SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA (AFP) - North Korea has revived a campaign to ban Japanese cars from its roads, apparently reflecting strained relations between the two nations, a South Korean welfare group said Monday.

The drive was launched in 2007 but later suspended because about 70 percent of cars in the communist country are Japanese, said Good Friends, which works in North Korea.

The group said Pyongyang revived the campaign in June, instructing provincial prosecutors to check for Japanese vehicles in each factory and public enterprise and to report their findings.

The new campaign calls for the elimination of Japanese vehicles by October 8, 2011, with the exception of heavy-duty trucks, it said.

Between July and August, prosecutors in the northern border city of Hyesan dumped 49 Japanese vehicles including ten cars, the group said.

Pyongyang might have stopped the campaign in 2007 "because most cars used by party and government officials are Japanese," Lee Seung-Yong, director of Good Friends, told AFP.

The new campaign reflects the nations' current state of relations, he said.

Yonhap news agency reported in early 2007 that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il ordered the seizure of all Japanese cars after he spotted a broken-down model blocking a road.

The order might be connected to Japan's push for sanctions against Pyongyang following its first nuclear test in 2006, it said at the time.

Japan intensified pressure after the North's second nuclear test and missile launches. In June, it imposed a total ban on exports.

http://motoring.asiaone.com/Motoring...12-173211.html

 

it's their loss

 

What a jerk. This guy is more ignorant than a pig in a sausage factory.

So Kim doesn't like Japanese cars. Let's see if HIS country can build vehicles that are any better. They don't even feed their own people, much less build cars....the population is starving, primarily because he spends all of the budget on the military and procuring nuclear weapons.

 

How many cars are actually there to begin with? Doubt it will crumble anyone's stock anytime soon.

 

That's what all dictators do!

 

I think a Coup d'état is in order

 

Kim Jong needs some new pajamas...

 

How many people in North Korea can affort a late model car, I am sure the Japanese are just laughing at them. If I were the Japanese, I would stop exporting trucks to North Korea, they will really teach them a lesson.