Applied Confucianism

The Washington Post's Doug Struck on Japan's Refusal to let kidnap victims return to North Korea:

There has been almost no debate about the government's authority to prevent the abductees from returning to their families. "Of course we respect the free will of the individual," Katsunari Suzuki, the Foreign Ministry official in charge of negotiations with North Korea, said in a recent interview. But "their state of mind is certainly not normal. We have to give time and the proper environment in which they can quietly think about their future. "We would not agree to return them" to North Korea, he said. "They might have developed some feelings that [North Korea] is their own land."...In a Confucian twist to the argument, the government also has said it is responding to the wishes of the abductees' families, whether or not the five abductees agree.