The new president of South Korea, Lee Jae Myung, and Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba have tried to leave old feuds behind and look to the future at a Tokyo summit.
That makes perfect sense if you have no sense of the historical context of relations between Japan and Korea or the major factors of racism and historical revisionism at play.
Since the end of WWII, Japan has actively downplayed and minimized its own historical atrocities against Chinese and Korean civilians. Mass rape, torture, and indiscriminate massacre aren’t things a proud culture like Korea are gonna just “get over” on a short timescale. The fact that racism against Koreans in Japan is still rampant is just icing on the shit cake.
One of the other articles linked to from the OP article mentions that, while two Japanese companies (Mitsubishi and Nippon Steel) have voluntarily offered reparation payments to “forced laborers” from WWII recently, this has actually inflamed tensions because they have also notably not offered apologies. The money is seen as a dirty bribe to shut up about the whole “nearly a million people pressed into slavery” thing.
This is happening now because both of these countries have relatively similar political values and are being squeezed by both sides by China and the US. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
That makes perfect sense if you have no sense of the historical context of relations between Japan and Korea or the major factors of racism and historical revisionism at play.
Since the end of WWII, Japan has actively downplayed and minimized its own historical atrocities against Chinese and Korean civilians. Mass rape, torture, and indiscriminate massacre aren’t things a proud culture like Korea are gonna just “get over” on a short timescale. The fact that racism against Koreans in Japan is still rampant is just icing on the shit cake.
One of the other articles linked to from the OP article mentions that, while two Japanese companies (Mitsubishi and Nippon Steel) have voluntarily offered reparation payments to “forced laborers” from WWII recently, this has actually inflamed tensions because they have also notably not offered apologies. The money is seen as a dirty bribe to shut up about the whole “nearly a million people pressed into slavery” thing.
This is happening now because both of these countries have relatively similar political values and are being squeezed by both sides by China and the US. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.