If leaders of the two “friendly” countries would not see each other for more than a year, something must have gone terribly wrong between them. One of the ways to break the impasse is for a common friend to mediate. That is what’s happening now between Korea, Japan and the United States.
Apparently under pressure from Washington to mend its strained ties with Seoul, Tokyo sent a vice foreign minister to meet with his Korean counterpart Wednesday. The three-hour talks ended without results and the Japanese diplomat left Seoul later in the day, cutting short his two-day stay. That surprised few people here, given Japan’s superficial, half-hearted attitude toward dealing with its former colony.
The Japanese envoy reaffirmed Tokyo would not alter the so-called Kono Statement, which acknowledged imperial Japan’s involvement in recruiting sex slaves during World War II, and apologized to the victims.
As Seoul sees it, however, that can hardly be called a concession on the part of Tokyo. Korea has urged Japan to move forward in its perception of history, but the latter threatened to move backward, especially on the sex slave issue, and is only begrudgingly returning to where it stood.
Moreover, while the vice-ministerial talks were going on in Seoul, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary effectively denied the 1993 statement by reiterating Tokyo’s position that there is no evidence that the Japanese military forcefully mobilized Korean women. If the Japanese Cabinet says two completely conflicting things in different places at the same time, it is either making fun of its foreign counterparts or revealing a serious schizophrenia on a governmental level.
Some Japanese newspapers also reported the two Asian neighbors and the U.S. will hold a trilateral summit on the sidelines of the global nuclear summit in The Hague later this month. The visiting Japanese envoy denied the report, but in this age of mutual distrust across the Korea Strait, even such speculative reports can be seen as Tokyo playing the media, a scheme to realize the bilateral summit without conceding any diplomatic ground to Seoul. Even the Japanese official’s visit might be little more than a gesture to just show Tokyo is not sitting idle.
Regrettable in this regard is the U.S. attitude. Washington, of course, has expressed its displeasure with historical revisionism by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and called for Tokyo to improve ties with Seoul. If the U.S. maintains its “both-could-be-right-or-wrong” stance in the Korea-Japan wrangling, Washington will only end up emboldening Tokyo, making its “rebalancing” strategy in Asia unsustainable.
It was such putting of short-term strategic interests ahead of long-term international justice by the U.S. that has made what Japan is today, a self-pitying and self-justifying perpetrator.
So U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was wrong to call on Seoul and Tokyo to improve their relationship before President Obama’s Asian tour next month. Most Koreans think Washington should tell Tokyo unequivocally to admit its historical wrongdoing and genuinely seek forgiveness from its former victims, before the U.S. leader lands here.
And they think that if the U.S. had done so 70 years ago, Japan would have been a different country now.