Japan South Korea Relations Research Articles

Discourse, Public Space, and Politics Regarding the Issue of Korean "Comfort Women": Implications for East Asia Relations

The issue of “comfort women,” sex slaves utilized by the Japanese army during World War II, is treated in this paper as a collective memory in the consciousness of South Koreans. This serves as the underlying basis for increased present tensions between the governments of South Korea and Japan. To understand the complexity of these painful experiences as a collective memory requires a discussion on the impact of colonization as well as on contemporary problems regarding a whitewashing of history and the utilization of public space for the memorialization of these women. The result of these factors is the exacerbation of tension between the South Korean and Japanese governments, mainly due to a widely perceived belief within South Korea regarding the Japanese government’s reluctance to engage in transparent discussions regarding history. This tension will likely impact cooperation between the two countries on issues in East Asia. The paper not only seeks to examine Japan-South Korea relations, but to emphasize the importance of focusing the narrative on the individual women who were subjected to such atrocities.

Syncronization of History Reconciliation and Security Policy in South Korea-Japan Relations: Conditions and Challenges for Two-track Approach

Syncronization of History Reconciliation and Security Policy in South Korea-Japan Relations: Conditions and Challenges for Two-track Approach

South Korea and Japan since World War II: Between Ideological Discord and Pragmatic Cooperation

Since the end of World War II, relations between South Korea and Japan have gone through significant changes – from distant and hostile in the 1950s, to cooperative and increasingly close through about 2005, to the last decade of serious deterioration. Three frameworks are used to understand change and continuity in South Korea–Japan relations: a realist perspective emphasizing either structural military power relations or “revealed” patterns of military threat; an institutional perspective that emphasizes similarities or differences in political institutions; and an ideological regime‐type perspective that includes ideologies as well as institutions as influences on government or leadership preferences. The third framework captures two types of ideological factors that have exerted significant influences on South Korea–Japan relations: the existence of a small range of competitive ideological regime types or government types specifying national ideals and national development roadmaps; and historical legacies of intense conflict, which tend to produce ideological and diversionary frictions that cause conflict to persist or recur. Only the last factor, the history issue, is readily subject to policy control: the best way forward to restore cooperative and stable relations is for South Korean and Japanese leaders to agree informally on truthful and empathetic norms governing historical judgments, and for Japanese political and opinion elites to agree informally to marginalize those that defy such norms.

The role of Japan’s civil society organizations and the deteriorating relationship between Japan and South Korea

In recent years, the process of reconciliation between South Korea and Japan has been going backwards, at both governmental and societal levels. Previous studies, including those from historical, realist, and domestic perspectives, have attributed this to government-level actions only. This study, however, treats civil society as an active agent and scrutinizes evolving South Korea–Japan relations through the prism of cooperation/conflict between Japan’s civil society and its government. Cases involving forced sex slaves and history textbooks will be used to examine how Japan’s civil society affects policies on postwar issues, or to discover the reasons for their limited influence. Because such structural factors as the Japanese government’s control over civil society and civil society’s restricted influence on government cannot be changed rapidly, this study recommends that civil society organizations in each country form a transnational civil society as an alternative way to create solidarity and give meaning to Japanese civil society’s past efforts at reconciliation.

North Korea in South Korea–Japan relations as a source of mutual security anxiety among democratic societies

When Kim Dae-jung and Koizumi Junichiro visited Pyongyang in 2000 and 2002, their visits facilitated a perception shift toward North Korea in South Korea and Japan. This was a consequence of the two democratic societies expanding and redefining the acceptable boundaries of their national security identities and principles in a changing regional environment. Although the expansion of societal security discourse did not lead extreme ‘revisionists’ to implement drastic strategic policy transformations in either country, it did provoke a ‘mutual security anxiety’ between the South Korean and Japanese publics, as they felt increasingly uncertain about each other's future security trajectory. This mutual anxiety, in which both countries tend to view each other as potential security risk, while overlooking the existence of moderate democratic citizens on the other side, continues to provide a powerful ideational undertone to the bilateral relationship, which contributes to persistent misunderstanding at various levels.

