The news out of Tokyo and Seoul on the eve of the New Year was nothing short of blockbuster. After decades of dispute, recrimination, and ill will, Asia’s two most powerful democracies agreed to resolve one of the bitterest lingering issues from World War II. In forthrightly offering “his most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds,” Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe appears to have succeeded in bringing diplomatic closure to the issue of South Korea’s “comfort women” — captives forced to have sex with Japanese servicemen.
There are officially 64 surviving comfort women in South Korea today, out of the tens of thousands forcibly taken by the Imperial Japanese Army for sexual services during World War II. The question of official responsibility for the “comfort women” has plagued postwar relations between Tokyo and Seoul, becoming among the most rancorous of disputes resulting from Japan’s 35-year colonization of the Korean peninsula, from 1910 to 1945. Tokyo has claimed that the issue was resolved with the 1965 normalization of relations between Japan and South Korea and the establishment of a private fund in the 1990s to provide compensation to surviving comfort women.
The unambiguous public statement by Abe met the demands of South Korean president Park Geun-hye, allowing her to drop her opposition to engaging with her counterpart beyond diplomatic photo sessions. Perhaps just as significantly, Abe pledged $8.3 million in government funds, thereby giving official imprimatur to the compensation that Koreans had long argued Tokyo was avoiding. Yet Japanese foreign minister Fumio Kishida asserted that from Tokyo’s perspective, the new monies were not additional compensation, but were to help the surviving comfort women with emotional and physical needs. The epochal nature of the agreement was made clear by a joint statement by Kishida and his South Korean counterpart, Yun Byung-se, that it had forged a “final and irrevocable resolution” of the issue.
Not only the Japanese compromised. South Korea pledged no longer to criticize Japan over the issue, effectively removing it from Korea’s national discussion and diplomatic agenda. The Park government also agreed to begin discussions on removing a controversial private comfort-woman statue that is located in front of the Japanese embassy in downtown Seoul. In a region where creative diplomacy is rare, the governments of Japan and South Korea showed initiative and maturity in tackling a problem that had defied solution for two generations.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the agreement is the end of the beginning in postwar Korean–Japanese relations. Although a half century has passed since the normalization of ties, unresolved war issues have been a constant drag, severely limiting how far the two countries could go towards a truly normal relationship. There are still outstanding issues that could harm bilateral relations, including Korean opposition to Japanese grade-school textbooks that they claim whitewash Japan’s wartime guilt, and a legal dispute over sovereignty of the Liancourt Rocks (which are known as Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese). Moreover, Western media reporting on the agreement was quick to point out that not all the surviving comfort women, nor all Koreans, accepted that this was the end of the issue.
Pessimism aside, the two governments have shown leadership and illuminated a way forward in relations. For Abe, the agreement was as much about the future as it was about the past. Reiterating thoughts from his address before the U.S. Congress earlier this year, Abe made clear that he did not want “our children, grandchildren, and their offspring to keep apologizing” for a history from the previous century. Yet what’s just as important, as Japanese officials in Washington told me, is that Japan and South Korea face a common set of regional challenges, including the North Korean nuclear threat and an increasingly assertive China, and need to work together to respond to them. The question is whether South Korea, which has deepened relations with China under Park, also sees the benefit of closer ties with Japan.
Seoul and Tokyo are Washington’s closest allies in the Indo-Pacific region, and the freeze in their relations in recent years has complicated efforts to get the three countries working more closely on security issues. Yet their interests in preserving freedom of maritime and aerial navigation, the desire to contain if not denuclearize North Korea, and the need to continue engaging Beijing to encourage more cooperative behavior create a host of common issues on which Japan and South Korea can work together.
No one should think the road ahead will be smooth. The next era in Korean–Japanese relations will require the willingness of both governments not merely to put the past behind them, but to focus on the future. After so many decades of distrust, creating meaningful working relations will take time. Each side must commit to understanding the outlook and priorities of the other, and diplomacy as creative as that which resulted in today’s agreement must now be employed to craft a common agenda.
As Asia’s two strongest and most developed democracies, Japan and South Korea can play a major role in reshaping the region’s politics. Their common embrace of liberal values, rule of law, freedom of the press, and the like can form a new center of gravity in Asia. With enough trust and with growing experience, they can work together with their American ally to uphold the rules-based order in Asia that has provided security and stability for decades. They can also help encourage Asia’s other democracies, such as newly liberalizing Myanmar, and encourage those that have turned away from democracy, like Thailand, to return to liberal principles.
Such a new Asian core may be far in the future, and such optimism unfamiliar. But the agreement on comfort women offers the best opportunity in a generation for Asia’s leading democracies to recognize their common interests and begin the challenging process of figuring out how interested they are in working together. In a region in which the risk of conflict seems to have been growing, Seoul and Tokyo have offered a much-needed example of cooperation and realism. It may well portend a better year ahead for Asia than many expected.
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