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 "It was childish. Still, a part of me thought, well, it serves
them right," Shin Jong-Hoon, a 23-year-old biomedical engineering
student, said in Seoul, noting that Japanese fans at the game this
summer had also been waving flags associated with Japan's wartime
military.
As U.S. Vice President Joe Biden arrives in Asia on Monday for a
visit to Japan, China and South Korea, the relationship between
America's two biggest allies in Northeast Asia isn't merely bad,
it's toxic. This matters to Washington because it's poisoning
efforts to forge a unified front as China challenges U.S. military
pre-eminence in the region.
China recently alarmed its neighbors and Washington by announcing a
new maritime air defense zone in the East China Sea partly to assert
its claims over disputed islands controlled by Japan.
South Korea and Japan, democratic neighbors in communist China's
backyard, share many things. Both worry about North Korea's nuclear
ambitions, express wariness about Chinese assertiveness and count on
Washington for their military defense.
But the common interests lately have been overshadowed by an
inability to reconcile a bitter, centuries-old history. This was on
display last year when a planned Japan-South Korea
intelligence-sharing pact fell apart at the last minute amid a
political outcry in Seoul.
Things have gotten so bad that South Korean President Park Geun-hye
and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, both scions of powerful
conservative political families, won't even talk to each other. Abe
and Park have yet to hold a summit meeting in their first year in
office, usually a high priority for both countries.
When U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel broached South Korea-Japan
ties on a recent visit to both countries, he got an earful from Park
on Japan's alleged whitewashing of the past.
Most experts don't see South Korea moving into China's camp. But a
recent poll by a major South Korean think tank showed that South
Koreans ranked China's favorability ahead of Japan's. Beijing is now
a larger trading partner for South Korea than Japan and recently
agreed to erect a statue of a Korean nationalist who assassinated a
senior Japanese official on a visit to Manchuria in 1909 — the same
man depicted on one of the banners at the South Korea-Japan soccer
game.
Biden will make clear on his Asia trip that Washington wants its
allies to resolve their differences, U.S. officials say. But experts
wonder what he can realistically do.
"There has been a sense that the U.S. should just grab these two
countries by their necks and bang their heads together to get them
to work together," said Terence Roehrig, a Korea expert at the U.S.
Naval War College. "That's not as easily done as folks say."
While the horrors of Japan's 35-year colonization of the Korean
Peninsula, which ended only with its World War II defeat in 1945,
are ancient history for many Japanese and Americans, the memories
remain fresh in South Korea, whose people were forced to work in
military brothels and Japanese mines and factories.
South Koreans' feelings are shaped by a perception that Tokyo has
never adequately addressed this history. Asia's fourth-biggest
economy and a growing diplomatic power, South Korea is also now less
willing to heed U.S. pressure and set aside its demands.
Protesters here regularly call for compensation for Korean women
forced into wartime sex slavery by the Japanese military and blast
Tokyo's claim to South Korean-occupied islets in the sea between the
countries.
"The South is now a successful modern society that has surpassed
Japan in some areas. But this traumatic and humiliating past still
casts a long shadow," Robert Dujarric, an Asia specialist at Temple
University's Tokyo campus, wrote recently.
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In Japan, public opinion surveys show plunging support for South
Korea in the past two years. Popular South Korean stars have all but
disappeared from Japanese commercials, and TV stations have cut back
on Korean programming, in part because they were deluged with
protests when the shows were broadcast.
Protests, while still mostly a fringe movement, have increased this
year against Japan's 500,000-strong ethnic Korean population — many
third- or fourth-generation descendants of those who came or were
brought to Japan as laborers during the colonial era.
"It's been a long time since the end of the war and we shouldn't
have to keep apologizing forever," said Miki Sakuma, a 44-year-old
dental assistant watching an anti-Korean rally earlier this year in
Kawasaki.
In Seoul, there's widespread resentment but also some recognition
that right-wingers don't speak for all Japanese.
Oh Kyungjin, a 29-year-old associate researcher on international
development issues, wants Tokyo to take responsibility for the past
but says South Korea can learn from Japan economically and
culturally.
"The way the media here talk about Japan sometimes makes me feel
that the issue has more to do with getting people's attention by
making Japan a public enemy than by showing why Japan needs to
apologize," Oh said.
Anti-Japanese voter sentiment weighs on all South Korean presidents,
but particularly on Park, whose father is a former South Korean
dictator who was close to Japan. She has refused to meet Abe until
Japan makes more amends for its colonization of Korea.
The countries' leaders, both of whom are strong-willed and mindful
of conservative support at home, would have to make hard political
sacrifices to reconcile. Many believe that because of anger in South
Korea, Tokyo would have to take the lead.
Compromise, however, currently looks unlikely.
Abe's deputy prime minister, Taro Aso, visited Yasukuni Shrine —
reviled by South Koreans and Chinese because it honors convicted war
criminals — almost immediately after representing Japan at Park's
inauguration in February.
In April, Abe made remarks that suggested he wanted to revise an
official 1995 apology to victims of Japan's wartime aggression.
Although he has since backtracked, the damage in Seoul was done.
[Associated
Press; FOSTER KLUG and
KEN MORITSUGU]
Moritsugu reported from
Tokyo. Associated Press writers Eun-Young Jeong and Hyung-jin Kim in
Seoul, Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and Josh Lederman and Matthew
Pennington in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
Follow Foster Klug on
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/APklug.
Copyright 2013 The Associated
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