Detente

By Deauwand Myers

Korea and Japan have a long and troubled history with each other. They shared a variation of the Chinese writing system for centuries. Both countries share similar tastes in food (raw seafood, rice and green tea, for example), and they both have excellent infrastructure and public transportation. But Japan's brutal occupation of Korea from 1910 until 1945 and the industrial slavery of Koreans by the Japanese is still a point of contention with the Korean population, especially its politicians.

This is why the recent bilateral and trilateral summits with Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan and U.S. President Joe Biden are so remarkable. The liberals (the Democratic Party of Korea, or DPK), who control the National Assembly, claimed President Yoon (member of the conservative People Power Party, or PPP) was giving concessions to Japan's bad history with Korea.

It is not uncommon for Korean and Chinese politicians to use Japan's wartime atrocities as a way to score political points. (Japan also occupied China during wartime, and was horrific in its war crimes, murdering hundreds of thousands of Chinese, butchering pregnant women, raping, torturing and on and on. Just like Nazi Germany, Japan's imperial military was also extremely brutal).

What is particularly remarkable is that President Yoon comes from a political party that is classically hawkish, especially with North Korea and Japan; meanwhile, the DPK has tried for some time to achieve normalized, peaceful relations with Korea's adversaries, North Korea being on the top of that list.

Prime Minister Kishida is also from a conservative political party, the Liberal Democratic Party, which has held power over the Japanese Diet (parliament) for most of the last few generations. Some of the previous prime ministers of that party have irked China, Korea and other Asian countries ravaged by the Japanese imperial military by visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The shrine pays respects to well over 2 million military personnel who have died in previous wars in service to Japan. Unfortunately, some of those enshrined there are convicted war criminals from World War II ― over 1,000.

Previous prime ministers from Kishida's party use the shrine as a political tool as well. The Liberal Democratic Party's overarching thesis, at least since I have been alive, is that Japan was castrated (their words) after World War II. They argue that Japan needs a stronger military and that the atrocities during World War II committed by Japan are overstated.

Of course, the atrocities imperial Japan committed during World War II and before it are well-documented. They, like their counterparts and allies the Nazis, kept very good records.

Japan was angry at Korea for suing two Japanese companies for wartime forced labor, something Japan sternly objected to since the Japanese government gave reparations to Korea in a 1965 treaty normalizing relations between the two nations.

President Yoon deserves a lot of credit for trying to establish better ties with Japan. Both of these countries are wealthy, sophisticated democracies that serve as a check on North Korea's aggression and Chinese President Xi's vision, one where China becomes a hegemonic force throughout Asia and Africa.

Both President Yoon and Prime Minister Kishida face political risks by staging such a sweeping show of detente. Their political enemies will and indeed are using their multiple summits against them.

Prime ministers can serve indefinitely in Japan (but in the last 20 years they have had a revolving door of them), so Kishida can weather the storm if it comes. By constitutional law, Korean presidents can only serve one term (this was to stop presidents from getting into office and never leaving, i.e. dictators). Because President Yoon can only be in office for five years, the only ones facing political heat are his party members in the unicameral (one legislative chamber) National Assembly.

These summits are also remarkable because, before them, the leaders of both countries hadn't met in over a decade, which ― considering the geographic proximity between the two countries, North Korea and China and their mutual security interests ― is truly political and diplomatic malpractice. They have such a huge American military presence in both countries, one can be forgiven astonishment at the ridiculousness of their not meeting for so long.

The benefits of these two nations becoming closer to each other are huge. Imagine it. More intelligence sharing about North Korean and Chinese movements, perhaps a sharing of military and intelligence technologies, even military practices like what Korea and Japan do with the United States separately. They could work on the long-term challenges both countries' societies face, and that list is long: tackling how to negotiate caring for an aging population, shrinking workforce and tax base, fairly low work participation among working-aged women and suicide and its root causes (both countries have terribly high suicide rates).

Detente is a good thing.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside of Seoul.