The Yasukuni question: histories, logics, and Japan–South Korea relations

This article argues that the problem of the Yasukuni Shrine between Japan and South Korea stems from the differential growth of Yasukuni discourses in both countries after the Pacific War. While the Japanese post-war discourse split into three schools of thought – Nationalists, Moderates, and Progressives – South Korean discourse has been consolidated into one dominant anti-Yasukuni perspective, largely shaped by Japan's political discourse and actions from the 1980s. This divergence created the perception gap between the two, resulting in a diplomatic obstacle that hinders Japan--South Korea strategic cooperation.

The Kishi Effect: A Political Genealogy of Japan-ROK Relations

The severe deterioration in South Korea-Japan relations under Abe Shinzo and Park Geun-hye seems paradoxical given that Abe's grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke, and Park's father, Park Chung-hee, were who helped forge Japan-South normalization in 1965. However, Abe and Park are better understood as operating within nationalist conservative logic that brought their families together but now drives their countries apart. KEYWORDS: Korea-Japan relations, Kishi Nobusuke, Abe Shinzo, Park Chung-hee, Park Geun-hye, Manchukuo, Korea-Japan normalization, conservative nationalism.WHEN PRIME MINISTER ABE SHINZO VISITED WASHINGTON AFTER returning to power in 2013, he was asked to reflect on frayed state of Japan's relations with Seoul. met President-elect Park Geun-hye twice before, and had a meal with her actually, he answered. And then, her father President Park Chung-hee was close friends with my grandfather. President Park Chung-hee was pro-Japan. . . . Although we do have Takeshima issue [the territorial dispute over islands known to Koreans as Dokdo], I would like to try to work to resolve these issues and have a good relationship with Korea (Abe 2013). Abe's maternal grandfather Kishi Nobusuke and Park's father were indeed close political allies. Abe assumed, as did many onlookers, that this deep family bond would help bring Tokyo and Seoul closer.Yet quite opposite occurred in first two years after Abe and Park took power in early 2013. Indeed, two leaders refused to set foot in other's country, and only met when it was virtually impossible not to-on sidelines of 2014 Nuclear Security Summit, for example, when US president Barack Obama leaned hard on both allies to sit side by side (they sat with him in between). South Korea-Japan relations went into a kind of deep freeze, one of worst periods since normalization in 1965. Abe seemed to South Koreans to be going out of his way to antagonize them: undercutting validity of Kono and Murayama statements of apology for wartime sexual slavery- even as number of elderly Korean comfort women dwindled, arguing in Diet that the definition of aggression has yet to be established, and visiting Yasukuni, where Class A war criminals are enshrined. Park was depicted as attacking Abe behind his back in her meetings with world leaders, and books on why Koreans are anti-Japanese lined shelves of Japanese bookstores.As relationship deteriorated, it was also notable that neither leader seemed terribly distraught over it. Abe and Park's foreign policy priorities clearly lay elsewhere in Asia. Park's primary goal was to improve relations with Beijing, while Abe made a big push to strengthen political and economic ties in Southeast Asia- including Australia and Taiwan. Nearer to home, Abe confounded observers by engaging Pyongyang in a bold effort to resolve issue of Japanese nationals abducted by North Korean agents- even openly stating his willingness to meet with Kim Jong-un if necessary. Park for her part also indicated she was open to visiting Pyongyang for what would be third inter-Korean summit, while simultaneously stating she saw no reason to go to Tokyo for a summit with Abe.Kim Jong-un meanwhile was keeping a distance from his country's traditional ally, China, and Xi Jinping displayed palpable annoyance at young North Korean leader (despite bond established in 1980s between Xi's father, Xi Zhongxun, and Kim's grandfather, Kim Il-sung). To make matters stranger still, Xi hosted Park with great fanfare on a state visit to Beijing in June 2013 and then made a reciprocal state visit to Seoul following year. The traditional structure of international relations in Northeast Asia seemed to have jumped down rabbit hole, and turned upside down.In light of prominent family histories of Northeast Asia's leaders, in particular friendship between Kishi and Park, these counterintuitive shifts in alignments call for taking a deeper look into legacies passed on from their forebears. …

