This is third and the last in a series of articles highlighting Japan’s wartime crimes and their impact on Seoul-Tokyo relations as well as on East Asia.—ED.
By Chung Min-uck
Seoul and Tokyo held talks Friday after the two sides locked horns over sensitive historical issues that even raised U.S. diplomatic concerns. The flurry of talks stirred up speculation that the diplomatic spat was cooling down.
Shin Kak-soo, the South Korean ambassador to Japan, met a senior Japanese official to discuss bilateral ties while Ahn Ho-young, first vice foreign minister, also held talks with Japanese Ambassador to South Korea Masatoshi Muto.
Despite the bilateral efforts, the diplomatic row could flare up at any time in the future as differences over historical issues remained unresolved.
Korean experts say Japan holds the key to preventing the resurfacing of sour Seoul-Tokyo ties on the same issues, noting the root cause of the recurrence of tensions between the two sides is post-Cold War negotiations.
“Unlike in the case of Germany, the combined incidents of the Soviet Union creating an alliance with the newly established communist People’s Republic of China (in 1949), the outbreak of the Korean War (in 1950), the U.S. attempt to fully punish Imperial Japan, led to a shift in direction to forge a series of anti-communist alliances including with Japan,” said Doh See-hwan, a research fellow at the state-run Northeast Asian History Foundation. “In turn, Japan was absolved of its wartime and colonial blame to become one of Washington’s key allies.”
The San Francisco Peace Treaty, the post-World War II settlement with Japan, was signed in 1951 in the background of the ongoing Korean War (1950-1953) sowing seeds of problems that linger until now in the East Asia region.
Neither the North nor South Korea was included when signing the treaty. A South Korean diplomat asking not to be named said such a result was influenced by Japan’s then vice foreign minister who had lobbied Washington to keep the two Koreas out of the post-war treaty claiming its occupation of the Korean Peninsula was legitimate.
Through the treaty Japan regained its sovereignty, re-establishing itself as a global economic and political power. Records show it also rehabilitated many war criminals to their former political and government positions.
However, the Cold War logic does not fully explain why the Japanese were not punished as severely as the German Nazis for their wartime crimes.
According to an essay “Researching Japanese War Crimes Records” published by the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in 2006, the U.S. government protected some Japanese medical officers from punishment in exchange for data on human experimentation.
It writes “Japanese war criminals were not punished. Perhaps the most notorious was Gen. Shiro Ishii of Unit 731 who escaped postwar prosecution in exchange, apparently, for supplying the U.S. government with details of his gruesome human experiments.”
Ishii was a Japanese microbiologist and lieutenant-general of the notorious unit, a biological warfare section of the Imperial Japanese Army in charge of human experimentation.
Records show that Ishii and other members of the unit were granted immunity from war-crime prosecution in 1946 before the Tokyo trials.
The NARA report also says convicted Class A war criminals such as Mamoru Shigemitsu, a senior diplomat and foreign minister during the war years, was able to regain his position in 1954 without being indicted under the U.S. occupation.
“The Allied Forces were less strict in punishing war criminals compared to Germany,” said Doh. “Japan took full advantage of the Cold War situation by teaming up with the U.S. It also laid the groundwork to its current claim that Japan is relieved of legal liability through the treaty and compensation made to the victims. After that the claims comes from a mere humanitarian perspective.”
Taking into account the abnormal post-war circumstances, critics say Seoul should press Tokyo to face up to its history to make a fundamental breakthrough in volatile relations by shedding new light on the post-war exceptions.