hankyoreh

The Japan issue occupies a peculiar place in South Korea. To begin with, there is almost no difference in views between conservatives and progressives. Left and right alike have been unabating in their warnings and criticisms against Japan’s distorted perceptions of history, growing military role, and turn toward the far right. It may be the only thing South Korea’s left and right consistently agree on.

Ever since the Kim Young-sam administration, South Korean presidents have exhibited what is known as the “final years syndrome.” Everything goes well with Tokyo for the first few years, then year four rolls around and cold winds begin to blow. We’ve seen this time and time again. The Kim administration got off to a good start with a Nov. 1993 summit in Gyeongju, where then-Japanese Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa made an apology for his country’s past actions. But as conflict continued to rage over historical matters such as the Dokdo issue, the Kim government got a particularly lousy going-away present: Japan’s unilateral withdrawal from the Korea-Japan Fisheries Agreement and refusal to cooperate on the financial crisis of 1997.

The Kim Dae-jung administration also started things off auspiciously in 1998, joining then-Japanese prime minister Keizo Obuchi in declaring a “South Korea-Japan partnership for the 21st century.” But by 2001 things were back to square one, the gains undone by issues over approval of Japanese school textbooks and an August visit by then-prime minister Junichiro Koizumi to the Yasukuni Shrine, which commemorates Japanese war criminals. Next was President Roh Moo-hyun, who said he wouldn’t be picking any fights during his term. As the Dokdo issue raged, however, he ended up declaring a “merciless diplomatic war”.

When Lee Myung-bak was elected president, he also said he had no plans to demand apologies from Tokyo for past actions. Even he could not hold out, though. His calls for a sincere resolution to the comfort women issue at a Dec. 2011 summit meeting in Kyoto were met by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s demand that a peace monument in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul be taken down. This put a definitive end to the “smile diplomacy.” The cold currents continue to blow even now.

Why do we keep seeing Seoul and Tokyo going back and forth between warm and cold? In Japan, the suspicion is that our leaders are using anti-Japanese sentiment to boost their sagging support levels late in their administration. But if we look closely at the frictions that have came about since the Kim Young-sam administration, we can see that they mostly originated not on our side, but in Japan’s inability to escape the prison of its past. Recent years have been touch and go for Tokyo, with prime ministers coming and going in roughly one-year intervals. In the process, instances of narrow-mindedness in foreign affairs have become more and more frequent.

That being said, we would better off finding an answer ourselves. Our problem so far has been suffering from the outdated mind-set that characterized the 1965 Korea-Japan Basic Agreement. Believing that we would only suffer from fighting with our bigger neighbor, regardless of what happened in the past, we have always sought political stopgaps rather than a fundamental resolution. Another consistent theme has been the belief that Japan would surely respond in kind to a gesture of good faith on our part.

If we ever hope to get off this merry-go-round, we have to accept the inconvenient truth that relations with Tokyo will be a Sisyphean struggle so long as Japan does not change from its position that all past issues were fully and conclusively resolved in the black hole of the 1965 agreement. We need to keep the past separate from other issues, taking the dignified approach of cooperating and fighting where each is warranted.

In point of fact, recent rulings from our Constitutional Court (which found the government unconstitutional in its failure to act on the comfort women issue) and Supreme Court (which ruled that individual claims by people conscripted to serve Japan during the colonial area are still valid) show that there is no going back to patched-together political compromises on historical matters.

In the end, South Korea stands alongside Japan as one of the only two countries in Asia to be both democratic and economically successful. As nations that share common values, including human rights, we need to increase our cooperation toward a fully developed relationship, but we also face the difficult task of doing so without falling back on compromises on issues of history. We have to be willing to accept certain growing pains that go along with this.

The views presented in this column are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Hankyoreh.

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