South Korea makes waves with China
pacts
A revelation that South Korea is forging military pacts
with China days after ditching a deal with former colonial ruler Japan smacks
more of an attempt to dodge political flak than to play a balancer's role in
relations as North Korea provokes alarm. A deal with China, though it stands
slim chance of success over Pyongyang's objections, also looks like a snub to
American designs. - Kosuke Takahashi (May 25,
'12)
South Korea makes waves with China
pactsBy Kosuke Takahashi
TOKYO - Alarmed at North
Korea's unstoppable nuclear and missile development programs, South Korea, Japan
and the United States seem to have elevated trilateral security cooperation.
But that's only on the surface. Just like ducks that appear calm above
the water but are paddling furiously, relations between the three countries on
the subject of how to handle China and North Korea are generating a lot of
unseen turbulence.
Earlier this week, South Korea abruptly announced it
was negotiating a military agreement with China, a fierce enemy during the
1950-1953 Korean War and North Korea's long-time ally. What surprised the media
was the fact this move came just days after Seoul suspended the signing of a similar military pact with Tokyo.
Is Seoul just trying to get closer to its largest trade partner China?
Or by shifting its axis of cooperation from Tokyo to Beijing, is it aiming to
play a "balancer's role" between Japan and China, a position that former South
Korean president Roh Moo-hyun used to advocate?
"South Korea's left-wing
opposition parties and groups have been attacking the Lee Myung-bak
administration on forging military pacts with the former colonial ruler Japan so
far," Hideshi Takesada, a professor at Yonsei University of South Korea, told
Asia Times Online. "So by bringing up the subject of a military pact with China,
it wants to say 'Hey, we are not negotiating only with Japan, but also with many
nations such as China.' It tries to dodge a public backlash that military pacts
with Japan have caused."
Takesada pointed out that Lee had already
become a lame duck ahead of the presidential election in December and that he
was losing his centripetal force, thus pandering to populist policy measures.
Takesada, a former executive director of the National Institute for
Defense Studies in Tokyo, the Japanese Ministry of Defense's think-tank, sees
almost no chance that Seoul could make a military deal with China because this
would provoke a fierce backlash from Pyongyang.
"From South Korea's
perspective, such an attempt is to defuse China's concerns that the increased
military cooperation with Japan might work as a containment against China," said
Hyon Jooyoo, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at
Trinity University in San Antonio of Texas. "It seems to me that South Korea
tries to find a middle ground between Japan and China by forming a similar
contract with Beijing."
"Increasing military cooperation with Japan is
significant to Seoul but South Korea should not make it antagonize China," Hyon
said while visiting Keio University in Tokyo on Wednesday.
South Korea
and Japan have reached the final stages of talks on two agreements: an
Acquisition and Cross Servicing Agreement (ACSA) and general security of
Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA). The ACSA would allow exchange of fuel
supplies or vehicles during United Nations peacekeeping or disaster relief
operations. The GSOMIA would establish a bilateral exchange of sensitive
military information such as that regarding North Korea's weapons of mass
destruction, including its nuclear program.
Military experts say that
South Korea's military pacts with China, even if realized, would rank a notch
lower than its military accords with Japan, as they may limit the scope of
cooperation between Seoul and Beijing.
In China's rise, Seoul is
beginning to see more economic and diplomatic opportunities than military
threats.
"Thinking about North Korea, China is very, very important for
Seoul," a senior South Korean diplomat told Asia Times Online.
For
left-leaning political elites in Seoul, China is a key partner to form a bridge
between them and Pyongyang. On the other hand, for conservative South Korean
leaders, China is a strategic collaborator to pre-empt North Korea's military
and diplomatic provocations.
Discord between the US and South
Korea
It's true that tightening bilateral security ties with Tokyo is a very
sensitive topic given latent anti-Japanese sentiment among South Koreans
regarding the 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula. But it is the US,
which has urged Japan and South Korea, its strongest allies in the Asia-Pacific
region, to create unprecedented military pacts for sharing information and
equipment.