The Abe Effect on South Korea’s Trade Policy

Prime Minister Shinzo's decision to enter talks on the Trans- Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been a game changer in the competition over Asia Pacific free trade agreements (FTAs). His move helped to create a space for multilateral, mega-FTA competition before South Korea could fully prepare and implement its FTA predicated on bilateral deals. In this article, I provide an overview of South Korea's evolving strategies toward FTAs and explore how it has responded to the Abe effect. My focus is on two challenges for South Korea in participating in the TPP: US geopolitical pressure once Japan entered negotiations, and the de facto FTA negotiations with Japan under the TPP. Dealing with Japan is an especially tall order given the troubled history of South Korea-Japan economic and political relations. KEYWORDS: Korea-Japan relations, TPP, Shinzo, strategy, security-economy nexus.WHEN ABE SHINZO RETURNED TO POWER IN DECEMBER 2012, FEW people expected that Japan-South Korea relations would hit their lowest mark since diplomatic relations between them were restored in 1965. Instead of celebrating joint accomplishments of the past five decades, the two sides attempted to improve their severely strained relations, which included failure to hold a oneon- one summit meeting since took office. History conflicts emanating from Abe's historical revisionism in regard to imperialism and colonialism have been the primary source of political strains. While South Korea's president Park Geun-hye has demanded a more explicit apology from Japan on the history issues, such as the Imperial Army's enslavement of so-called comfort women, in Japan a view is gaining strength that it has apologized enough. Increasing enmity is reflected in public opinion surveys, such as one by the East Asia Institute and Genron NPO in spring 2014. It found that nearly 70 percent of South Koreans have a negative image of Japan, while 66 percent of Japanese have an unfavorable image of Korea (East Asia Institute 2014). This trend will most likely continue throughout 2015 because, as John Delury's article in this volume argues, the odds of genuine reconciliation between and Park are very low.Abe's return to power has also made an economic impact. The best example is his decision to enter TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) negotiations on March 15, 2013, significantly affecting South Korea's trade strategy that sought middle-power leadership as a of regional and transregional free trade agreement (FTA) networks. Abe's decision means that Japan supports the TPP, the US initiative in regional trade architecture, and helps to enhance the TPP's credibility and viability as a mega-regional trade agreement within the US coalition-building strategy (Terada 2013). Abe's move prompted China's response to accelerate the pace of devising alternative FTA networks. And it created strategic dilemmas for South Korea. Because the United States, together with Japan, has taken the initiative in forging regional trade networks through the TPP while China is counterbalancing it, the FTA game is now about creating (or multilateralizing) a regional or megaregional FTA. This is a blow to South Korea's FTA hub strategy predicated on bilateral FTAs with the major economies.My article explores how South Korea has responded to the challenges caused by the major economic powers. After providing an overview of South Korea's evolving strategies toward FTAs as an FTA latecomer, I examine the country's policy toward the TPP. I then analyze the Abe effect on South Korea's global strategy. The new dilemmas facing South Korea on TPP participation are twofold. It felt strong US geopolitical pressure once Japan entered the negotiations. But should South Korea enter the FTA negotiations, it would have to deal with a difficult Japan.The Rise of South Korea in the FTA GameFTAs and the Hub Strategy in East AsiaEast Asian countries embarked on FTA initiatives in response to economic globalization, the Asian financial crisis, and competitive regionalism. …

Japanese Military Comfort Women and South Korea-Japan Relations: With a Focus on the 1990s

Japanese Military Comfort Women and South Korea-Japan Relations: With a Focus on the 1990s

Middle Powers and the Rise of China: ‘Identity Norms’ of Dependency and Activism and the Outlook for Japan–South Korea Relationsvis-à-visthe Great Powers

AbstractHow do state identities and their accompanying norms affect security behaviour especially when states consider forming alliances or alignments? Are middle powers different from great powers in their security norms and preferences? This article identifiesdependencyandactivismas two ‘identity norms’ that constitute and reproduce medium-sized states asbona fidemiddle powers. This article argues that, due to the identity norms of a middle power, Japan and South Korea are reluctant to form a bilateral alliance between themselves and their efforts to socialize with China do not necessarily contradict their security relationships with the United States. The first section focuses on the norm of dependency to illustrate whether Japan and South Korea sought to strengthen bilateral alignment in the event of major security crises, provoked by China and North Korea. It argues that a middle power is not disposed to strengthen alignment with another middle power in the event of a national security crisis because of its entrenched norm of dependency on a great power. The second section elaborates the norm of middle power activism. Both Japan and South Korea have engaged in diplomatic efforts to enmesh China in a number of multilateral security mechanisms in order to hedge against the relative decline of US influences in East Asia.

