Why China, not Japan, should be the real worry for South Korea
John Power says Beijing’s willingness to stamp all over Seoul’s interests is all too clear. So while South Korea’s historical resentment against Japan is human, it has reason to seek closer defence ties with Tokyo, amid mutual concerns over Pyongyang’s nuclear quest
More than 70 years after the dropping of the atomic bomb brought the Japanese empire to its knees, South Koreans still harbour bitter memories of Tokyo’s colonial rule.
The colonial authorities, which ruled the Korean peninsula from 1910-1945, were unquestionably repressive and cruel. Their policy of assimilation suppressed the Korean language and customs, even forcing colonial subjects to adopt Japanese names.
During and leading up to the second world war, the imperial government forcibly drafted millions of Korean men to work at Japanese factories or fight on the front lines, and coerced as many as 200,000 Korean “comfort women” into sexual servitude for its troops.
Most Koreans don’t believe Japan has earned absolution – a conviction reinforced whenever a Japanese politician refers to the comfort women as willing prostitutes or Tokyo reasserts its territorial claims to the disputed Dokdo islets in the Sea of Japan.
Just 25 per cent of South Koreans had a favourable view of Japan in a 2015 poll
Just 25 per cent of South Koreans had a favourable view of Japan, a fellow liberal democracy and US ally, in a 2015 poll by the Pew Research Centre. And a survey in November, by Tokyo’s Genron NPO think tank and the Seoul-based East Asia Institute, had 76 per cent saying Japan was an unreliable partner. By contrast, 61 per cent viewed China positively, while just 53 per cent saw South Korea’s top trading partner as unreliable.