Treaty offers way out for Tokyo and
Seoul By Kosuke Takahashi
Relations between Japan and South Korea
have plummeted to their worst levels in
postwar history after South Korean President Lee
Myung-bak on August 10 made an unprecedented visit
to disputed islets called Takeshima by the
Japanese and Dokdo by South Koreans in the Sea of
Japan (known in Korea as the East Sea).
The diplomatic wounds inflicted by his
controversial visit to the contested rocky islets
cannot be healed easily. The Japanese government
is preparing to unilaterally file the islets case
to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in an
appeal to the international community for support,
after the South Korean government flatly refused
to go to the ICJ together with Japan.
The
bilateral problem already went far beyond the
territorial row. Lee has demanded Japan's Emperor
Akihito apologize to Koreans
who died in the
independence movement under Japanese colonial rule
if the emperor wants to visit Seoul. Lee's
statement came out of the blue, as the emperor has
never expressed an intention to make a trip which
would likely stir latent anti-Japanese sentiment
among Koreans over Japan's colonial rule,
provoking a sharp public backlash in Japan.
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has bluntly
criticized Lee's remarks as "deviating far from
common sense" and demanded a retraction and an
apology.
This strains of relationship are
not likely to be ratcheted down anytime soon - at
least until leadership changes in either nation
lead to a diplomatic thaw. South Korea's
presidential election is scheduled to be held in
December. Meanwhile, Noda said he will dissolve
the lower house "in the near future" for a general
election. Noda's ruling Democratic Party of Japan
is highly likely to suffer a major defeat in the
upcoming election, sweeping him out of power. Both
Lee and Noda are already seen by many as lame-duck
domestically.
A microcosm of Japan's
colonial occupation To understand the
complexity of the festering Takeshima/Dokdo
islands row, one has to know the modern history of
the two nations, which has been always a major
source of conflict. South Korea regards these
rugged islands as Japan's first milestone - and
the first victim - in its 1910-1945 colonial rule
of the Korean Peninsula.
Japan claims that
it established sovereignty over the islands in the
mid-17th century. It officially incorporated the
islets into Shimane Prefecture, or its own
territory closest to the islands, in January 1905,
around the time when Japan was a rising nation
after defeating Russian following its victory over
China a decade earlier. Imperial Japan made Korea
its protectorate in 1905, and in effect deprived
Korea of its diplomatic power and property rights
before annexing it under the 1910 Japan-Korea
treaty.
Seoul calls this incorporation of
the islands in 1905 "null and void" under
international law, noting that it was robbed of
its sovereignty and that it was in no position at
the time to lodge strong protests against Tokyo.
Thus, for South Koreans, Japan's territorial claim
over the islands is more than a matter of the
territorial dispute. Rather, this is a microcosm
of Tokyo's brutal colonial aggression, always
enflaming nationalistic sentiments among Koreans.
On the other hand, for the Japanese,
especially local people in Shimane Prefecture,
this dispute is not simply a territorial and
political dispute but a major fisheries and
economic issue in their real lives. The islands
are a rich fishing ground that has been long
occupied by Seoul since 1952, when then South
Korean president Syngman Rhee unilaterally
proclaimed the so-called Syngman Rhee Line,
declaring the nation's sovereignty over waters
adjacent to the Korean Peninsula, including Dokdo,
which also became a symbol of independence.
The two nations shelved this thorniest
land problem when they concluded the Basic
Japan-South Korea Treaty in 1965, which normalized
their diplomatic relations. There is a famous
saying among politicians who went through the
tough negotiations back then, "We consider this
Takeshima/Dokdo issue to be solved by leaving it
unsolved."
But about five decades later,
the tinderbox has ignited. The simmering island
and other issues, have been brought to boiling
point all at once.
Comfort women and
forced laborers Although the bilateral
relations appear to have been strained rather
suddenly, there were however early signs of an
inevitable collision. First, the issue of
the so-called comfort women, which had been
ignored for years, had been abruptly rekindled in
late August 2011 by a South Korean constitutional
court decision that it was a violation of the
constitution for the South Korean government to
make no effort to resolve the compensation claims
from those women. Following the court decision,
the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially
requested the Japanese government to start
negotiations. Then, during a summit between the
two nations last December in the Japanese ancient
capital of Kyoto, Lee directly asked Noda to
address the issue of comfort women. Noda replied
to Lee, "We will continue to exercise wisdom from
a humanitarian perspective." But there was no easy
solution.
About the 50,000 to 200,000
women from across Asia and the Pacific are said to
have been tricked, coerced, or abducted by the
Japanese military and sent into sex slavery or
prostitution to "comfort" Japanese troops during
the Asia-Pacific War(1930-45). About 80% of them
are said to have been Korean. Others were
Filipinas, Chinese and a handful of Westerners.
(At the end of the Second World War, the US
military knew about the plight of the comfort
women, but did nothing to raise this issue at the
1946-48 Tokyo Tribunal of War Criminals.) There
are now only 61 survivors left out of the 234
"comfort women" registered with the South Korean
government.
Second, the South Korean
Supreme Court in this May also recognized wartime
reparation demands against two Japanese companies
by Korean nationals who were coerced into wartime
labor - the first ruling to admit the validity of
suits seeking damages from Japanese firms over
forced labor. The Supreme Court stressed that the
Imperial Japanese Army illegally occupied the
Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945, and its ruling
stated that a 1965 bilateral agreement between
Tokyo and Seoul did not invalidate South Koreans'
right to seek wartime compensation, and that the
statute of limitations had not expired.
Historically, about 700,000 Koreans had
been taken and forced to work in Japan in
coal-mining regions, munitions factories,
dam-construction sites and other places across the
country under Japan's colonial rule. The South
Korean government has claimed that at least a
million of its citizens were mobilized to Japan.
