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South Korea
OpinionComment
Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

North Korea is the only winner when South Korea and Japan spar over historical issues

  • A court case triggered the latest row between the East Asian democracies, but decades of animosity have contributed
  • The two sides should remember all that unites them, however, and that an escalating dispute means neither wins

Reading Time:3 minutes
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Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Moon Jae-in attend an event on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum summit in Papua New Guinea in November 2018. Under the conservative Abe and progressive Moon, relations between Japan and South Korea have reached their lowest point in decades. Photo: Kyodo
Donald Kirk
Korean and Japanese relations have plunged to their lowest depths since the Korean war, and there’s apparently no reconciliation in sight. The governments in Seoul and Tokyo are engaged in a game of dare and double-dare in which they both want to out-threaten the other with hurtful measures.
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The Japanese clearly think they have the South Koreans where it hurts, banning the export of key chemical ingredients for semiconductors manufactured by Korean electronics giants led by Samsung.

Tokyo is claiming some of these chemicals are making their way into North Korea, while South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in pursues what Japan’s arch-conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sees as a dangerous policy of reconciliation with a regime that’s never going to relinquish its nuclear warheads and the missiles for hurtling them into Japan.

But obviously there’s much more behind the Japanese export ban.

What a great way to get those Koreans, the Japanese are saying, after all the Koreans have been doing to us over the years. Most recently, the Japanese are upset by Korean court decisions ordering immense Japanese companies, like Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, to compensate ageing Koreans who were forced to work for them, basically as slave labor, when they were kids in the darkest days of World War II.
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South Korean Lee Chun-sik (centre), a 94-year-old victim of forced labor during Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula before the end of World War II, sits in a wheelchair outside the Supreme Court in Seoul on October 30, 2018, the day South Korea’s top court ordered Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp to pay 100 million won (US$88,000) each to four plaintiffs forced to work for the company during colonisation. Photo: AP
South Korean Lee Chun-sik (centre), a 94-year-old victim of forced labor during Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula before the end of World War II, sits in a wheelchair outside the Supreme Court in Seoul on October 30, 2018, the day South Korea’s top court ordered Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp to pay 100 million won (US$88,000) each to four plaintiffs forced to work for the company during colonisation. Photo: AP
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