In December 2010, Mike Mullen, serving as the chairman of the
US Joint Chiefs of Staff, stressed the significance of trilateral cooperation
between the US, Japan and South Korea at a press conference in Tokyo. Mullen
said North Korea's shelling of a South Korean island a few weeks early, which
killed two troops and two civilians, had created a "real sense of urgency".
Even so, South Korea has not fully met the US request. Instead, why is
it seeking a military agreement with China, especially when Washington seems to
have formed the US-led alliance of encirclement against Beijing, involving
Japan, Australia and the Philippines?
Yonsei University's Takesada said
that a recent visit by US officials to Pyongyang, without letting Seoul know of
it, may have hurt South Korean officials' feelings.
According to South
Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper, a US Air Force Boeing 737 flew from Guam to
Pyongyang with the officials on April 7, six days before North Korea's April 13
long-range rocket launch in an apparent bid to halt the test.
The
newspaper said the aircraft passed through South Korean airspace and might have
been carrying Sydney Seiler, a National Security Council adviser to President
Barack Obama, and Joseph DeTrani, director of the National Counter-Proliferation
Center.
The US government did not notify South Korea's military air
traffic controllers of the flight. As a result, the controllers initially had
trouble identifying the aircraft and eventually found it was heading to the
North, according to a report last week by Reset KBS, an online broadcasting
channel.
"Seoul should have got indignant at the US, as it felt a loss
of face because of this secret deal between the US and North Korea," Takesada
said.
US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland on May 22 did not
deny the news report, saying "we don't have any comment on that report at all".
A report from Pyongyang on the same day was more bothersome to the State
Department.
North Korea's Rondog Sinmun reported, "Several weeks ago, we
informed the US side of the fact that we are restraining ourselves in real
actions though we are no longer bound to the February 29 DPRK-[Democratic
People's Republic of Korea]-US agreement, taking the concerns voiced by the US
into consideration for the purpose of ensuring the peace and stability of the
Korean Peninsula necessary for focusing every effort on the peaceful
development."
"From the beginning, we did not envisage such a military
measure as a nuclear test as we planned to launch a scientific and technical
satellite for peaceful purposes," it said.
If North Korea's claim is
true, the US has not publicized this fact at all, just stressing North Korea's
provocations by violating UN resolutions in the past few months.
There
is a possibility that the Obama administration will go for unilateralism to seek
a rare foreign policy success concerning North Korea in its final months in
office before the US presidential election in November. This would undoubtedly
give South Korea and Japan the chills.
Kosuke Takahashi is a
Tokyo-based Japanese journalist. His twitter is @TakahashiKosuke
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Friday, May 25, 2012
Monday, May 21, 2012
I recommend you to go over the following articles on Okinawa
Thank you so much for your comments. I always welcome any of your feedback.
To better understand the situation facing Okinawans, I recommend you to go over the following articles.
To better understand the situation facing Okinawans, I recommend you to go over the following articles.
On Okinawa, Trouble at Home Base
By Kosuke Takahashi
Marines on Okinawa: Time to Leave?
By Kirk Spitzer
Give Okinawa Back To The Okinawans
The Okinawa Solution
By Carlton Meyer
Misunderstandings on the US Military Bases in Okinawa
By Yukie Yoshikawa
(My first and latest story for The Diplomat)
Japan’s Persistent “Ameriphobia”
May 18, 2012
Japan has long been a key part of the U.S. Pacific strategy. But for many Okinawans, the military “occupation” has gone on too long.
Image credit:U.S. Navy
Earlier this week, Okinawa Prefecture marked the 40th anniversary of its reversion to Japanese sovereignty following U.S. occupation. Yet four decades on, and the future of Japan’s southernmost prefecture remains uncertain, with slow progress on key issues. For Okinawans, the harsh reality is that they are still living on occupied territory.
Despite the 1972 transfer, U.S. military bases still occupy almost a fifth of the main Okinawa island, while 75 percent of all U.S. bases in Japan are concentrated in Okinawa.
