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Can the South Korea–Japan rapprochement stick?

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South Korea's President Yoon Suk-yeol toasts with Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida during their talks at Rengatei, a popular and long-established restaurant specialising in Japnese-style Western dishes, at Ginza district in Tokyo, Japan,16 March 2023 (Photo: Reuters/Japan's Cabinet Public Relations Office/Kyodo).

In Brief

The Tokyo summit that brought together South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on 23 March 2023 successfully cleared away much of the accumulated debris of the last five years of dysfunctionality.

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The two-day official visit — the first by a South Korean president in a dozen years — checked off a substantial list of to-do items. It restored regular meetings between the leaders of the two countries and rolled back the tit-for-tat trade measures in place since 2019. The two leaders embraced a shared security agenda, topped by countering North Korea, and reaffirmed the operation of the General Security of Military Information Agreement intelligence-sharing pact.

The stage is now set for a return to normalcy, or at least functionality, in South Korea–Japan relations. Looming over both leaders was the United States, their mutual ally. Biden administration officials have been pounding away at the need for trilateral cooperation, particularly in the security arena. For Yoon, the Tokyo summit was a necessary precondition for a state visit to Washington next month.

But the visit also offered evidence that Seoul and Tokyo share a desire to push back against a drift towards Cold War style confrontation and full scale economic war, with the two leaders announcing the creation of a new dialogue on economic security and a desire to restore the trilateral summit dialogue with China.

All of this was made possible due to President Yoon’s politically risky decision to accept the failure in reaching a bilateral agreement with Japan on the thorny wartime issue of compensation for South Korean labourers forced to work in Japanese mines and factories without pay. The Supreme Court of Korea’s decision in 2018 to order two Japanese firms — Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries — to pay a handful of surviving labourers was the primary driver of the recent downturn in South Korea–Japan relations.

Months of negotiations at the ministerial level failed to bridge the gap on this issue. South Korea yielded to Japan’s insistence that it was legally not obliged to pay the forced labourers, as this issue had been settled by the Claims Agreement reached at the time of normalisation of the two countries’ diplomatic relations in 1965. Seoul offered instead to use an existing fund for compensation, fed by contributions from POSCO and other South Korean firms.

But the South Korean government pushed for the two Japanese firms to offer voluntary contributions to that fund in addition to their own statement of apology, in the hope that it would be echoed by Prime Minister Kishida. This push was rightfully seen as key to gaining the acceptance of the victims, their lawyers and the public.

Prime Minister Kishida balked at crossing that Rubicon. He is wary of bilateral agreements on history issues due to the controversies which arose from the 2015 compensation and apology deal for South Korean ‘comfort women’ he reached as foreign minister. And Kishida is under heavy pressure from Japanese conservatives who oppose any concession on history.

In his statement at a joint press conference, Kishida issued no clear expression of his own about the troubled past and ruled out any Japanese moves to reimburse the workers, even indirectly.

This morally murky response from Japan has fed those in South Korea who see this as a surrender. Polls show that a significant majority of South Koreans want the Japanese firms to join in and to apologise. The opposition Democratic Party has assailed the outcome and have organised loud and somewhat ritualised public protests. Though there is a clear desire in South Korea to move away from the past, even supporters of Yoon’s policy express dismay at Japan’s lack of courage.

Former Korean ambassador to Tokyo Shin Kak-Soo expressed his ‘[disappointment] at the timidity from the Japanese government to respond to the bold initiative by President Yoon who risked his political fortune.’ He continued, ‘At least the Prime Minister should have made sincere and concrete apology.’

There is some hope that Kishida will use the opportunity of a visit to South Korea later this year as a moment to step forward. Yoon has made efforts to sell reconciliation in Japan by meeting with conservative Liberal Democratic Party stalwarts Taro Aso and former prime minister Yoshihide Suga. But so far, Kishida seems unable or unwilling to reciprocate.

Lurking behind all this is the possibility that these legal issues may not be fully resolved by a unilaterally created fund. A handful of the 15 litigants in the Nippon Steel case are refusing to accept payments from that fund. And beyond them are other suits that have been filed against a larger set of Japanese companies, one of them being a class action style suit on behalf of potentially almost 1000 surviving labourers and their descendants against more than 60 Japanese firms.

But while the resolution of these suits will require substantial funds, there is a readiness to accept settlement, according to some of the lawyers representing the victims. Most of the 15 litigants in the Supreme Court case have privately agreed to the settlement.

‘They want to embrace the settlement, especially with the enhancement of an apology,’ says Robert Swift, the lead counsel for the larger class action suit and co-counsel for other suits now pending. ‘It’s actually very simple — the foundation will have the money, the foundation will pay the money, and the claimants will dismiss their litigation.’

President Yoon offered his own full-throated defence of his policy this week, declaring that ‘the necessity of cooperation between Seoul and Tokyo is ever increasing’ amid global issues such as escalating US-China tensions, supply chain disruptions and North Korean nuclear threats.

The door to rapprochement and normalisation of South Korea–Japan relations has been opened — and there is a clear way to pave the road forward so that it can withstand coming storms. But the perils of reversal remain. For now, it is Kishida who bears the responsibility to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Daniel Sneider is a Lecturer of International Policy and East Asian Studies at Stanford University and a Non-Resident Distinguished Fellow at the Korea Economic Institute.

2 responses to “Can the South Korea–Japan rapprochement stick?”

  1. The author writes of a “clear desire in South Korea to move away from the past”. Does South Korea’s behaviour over the past decade not demonstrate the exact opposite of that?

    Kishida is right to be sceptical and cautious. He experienced first hand the humiliating bait-and-switch performed by South Korea on the comfort women agreement. He would be foolish indeed to not peer over President Yoon’s shoulder to see the spectre of the Korean progressive party that has proven itself only too happy to renege on bilateral agreements on the issue for cheap political gain.

    Yoon’s efforts are commendable. Yet all other signs suggest South Korea prefers this issue to fester as a useful political tool. The country has much to do to undo that dynamic, to repair the relationship and restore some semblance of trust. It has barely begun down that path.

    • This quote from a foreign policy article says it well:
      https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/27/south-korea-japan-forced-labor-deal/

      “Tokyo has repeatedly claimed that it did not subject any Korean to forced labor—a claim that strains both credulity and decency. Japan has also claimed that, at any rate, it already made reparations to Korean laborers when the two countries normalized diplomatic relations in 1965 and Japan paid money to South Korea in the form of grants and loans. But that stance, which Tokyo did not officially adopt until the 1990s, was plainly contradicted by Japan’s then-foreign minister, Etsusaburo Shiina, who said shortly after the normalization in 1965 that the payment made to South Korea was to “congratulate the beginning of a new nation”—not reparations.”

      Hayashi Yoshimasa, the current foreign minister of Japan testified March 9 in front of the Japanese parliament that he does not believe forced labor in any form happened in regards to Korea. If the German foreign minister claimed that Auschwitz did not happen and was just fiction, what do you think the reaction from other European countries would be?

      The additional slap in the face is that the Japanese government compensated $60 million to some 3,765 Chinese forced laborers in a very similar case at 2016. This gives rise to the strong suspicion that the reason Japan is so lukewarm in compensating Korean victims is because Korea does not have the political clout that China has in regards to Japan.

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