hankyoreh

one day before Arbor Day

By Seong Yeon-cheol, Beijing correspondent

The so-called “Northeast Asia history wars,” pitting South Korea and China on one side against Japan on the other, hit full swing last December with a visit by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine.

Abe’s visit had the effect of tossing gasoline onto the long-smoldering embers of territorial conflicts with South Korea over Dokdo, and with China over the Senkaku Islands (known as the Diaoyu Islands in China). South Korea responded by expressing “indignation” over the “whitewashing of colonial rule and wars of invasion,” while China voiced its own strong dismay about the “open affront to historical justice and human sensibility.”

During her address to commemorate the March 1 Independence Movement holiday, President Park Geun-hye took aim at the rightward lurch from Tokyo, including attempts to overturn the Peace Constitution and repudiate the 1993 Kono Statement apologizing to victims of wartime sexual enslavement.

“If [Japan] does not acknowledge its errors and the historical truth, it will only isolate itself,” Park said in the address.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Yun Byung-se sounded a similar note speaking at the United Nations Human Rights Council the same month, saying that Japan’s “denial of the 1993 Kono Statement acknowledging the forced mobilization of military ‘comfort women’ tramples on the dignity of all the world’s comfort women survivors.”

Meanwhile, China has been ramping up its own pushback against the Abe administration on historical matters, with its Foreign Ministry even referring to Japan as “the devil” in one official briefing. In January and February, it waged a campaign to alert the international community to the atrocities committed under Japanese militarism, inviting reporters to visit the 9.18 Incident Exhibition Museum in Shenyang and the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall.

President Xi Jinping issued his own unusually strongly worded public criticisms of Japan on Mar. 28 during a visit to Germany, declaring that “35 million Chinese were killed or wounded in militarist Japan’s war of invasion, with over 300,000 Chinese massacred by the Japanese military in Nanjing.”

The history war has also resulted in closer coordination between South Korea and China as past victims of Japanese militarism. On Jan. 19, China officially opened a memorial to Korean independence activist Ahn Jung-geun at Harbin Station in China, the site of his 1909 shooting of former Japanese Prime Minister and Resident-General of Korea Hirobumi Ito. South Korea sent a message of approval to China, while Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga declared that “Ahn Jung-geun was a criminal, and the memorial is a memorial to a terrorist.” The Chinese government responded by calling Ahn an “illustrious martyr in the resistance against Japanese rule who is esteemed in China as well.”

In March, Chinese authorities delivered Japanese military figures to the South Korean media showing that Korean “comfort women” had been forcibly mobilized according to Japan’s National Mobilization Law. Another example of coordination came on Apr. 2, when the family members and attorneys of Korean conscriptees appeared in court where Chinese victims of conscription were claiming damages from a Japanese company.

Throughout the process, Japan has been needling South Korea and Japan with repeated denials of historical responsibility. At one point, Katsuto Momii, director-general of the NHK network and a close associate of Abe, declared that there was “no evidence that comfort women were forcibly mobilized, and no Nanjing Massacre.”

Analysts see the root cause of the conflict as Japan’s overreaction to being marginalized, with Abe and other right-wingers exploiting the public’s fears about the stagnant economy and being surpassed by China. Fueling the conflict is the collision between this approach and the forceful diplomatic approach of Xi, who has been calling for a “great revival of the Chinese people.”

On condition of anonymity, a diplomatic expert in Beijing expressed pessimism about a resolution coming any time soon.

“As these historical conflicts connect with territorial issues like Dokdo and the Senkaku Islands, where neither side feels any compromise is possible, it becomes more and more likely this will drag out into the long term,” the expert said.

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