By Robert E. Kelly
Another perspective on the troubled relations of the East Asian neighbors.
Japan-Korea tension has reached a peak in the last year. South Korea’s president, Park Geun-Hye, refuses to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, even after a year in office. Park has met with Premier Xi Jinping of China, but not the Japanese leadership – even though Korea and Japan are both U.S. allies, and despite China’s controversial expansion of its air defense identification zone at both Korea and Japan’s expense. When U.S. Secretary of Defense Charles Hagel went to Japan in the fall of last year to strengthen the alliance as a part of the U.S. pivot to Asia, it was widely read in the Korean media as a snub of Korea. In a fit of pique, Park jetted off to Southeast Asia to pursue a separate, counter-Japanese diplomatic track in Asia. This was roundly cheered in Korea.
Abe, for his part, has visited the always-controversial Yasukuni Shrine and said nothing on recently reiterated Japanese textbook claims to the Korean-controlled Liancourt Rocks. He has repeatedly allowed the creepiest right-wing elements of his electoral coalition to overwhelm good sense in public without rebuke. The most recent disturbing, atrocity-denying outburst has come from NHK television. It is long overdue for Abe to make a high-level statement against this stuff.
China, the major geopolitical beneficiary of such tension, has happily stoked it by constructing a memorial to Ahn Jung-Geun at Park’s request. Ahn assassinated Hirobumi Ito, an early prime minister of Japan and governor-general of occupied Korea at the time of his death (1909). The memorial was built on the location of the shooting, which is today in China. Inevitably, Ahn is denounced as a “terrorist” by the Japanese and celebrated as a “freedom fighter” by Koreans. Korean-Japanese competition has even arrived in U.S. domestic politics, where intense Korean ethnic lobbying in the state of Virginia produced legislation that Virginian textbooks should use the name “East Sea” instead of the more widely used “Sea of Japan” to denote the body of water between Korea and Japan.
Read the full story at The Diplomat