hankyoreh

Park Tae-gyun

By Park Tae-gyun, dean of the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University

In his commemorative address for March 1 Independence Movement Day, South Korean President Moon Jae-in stressed the need to improve relations with Japan. Insisting that matters of history cannot be allowed to get in the way of bilateral cooperation toward the future, he emphasized the need to distinguish between historical matters and present concerns.

He was elucidating the most important principle when it comes to the future of South Korea-Japan relations. So does that mean history is not important?

For the sake of the future, it is crucial indeed that we resolve matters of history. The question is how we go about that.

With the past approach to resolving historical issues in South Korea-Japan relations, the issue has not been about postponing the resolution to a later date. Instead, it’s been a problem of unreasonably attempting to tie historical matters to present ones and resolve both of them together.

The 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations and the 2015 intergovernmental comfort women agreement could be seen as illustrative.

During the mid-1960s, the South Korean government needed to normalize its relations with Japan for the sake of rapid implementation of its economic growth policies, while the US needed the two sides to normalize their relationship so that it could resolve its security concerns and shift the South Korean aid burden over to Japan.

This was the purpose behind South Korea and Japan pursuing their Treaty on Basic Relations. Yet, they were unable to come to an agreement in their perceptions of the unfortunate past between them.

One particularly important issue is how agreements prior to 1945 (the year of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule) are defined. South Korea, which maintains that the Eulsa Treaty of 1905 and the Annexation Treaty of 1910 were both invalid from the outset, has been at odds with Japan and its insistence that they were only invalidated after Japan’s World War II defeat in 1945.

Representatives on both sides have deployed petty tactics, making announcements at home consistent with their position. Tokyo has said that the matter of compensation to individual victims of historical abuses was entirely resolved with the past agreement — but it could be seen as a contradiction in terms of having provided “compensation” while also declaring Japan’s colonization of Korea itself to have been lawful. Isn’t that the reason it used the unheard-of term “claim payments” instead of “compensation”?

The ruse it resorted to back then has continued to hamper any resolution to the historical issues between the two sides today.

We saw a repeat of the same situation with the comfort women agreement in 2015. Because of the rise of China and the North Korean nuclear issue, the US government wanted close cooperation between South Korea and Japan, and so those two governments announced an agreement to compensate survivors of wartime military sexual slavery.

But they could not reach an agreement in terms of their perceptions of the comfort women issue. Both before and after the agreement, the Japanese government continued to claim that it bore no responsibility for the comfort women system, insisting that it was an individual issue in which the Japanese government and military had not been directly involved.

It’s the same position seen recently in an academic paper written by a certain US Harvard Law School professor. Despite the claims that an “agreement has been reached,” the historical issues remain unresolved in practical terms, and relations between the two sides have only continued to sour.

At root, matters of history come down to reconciliation, with remorse on the part of the perpetrators and forgiveness on the part of the victims.

There needs to be a shared perception between perpetrators and victims alike that the things that happened in the past must not be allowed to happen again. That shared perception is the objective — not compensation. Are we to claim that monetary compensation alone should suffice if the same crimes are committed again in the future?

The problem is that when we say that historical issues need to be resolved as a precondition for resolving present-day issues — in the absence of any consensus in perceptions of history — that leaves us unable to make any progress at all with South Korea-Japan relations.

This explains what we saw during the last administration under Park Geun-hye, which insisted that it would not discuss present concerns without resolving historical matters. It then ended up suddenly announcing the comfort women agreement in 2015, incomprehensibly labeling it as “irreversible.”

Both sides need to be forthright. They need to acknowledge that the South Korean public and Japanese public do not share the same perceptions when it comes to matters of history.

It should be enough for them to cooperate in various areas to resolve more immediate issues, while also pledging to work toward sharing the same perceptions so that the unfortunate events of the past are never repeated. To ensure that this promise is kept, they should spell out the topics and content where the two governments differ in their perceptions.

They should also announce plans to establish a consensus between the two sides by pursuing concrete research on those topics and that content, with the findings to be included in both countries’ textbooks.

There is also something that South Korea needs to do first to forge a consensus with Japan on historical matters — and that is to resolve its own historical issues. As an MP from Britain’s Labour Party recently remarked, we need to address South Korea’s past involvement in areas such as the Vietnam War.

This would be a way of restoring the reputation of the veterans whose mobilization by the state turned them into perpetrators of violence. We can’t adopt the attitude of “it’s only fine when we’re the ones doing it.”

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]