For the central government and the U.S. at least, progress seemed to have been made last month on the question of the future of U.S. forces in Japan. Under a new agreement, the U.S. and Japanese governments decided to stick to an existing plan to relocate the controversial U.S. Marine Corps Air Station in Futenma to Henoko, Nago, in northern Okinawa by constructing a new sea-based replacement facility off Camp Schwab.
But the deal, which includes the transfer of about 9,000 troops and their dependents to U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, has left many Okinawans cold.For a start the United States is reportedly planning to deploy the MV-22 Osprey vertical take-off and landing transport aircraft to Futenma, in what is an already built-up area, in July. In addition to longstanding concerns over crime, locals also point to concerns over safety and noise pollution from aircraft. Such concerns have only been compounded by a series of accidents involving the Osprey during its development. Indeed, only last month, a Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey crashed in Morocco, sparking further safety concerns.
Today’s problems are rooted in a deal reached during the U.S. occupation following Japan’s defeat in World War II, when Emperor Hirohito suggested to U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then the post-surrender potentate in Tokyo and protector of the Japanese monarchy, that the U.S. continue occupying Okinawa and other islands in the Ryukyu chain in exchange for keeping the imperial system intact.
MacArthur saw limited Japanese opposition to the U.S. retaining Okinawa because “the Okinawans are not Japanese.” Hirohito's Okinawa message, and MacArthur's willingness to retain Okinawa, underscored the reality that the islands were being sacrificed for the purpose of defending the traditional national polity.
But since Hirohito’s death in 1989, his thinking on Okinawa has remained deeply embedded in the minds of mainstream conservative political elites, bureaucrats and politicians in Tokyo, including in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is often criticized as being subservient to U.S. diplomacy.
Although they will never admit it openly, Japan’s elites have “Ameriphobia” – a fear of the United States – that’s rooted in the devastation of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This fear was on display even after almost six decades of Liberal Democratic Party rule was broken in 2009, when the government of Democratic Party of Japan Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama was toppled in June 2010 in part over his mishandling of the U.S. Futenma Air Station issue in Okinawa. Hatoyama’s failure to renegotiate the relocation with the United States due to strong opposition from the nation’s conservatives, as well as the Obama administration, created a damaging and ultimately devastating political impasse for the Japanese government.
Against this backdrop, and taking advantage of Tokyo’s traditionally weak-kneed approach, the U.S. government has consistently asked Japan to increase the share of the security burden that it carries. Last month, for example, while the two governments said the total cost of relocating marines and their dependents from Okinawa to Guam would be lowered to $8.6 billion from the original $10.27 billion, the cost to Japan was to rise from a maximum of $2.8 billion to $3.1 billion.
Still, while the central government may be averse to standing up to the United States, Okinawans have traditionally had fewer qualms about doing so. And ultimately, time may well be on the side of Okinawans.
For a start, with both the U.S. and Japan facing significant budget deficits, it’s becoming increasingly hard to sustain the security alliance at its current levels. The United States may well, whether it likes it or not, be forced to reduce its military footprint in Japan, particularly in Okinawa.
Meanwhile, for Japan – whose finances are the weakest among the world’s major economies, with government debt reaching 230 percent of gross domestic product – the growing burden of realignment of U.S. forces is becoming a major problem. This has only been compounded by the enormous costs of recovering from last year’s earthquake, tsunami and nuclear incident.
But there’s another reason why the U.S. may rethink its presence in Japan: China’s growing military might. Tackling China’s rise is the biggest common interest between the United States and Japan, and China’s growing naval power, and its enhanced strike capabilities, is helping reshape the security dynamic in the region. This has prompted the United States to shift its security focus to expanding its presence in Australia, the Philippines and Singapore. The Pentagon is wary of China’s anti-access/area denial strategy, and may be keen to shift U.S. Marines currently stationed on Okinawa to regions more out of reach of China’s missile strikes.
In addition, support for an “offshore balancing” strategy is gaining support in Washington, a strategy that would likely see a reduction of U.S. troops in Japan. Such a shift would force Japan to do more itself to counter China, driving a further political wedge between Tokyo and Beijing and in the process scuppering any prospects for the establishment of an East Asian Community or the like – an initiative proposed by Hatoyama, but which the United States has indicated it is opposed to.
