hankyoreh

Chief Cabinet Secretary

By Gil Yun-hyung, Tokyo correspondent and Park Byong-su, senior staff writer

The Japanese government stridently criticized South Korea and China for joining together to open a memorial hall for Ahn Jung-gun in Harbin, China.

During a regular press briefing on Jan. 20, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga (who serves as spokesperson for the Japanese government) was asked about the opening of the memorial hall at Harbin Station, where Ahn carried out his historic deed. “The Japanese opinion of Ahn Jung-geun,” Suga said, “is that he is a terrorist who was sentenced to death for murdering Ito Hirobumi, our first prime minister.”

“It is extremely regrettable that this happened despite the fact that we have expressed our position to both South Korea and China on numerous occasions,” said Suga.

“Japan and South Korea have completely different attitudes about Ahn Jung-geun,” said the Chief Cabinet Secretary. “It is not helpful for the peace and stability of the region for South Korea and China to band together and take joint action based on a arbitrary assessment of something that took place a hundred years ago.”

Junichi Ihara, Director-General of the Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau at Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, placed calls to the South Korean and Chinese embassies in Tokyo on Jan. 19 to lodge a protest about the establishment of the memorial hall, the Hankyoreh confirmed.

Suga also provoked a fierce backlash from the South Korean government when he referred to Ahn as a “criminal” in Nov. 2013.

The attitude adopted by the Japanese government is strongly at odds with the general tone of the Japanese press. In their Jan. 20 editions, major newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun and the Yomiuri Shimbun called Ahn a “Korean independence fighter,” while even conservative papers like the Sankei Shimbun adopted neutral phraseology, referring to him as “Ahn Jung-geun from the Korean peninsula who assassinated Governor-General Ito.”

Rather than criticizing the governments of China and South Korea for opening the memorial hall, these papers focused on analyzing the reasons for these developments. “China appears to be trying to strengthen its ties with South Korea in terms of historical issues in order to crank up the pressure on Japan,” the Yomiuri Shimbun said.

The Sankei Shimbun reported that, “Initially, China had been reluctant to build a memorial statue to Ahn Jung-geun. Now, though, it is conceivable that the Chinese government did a quick about-face after Prime Minister Abe’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine and gave a green light.”

This is why it has been suggested that the Japanese government may be intentionally taking a hard line on the issue to counter pressure from South Korea and China, which have been cooperating on historical issues since Shinzo Abe paid his respects at Yasukuni. However, it appears that the Japanese government is paying more attention to its word choice than it did in Nov. 2013. This time around, they called Ahn a “terrorist” instead of a “criminal.”

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