Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is making brisk, almost unabashed efforts to put his country back in the global limelight. “I am back, and so Japan shall be,” he told a Washington think tank Friday.
And Abe is trying to accomplish this by going back to the U.S. embrace after what was seen as a brief aberration. There is nothing strange about the two nations reaffirming their decades-long ties in the face of an emerging China.
In principle, foreigners can seldom oppose Japan playing a political, and even a military, role congruous with its status as the world’s third-largest economy. But does Tokyo think it has earned enough moral credentials to do so from foreign partners, especially its Asian neighbors, before asking it from an ally across the Pacific and its World War II enemy?
Germany has repeatedly apologized and compensated for its historical crimes against Jews, and Great Britain also admitted to its massacre of 379 Indians in April 1919 as “shameful.” Imperial Japan killed 20 times more Koreans during the national independence movement that started here one month earlier, but Korea has never heard a similarly unequivocal expression of admission from its former colonizer.
All this explains why Koreans are less than wholehearted in welcoming the enhanced U.S.-Japan alliance.
Washington, for instance, sides with Tokyo in the dispute over the Senkaku islands under the effective control of Japan, but maintains neutrality in the Dokdo conflict, although Seoul exercises effective control of the islets. The unilateral U.S. support for Japan, while not entirely incomprehensible from a U.S. strategic viewpoint, needs a long-term review if Washington’s “pivot to Asia” cannot neglect its northeastern part.
Most egregious to hear was Abe’s reported show of closeness with new Korean President Park Geun-hye, citing personal intimacy between his maternal grandfather and Park’s father. It’s not easy to see why Abe, who must be aware such a personal friendship is a burden rather than an asset in Korea, made such a comment.
President Park must be more resolute in dealing with Japan if for no other reason than erasing her father’s pro-Japanese disgrace even a little.