Aside from the Communist Party and its supporters, few doubt that the United States is Japan’s most important ally, and that the U.S.-Japan alliance is the cornerstone of peace, security and stability in the Asia-Pacific region. Resolving the problems over U.S. military bases on Okinawa as quickly as possible would therefore contribute to enhancing the security partnership between the two countries.
The withdrawal of additional U.S. forces from Japan would bring challenges, for sure. But for Okinawans, at least, the time seems to have come for U.S. Marine Corps to leave their islands.
Kosuke Takahashi is a Tokyo-based journalist. His work has appeared in the Asahi Shimbun, Bloomberg, Asia Times and Jane's Defence Weekly, among other publications. You can follow him on Twitter @TakahashiKosuke.
Despite the 1972 transfer, U.S. military bases still occupy almost a fifth of the main Okinawa island, while 75 percent of all U.S. bases in Japan are concentrated in Okinawa.
For the central government and the U.S. at least, progress seemed to have been made last month on the question of the future of U.S. forces in Japan. Under a new agreement, the U.S. and Japanese governments decided to stick to an existing plan to relocate the controversial U.S. Marine Corps Air Station in Futenma to Henoko, Nago, in northern Okinawa by constructing a new sea-based replacement facility off Camp Schwab.
But the deal, which includes the transfer of about 9,000 troops and their dependents to U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, has left many Okinawans cold.For a start the United States is reportedly planning to deploy the MV-22 Osprey vertical take-off and landing transport aircraft to Futenma, in what is an already built-up area, in July. In addition to longstanding concerns over crime, locals also point to concerns over safety and noise pollution from aircraft. Such concerns have only been compounded by a series of accidents involving the Osprey during its development. Indeed, only last month, a Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey crashed in Morocco, sparking further safety concerns.
Today’s problems are rooted in a deal reached during the U.S. occupation following Japan’s defeat in World War II, when Emperor Hirohito suggested to U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then the post-surrender potentate in Tokyo and protector of the Japanese monarchy, that the U.S. continue occupying Okinawa and other islands in the Ryukyu chain in exchange for keeping the imperial system intact.
MacArthur saw limited Japanese opposition to the U.S. retaining Okinawa because “the Okinawans are not Japanese.” Hirohito's Okinawa message, and MacArthur's willingness to retain Okinawa, underscored the reality that the islands were being sacrificed for the purpose of defending the traditional national polity.
But since Hirohito’s death in 1989, his thinking on Okinawa has remained deeply embedded in the minds of mainstream conservative political elites, bureaucrats and politicians in Tokyo, including in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is often criticized as being subservient to U.S. diplomacy.
Although they will never admit it openly, Japan’s elites have “Ameriphobia” – a fear of the United States – that’s rooted in the devastation of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This fear was on display even after almost six decades of Liberal Democratic Party rule was broken in 2009, when the government of Democratic Party of Japan Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama was toppled in June 2010 in part over his mishandling of the U.S. Futenma Air Station issue in Okinawa. Hatoyama’s failure to renegotiate the relocation with the United States due to strong opposition from the nation’s conservatives, as well as the Obama administration, created a damaging and ultimately devastating political impasse for the Japanese government.
Against this backdrop, and taking advantage of Tokyo’s traditionally weak-kneed approach, the U.S. government has consistently asked Japan to increase the share of the security burden that it carries. Last month, for example, while the two governments said the total cost of relocating marines and their dependents from Okinawa to Guam would be lowered to $8.6 billion from the original $10.27 billion, the cost to Japan was to rise from a maximum of $2.8 billion to $3.1 billion.
Still, while the central government may be averse to standing up to the United States, Okinawans have traditionally had fewer qualms about doing so. And ultimately, time may well be on the side of Okinawans.
For a start, with both the U.S. and Japan facing significant budget deficits, it’s becoming increasingly hard to sustain the security alliance at its current levels. The United States may well, whether it likes it or not, be forced to reduce its military footprint in Japan, particularly in Okinawa.
