Moon-Abe summit opens up more questions

President Moon Jae-in shakes hands with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the Du Fu Thatched Cottage, a park and museum for the famous Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu (712 ― 770), on Dec. 24. Yonhap

Rare meeting builds rapport, but differences linger on key issues

By Do Je-hae

A rare Korea-Japan summit is considered the highlight of President Moon Jae-in's Dec. 23-24 visit to Chengdu, China.

There was much anticipation toward the first official meeting between the two leaders in 15 months. The biggest outcome of their latest summit in the southwestern Chinese city is that the two leaders have restored a certain level of trust, which has been glaringly absent in their relationship while bilateral relations have tumbled to their lowest level in decades.

While attending the 8th Korea-China-Japan summit in China, it was noteworthy that the leaders of Korea and Japan, who have hardly spoken since a contentious 2018 South Korean Supreme Court ruling on wartime forced labor, spent a considerable amount of time together during their brief stay in China. On Dec. 24, they spent the whole day together and appeared side by side at six events, including several with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. This is quite a departure from the distance they have maintained throughout the year. At the G20 summit in Osaka in June, Abe refused to have a summit with the South Korean leader and only exchanged a cold handshake. During a “pull-aside” meeting at an ASEAN even earlier last month, they sat down for only 10 minutes and the atmosphere was far from warm.

The photos from their summit at a hotel in Chengdu at 2 p.m. showed the two leaders looking visibly more relaxed than in their previous brief encounters this year. Their latest summit meeting, which was scheduled originally for 30 minutes, took 15 minutes longer. Moon and Abe also looked to be in a good mood during their joint visit to a popular historic site in Chengdu. They were all smiles when saying their goodbyes before Moon departed for Seoul on Christmas Eve. Abe stayed in China one more day.

Their increased rapport since the Chengdu summit is evident from Abe's latest remarks about Moon. According to the Japanese media, Abe reportedly descried Moon as “a soft-spoken gentleman” in a TV program recorded on Dec. 27, four days after their summit in Chengdu. “A dialogue is needed at all times, and it is all the more important when there are difficult problems. President Moon is a soft-spoken gentleman, with whom I wish to build a relationship that enables more frequent meetings in the future,” Abe was quoted as saying.

This is the first time for the Japanese leader to have anything kind to say about his Korean counterpart since bilateral relations deteriorated swiftly after the October 2018 Supreme Court ruling which ordered Japanese firms to compensate surviving South Korean victims of wartime forced labor during Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula. Abe has since shunned Moon and has accused Seoul of breaching a 1965 bilateral treaty which normalized relations between the two countries.

The building of trust between the leaders has been underlined as a critical condition to improving bilateral relations. In this regard, the summit was significant that it created a “momentum” for taking things to the next level. This is what Cheong Wa Dae had emphasized when announcing the summit earlier this month.

But analysts have noted that the summit also left more questions than answers because the two leaders were still relentless in their respective positions about some of the key contentious issues, such as compensation for victims of forced labor. There were also differences about how they view the situation regarding radioactive nuclear waste from the Fukushima disaster, which has sparked controversy ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Seoul's immediate concern is to get Tokyo to rescind the trade restrictions on Korea. There has been some progress with Japan removing part of the regulations ahead of the summit, but it is still far from what Seoul wants, which is to “go back to the situation before July 1,” as Moon strongly stressed during his summit with Abe.

Some experts have warned that the Abe government will not fully resolve its trade restrictions on Seoul until the wartime forced labor issue is addressed.

“In November, South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy credited a lack of disruption from Japan's export restrictions to the success of large Korean tech firms in diversifying imports and cultivating domestic suppliers. But the main reason Japan's trade measures have not yet damaged South Korea's economy is because Tokyo wasn't attempting to punish, but to send a signal. The warning was that if Seoul liquidated assets of Japanese companies to compensate wartime forced labor plaintiffs, trade would then suffer,” said Leif-Eric Easley, associate professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.

“The Abe government will not fully resolve trade restrictions on Seoul until the liability of wartime labor court cases is addressed. The domestic politics of doing so are difficult for South Korea. The Moon administration is cautious of being seen as capitulating to Tokyo's positions on international law and bilateral agreements, as politically intervening in the judicial branch, or as abandoning civil society groups that demand greater atonement from Japan. It would take political courage for Moon to make a deal before legislative elections in April.”