How can we explain the timing of Japan and South Korea’s latest row? And how might the two countries de-escalate their current predicament?
Japan–South Korea tensions caught global attention in July 2019 when Japan imposed restrictions on the export of three chemicals to South Korea — fluorinated polyamides, photoresists and hydrogen fluoride. These chemicals are important to the South Korean economy as they are needed in the manufacturing of semiconductors and smartphone display screens, both key South Korean export products. Japan also removed South Korea from its ‘whitelist’ of preferred trading partners. South Korea no longer enjoys preferential treatment and is no longer able to import these chemicals in bulk.
The Japanese government says that the export controls are exclusively for national security purposes, necessary because of South Korea’s inadequate management of re-export controls and the military dual-use applications of the chemicals in question. Japanese media reported that in the past one of the chemicals found its way from South Korea to North Korea in violation of UN Security Council sanctions. South Korea has rejected this accusation, emphasised that it is faithfully implementing sanctions, demanded that Tokyo provide evidence and proposed an international investigation.
Japan’s trade measures against South Korea are widely perceived as aimed at punishing the Moon government for its other ‘misdeeds’. In November 2018 it cancelled the domestically unpopular comfort women agreement which the Abe government concluded with the Park Geun-hye administration in December 2015 and had intended as a ‘final and irreversible resolution’ to the issue.
And in October and November 2018 the South Korean Supreme Court ordered a number of Japanese companies, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Nachi-Fujikoshi and Nippon Steel, to compensate the families of Korean wartime forced labourers. The Japanese government protested these rulings as a violation of the 1965 Basic Treaty that normalised Japan–South Korea relations after the war on the basis that this treaty resolved all outstanding issues up until 1945 between the two countries while Japan provided US$800 million in economic assistance to South Korea (a sum equivalent to 1.5 times South Korea’s national budget at the time).
The South Korean government is set to retaliate against Japan’s trade measures by removing Japan from its list of preferred trade partners. It also escalated tensions in August 2019 when it announced that it would not be renewing the bilateral General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA). This presents a blow to US–Japan–South Korea trilateral security cooperation vis-a-vis North Korea. And on 11 September 2019, South Korea lodged a complaint with the WTO over Japan’s export restrictions alleging that they were a discriminatory move in retaliation for the Supreme Court decisions.
The tensions have permeated deeply. South Koreans are boycotting Japanese products such as beer and cars. Sister-city activities are on pause. Flights between the two countries have been cut. The tensions have also hit the Olympics, with South Korea lodging a complaint with the IOC requesting a ban on the ‘rising sun flag’ (used by the Imperial Japanese Army in the invasion of Asia) at venues during the Tokyo 2020 games.
Why have tensions boiled over so dramatically right now?
One explanation is found in the different post-Cold War experiences of the two countries, argues Seung Hyok Lee. In South Korea, with the end of military rule in 1988 ‘achieving “social justice” and democratisation rose in significance’. Democratisation opened new space for those Koreans seeking but denied justice under the Japan–South Korea 1965 Basic Treaty. In Japan, after the death in 1989 of Emperor Hirohito in whose name Japan fought the war, ‘the post-Cold War era became a time in which the public strove to come to terms with the legacy of World War II’. For many civil society groups this meant facing up to history, but for the Abe administration it sometimes meant ‘escaping the post-war regime’ filtered through historical revisionism.
As Kazuhiko Togo notes, many South Koreans seem to consider the 1965 Basic Treaty and its accompanying agreements ‘no longer legitimate or relevant to the modern Japan–South Korea relationship … In order to improve mutual understanding and create more trusting relations, the Japanese might consider such a possibility as well’.
In our lead article this week Lauren Richardson explains that the ‘divergence in Seoul and Tokyo’s strategic views toward North Korea’ has ‘reduced their diplomatic incentives to manage their history problems’. The ‘precarious security environment’ relating to North Korea throughout 2017, with (its Trumpian) rhetoric of fire and fury, ‘provided strong incentives for Seoul and Tokyo to cooperate’. ‘Both sides were in favour of strong sanctions, intelligence sharing and trilateral military exercises with the United States. Defence cooperation necessitated keeping their ever-present history problems in check’.
Once the Moon government began its Olympic diplomacy at the beginning of 2018, and after US President Donald Trump made the decision to engage with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, ‘the strategic views of Seoul and Tokyo quickly began to diverge’. President Moon took up the challenge of ‘ushering in an inter-Korean rapprochement’ as his legacy. But for Prime Minister Abe the ‘issue of Japanese abductees takes precedence over the North Korean nuclear threat’. Japan has maintained its hardline stance towards Pyongyang, and ‘Tokyo became sidelined from the regional summitry’.
The prospects of de-escalating tensions at the government level while both President Moon and Prime Minister Abe remain in office have dimmed. With the Trump administration unwilling to play the US-role of peacemaker and mediator that both Tokyo and Seoul have come to expect in the past, there is no obvious circuit breaker to the current imbroglio.
Beijing is hosting both leaders later this year for a trilateral summit and China — searching for stability around it while it deals with its own problems with the United States — could play a constructive mediating role. The China–Japan–South Korea trilateral has hung together despite all the ups and downs in Northeast Asia. It’s a happy irony that China is anxious to broker rapprochement between the United States’ two most important East Asian allies.
And Mr Morrison goes to Washington…
This week Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison goes to Washington on a state visit at the invitation of President Donald Trump — only the second state visit in his presidency so far. It will be an exceptionally sensitive and important visit, testing Morrison’s capacity to navigate big economic and security issues between Washington and Beijing and to defend Australia’s interests against the US assault on the global order and the economic security that it underpins.
Mr Morrison’s meeting with Mr Trump is being given top billing by his host and it will also be watched intensely by Australia’s partners in Asia, not only China, but in ASEAN and across the Asian region.
In a special editorial feature this week, James Curran argues that the visit gives Morrison an opportunity to expand on Australia’s stated position by taking ‘the occasion to make the case for why Australia and other US allies would like to see more of an American shoulder put to the diplomatic wheel in Southeast Asia in a way that also comprehends the region’s economic security interests in the multilateral global trading order’.
Curran is right in his argument that if the hardliners in Washington have their way, the new American exceptionalism for the 21st Century will be defined by the containment of China.That wouldn’t be in Australia’s interests. Mr Morrison has warned of the dangers of seeing US–China tensions only through the prism of ‘malevolent intent’, and pointed to the risks of this becoming a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. Curran’s also right in his conclusion that ‘that is precisely the kind of argument America needs to hear from its Australian ally at this moment’.
The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.