Meanwhile, for Japan – whose finances are the weakest among the world’s major economies, with government debt reaching 230 percent of gross domestic product – the growing burden of realignment of U.S. forces is becoming a major problem. This has only been compounded by the enormous costs of recovering from last year’s earthquake, tsunami and nuclear incident.
But there’s another reason why the U.S. may rethink its presence in Japan: China’s growing military might. Tackling China’s rise is the biggest common interest between the United States and Japan, and China’s growing naval power, and its enhanced strike capabilities, is helping reshape the security dynamic in the region. This has prompted the United States to shift its security focus to expanding its presence in Australia, the Philippines and Singapore. The Pentagon is wary of China’s anti-access/area denial strategy, and may be keen to shift U.S. Marines currently stationed on Okinawa to regions more out of reach of China’s missile strikes.
In addition, support for an “offshore balancing” strategy is gaining support in Washington, a strategy that would likely see a reduction of U.S. troops in Japan. Such a shift would force Japan to do more itself to counter China, driving a further political wedge between Tokyo and Beijing and in the process scuppering any prospects for the establishment of an East Asian Community or the like – an initiative proposed by Hatoyama, but which the United States has indicated it is opposed to.
Aside from the Communist Party and its supporters, few doubt that the United States is Japan’s most important ally, and that the U.S.-Japan alliance is the cornerstone of peace, security and stability in the Asia-Pacific region. Resolving the problems over U.S. military bases on Okinawa as quickly as possible would therefore contribute to enhancing the security partnership between the two countries.
The withdrawal of additional U.S. forces from Japan would bring challenges, for sure. But for Okinawans, at least, the time seems to have come for U.S. Marine Corps to leave their islands.
Kosuke Takahashi is a Tokyo-based journalist. His work has appeared in the Asahi Shimbun, Bloomberg, Asia Times and Jane's Defence Weekly, among other publications. You can follow him on Twitter @TakahashiKosuke.
http://the-diplomat.com/2012/05/18/japan%e2%80%99s-persistent-%e2%80%9cameriphobia%e2%80%9d/
Asia Times Online :: Japan News and Japanese Business and Economy
Cold comfort for Japan-South Korea ties
The intractable issue of compensation for women forced into sexual slavery during Japan's World War II occupation of South Korea looks likely to undermine the US-led united front against China's naval expansion and North Korea's nuclear ambitions. Stirred in part by nationalist pressure in the run-up to presidential elections in the South, the gap between the two sides' perceptions on the sensitive issue remains as wide as it ever was.
- Kosuke Takahashi (May 21, '12)
Cold comfort for Japan-South Korea ties By Kosuke Takahashi
TOKYO - Sixty-seven years after the end of World War II, history is once again beginning to produce heightened diplomatic tensions between Japan and South Korea.
The thorny question of whether or not the Japanese government should meet South Korea's renewed demand that Tokyo pay compensation to "comfort women" forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during World War II, accompanied by an official apology, is likely to show no sign of settlement. Escalating tensions between Tokyo and Seoul could harm the US-led united front against China's naval expansion and North Korea's nuclear and missile ambitions in coming months, especially before the South Korean presidential election is held in December amid rising domestic nationalist pressure.
"Regarding comfort women, there is a wide perception gap between Japan and South Korea," Masao Okonogi, a research professor at the Research Center for Korean Studies of Kyushu University in Fukuoka City, told Asia Times Online. "It's very difficult to bridge that gap, and it's difficult to resolve this issue."
South Korea's Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin on May 17 canceled a trip to Japan. Kim was expected to visit Tokyo on May 30 and 31 to conclude two bilateral accords on sharing military intelligence and logistics, in what would be the first such pacts since Japan's colonial rule over Korea ended in 1945.
"As public attention is high on a military pact with Japan, I will not handle the matter with more haste than caution but handle it throughout discussions at the National Assembly," Kim was quoted as telling Park Ji-won, the floor leader of the Democratic United Party (DUP), according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency.
His reservations over bilateral military cooperation with Tokyo came just days after South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda at a summit in Beijing on May 13 agreed to move forward on concluding the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), a pact on the sharing of military intelligence, and the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA), another pact for the exchange of supplies between the South Korean military and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF).
Behind the South Korean defense chief's sudden policy reversal was an opposition party offensive. Park on May 17 urged Kim to be cautious about signing any military pact with Japan as Tokyo had not fully repented on atrocities committed during its colonial rule, Yonhap news agency reported.
This incident became a major setback for the strengthening of the US-led alliance in the Asia-Pacific region to counter the military expansion of China. The foreign ministers of Japan and Australia on May 17 had signed an accord aimed at protecting classified information shared by the two nations, the latest example of bilateral agreements between US allies in the region.
The US also has tightened security ties with Australia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam in recent years, the US alliance system that Beijing considers a tool of encirclement. Thus, the US has long wanted the agreements between Japan and South Korea, the US's strongest allies in the region, to contribute to enhancing greater cooperation among its alliance partners by filling the missing link, especially when Seoul was about to stomach them politically.
This tinderbox was ignored for years, but the recent dispute first erupted in late August 2011 when the constitutional court of South Korea decided that it was a violation of the constitution for the government to make no tangible effort to resolve the compensation claims from former "comfort women", who were mobilized, or often coerced, as sex slaves during its 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula. Following the court decision, the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially requested the Japanese government to start negotiations over the issues.
Then, during a summit between the two nations last December in Kyoto, Lee directly also asked Noda to address the issue of comfort women. Meanwhile, a couple days earlier, a statue of a comfort woman was set up in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, reigniting diplomatic tensions between the two nations.
Most recently, a museum called the War and Women's Human Rights Museum opened on May 5 in Seoul. The museum records the turbulent history of comfort women through photographs, videos, documents and clothes detailing the history of their victimization. Placed in the exhibition is the same bronze statue of a demure teenage girl in traditional Korean hanbok that was implanted across the narrow street from the rear of the Japanese Embassy.
"The life I've lived is like a dream, but even dreams come as terrible nightmares," one engraving of a comfort woman says. Another says, "I am the very evidence alive. Why does Japan say they have no evidence?"
When I visited the museum on May 14, a South Korean resident in Osaka welcomed me as a volunteer guide and toured me throughout the museum, which has two stories and a basement level.
"Harumoni just hope this kind of tragedy will never happen again," Oh Woog-yeon, 40, who lives in the Ikuno district of Osaka, said at the museum. Harumoni means grandmothers in Korea. She said there are now only 61 survivors left out of the 234 "comfort women" registered with the South Korean government.
The Japanese Embassy in Seoul has lodged a complaint on South Korea’s funding of the museum, claiming that exhibition regarding the so-called “comfort women” did not comply with Japan’s stance.
Takashi Kurai, minister and deputy chief of mission at the Japanese Embassy in South Korea, on May 7 visited Korea’s foreign ministry to lodge a protest, expressing regret that the South Korea government had provided 500 million won (about US$427,000) towards building the museum, Japan’s conservative Sankei newspaper reported on May 18.
The newspaper said the museum’s exhibition did not recognize Japan’s efforts to solve the issue of comfort women.
Although Seoul has urged Japan to take a positive stance on solving the issue, Tokyo has made no concrete response. Japan has maintained the issue was settled by a 1965 treaty that normalized bilateral ties.
While many South Koreans think the Japanese government continues to delay issuing official apologies or compensation from government coffers, many Japanese feel that they have already repeatedly apologized and expressed regret.
Moreover, although many Japanese think Tokyo has no legal obligation to compensate war victims, including those forced to become laborers and comfort women, Japan has already tried to make its best efforts to make amends in some way for their ancestors' crimes on humanitarian grounds. The Asian Women's Fund (AWF), which was privately established in 1995 to follow Germany's "Germany-Poland Reconciliation Fund", collected money from the Japanese public and distributed it to former comfort women.
South Koreans and their government had repeatedly criticized the fund after Japan started paying atonement money to South Korean women in January 1997. The objecting South Koreans said the money should come from directly from the Japanese government treasury, accompanied by an official apology.
