Oh, yeah. I guess I’m sort of duty-bound to to mention that the DPRK has announced that it will return to the 6-party nuclear kaffee klatsch. Whatever. Reuters quotes an AEI expert…

But officials traveling with Rice in Asia said they have seen no concrete sign the communist state would surrender its nuclear capability — which U.S. intelligence estimates at more than eight weapons. Many experts doubt this will happen.

“I don’t believe that talks will convince the North Koreans to abandon their program,” former Pentagon official Daniel Bluemthal, from the pro-Bush American Enterprise Institute, told Reuters by telephone from Washington, D.C.

“Pyongyang’s nuclear aspirations go to the core of the regime’s raison d’etre — ensuring its own survival and forcefully unifying the peninsula under its control,” the Asia expert wrote in an analysis on the AEI Web site.

…but you don’t have to believe that the contemporary DPRK is still motivated by the goals of the Kim Il-sung era in order to doubt that Kim Jong-il’s regime is unlikely to disarm. By this point, sheer hubris strikes me as motivation enough. North Korea is aware that its inability to feed its people is so well-known worldwide that it’s not even news anymore. The occasional puff piece hardly compensates. And the PRC, which has a growing economy and cannot afford to be as openly combative toward companies with large consumer markets such as the US and Japan, is less and less inclined to stand firm behind the DPRK when it gets adversarial.

Even so, it remains a North Korean backer, which makes me wonder about this:

A hardline Bush administration faction, including Vice President Dick Cheney, has been viewed as opposed to talks with Pyongyang and eager to shape U.S. policy to encourage the regime’s collapse.

While we’re making all nicey-nicey with China? While economists in the ROK look at the potential problems with reunification and reach for their nitro-glycerine pills? (South Korea has just announced that it will send more rice as aid to the North, BTW.) We all want the DPRK regime to collapse, but I can’t imagine how the Cheney faction imagines we could seriously, openly pursue that as a policy goal.

The talks do serve a purpose, though: they give the DPRK attention and make it feel like a world power. (Rice recognizes that that’s important–a few months ago she was chuckling that the DPRK was indignant because some press release of its hadn’t caused a general spaz.) However galling it may be, keeping North Korea from feeling like a cornered rat is a worthy goal.

The Japanese government has decided to make a greater effort to encourage citizens to eat healthy foods–no surprise, given the collectivist bent of Japanese society and the paternalist bent of the federal ministries. Humiliatingly, it sounds as if what it comes up with may be less patronizing than the USDA’s latest orgy of finger-wagging:

The government is aiming to start a trend of “dietary education” by which, through families, schools, and regional governments, proper knowledge and judgment about diet will be learned; by the beginning of September, a council to promote dietary education, headed by the Prime Minister and consisting of relevant cabinet officials and experts, will be created. The goal is to formulate a basic plan within the year that incorporates concrete policies efficacious in the preservation of [Japan's] traditional dietary culture and [improvements to] communication between local governments and farmers.

The potential for boondoggling here is nearly illimitable, of course–lots of pointless new boards and committees and community centers. Japanese agriculture and education policies are full of those already.

Yes, the Japanese diet is becoming less healthy. That always happens when people are rich. Still, even people who eat Western foods frequently seem to prefer to base their diets on Japanese foods, and it’s hard to get fat on them. There are a lot of people in Tokyo who could stand to take in a far lower percent of their daily calories through alcohol, but I somehow doubt that’s going to be one of the new council’s focal points.

Oh, yeah, speaking of subways: something else I forgot to link last week was this post by Japundit, which in turn links to a fascinating website about Pyongyang’s subway system. It’s an unofficial site, but the site owner seems to take care to back up his speculations about how the Pyongyang Metro actually works. The number of cars ordered from the PRC and GDR–remember that entity?–suggests that there may be an entirely separate network for government officials only, for example. There’s also been a suggestion, though the site owner doesn’t take it very seriously, that the two stations through which foreign visitors are given tours are actually the only two in existence–that is to say, that the rest of the network is a fabrication and was never built.

One of the more interesting tidbits is this passage from the official guidebook:

An overseas Korean who was on a visit to the homeland gave his impression of the Pyongyang Metro to respected President Kim Il Sung. He said that in the country where he was residing it was out of the question to use high-quality stones in the buildings for common people.

At this point the president said that in our country we were building a metro not as a means of making money but for providing the civilized and convenient life to the people, so that we did not spare money to decorate the inside well and construct it solidly and modernly.

More than 30,000 square metres [sic] of natural marble and 40,000 square metres of granite have been used in the construction of the Pyongyang Metro. This is nothing but a negligible amount of materials used in the building of the metro by the Government of the DPRK.

Vainglorious Monument Syndrome has afflicted dictators since time immemorial, but its cruelty is particularly heart-piercing here. In rich countries, we move about freely and get to choose our own priorities. A lot of subway stations are dumpy, but we don’t care because we’re just moving through them on the way to things we want, or at least have chosen, to do. It’s not hard to imagine, in North Korea’s screwed-up economy, that the subway station could be the only fleeting moment of aesthetic pleasure some people get in a workday. (It’s worth noting that the subway was built in the early 1960s, when the still-young DPRK was, according to official statistics, outpacing the South in economic growth–military, industrial, and public works hypertrophy gave people plenty to do. Of course, we all know what happened after that.)

Myself, I’m not so nuts about the marble columns; they’re a bit bull-necked and graceless. The murals give me the Diego Rivera yawns, too. Let me have those light fixtures, though!

I think those on the left compare very favorably to, for example, that horrible neon epileptic fit that’s scribbled witlessly down the concourse ceilings at O’Hare Airport. However, I don’t know that I’d be so hot on them if, 40 years down the pike, the policies that produced them had also starved a few million of my countrymen.