By Kang Hyun-kyung
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has rejected Seoul’s call on a Japanese cabinet minister to withdraw his controversial remarks on Korea’s easternmost islets, making bilateral ties sour.
Speaking to a parliamentary session, Noda brushed Korea off Thursday over its call for Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba to take back his comments that he would be firm in saying what Japan cannot accept on the issue of Dokdo.
South Korea protested and asked us to withdraw his remarks, but our position is clear that we are not going to do so, Prime Minister Noda said.
Japan’s tough stance on the Dokdo islets, which have become a source of diplomatic tension for several decades as the two sides both claim their sovereignty, came amid media reports that Noda may call a snap election to seek a breakthrough in a sales tax proposal.
His drive to push for doubling the sales tax to 10 percent by October 2015 to help fund Japan’s soaring social welfare programs didn’t receive enough support from parliament. Recent public opinion polls have seen his ratings fall sharply.
The circumstantial evidence has prompted some analysts to speculate that election politics could be behind the Japanese prime minister’s stance.
They said it is common that leaders get tough on foreign policy in an election year.
Recently, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is seeking the top job in this year’s presidential election, ratcheted up rhetoric against the United States, an apparent move to garner support from voters.
“The United States wants to control everything and takes decisions unilaterally on key questions,” he was quoted as saying by Bloomberg on Thursday in the Siberian city of Tomsk.
Analysts say France’s recent passage of the so-called genocide law is a good example of how election politics in full swing can deal a blow to bilateral relations with a neighbor.
On Monday, the French parliament approved the bill to make it a crime to deny that the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks nearly a century ago constituted genocide.
The controversial legislation drew the ire of Turkey as it suspended military, economic and political ties.
Experts say the passage of the genocide bill came as French President Nicholas Sarkozy is seeking to garner the votes of some 500,000 Armenians in France ahead of the presidential runoff this spring.
Valerie Boyer, a French lawmaker who wrote the bill was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that politicians are supposed to pass laws they think their constituents want.
China will see Xi Jinping as its new leader to replace President Hu Jintao this year.
Asked if such a leadership change could affect Korea’s ties with China, Bonnie Glaser, a senior fellow of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said she didn’t expect that would happen.
“I don’t see much in common between democratic societies (at least nations with popular elections that choose their leaders) and the system in China,” she said.
“Considerations of leaders running for office in France won’t help to understand the considerations of Chinese leaders. That said, of course the new Chinese leadership will seek to bolster public support.”
The China expert said being too tough and souring relations with its neighbors would be a bad approach. “The Chinese are still recovering from their mistakes in 2010.”
Glaser didn’t specify what mistakes she was referring to but is construed as meaning China’s assertiveness shown in the diplomatic row with Japan over the Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea.