South Korea-Japan relations in the shadow of Ukraine

By Daniel Sneider

The repair of the shattered state of South Korea's relations with Japan is already high on the agenda of the administration of Yoon Suk-yeol. The need for this has been evident for the last four years but there was an absence of political will on the part of the leaders of both countries to reverse the downward turn.

Daniel Sneider

This task has a new urgency, however, thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the threat this aggression represents to global order, on which both South Korea and Japan depend. Ironically, perhaps, the Russian invasion and the brutal war that has unfolded in Europe evokes parallels with the Korean War.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin gave the green light to the North Korean invasion of the South in June 1950, convinced that the U.S. would not defend it and was preoccupied with Europe. Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung, focused on gaining control of Taiwan, reluctantly agreed to support the invasion.

It was a profound strategic miscalculation. The result was the creation of the Cold War security system in East Asia that remains remarkably intact to this day.

Ukraine offers an eerie repeat of those events. The Russians have again miscalculated about American and Western will. China has again become a partner to this strategic disaster. Russian and Chinese backing for North Korea seems to have emboldened Pyongyang, perhaps believing that the U.S. is now sucked into Europe.

Rather than distracting the U.S., however, the war has reinvigorated the strategic value and purpose of the alliance system in the region, not only with Japan and South Korea, but also the de facto security partnership with Taiwan.

The Yoon administration has already made it clear that they see the improvement of relations as closing a dangerous hole in the regional security structure. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also seems to share that understanding.

Behind both governments stands the U.S., which had already been stressing the need for trilateral security cooperation. President Joe Biden's decision to visit South Korea, and then Japan, makes it clear that American policy makers will be pushing hard on both Seoul and Tokyo to restore normality to their relations at last.

The stated desire to unfreeze relations is not, however, sufficient. There are two elements that are essential to any breakthrough: political leadership with the will to resist domestic political pressures; and a recognition that strategic imperatives cannot substitute for a serious effort to address the underlying historical issues that have driven South Korea and Japan apart.

The South Korean president ran a campaign which made clear his intention to try to improve relations with Tokyo. But he already must feel the beginning of an assault from the opposition party, and from civil society, that is eager to label him as "pro-Japanese." These attacks are interestingly already a theme as well of the North Korean regime. As President Yoon moves from statements to actual policy, such criticism is sure to grow. It will be a test of political leadership to maintain momentum under these circumstances.

Prime Minister Kishida faces a similar dilemma. Every step toward restoring relations, even the most obvious ones such as attending the inauguration, is assailed by the revisionist right in Japan. Lurking nearby is former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who commands a large base in the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party, and who has little enthusiasm for improving relations with Korea. Kishida must make a crucial choice to forge his own path.

There can be no illusion that true reconciliation can take place without confronting the issues of historical justice. The starting point for the current decline is the decision of the Moon Jae-in administration effectively to dismantle the 2015 agreement to provide compensation and an apology to the surviving "comfort women."

But that decision was compounded by Tokyo's narrow and misleading interpretation of that agreement as marking an end to any public commemoration of this crime. The Japanese government may insist that South Korea "take the first step," but it is essential that Kishida take a simultaneous step not only to acknowledge the dark past but also to reverse Abe's efforts to undermine the legacy of the Kono Statement of 1993 and the Murayama statement of 1995.

This path should lead logically to finding a diplomatic solution to both issues of historical justice: the "comfort women" and forced laborers. Good ideas exist; this writer believes the formation of an overarching new foundation and fund to deal broadly with all forced laborers offers an elegant way through the current impasse. There are of course legal and political barriers, but they can be overcome with leadership and skilled diplomacy. As the war in Ukraine widens, the sense of strategic urgency in both Tokyo and Seoul should grow deeper as well.

Daniel Sneider is a lecturer in East Asian Studies at Stanford University and the author of numerous works on the formation of wartime historical memory in Asia.