hankyoreh

Nam Ki-jeong, professor at SNU’s Institute for Japanese Studies.

Though itself a product of the Supreme Court’s ruling on compensation for victims of Japan’s wartime forced labor, the “solution” put forth by Korea’s current administration last week contained no traces of the ruling. In fact, the plan nullified the ruling, which called for victims to be compensated on the premise of the illegality of colonial rule. This can be described as nothing short of a disaster.

The “solution” followed the framework set by the Japanese government, which pressured the South Korean government to take sole initiative to resolve what Tokyo alleged to be violations of international law committed by Korea’s judiciary. As such, negotiations with Japan were not included as part of this plan. The plan also failed to materialize into the “grand bargain” that President Yoon Suk-yeol had once called for. This proposal cannot be called a diplomatic disaster. It’s simply a disaster.

So why did things turn out this way? A litany of misperceptions and bad decisions is to blame.

Yoon has long held that the former Moon Jae-in administration holds complete responsibility for the deterioration of South Korea-Japan relations. Never has he uttered a single word about the accountability of Shinzo Abe’s administration in Japan, which threatened the economic rights of Koreans through strict export control measures. Instead, he argued that the impasse in bilateral ties had gotten to this point due to Korea’s militancy on historical issues with Japan. But these arguments collapse on themselves.

Japan's export control measures were implemented because of the Supreme Court ruling? The Japanese government itself denies this. Was our Supreme Court ruling wrong? The Supreme Court ruling was a reasonable judicial ruling made based on the spirit of the Constitution and the government's position on the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between South Korea and Japan. In reality, the 2018 Supreme Court ruling at the center of this issue only finalized a previous ruling given in 2012, when Lee Myung-bak was in the Blue House.

The Yoon administration also called the “Korean Peninsula peace process” promoted by his predecessor a “failure,” choosing to change course and strengthen trilateral security cooperation between South Korea, the US, and Japan.

In reality, however, the South Korean government’s status has fallen and its negotiating power has weakened as a result of the South Korea-US alliance being incorporated as a subordinate alliance under the broader frame of the US-Japan alliance.

Japan, which tried to intervene in the Korean Peninsula peace process, accused the Korean government of violating international law and pushed it to change the status quo. While the Yoon administration may have wanted to use the US as leverage against Japan, US pressure ended up being directed at South Korea instead.

As US leverage began pointing in the wrong direction as a result of South Korea making wrong decisions and throwing away all its negotiating options with Japan, the disaster on March 6 became increasingly predictable. This all occurred due to mistaken perceptions held by the current government.

But there had been signs. When Prime Minister Han Duck-soo attended Abe’s state funeral on Sept. 27 last year, he made several foreboding remarks at a press conference.

By saying of the impending liquidation of Japanese assets ordered by courts that “it is true that something that would usually be difficult to understand took place when looked at from an international law perspective,” he practically sided with the Japanese government’s position.

On that same day, former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga read a eulogy that alluded to the feelings of Aritomo Yamagata when he was mourning the death of Hirobumi Ito.

Yamagata was the founding father of Japan's geopolitics, with its principles of the line of sovereign power and line of advantage, while Ito materialized these policies until he was shot dead by Korean independence activist An Jung-geun. For Japan, international law was an effective tool for taming Korea. It also proved useful as a front for Japanese aggression.

The perceptions held by both Yamagata and Ito continued seeping into Japan's perception of the Korean Peninsula after the war.

Shigeru Yoshida, who is considered to have laid the foundation for postwar Japan’s pacifist constitution system, actually regarded Ito as the politician he respected most and praised his discernment for trying to take control of the Korean Peninsula to ensure Japan's safety from continental forces such as Russia and the Qing in China.

For Yoshida, the Korean War was a godsend while the normalization of South Korea-Japan relations was supported behind the scenes to maintain the status quo on the Korean Peninsula.

Now, geopolitics is once again in vogue in Japan, reminiscent of the early Meiji period. It’s a word that has long been taboo after Japan's defeat in its war of aggression, which was a result of Meiji geopolitics. In the end, the theory of the “Far East 1905 system” emerged.

As a result of the Russo-Japanese War, the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan were roped into one bloc with Japan and formed a power-balancing system in East Asia. Due to Japan’s defeat, however, the system became reorganized around the US in the wake of the Korean War.

With this, the “Far East 1905 system” is not a relic of the past but an entity in which the US-Japan and South Korea-US alliances operate as one system. Here, the fact that Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula is seen as something that was “unavoidable.”

After the administration revealed its “solution” to the Supreme Court’s ruling, there has been talk in Japan of reorganizing command and control structures in the event of an emergency on the Korean Peninsula. Some argue that since there is no room for Tokyo to intervene under the current ROK-US Combined Forces Command system, Japan should have a place at the table during any planning stages, considering the level of risk Japan would face in case of an emergency on the peninsula.

It's difficult to hear people say to not get caught up on the past but look at the future and brush off all that has happened. It’s dangerous, and we must be cautious.

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