Even though sharing strong democratic values and strategic interests, Japan and its immediate neighbor, South Korea, have recently estranged themselves each other.
Certainly, South Korean presidents usually cut anti-Japan cards, but only after they become a lamed duck. To buoy up popular support, they take advantage of strong nationalism against pre-war Japanese colonialism. Yet, President Park Geun-hye, soon after in office earlier last year, began showing acrimony against Japan. More recently, she disparaged Japan directly to top U.S. and European leaders during her official visits. She went to Beijing to meet President Xi Jinping, but even refuses to meet Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for rapprochement, instead escalating her rhetoric.
The friction appears to have transpired from the longtime territorial dispute of an islet, Tekeshima/Dokdo, and Second World War legacy issues over which South Korea insists Japan’s official compensation and additional apology. But the entrenched estrangement originates from their conflicting identities embedded to the existing Western inter-state versus the defunct Sino-centric systems. Neither Japan’s international-law approach revealing South Korea’s ignorance nor the latter’s history-question approach emphasizing the former’s insensitivity helps.
Since the mid-19th century, the Korean Peninsula has been a cockpit of continental and maritime great powers: China, Russia, Japan, and, for the last several decades, the U.S. Korea has been an object, rather than a subject, of great power politics.
With Imperial Japan’s victory over the Qing dynasty, the 1885 Peace Treaty of Shimonoseki brought about the first political independence of a unified Korea. Over two thousand years, Korea continually suffered successive Middle-Kingdoms’ invasion and interference, and survived their excruciating subjugation and exploitation through outright Sinicization and slavish submission to them. No wonder, historic Korea was entrapped in underdevelopment and poverty.
The Japanese victory stripped the last tributary state, Korea, from China’s orbit, necessitating the breakdown of the Sino-centric world system. True, Korea was emancipated from China’s yoke, but at the same time lost the solid base of its Sinicized identity. In the hierarchical Sino-centric order, Korea regarded itself superior to Japan on the basis of its geographic proximity to China, involving the early timing and higher degree of Sinicization. In contrast, Japan had strong self-esteem for an independent medium-sized civilization detached from the Sino-centric world, allegedly, under an uninterrupted line of throne since the beginning of its history.
With its annexation of Korea in 1910, Japan modernized it across public health, education, infrastructure, economy, among others, and molded the fabric of its state and society. Throughout its rule that ended in 1945, the popular welfare significantly improved, but the transformation was so extensive that the Sinicized traditionalism and convention dwindled, putting the sense of superiority vis-à-vis Japan in jeopardy. Consequently, Koreans suffered a conflicted national identity involving the superiority and inferiority complex. To put it under control, they have to beautify dire history prior to the Japanese rule and deny Japanese contribution to the modernization, to the extent that their history-telling becomes a fantasy.
South Korea’s security relies on the alliance with the U.S., which is buttressed by the U.S.-Japan alliance. Also, Japan needs South Korea, the tip of a dagger pointed at the mainland, as a stable security partner
Even in today’s South Korean socio-economic life, including food, fashion, and other aspects in pop culture, the Japanese way of modern life remains paramount. This is reinforced by the central importance of predominant Japanese vocabulary in the Korean language and other enduring legacies of the prewar Japanese rule.
Thus, Japan is South Korea’s cultural arch-enemy unconsciously exerting irresistible assimilative modernizing power. With its established peaceful diplomacy, postwar Japan will never pose any security threat to South Korea, and instead provides intermediate products and services that are essential for the country’s final export products and, therefore, continued prosperity.
Embracing Japan, however, will inevitably thaw the die-hard Korean national identity that made it feasible to have survived even China’s bi-millenary yoke. This resembles Canada’s predicament vis-à-vis the adjoining U.S. that poses no security threat but exerts overwhelming assimilative effect on the basis of its economic, cultural, and political power and influence. South Korea’s relationship with Japan is far more complicated due to the abovementioned clash of civilizations.
Alas, South Korea’s behavior is simply incidental to rising China’s power and the relative decline of combined U.S. and Japanese power, which has apparently altered President Park’s strategic calculation rendering her to lean toward China. Whether such a calculation is tenable or not remains to be seen, but there in fact exists a rationale behind Park’s “Japan discount” policy under the growing shadow of a possible China’s regional hegemony. Now South Korea is on trial and error, though in an eccentric manner, to calibrate exactly where it has to stand in the regional dynamics of great power politics.
Hence, Japan should not react to Park’s anti-Japan initiatives, and emphasize two countries share strategic interests, at least until she mutes out. South Korea’s security relies on the alliance with the U.S., which is buttressed by the U.S.-Japan alliance. Also, Japan needs South Korea, the tip of a dagger pointed at the mainland, as a stable security partner.
To counter growing China’s aggressiveness, the U.S. and Japan have recently further strengthened the bilateral alliance, in tandem with their diplomatic alignment with major Asia-Pacific allies and friendly nations. China’s recent unilateral move to set an Air Defense Identification Zone in the East Asia Sea reinforces the primacy of security considerations. With a growing sense of diplomatic isolation, the South Korean public opinion is now slowly but steadily shifting to a realist thinking cognizant of the need to improve the relations with Japan
The international community, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, must take no side in the Japan-South Korea ruckus, and live patiently with it until strategic considerations will dictate Seoul’s Japan policy. Doing otherwise would aggravate the ruckus and harm regional peace and stability. In dealing with the issue, doing nothing as bystanders is the best policy.