Media Discourse on the Japanese History Textbook Controversy of 1982 From the Perspective of Foreign Policy and Media Frame

This paper’s purpose is to consider a media-foreign policy nexus on the history perception issues of Japan-South Korea relations. Previous studies demonstrate that the media tends to cover the pronouncements of political elites and that the media faces certain difficulties when covering secret foreign policy processes. This proves that the media has a negligible effect on the foreign policy process. However, in terms of a linkage between foreign and domestic politics, the media more likely focuses on public opinion in its coverage of foreign policy. With regard to Japan–Korea relations, previous studies indicated the importance of the media in the issue of history perception. This paper focuses on the Japanese history textbook controversy of 1982 and examines how the media covered the debate from the perspective of justification.

Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era by Tessa Morris-Suzuki (review)

Reviewed by: Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era by Tessa Morris-Suzuki Youngmi Lim (bio) Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era, by Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xi, 286 pages, illustrations, maps, references, index. $99.00 cloth, $36.99 paper. The year 2012 witnessed increased tensions between South Korea and Japan over the disputed sovereignty of the islets of Dokdo/Takeshima. The generally amicable relationship between the two nations rests on unsettled debates, though. Japan's colonization, war responsibilities, and the territorial sovereignty of Dokdo/Takeshima are the major simmering issues. Regardless of how thoroughly the Japanese have embraced South Korean popular icons, these debates and tensions have had a cooling effect on South Korea-Japan relations. A movement of revisionist history around since the mid-1990s and xenophobic Internet-based activism in the 2000s have vehemently denied Japan's responsibility for war and colonization. Contemporary Japanese anti-Korean sentiments represent the die-hard legacy of colonial and postcolonial racial hierarchies and the bungled handling of postwar and postcolonization political affairs. The surfacing of dormant historical and territorial disputes with South Korea has triggered outbreaks of public displays of anti-Korean racism in Japan. Tessa Morris-Suzuki's 2010 monograph, Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era, should interest those who study Korea-Japan relations, the Korean minority population in Japan, and the construction and contour of Japanese and Korean collective identities during a period of aging populations and projected labor shortages in Japan and in South Korea. Scholars concerned with the development of border controls and immigration policy in twenty-first century East Asia will also benefit from Morris-Suzuki's critical analysis of the formative period of Japan's contemporary immigration control. The author presents bottom-up narratives about the effects of Cold War politics on the origins of Japan's post-World War II border control system and individual lives stranded in legal limbo by revisiting the geopolitical conditions of the Korean peninsula and Japan following Japan's defeat and the Allied occupation of Japan and Korea. Placing individual narratives of detained Korean illegal migrants, border-control officers, and policy-makers in the context of broader political and ideological forces when the Iron Curtain was just about to be drawn tight, this volume provides readers with a critical guide to contemporary issues that complicate the relationship between Japan and both Koreas. Based on exhaustive archival research in Japan, Korea, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, and Switzerland, as well as in-depth [End Page 149] interviews with undocumented, "irregular," Korean migrants in Japan and secondary sources such as newspaper articles and personal memoirs, Morris-Suzuki elucidates how Japan's contemporary border-control system was established in response to the particular historical circumstances of Cold-War-ridden East Asian geopolitics. She reports on resistance in popular discourse and among policy makers to proposals to overcome Japan's economic malaise through increased immigration (chap. 9). This volume thus situates Japanese border policies in a broader context of the marginalization of ethnic minorities and immigrant laborers so ubiquitously observed during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The immediate postwar period marks a critical juncture: Japan had lost her colonies, including Taiwan, Korea, and the southern half of Sakhalin, as well as the puppet state of Manchukuo. Hastily redrawn national boundaries (pp. 28-32) decisively influenced displaced individuals' fates—especially those of Koreans. Japan's colonial rule had provoked large-scale Korean population movements across East Asia, mainly for survival or Japanese war mobilization, but with the drawing of new borders they often found themselves "stranded on the wrong side of the line" (p. 33). It was part of a vast imposition of impassable national borders drawn between Japan and Korea, Japan and Okinawa, and Japan and China, and between ideologically divided Koreas and Chinas. New borders made the movement across these boundaries impossible for ordinary people. Morris-Suzuki challenges two commonly held assumptions: (1) Japanese exceptionalism among industrialized nations in receiving its immigrant labor force and (2) hierarchical categorizations reflecting contemporary national-border-crossing practices. It has often been assumed that...

The United States between Japan and Korea: keeping alliances strong in East Asia

Abstract Japan and the Republic of Korea are the United States' two most important allies in East Asia. Although U.S. alliances with those countries have succeeded in maintaining peace and stability in Northeast Asia, it is not clear how effective they would prove to be should they be tested by a major incident originating, say, in North Korea, because South Korea-Japan relations are troublesome. The issues that divide these two countries, based on strong and long-standing emotional attitudes that are resistant to change, largely revolve around Korean perceptions that the Japanese have not sufficiently recognized and apologized for past aggression against their neighbors during the first half of the twentieth century. For its part, the United States can improve trilateral relations by avoiding foreign policy decisions that make other countries nervous, such as decisions based on the principle of preemptive attack. A resumption of trilateral security dialogue is also needed. The U.S. alliances with Japan a...

Taking the 'taken-for-grantedness' seriously: problematizing Japan's perception of Japan-South Korea relations

Taking the 'taken-for-grantedness' seriously: problematizing Japan's perception of Japan-South Korea relations

Systemic Lock: The Institutionalization of History in Post- 1965 South Korea–Japan Relations

AbstractLegal and diplomatic guidelines for relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK) have been in place since the Treaty of Normalization and accompanying Agreements of June 1965. Tokyo and Seoul have also cultivated extensive economic ties. Since 1965, Japan has been a major supplier of technology and capital for Korea, while Korea has consistently been among the top four export markets for Japan. Unlike relations between other neighboring countries in Asia (such as China and Vietnam, Vietnam and Cambodia, China and India, India and Pakistan, or South and North Korea), there have been no wars or military conflicts between South Korea and Japan since 1945.

North Korea and South Korea-Japan Relations

North Korea and South Korea-Japan Relations

North Korea's Relations with Japan Since Detente

THE EASING OF tensions in East Asia since the 197I visit of Richard Nixon to Peking and Japan's diplomatic normalization with China in I972 has brought significant changes in North Korea's relations with Japan.* Though they are not yet normalized, the impact of detente has been great enough to raise hopes of eventual normalization. Such a development could significantly affect such crucial issues as the status of two Koreas, South Korea-Japan relations, and North Korean policies toward China and the Soviet Union. The coming of detente presented a dilemma for Japan because of the conflicting interests involved in dealing with North Korea. On the one hand, the Japanese government has to reckon with the increasing pressure from North Korea and from Japan's opposition parties for early normalization. It must also consider the attitudes of China and the Soviet Union, with which Japan has been endeavoring to improve her relations, for a persistent hostile or intransigent attitude on the part of Japan toward North Korea could be viewed by both China and the Soviet Union as a revival of Japanese militarism and colonialism. On the other hand, considering Japan's economic interests in South Korea (with a total investment of $2.012 million, some $6.2 billion of surplus resulting from Japan's trade with South Korea over the past ten years)1 and her national security ties with South Korea, she can not disregard South Korea's strong disapproval of Japan's flexible policy toward North Korea. Japan's basic policy of seikei bunri (separation of politics from trade),2 which has been intended to maximize her interest in and involvement with both Koreas, has not been satisfactory to either North or South Korea. Both have charged that such a policy could perpetuate Korea's division and aid one against the other. In essence,