Chosun Ilbo:
 A Fresh Start in Ties With Japan?

In a speech marking the 89th anniversary of the March 1 Independence Movement against Japan’s colonial rule on Saturday, President Lee Myung-bak said, “Although we must never neglect the truth of history, we cannot let the past drag the journey toward the future.” Even before he was formally sworn in as president, Lee said he did not want to keep telling Japan to apologize and repent. He said while Japan has yet to offer a genuine apology that will move the hearts of Koreans, he expected the island country to engage in a more mature level of diplomacy. Lee was saying that he is willing to look to the future rather than the past.

Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun in their day made similar comments. During a visit to Tokyo in 1998, Kim announced a Korea-Japan Partnership Joint Declaration in a bid to overcome problems involving the shared history between the two countries. At a summit with former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi in 2004, Roh said he would refrain during his term from raising issues involving Japan’s glossing over of its atrocities during World War II.

But Japan keeps glossing over its wartime atrocities in school texts, and the country’s Shimane Prefecture designated a special day to commemorate its ownership of Korea’s Dokdo Islets. And the Japanese government refuses even to acknowledge the women who were forced into sexual slavery by the imperial military during World War II. Koizumi also kept paying his respects at the militarist Yasukuni Shrine that honors convicted war criminals from World War II, despite protests from Korea and China. Less than a year after his meeting with Koizumi, Roh changed his mind and said he was willing to wage a “diplomatic war” against Japan.

At the time, Roh pledged to get to the bottom of this problem once and for all. There has even been a Korean president who vowed to teach Japan a lesson. But the result is invariably that Japan behaves the same way it has always done, and the problem remains. Roh attempted to register a Korean name for the waters surrounding Dokdo, but quietly gave up the effort after Japan countered by surveying those waters.

Japan won’t change drastically simply because Korea inaugurated a new president. We will continue to see comments by Japanese officials about Dokdo, history texts, Yasukuni and the sex slaves that will anger Koreans. Lee’s announcement will be put to the test every time such comments are made.

Japan is totally different from Germany. It is impossible to turn Japan into a kind of Asian Germany by the force of goodwill and idealism of one side alone. China has its own historical grudges against Japan, plus a geographical dispute as well. But it is opening a new honeymoon in diplomatic relations with Japan. That strategic decision was possible because the Chinese people have become confident that their country will overtake Japan in terms of power. Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda visited China recently and told Peking University students the two countries should pursue a shared future through mutual cooperation, international contribution, mutual understanding and trust. As long as China continues to make its enormous strides, Japan will have no choice but to quickly become like Germany at least before the Chinese. The new Korean government must face that reality and the intrinsic nature of Korea-Japan relations, and look to the future of bilateral ties with that in mind.

(March 3, 2008)