Right-wing Japanese lawmakers and neo-conservative nationalists have also exasperated elderly Korean female survivors of the enslavement of comfort women by claiming many Korean women during the war were merely sex workers for money. Those reactionaries have always bitterly disputed that it was Japan's official policy of centralized recruiting and dispatching of comfort women to carefully administered comfort station under military control.
For South Korea's part, some supporters are, consciously or subconsciously, using those women to stir up the so-called victim-based Korean nationalism. The issue has been assimilated to national history, sometimes ignoring the women's real feeling and experiences. Many experts have pointed out the women were not often given freedom of speech because they were expected to become symbols of the Japanese colonial exploitation of Korea, although each woman had different relations with Japanese people.
Japan has amnesia about past wrongs generally, while Seoul is failing to accommodate the victims' feelings.
"Both governments need to decide whether they will seriously work together by building up domestic consensus, or decide to mothball this issue once and for all as it seems impossible to solve," Okonogi said.
Kosuke Takahashi is a Tokyo-based Japanese journalist. His twitter is @TakahashiKosuke
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
The intractable issue of compensation for women forced into sexual slavery during Japan's World War II occupation of South Korea looks likely to undermine the US-led united front against China's naval expansion and North Korea's nuclear ambitions. Stirred in part by nationalist pressure in the run-up to presidential elections in the South, the gap between the two sides' perceptions on the sensitive issue remains as wide as it ever was.
- Kosuke Takahashi (May 21, '12)
Cold comfort for Japan-South Korea ties By Kosuke Takahashi
TOKYO - Sixty-seven years after the end of World War II, history is once again beginning to produce heightened diplomatic tensions between Japan and South Korea.
The thorny question of whether or not the Japanese government should meet South Korea's renewed demand that Tokyo pay compensation to "comfort women" forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during World War II, accompanied by an official apology, is likely to show no sign of settlement. Escalating tensions between Tokyo and Seoul could harm the US-led united front against China's naval expansion and North Korea's nuclear and missile ambitions in coming months, especially before the South Korean presidential election is held in December amid rising domestic nationalist pressure.
"Regarding comfort women, there is a wide perception gap between Japan and South Korea," Masao Okonogi, a research professor at the Research Center for Korean Studies of Kyushu University in Fukuoka City, told Asia Times Online. "It's very difficult to bridge that gap, and it's difficult to resolve this issue."
South Korea's Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin on May 17 canceled a trip to Japan. Kim was expected to visit Tokyo on May 30 and 31 to conclude two bilateral accords on sharing military intelligence and logistics, in what would be the first such pacts since Japan's colonial rule over Korea ended in 1945.
"As public attention is high on a military pact with Japan, I will not handle the matter with more haste than caution but handle it throughout discussions at the National Assembly," Kim was quoted as telling Park Ji-won, the floor leader of the Democratic United Party (DUP), according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency.
His reservations over bilateral military cooperation with Tokyo came just days after South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda at a summit in Beijing on May 13 agreed to move forward on concluding the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), a pact on the sharing of military intelligence, and the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA), another pact for the exchange of supplies between the South Korean military and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF).
Behind the South Korean defense chief's sudden policy reversal was an opposition party offensive. Park on May 17 urged Kim to be cautious about signing any military pact with Japan as Tokyo had not fully repented on atrocities committed during its colonial rule, Yonhap news agency reported.
This incident became a major setback for the strengthening of the US-led alliance in the Asia-Pacific region to counter the military expansion of China. The foreign ministers of Japan and Australia on May 17 had signed an accord aimed at protecting classified information shared by the two nations, the latest example of bilateral agreements between US allies in the region.
The US also has tightened security ties with Australia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam in recent years, the US alliance system that Beijing considers a tool of encirclement. Thus, the US has long wanted the agreements between Japan and South Korea, the US's strongest allies in the region, to contribute to enhancing greater cooperation among its alliance partners by filling the missing link, especially when Seoul was about to stomach them politically.
