[Column] Denuclearizing Northeast Asia

Kim Yeong-ho, endowed chair professor at Yuhan College and visiting professor at Tokyo University

The day after it was announced that Japan’s new prime minister Abe Shinzo would be visiting Korea, a well known Japanese university professor had this to say:

"This is the most intensely conservative group to assume the government in the postwar era. Abe, his five main aides, and the thinkers he has surrounded himself with are all ultra-rightists. In the U.S., at least there is a mix of hard-liners and moderates in the Bush administration, so by comparison this government is even more neoconservative. Will they really be able to produce for all to see a turnaround in the situation when Abe meets with East Asia’s most leftist leader, president Roh Moo-hyun, and they sit down to talk while dreaming of entirely different things?"

Ever since taking office, Abe has skillfully maintained a clever balance of sorts. He has always called the 1995 Murayama Statement on Japanese aggression and colonial rule a form of "masochist history," and during his campaign he said such issues "should be left to historians." When he was inaugurated, he took an ambiguous position when he said he "accepts the spirit" of what Murayama said, and then later he said he accepts it "as the government’s understanding." Meanwhile he is avoiding expressing any "understanding" and "conviction" of his own. This ambiguity has earned him the nickname "the misty PM."

His unclear approach to turning the situation around is perfectly consistent with a certain trend. About the issue of separation between government and big business and, in addition, the government’s interpretation of history, he separates "the government’s position" from "the prime minister’s position." About worshiping at Yasukuni Shrine, there is the separation of "the prime minister’s official position" from "a personal position." Regarding Japan’s responsibility for the war, you have the "government’s position" versus "the judgment of historians." He also divides up what the positions are when it comes to massive human rights violations in the course of colonial rule and the approach to Japanese kidnapped by North Korea. His separation tactics are meant to maintain his conservative support base while winning wider support as well, and the ambiguity is only going to increase as time goes on.

That is the setting as Abe goes to Korea and China. Both countries maintained that certain prerequisites had to be met before any summit talks with Japan, but now they are going beyond that and a formal resolution is going to be sought after those meetings take place. Abe’s people, for their part, came to the conclusion that merely having summit meetings in Seoul and Beijing will give them an advantage in the various elections coming up over the next 10 months. There are widespread rumors that he has already secretly promised China that he will not worship at Yasukuni in an official capacity. As for Korea, the dominant view in Japan is that Korea was suddenly isolated when Sino-Japanese relations began moving forward again, making it unable to insist on a strong position of any kind.

China is one move ahead of Korea in terms of policy towards Japan. Ahead of Abe’s inauguration, China invited 100 Japanese businessmen with investment holdings there and asked them to pressure Abe to stop praying at Yasukuni. Prior to that, Japanese Democratic Party chairman Ozawa Ichiro was invited to meet with president Hu Jintao, and then show the television cameras what a warm reception the party chairman received. Beijing has been pushing on Abe, who has elections for the upper house of the Diet coming next July.

Korea needs to stop letting Yasukuni be the biggest issue in relations with Japan. It needs to make sure it does not get dragged into a compromise Abe may try to achieve by covering up the essence of the issue with vague "separations" of official and personal positions, or by simplistic methods such as the creation of another location to honor war dead. Even if the issue of Yasukuni does actually get resolved, Korea must not lose sight of the bigger problems. Those would be the move to introduce ultra-nationalist content to Japanese education while vaguely avoiding Yasukuni, the attempt to use North Korea as an imaginary excuse to gain "the right of collective self defense," and the attempt to increase military spending and revise the constitution. Korea should not grab the clothing and lose the body.

When it began, Roh’s Participatory Government made the mistake of overlooking the past when it came to relations with Japan. In its later stages, it made the mistake of overlooking the future. I want to argue that the core issue from the past is not worshiping at Yasukuni - it is that those three treaties from the final years of precolonial Korea were all invalid. The core concerns for the future are establishing a "Korea-Japan civic order," in which the civil societies of each country are placed at the center, and to firmly establish cooperative economic relations as one strategy for finding the Korean economy a place in Northeast Asia. In response to Abe’s call for a hard-line reaction to a North Korean nuclear test, it might be worth calling for a nuclear-free Northeast Asia, one that keeps North Korea from developing nuclear weapons and links that to a non-nuclear Japan. I really hope the Korean government does not lose its way amid the dense mist that arrives with Abe’s visit to Seoul.