Hands Across The Sea.(North Korea's foreign policy)

For a few brief hours this summer, million of North Koreans sampled a rare treat. Pyongyang's state-run Korean Central Television unexpectedly interrupted its regularly scheduled propaganda to air excerpts of World Cup football matches--including highlights from cohost South Korea's dramatic march to the semifinals. Pyongyang watchers interpreted the broadcasts as a signal of greater openness: for the first time ever, they noted, North Korean households saw uncensored images beamed from their blood enemies in the South. "Having allowed their people to see South Korea's football fever and all those magnificent stadiums," says a prominent scholar in Japan with ties to North Korea, "it is very possible that the North Korean leadership senses this is the time to take a step forward and enter the international scene."

The broadcasts foreshadowed a string of fresh initiatives from the communist North. In recent weeks North Korea has agreed to unite more war-torn families and to open new road and rail links across the demilitarized zone. In addition, Pyongyang will send hundreds of athletes to compete in this month's Asian Games in South Korea. The government has also made a few economic moves--including sweeping price reforms designed to emulate Beijing's capitalist experimentation in the early 1980s. Most surprising, North Korea is mending fences with its former colonizer, Japan. In late August North Korean strongman Kim Jong Il invited Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to meet him in Pyongyang, and Koizumi quickly accepted. The summit is scheduled take place on Sept. 17. "The cumulative picture is one of more optimism that I've seen in a very long time," says L. Gordon Flake, executive director of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs in Washington.

To be sure, Pyongyang's motives are as crass as ever. The world's last bastion of Stalinism, North Korth is desperate for food and money, and Kim knows that cracking open the hermit kingdom occasionally is the best way to get them. In return for Pyongyang's agreement to allow more family reunions and open transport links, for example, Seoul has offered 400,000 tons of rice and 100,000 tons of fertilizer. By courting Koizumi, Kim hopes to win an estimated $5 billion to $10 billion in war reparations for Japan's brutal colonial rule--a payout that could happen if relations are normalized. Koh Yu Hwan, a North Korean watcher at Seoul's Dongguk University, says the payment would be "seed money" to help rebuild the Northern economy. Pyongyang is also courting direct foreign investment from Japan and South Korea aimed at turning rust-belt Soviet-era factories into an export-oriented manufacturing base. As one Korea Herald commentator put it recently: "For Kim Jong Il there is one motive: money."

In return, though, Kim may have to offer even more concessions. Japanese hope Koizumi will win the release of a handful of their countrymen abducted by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s. (Pyongyang's failure to acknowledge their existence has been a bilateral stumbling block for years.) Washington wants North Korea to open its nuclear facilities and to extend a self-imposed moratorium on ballistic-missile tests. South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, whose "sunshine policy" toward the North won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000, hopes to cement his legacy before he leaves the Blue House next February. His dream: that Kim Jong Il will travel by rail to the DMZ by year-end and meet him for a repeat of their breakthrough 2000 summit in Pyongyang.

A series of events has drawn Pyongyang back to the negotiating table. The most important, from North Korea's perspective, is undoubtedly Washington's tougher ...