Can South Korea and Japan overcome their past and focus on the future?

Coming off some of the most tense years since Japan and South Korea normalized relations in 1965, the two countries appear to be entering a new era in defense cooperation. 

The Asian neighbors recently stepped up military ties, along with their treaty ally, the United States, in response to geopolitical pressures including North Korea’s growing missile and nuclear weapons program, concerns surrounding China’s military buildup, and the war in Ukraine. They have held joint anti-submarine warfare exercises and ballistic missile defense drills, and pledged at a trilateral meeting in Washington last month “to further strengthen and diversify security cooperation to counter the threat” from North Korea. 

Today, following the trio’s first economic security dialogue on Tuesday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol marked a key anniversary in relations by saying Japan has “transformed from a militaristic aggressor of the past into a partner” that “shares the same universal values.”

​​“You’ve seen a marked shift in bilateral relations over the past six to 12 months,” says Frank Aum, senior expert on Northeast Asia at the U.S. Institute of Peace and a former U.S. defense official.

Yet solidifying such gains in security ties between America’s two most important allies in Asia ultimately depends on progress in resolving their nagging historical conflicts – disputes dating from Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula that are deeply rooted in the national identity of both countries, experts say.

Today, Seoul and Tokyo have a rare and limited window of opportunity to do just that, following the election of two conservative leaders: President Yoon in 2022 and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio in 2021. The two sides are negotiating a deal to provide compensation and an apology to Koreans forced to labor for Japan during World War II. But Asia experts say any deal must have Japanese and South Korean domestic support – especially from the victims and their advocates – or risk unraveling as have past agreements. That will require strong leadership and political courage, they say.

“It’s not a lack of ideas and solutions to these particular problems that is halting progress, it’s a lack of political will” by politicians to mobilize public backing, says Daniel Sneider, a lecturer in East Asian studies at Stanford University in California. “The window of opportunity exists, but it’s not going to be open for a long time.” 

Past and present tensions

A 2018 decision by South Korea’s supreme court triggered the implosion of Japan-South Korean relations by ruling in favor of South Koreans claiming compensation for wartime forced labor. The decision fundamentally challenged Tokyo’s position that its occupation of Korea was legal and that the 1965 normalization treaty settled all claims.

“South Korean courts said these claims are active and actionable now,” says Timothy Webster, an authority on the forced labor issue who teaches International and Comparative Law at Western New England University.

Japan responded in part by canceling favored trade ties with South Korea and imposing export controls on chemicals vital to South Korea’s semiconductor production.

“That was a huge event,” says S. Nathan Park, an attorney who is an expert on the 1965 agreement. “Japan was threatening the semiconductor supply chain over this issue,” a move that “crossed the red line between defense cooperation ... and historical issues” that had previously been dealt with on a separate track, he says. 

“For the first time since 1965, the Japanese government leveraged economics to get resolution on a historical question. South Koreans saw that as a major issue of trust,” says Mr. Park, a nonresident fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. 

Today, the supreme court is poised to enforce its ruling by ordering the seizure of Japanese companies’ assets in South Korea – a step that would again plunge the relationship into turmoil, experts say. “The judgments are very close to being enforced against business assets in South Korea, and the Japanese government has threatened an all-out economic war,” says Ethan Hee-Seok Shin, a legal scholar at Seoul’s Catholic University of Korea. 

The court was scheduled to rule in August but delayed the decision, as South Korean and Japanese diplomats try to hammer out a political compromise to address the sensitive claims issue.

“The big sword of Damocles ... is that the court will finally order the seizure of the assets of Japanese companies to make those payments,” says Mr. Sneider. “If you get to that point without having made a deal, everything collapses. ... The build-up of momentum for strategic reasons to create a closer trilateral security system – all that can go by the wayside in a snap of the fingers.” 

As South Korean and Japanese government negotiators hold talks aimed at working out a deal, a central question is whether the outcome will be seen as legitimate by domestic audiences in both countries. 

Public buy-in

Past efforts to resolve this and related historical disputes have failed because they were viewed by the public as top-down, undemocratic, and insufficiently reflective of the concerns of victims and their descendants. “What most of the victims want is an apology ... that expresses genuine remorse,” as well as commemoration in the form of a ceremony, statue, or inclusion of the forced labor history in Japanese textbooks, says Dr. Webster.

In South Korea, conservative leaders are constrained by the perception that they are overly pro-Japan. Most South Koreans hold unfavorable impressions of Japan, polls show. “There is this broad sentiment that links conservatives as both having been collaborationists during the colonial period and [colluding] in the post-colonial period,” says Eun A Jo, a fellow at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University and a doctoral candidate at Cornell.

This makes prioritizing outreach to victims imperative, experts say. “Without this consensus domestically, the South Korean government trying to ram through a settlement is not going down well with the forced labor survivors, to put it mildly,” says Dr. Shin.

In Japan, a political shift to the right in recent decades has lessened the government’s incentives to strike a deal, particularly amid concerns that it won’t be lasting if South Koreans reject it. “In Japan, there’s hesitation about moving ahead too quickly and having to deal with backlash [in South Korea],” says Kristi Govella, director of the Center for Indo-Pacific Affairs and an assistant professor of Asian studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

The biggest political hurdle for Tokyo is that within “the general public, even on the opposition side, there are no voices asking the Japanese government to do more to reach an agreement with the South Koreans,” says Kunihiko Miyake, a special adviser to Mr. Kishida’s cabinet, speaking in his personal capacity.

Fewer Japanese believe relations with Korea are important – less than half, compared with three-quarters a decade ago. “The general public is still skeptical,” says Mr. Miyake, a former career Japanese diplomat who is now research director at the Canon Institute for Global Studies in Tokyo.

A key question is whether Mr. Kishida will forge ahead despite this political atmosphere, as well as the reluctance of the right wing of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. “It’s a moment where Mr. Kishida is going to have to show some real leadership relative to conservative voices within the party,” says Mr. Sneider. In South Korea, President Yoon’s government “wants this agreement badly,” he says.

Negotiators are actively exploring possibilities including Japan funneling compensation funds to victims through a Japanese business federation and issuing an apology in the form of reaffirming key past statements, says Mr. Sneider. An agreement could be penned as early as this spring, with a visit by President Yoon to Japan prior to the May G-7 summit in Hiroshima, he says. But will these steps be enough?

“Mr. Kishida is trying because he understands the strategic importance of Japan-South Korea relations,” says Mr. Miyake. “That’s not the big issue – the issue is how to do it.”