By John Power
The Park-Abe meeting was encouraging, but there are structural issues that still need to be addressed.
Are perennially rocky relations between South Korea and its former colonizer Japan in the midst of a thaw? That has been the suggestion in various media since the first official talks Monday between South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Despite their countries’ close geographic and cultural proximity, the leaders hadn’t formally met one-on-one since taking power, a result of a tense standoff over historical and territorial disputes. At the talks, Park and Abe agreed to work toward a solution to the most contentious of these issues, that of the “comfort women,” the euphemistic term for Korean and other women coerced into prostitution by imperial Japan. South Korea has long demanded compensation and a sincere apology for the victims, while Japan has argued the matter was settled by a 1965 normalization treaty that included monetary restitution and an apology in the early 1990s.
But while the meeting represents progress, a true warming of ties will require a shift in public attitudes in the two nations, said Robert E. Kelly, an associate professor of international relations at Pusan National University.
“Neither one of them are really dealing with the sort of structural issues below in their societies that sort of create the trouble between them,” Kelly told The Diplomat.
“That is why they’ve both got nationalistic textbooks; they’ve both got activated right-wing sectors that insist on keeping historical issues between the countries alive and well.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat