North Korea's apparent acquisition of nuclear weapons and its admission last year that it had abducted scores of Japanese citizens over the past two decades has transformed the political outlook of many Japanese, driving even cautious diplomats to take positions further to the right of the Bush administration.

That was apparent at a recent Washington seminar on Korea, where Naoyuki Agawa, the minister for public affairs and director of the Japan Information and Culture Center at the Embassy of Japan, publicly endorsed the concept of "regime change" in North Korea as "ultimately the solution" for the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula.

"Nobody talks about it, but I think it's obvious," Agawa told the seminar organized by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. "The question is how soon. I don't think anybody's in a hurry to forcibly bring that to take place, and therefore I think that the status quo will continue."

To be sure, Agawa, who is a member of a US-Japan Strategic Study Group, was speaking for himself and not the Japanese government. But his open call for an overthrow of the Kim Jong Il regime in Pyongyang show how deeply North Korea's recent behavior has touched Japan's political psyche.

According to Agawa, Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, along with other political parties, began to change their attitude towards the North after it tested a ballistic missile over Japan three years ago and admitted to the kidnapping charges during Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's historic visit to Pyongyang in 2002.

"For the first time in 50 years, Japan has the fear of a clear and present danger," he said. Many ordinary citizens now realize "that one of their loved ones could be abducted from the coast."

He pointed out that Takako Doi of Japan's Socialist Party, a historical ally of North Korea, recently lost her bid for reelection as party chair because she was identified with a faction that had denied the abductions for many years.

To some observers, Agawa's comments illustrate an alarming lurch toward militarism in Japan and show how quickly Japan has forgotten its own legacy in colonial Korea and its role as a US military supply base during the Korean War.

Agawa's views "reflects the Koizumi's government's stand, definitely," said John Feffer, a longtime Korea watcher and the author of North Korea/South Korea: US Policy at a Time of Crisis recently published in the United States by Seven Stories Press. "It's unfortunate there's been such a rise in anti-North Korean feeling in Japan."

Feffer sees a strong link between the government's positions on North Korea and its attempts to change Japan's peace clause in the constitution to allow Japanese military forces to participate in overseas conflicts, such as the US war in Iraq. "The specter of a North Korean attack is the only thing that can uproot Japan's deeply seeded pacifism," he said in a separate interview.

Feffer, who has visited both North and South Korea, believes that calling for regime change in North Korea is irresponsible because "there are no alternatives. They have no idea what would replace it (the Kim Jong IL regime)."

Agawa broached the idea after Ralph Cossa, a Korea specialist and president of the Pacific Forum of the Canter for Strategic and International Studies in Honolulu, provided a generally upbeat preview of the upcoming six-party talks on ending the nuclear crisis.

The talks, tentatively scheduled for December, include the United States, South Korea, China, Russia, and Japan, all of whom want Pyongyang to stop making weapons, and North Korea, which is seeking guarantees of security and economic aid in exchange for any promise to disarm.

The negotiations have been complicated by deep splits within the Bush administration, which is constantly wavering between a hard-line faction centered at the Pentagon, which would prefer to see the problem disappear through the regime change sought by Agawa, and a more pragmatic faction at the State Department, which sees no choice but to negotiate.

US President George W Bush, in a recent visit to Asia, made it clear that he supports the latter course, which has been doggedly pursued by Secretary of State Colin Powell. He has been represented at all talks with North Korea by Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, who was Cossa's predecessor at the Pacific Forum before taking his present job.

Cossa lamented as "one of the saddest things in the conduct of US foreign policy" the fact that when Powell announces something as policy, skeptics question whether that is official policy even after Bush endorses it. Instead, many suspect that when John Bolton, a hardliner in the State Department who supports the Pentagon position "opens his mouth, that's when the real George Bush speaks."

"That's the real US credibility problem in Asia," said Cossa. "There's a feeling that US foreign policy is in shambles."

Despite that perception, said Cossa, many officials in both China and Japan, key participants in the talks, believe that their relations with the United States have "never been better." With both countries pressing for an end to North Korea's nuclear program, Cossa said a multilateral deal with North Korea is a likely outcome of the talks.

Realistically, "they will be rewarded," he added. "It's not a question of if, but when." Cossa added that any such agreement must be fully verified, and, as a prerequisite, "South Korea must stand firm with North Korea."

Cossa dismissed liberal critics who say that Bush's hostile attitude toward Pyongyang, as evidenced by his 2001 "axis of evil" speech, was a key factor in the crisis that began a year ago when Kelly confronted North Korea with evidence it was enriching uranium.

"The ultimate goal of pursuing nuclear weapons and the decision to cheat not only on the Agreed Framework but also on the North-South 1992 denuclearization agreement and also on the International Atomic Energy Agency and Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty commitments started well before the Bush administration, and we're still dealing with that," he said.

Feffer pointed out that key members of the Bush administration, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were pushing for regime change in North Korea long before the uranium revelations, adding that even the Central Intelligence Agency has no concrete evidence of exactly what that program looks like.

The harsh rhetoric coming out of the Pentagon and the people like Agawa in Japan, Feffer said, is exactly why conservative Republicans in Congress like Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania "want to strike a deal."

Weldon recently led a small, bipartisan delegation of US lawmakers to Pyongyang and returned saying he believed a deal was in sight in which North Korea would end its nuclear program in exchange for written guarantees of its security.

Tim Shorrock is a freelance journalist based in Silver Spring, Maryland, who specializes in U.S. foreign policy in Asia, Korea, and labor issues. His writings have appeared in many publications at home and abroad.