IT DOESN’T hurt to have a crisis as your first challenge, even if, as in Shinzo Abe’s case, it is one you can’t solve.

Abe, Japan’s new Prime Minister, will travel to China and South Korea next week, a trip dominated by North Korea’s sudden threats of holding a nuclear test.

It would be perverse to say North Korea was actually helping the cause of peace in the region. But its threats have brought together Japan with China and South Korea, after a sharp frost, and that common front is the minimum needed to work out any solution to the Pyongyang problem.

What can Abe do next week? There is only one message worth delivering: that North Korea is China’s problem to sort out, and that it cannot afford, in its own interest, to persist in doing nothing.

Abe has already pulled off one diplomatic success: arranging next week’s summits, the first for two years with either country, without a commitment not to visit the Yasukuni war shrine. Tokyo has been at odds with both countries over territory, and over interpretations of wartime history, symbolised by the visits to the shrine by Junichiro Koizumi, Abe’s predecessor.

This first step, if modest, has still given the lie to the worried predictions when he won the leadership of the LDP last month: that he would give Japan a more aggressive, nationalistic voice. Certainly, he has those instincts; he wants Japan to be less apologetic about its past, and wants to rewrite the constitution to allow its Armed Forces to take part in foreign missions.

In the current tension with North Korea, that may provide some badly needed determination. Abe has pushed hard for international sanctions against North Korea since it fired off seven missiles in July. Four years ago, when North Korea admitted that it had kidnapped Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 1980s, his tough line shot him to prominence.

But beyond that, he has sketched out a vision of co-operation between the Asia- Pacific democracies: Australia, Japan, India and the United States. That is not the stance of a narrow-minded nationalist.

In the immediate crisis, he has said Japan “will work with the US, China, South Korea and other countries concerned” to respond to the North Korean threats.

There is nothing they can do to stop a test, should Pyongyang want to press ahead. To judge by its record of provocation, it probably does, although other countries’ intelligence reports have shown scant evidence of large-scale preparations.

But the flailing about that North Korea’s announcement prompted in its neighbours is not promising. South Korea and China renewed their long-standing attempts yesterday to persuade the US to hold its own talks with North Korea, something the regime wants. They hope that this would win Pyongyang’s consent to reopen the six-party talks it has boycotted since November.

Yet it is hard to see what those talks can do, without a much tougher stance from China. But China has hidden behind those talks as a reason not to shoulder the problem.

In the UN Security Council yesterday China resisted issuing a statement against North Korea’s test threat. The Chinese ambassador, Wang Guangya, said: “If the six-party talks cannot do anything about it, I don't think the council is in a position (to do anything).”

Very likely true. But that doesn’t mean that China is not in a position to help. It could do so by telling North Korea that its actions threaten China’s own security, and the region’s.

For graphic click here

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