Sunghee Hwang -
When Moon Jae-in heads to Japan on Wednesday he will be the first South Korean leader to do so in more than six years, but while the neighbours are both market democracies and US allies facing similar threats, analysts say their relationship is mired in the past.
Moon will attend a trilateral meeting in Tokyo with Japanese and Chinese leaders and hold a separate summit with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Seoul and Tokyo face a common threat from nuclear-armed North Korea, and have both been on the receiving end of Beijing’s economic muscle-flexing in recent years.
But despite their shared interests and outlooks, similar difficulties and extensive economic connections, their relations are marred by disputes over history and territory.
Koreans maintain a deep resentment over Japan’s colonial rule of the peninsula from 1910 to 1945 and its abuses, including the wartime slaves euphemistically known as “comfort women”, and say Tokyo has not expressed sufficient remorse.
South Korean national identity is rooted in the struggle for independence from Tokyo, and the history is prominent in education, monuments and culture.
Sporting contests between the two are tense affairs, and aside from North Korea, Japan almost always ranks as South Koreans’ most disliked country in opinion polls.
For its part Tokyo believes that all such issues were resolved through a treaty to normalise relations in 1965, which included massive economic aid to develop the South, at the time still recovering from the ravages of the Korean War.
Moon himself told Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper in an interview published on Tuesday that he supported “future-oriented cooperation”, separate from the issues of history.
But at the same time, he said that “true reconciliation” was not possible unless a “sincere self-reflection and an apology from the bottom of the heart must be conveyed to and received by the victims”.
Analysts say the two countries should try to draw a line under the past in favour of “more diplomatic options”.
“Korea and Japan both face a lot of shared challenges — North Korea, an unpredictable United States, an aggressive China, and the difficulty of sustaining economic growth,” Mintaro Oba, a former US State Department official, said.
“Cooperation between the two governments is both possible and critically important.” — AFP
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