This tinderbox was ignored for years, but the recent dispute first erupted in late August 2011 when the constitutional court of South Korea decided that it was a violation of the constitution for the government to make no tangible effort to resolve the compensation claims from former "comfort women", who were mobilized, or often coerced, as sex slaves during its 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula. Following the court decision, the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially requested the Japanese government to start negotiations over the issues.
Then, during a summit between the two nations last December in Kyoto, Lee directly also asked Noda to address the issue of comfort women. Meanwhile, a couple days earlier, a statue of a comfort woman was set up in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, reigniting diplomatic tensions between the two nations.
Most recently, a museum called the War and Women's Human Rights Museum opened on May 5 in Seoul. The museum records the turbulent history of comfort women through photographs, videos, documents and clothes detailing the history of their victimization. Placed in the exhibition is the same bronze statue of a demure teenage girl in traditional Korean hanbok that was implanted across the narrow street from the rear of the Japanese Embassy.
"The life I've lived is like a dream, but even dreams come as terrible nightmares," one engraving of a comfort woman says. Another says, "I am the very evidence alive. Why does Japan say they have no evidence?"
When I visited the museum on May 14, a South Korean resident in Osaka welcomed me as a volunteer guide and toured me throughout the museum, which has two stories and a basement level.
"Harumoni just hope this kind of tragedy will never happen again," Oh Woog-yeon, 40, who lives in the Ikuno district of Osaka, said at the museum. Harumoni means grandmothers in Korea. She said there are now only 61 survivors left out of the 234 "comfort women" registered with the South Korean government.
The Japanese Embassy in Seoul has lodged a complaint on South Korea’s funding of the museum, claiming that exhibition regarding the so-called “comfort women” did not comply with Japan’s stance.
Takashi Kurai, minister and deputy chief of mission at the Japanese Embassy in South Korea, on May 7 visited Korea’s foreign ministry to lodge a protest, expressing regret that the South Korea government had provided 500 million won (about US$427,000) towards building the museum, Japan’s conservative Sankei newspaper reported on May 18.
The newspaper said the museum’s exhibition did not recognize Japan’s efforts to solve the issue of comfort women.
Although Seoul has urged Japan to take a positive stance on solving the issue, Tokyo has made no concrete response. Japan has maintained the issue was settled by a 1965 treaty that normalized bilateral ties.
While many South Koreans think the Japanese government continues to delay issuing official apologies or compensation from government coffers, many Japanese feel that they have already repeatedly apologized and expressed regret.
Moreover, although many Japanese think Tokyo has no legal obligation to compensate war victims, including those forced to become laborers and comfort women, Japan has already tried to make its best efforts to make amends in some way for their ancestors' crimes on humanitarian grounds. The Asian Women's Fund (AWF), which was privately established in 1995 to follow Germany's "Germany-Poland Reconciliation Fund", collected money from the Japanese public and distributed it to former comfort women.
South Koreans and their government had repeatedly criticized the fund after Japan started paying atonement money to South Korean women in January 1997. The objecting South Koreans said the money should come from directly from the Japanese government treasury, accompanied by an official apology.
Right-wing Japanese lawmakers and neo-conservative nationalists have also exasperated elderly Korean female survivors of the enslavement of comfort women by claiming many Korean women during the war were merely sex workers for money. Those reactionaries have always bitterly disputed that it was Japan's official policy of centralized recruiting and dispatching of comfort women to carefully administered comfort station under military control.
For South Korea's part, some supporters are, consciously or subconsciously, using those women to stir up the so-called victim-based Korean nationalism. The issue has been assimilated to national history, sometimes ignoring the women's real feeling and experiences. Many experts have pointed out the women were not often given freedom of speech because they were expected to become symbols of the Japanese colonial exploitation of Korea, although each woman had different relations with Japanese people.
Japan has amnesia about past wrongs generally, while Seoul is failing to accommodate the victims' feelings.
"Both governments need to decide whether they will seriously work together by building up domestic consensus, or decide to mothball this issue once and for all as it seems impossible to solve," Okonogi said.
Kosuke Takahashi is a Tokyo-based Japanese journalist. His twitter is @TakahashiKosuke
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