My Take | Tokyo-Seoul deal over wartime slave labour will not survive
- To contain China and North Korea, the US is willing repeatedly to throw former ‘comfort women’ and slave labourers under the bus
Antony Blinken and Avril Haines have an idée fixe that seems impervious to continual changes in the combustive politics of the Korean peninsula.
The US secretary of state and director of national intelligence, along with practically the entire Washington establishment, have been uncorking champagne since last week when the government of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol announced a plan to compensate 15 forced labourers during the Japanese occupation and World War II.
It was received enthusiastically by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and the White House. Well, what’s wrong with compensating victims of Japanese war crimes? If you read the fine print, it’s South Korean taxpayers and corporations that will be footing the bill while Tokyo and the Japanese companies that ran the slave labour will not have to pay a cent, or issue any new apology or even an expression of regret. The most that is demanded of the Japanese is that companies such as Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries may chip into a voluntary fund and that the Kishida administration will reaffirm a joint declaration made in 1998 in which then-prime minister Keizo Obuchi expressed “deep remorse” for Japan’s colonial rule. Tokyo, of course, loves it.
The Kishida government and powerful right-wing groups can legitimately take the Seoul announcement as South Korea’s willingness to acknowledge officially Tokyo’s long-held position, which is that all claims about wartime compensation and reparation have been resolved by the 1965 treaty that normalised relations between the two countries.
Unsurprisingly, South Korea’s opposition and victims’ groups have fiercely opposed the arrangement since getting wind of the secret talks between the two governments. The US, however, is over the moon. Historical injustice has never been a concern for Washington as its priority is to get the two Asian allies to get on with the job of containing and encircling China in the new cold war. Never mind that the US helped create this thorny problem by allowing most Japanese war criminals and the Japanese people to escape the collective burden of war guilt the way Washington had forced it on the Germans.
If Yoon manages to force the sneaky deal down the throat of his fellow South Koreans – which, however, is unlikely – it will have vindicated this approach long advocated by Blinken and Haines. South Koreans have seen this movie only recently.
Leading up to 2015, with Blinken and Haines successively at the National Security Council, the State Department and the CIA, the pair encouraged Barack Obama to convince now-disgraced president Park Geun-hye that year to resolve the contentious issue of wartime “comfort women” with Japan. The late Shinzo Abe jumped at the chance.