In early March, South Korea proposed a plan to resolve a historic dispute that has greatly complicated relations with Japan in recent years, involving South Koreans who were forced to work in Japanese factories during the occupation of the Korean peninsula by of Japan, which lasted from 1910 to 1945. The two countries share a rather uncomfortable and problematic colonial past, which has been a source of mutual disagreements and recriminations for decades. Albeit among many precautions, starting from last year, however, the two governments have begun to seek an understanding to get closer.
In many ways South Korea and Japan are related countries. Both possess strong democratic institutions while economically they are among the most developed and richest states in East Asia. Although in different fields, they are at the forefront of the development of new technologies and are allies of the United States. However, between the two nations there is a very deep mutual distrust, which periodically resurfaces in different fields such as politics, diplomacy, economy, culture and even sport and cooking.
This distrust has historical roots dating back to when the entire Korean peninsula (both South and North) was under Japanese rule. Between 1910 and 1945, Korea was annexed to the Japanese empire and underwent a heavy colonial policy that profoundly marked the Korean society of the time, the consequences of which continue until today. Beginning in the 1930s, the Japanese authorities sought with increasing conviction to assimilate the local population eroding its culture: Japanese names were imposed on the subjects of the Korean peninsula and the cult of the emperor, the Shinto religion was promoted at the expense of the local ones, and the spaces in which it was possible to speak in Korean were gradually restricted.
In the collective consciousness of South Korea this period is remembered as a kind of “national trauma”.
The most painful and shared historical memory is that linked to the Second World War. During the years of conflict, the imperial authorities adopted dehumanizing policies towards Korean subjects: 780,000 of them were forcibly transported to Japan and forced to work in factories against their will. Widely remembered in South Korea is also the story of the so-called “comfort women” (better known as comfort women), i.e. about 150-200 thousand young Korean girls who were recruited sometimes by force and sometimes by deception to serve the Japanese army as prostitutes.
80 years later for many South Koreans these victims, some of which are still alivethey never got justice.
During the 1946 Tokyo Trials (the Asian equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials in which the leaders of Nazi Germany were tried) the Allies convicted the leaders of the Japanese empire of war crimes but the question of colonial responsibility towards Korea, which in the meantime had been liberated and divided into North and South, was not addressed. It was then dissolved in 1965 with a treaty between Japan and South Korea. On that occasion, the Japanese government undertook to “completely and definitively” close the accounts with the past and allocated 500 million dollars (which today have a value of about 4.75 billion) as compensation for its colonial rule, in exchange for which the South Korean government would have to give up asking for new reparations.
However, the dispute is far from over. Although the Japanese intended to repay the victims of colonial abuse individually, the then military junta ruling South Korea convinced them instead to provide compensation in the form of loans for the nascent industry of the country. The victims received nothing but in the oppressive climate of the South Korean dictatorship there was no room to disagree with the government. Only after the democratization that began in the 1980s did the victims of the violence of the colonial period begin to speak openly about their experience, after decades of silence.
The rediscovery of the traumas of Japanese colonialism and the elaboration of that historical memory are therefore a very recent process and in many respects still ongoing.
At the origin of the most recent tension between Japan and South Korea is a sentence, issued in 2018 by the Supreme Court in Seoul, which condemns two Japanese companies to pay reparations directly to some South Korean victims who were forced into forced labor in their factories. The two companies (Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Nippon Steel) refused to obey the ruling and, faced with the risk of expropriation of their assets in Korea, the Japanese government launched a massive economic counter-offensive in 2019 to dissuade the South Korean authorities. The sanctions adopted by the then government of Shinzo Abe concerned the removal of Korea from the list of privileged countries with which to maintain commercial relations and above all new limits on the export of some chemical components necessary for the manufacture of microchipone of the leading products of South Korean industry.
Abe himself was one of the personalities at the center of the dispute between the two countries. The former prime minister had deep ties to Japan’s more denial right, the one for which the imperial past continues to be a historical experience worthy of being celebrated. Abe was one of the politicians who more than others influenced nationalist sentiment in Japan in recent decades. Not only has he actively supported the country’s rearmament policies, but he has also contributed to spreading a revisionist reading of recent history. His visits to the Shinto shrine of Yasukuni in Tokyo (where numerous war criminals are also commemorated) have always attracted sharp criticism in Korea while the history books downplaying atrocities committed by the Japanese army have been disseminated in the country’s schools also thanks to his support. For this reason, the apologies issued in the past decades by the Japanese leadership today ring false to many South Koreans.
There are other reasons that divide South Korea and Japan, such as the conflicting sovereignty claims over the islets of Dokdo, or the controversy related to the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Korea still today prohibits the importation of fish products from the areas that were hit by the 2011 catastrophe and the Seoul government was among the most critical of the Japanese plan to spillage of contaminated water into the sea used to cool the reactor.
But at the heart of the mutual distrust there are undoubtedly the differences on historical memory, which in addition to having complicated economic relations have also had repercussions in terms of security given that in 2019 the South Korean government decided to suspend a bilateral pact on sharing information from the ‘intelligence.
Since former President Moon Jae-in’s progressives in South Korea lost the election last year and the conservative Yoon Suk-yeol was elected to the presidencySouth Korea has tried to mend ties with Japan. Historically conservatives are less hostile than progressives towards the former colonial power. Furthermore, Yoon has tried to relax relations with Japan both to relaunch the commercial and technological prospects of South Korean industry and above all to reconsolidate the front of democracies in the face of the numerous problems of the region, starting with China’s aggressiveness in the area and the threats North Korea’s nuclear and missile weapons.
The United States has also contributed a lot to this rapprochement, which sees Japan and South Korea as their main allies in the region.
Also for this reason, at the beginning of March, the South Korean government made public a proposal to resolve the issue of compensation to South Koreans forced into forced labor by colonialist Japan: it provides that payments to victims of forced labor are made through a foundation, to which private companies both Japanese and Korean will be able to make voluntary payments. But in Korea there is a distinct impression that Yoon conceded too much, sacrificing the right to fair justice for the victims, and voices are growing that oppose this proposed agreement that South Korean and Japanese officials have been working on for months. The internal consensus in South Korea will be a fundamental element in understanding whether relations with Japan can be consolidated or not. Already in 2018 an agreement signed with Japan three years earlier on the compensation of comfort women it was canceled by progressive ex-President Moon, under pressure from popular protests.