In addition to Japan, many Koreans were carted off
to places such as Manchuria, northern China, and
Sakhalin Island, also in forced-labor industrial
projects and coal mining.
Up to now, Japan
has refused to pay damages to individuals such as
comfort women and forced laborers, saying it
settled those issues on a government-to-government
basis in the form of economic cooperation under
the normalization treaty in 1965.
The
negative legacy of the 1965 Treaty As we
have seen here, the root cause of all of the
problems - the territorial dispute, comfort women
and forced laborers - which have strained today's
Japan-South Korea relations, lies in the ambiguity
of the 1965 treaty. And the current bilateral
framework, which has been maintained under the
1965 treaty, seems to be fraying at the edges,
especially on the Korean side.
Looking
back at that time when the basic Japan-South Korea
treaty was concluded in 1965, the world was right
in the middle of the US-Soviet Cold War. It was a
time when every country put top priority on
national security by increasing wealth and
military power. South Korea was no exception. The
Park Chung-hee administration, an authoritarian
South Korean government established by the 1961
coup d'etat and affiliated to the military regime,
was in a rush to normalize with Japan in the
pursuit of national reconstruction and economic
growth. The Park administration needed to do so as
a member of the Free World vis-a-vis the communist
bloc such as North Korea, the Soviet Union and
China. The US strongly urged both Tokyo and Seoul
to conclude the 1965 treaty to form a united front
against communists in East Asia.
South
Korea's official documents have showed that under
the treaty the Park Chung-hee administration
actually agreed never to make further compensation
demands against Japan, either at a government or
individual level, after receiving US$800 million
in grants and soft loans from Tokyo as
compensation for its 1910-45 colonial rule. Park,
who was himself an elite product of the Japanese
colonial system and trained at the Army Staff
College in Japan, did not hesitate to use the
Japanese capital and money in abundance for
economic development. As a result, Park was
acclaimed for bringing about the so-called Miracle
on the Han River, or South Korea's export-driven
rapid economic growth.
But under the harsh
authoritarian system in the midst of the Cold War,
the Park military government did not have to take
into consideration the rights of the individual to
seek compensation. Although his government itself
took the initiative in normalization talks with
Japan, it was willing to shelve the compensation
issues.
It's true that the South Korean
government did not take sufficient interests in
its people such as comfort women who actually
suffered from the colonial times. The Japanese
side also may need to show some flexibility and
compromise to set the bilateral relationship on
the right footing. Japan's persistent refusal to
pay reparations to individual victims from the
national treasury conjures up an image of a
country that does not sincerely admit the
wrongdoing in the past and correct them, only to
lose the international trust.
Japan needs
to recognize the 1965 regime is not the fruits of
reconciliation between Japan and South Korea, but
it's a product of compromise between South Korea's
military junta and Japan in the Cold War years.
Since 1965, South Korea has become
democratized and individuals' human rights have
become duly respected in Seoul. The old regime
under the 1965 treaty began to disintegrate.
Still, we have had no clear picture of a new
bilateral system replacing the old 1965 system.
One possible solution for better future
relations is Japan's Diet (parliament) will pass a
bill to promote a resolution of issues concerning
wartime victims of forced sex, paving the way for
the Japanese government to formally apologize to
former "comfort women" and to compensate each
surviving victim. This bill has been submitted to
the Diet on many occasions since the early 2000s,
but it has been scrapped every time in the face of
conservative forces.
To be sure, there is
strong opposition to this sort of initiative in
Tokyo. Conservatives are against any additional
compensation to Korean victims on the grounds that
a nation cannot scrap previous agreements with
other nations, even if that nation's
administration is changed, and that it is wrong
for South Korea to ignore the bilateral agreement
by citing domestic reasons.
It is high
time however for both nations to consider starting
negotiation for new reconciliation, and to pave
the way for Japan to offer state compensation to
those who suffered during the Japanese colonial
period and to settle historical things once and
for all. To offer redress from the national
treasury is necessary not only from a humanitarian
standpoint but also from the viewpoint of Japan's
enlightened self-interest. Any step toward
resolving Japan's troubled past will help bring
real peace to Japan, to our next generations and
to all of our neighbors in East Asia. More than a
few Japanese, except for noisy right-wingers, wish
Japan could finish off those past issues as soon
as possible.
For South Korean side, it
should not stick with past issues persistently
when it comes to deal with Japan. More persistence
isn't always better. It generates a national
public backlash among Japanese, which feeds more
power to Japanese rightists. Moreover, 67 years
after the end of World War II, if Seoul still
keeps doing so, the rest of the world may think
Seoul always brings up issues of history as an
outlet for its domestic problems and as diplomatic
cards against "scapegoat" Japan.
Both
nations should not miss the bigger picture of the
future Asia-Pacific region, where Asia's two
economic giants with robust democracy are expected
to play a leading role in a whole range of issues
from security affairs to human-rights issue.
2015 will marks the 50th anniversary of
the treaty 1965 treaty. This presents a good
opportunity to review the treaty itself. It would
be a great irony of history if the ruling Saenuri
Party's presidential candidate Park Geun-hye, or
Park Chung-hee's daughter, were elected as the
next South Koran president and were to address
Seoul's persistent demand that Tokyo pay
compensation for its past conduct by reviewing her
father's legacy.
Kosuke
Takahashi is a Tokyo-based journalist. Besides
Asia Times Online, his work has appeared in the
Asahi Shimbun, Bloomberg, Jane's Defence Weekly
and The Diplomat among other publications. You can
follow him on Twitter @TakahashiKosuke
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