial disputes with Russia," Seong Gi-man, director of deep-sea fishing at the ministry, said. "If Japan takes retaliatory action, we also plan to take commensurate retaliatory action," he added.

The Southern Kurils were seized by the Soviet Union in the last days of World War II, but Japan still claims them and says that Korea has no right to negotiate with Russia to fish there. The Korean fishermen will operate in the waters until the beginning of October and pay $57 per ton of fish caught. A harvest of about 15,000 tons is expected.

Meanwhile, the South Korean government greeted the landslide victory of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in the Japanese upper house parliamentary election with a mixture of hope and concern. Some analysts contended that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi no longer will have to cater to right-leaning voters, possibly permitting him to cancel his planned visit to the Yasukuni shrine honoring Japan's war dead.

Others argued that the Japanese government may use hard-line foreign policies to distract attention from the painful economic reforms it must undergo. Or, a third group says, Mr. Koizumi may shove international politics to the back burner and concentrate on the domestic agenda.

Experts feared that if Mr. Koizumi visits the Shinto shrine as planned on August 15 Korean-Japanese relations could be irreparably damaged, effectively nullifying the the 1998 bilateral Joint Declaration on a New Partnership in the 21st Century.

by Nahm Yoon-ho