The landmark agreement between Japan and South Korea over the so-called comfort women dispute represents a significant success for Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, and indirectly for the US, which has been urging its north-east Asian allies to bury the hatchet in the face of common threats supposedly emanating from China and North Korea.
But while Abe hailed what he called a new era in bilateral relations and his foreign minister described the deal as epoch-making, the response from South Korea’s president, Park Geun-hye, was notably cooler. Park said only that she hoped the agreement would enable the two countries “to start building trust and open a new relationship”.
After taking office in early 2013, Park repeatedly refused to meet Abe. Her reluctance was widely interpreted as a deliberate attempt to milk anti-Japan sentiment for domestic political purposes. When the two finally met last month at a much-delayed South Korea-Japan-China summit in Seoul, Park took the extraordinary step of excluding Abe from a state banquet with Chinese leaders.
As in China, public displays of hostility to Japan play well with conservatives and nationalists. Rightwing factions in South Korea work hard to ensure Tokyo’s wartime depredations are not forgotten or forgiven.
Prejudice remains deep-seated. An opinion poll last year found Abe was more unpopular among South Koreans than even North Korea’s murderous dictator, Kim Jong-un.
Park’s animosity, genuine or calculated, has adversely affected South Korea’s alliance with the US, which still maintains a substantial, post-Korean war military presence there. Park, flirting with a new strategic partnership with Beijing, was the only leader of a major democracy to attend communist China’s second world war victory celebrations in September.
Abe’s domestically controversial reinterpretation of Japan’s post-war pacifist constitution to allow the deployment and possible engagement of Japanese armed forces abroad has been met with suspicion in Seoul, too. The refusal of South Korea to directly share military intelligence with Japan necessitated a convoluted arrangement last year whereby both countries sent sensitive information to Washington, which then passed it on.
Park’s grudging shift on the comfort women issue appears to have followed key concessions from Tokyo, including the creation of a Japanese government-administered compensation fund and acknowledgement of the wartime military authorities’ complicity in enslaving the women.
But the shift is also the result of persistent, sometimes crude pressure from the Obama administration, impatient over perceived South Korean recalcitrance. There has been growing frustration in Washington, shared in Tokyo, that previous agreements ostensibly settling the comfort women issue have been disregarded by successive South Korean leaders who have tried to “move the goalposts”.
Earlier this year, Wendy Sherman, US under-secretary of state for political affairs, publicly scolded Seoul for provocative political opportunism, although Park was not mentioned by name. Sherman said: “Of course, nationalist feelings can still be exploited, and it’s not hard for a political leader anywhere to earn cheap applause by vilifying a former enemy. But such provocations produce paralysis, not progress.”
South Korea’s ever more salient national security needs have also encouraged an expedient rapprochement with Japan after years of diplomatic deep-freeze.
Far from imploding after the death of Kim Jong-il in 2011, North Korea’s brutal regime has grown ever more threatening under the tutelage of Kim Jong-un, the late dictator’s unpredictable son. In a joint statement last month, the US and South Korean defence ministers, echoing Tokyo’s stance, expressed grave concern over North Korea’s ongoing development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.
And despite Park’s attempts to curry favour with China, and China’s obvious interest in exploiting divisions between the two US allies, Beijing’s assertive political and military behaviour across the Asian region has become increasingly difficult to ignore.
Since taking office in 2012, Abe has gone to enormous lengths to counter Chinese expansionism, energetically pursuing binding political, security and trade alliances with smaller Asian neighbours. Earlier this month, he cut a series of cooperative deals with India, a major regional player that Japan, like the US, views as an important partner in balancing China’s ambitions.
Now, by apparently resolving the comfort women dispute, Abe has gone some way towards bringing South Korea back in line.