On March 6, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol announced a novel agreement with Japan that will settle the contentious issue of Imperial Japan's exploitation of slave labor during World War II without Tokyo paying a cent in reparations.
The pact was the result of months of negotiations between Yoon’s new right-wing government and Fumio Kishida of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which has been in power for decades. It was immediately hailed by the Biden administration and the Washington establishment as a huge breakthrough that will deepen Korean and Japanese alliances with Washington and gird them in their joint efforts to curb the power of China and the nuclear ambitions of North Korea.
This marks "a groundbreaking new chapter of cooperation and partnership between two of the United States’ closest allies," Biden declared. "I look forward to continuing to strengthen and enhance the trilateral ties between the Republic of Korea, Japan, and the United States."
"The region is speaking, we should listen," tweeted Josh Rogin, the Washington Post columnist who has been at the ideological forefront of the movement to confront China. "South Korea and Japan are moving past decades of mistrust because they both realize the need to counter China's rising aggression."
To celebrate, Yoon and Kishida will meet for a summit next week in Tokyo, where the Japanese leader said they will “overcome an unfortunate past” over Japan's 35-year colonial rule in Korea and decide on new steps to expand their security and economic cooperation. And in what looks suspiciously like a reward to a recalcitrant junior ally, Biden will host President Yoon with a summit and state dinner at the White House on April 26. Yoon's trip is "expected to be a major diplomatic event for the political novice," the Washington Post reported.
But Yoon's pact faces strong opposition in South Korea from civic organizations, progressives, and opposition parties. It's not even clear it will be approved in Japan, where the LDP and its leading politicians have often denied and ridiculed Korean claims that so-called "comfort women" were forced into sex slavery during World War II.
In the hours after Yoon's announcement, many Koreans denounced the pact as a sellout and a betrayal of their hopes that Japan might fully apologize for its wartime and colonial crimes and compensate victims. “It’s a day of shame,” said An Ho-young, a spokesperson for the opposition Democratic Party. "March 6 of 2023 will be recorded as the worst day in South Korean history and the second National Humiliation Day," a coalition of 611 organizations that advocate for the rights of forced labor victims declared in front of the National Assembly.
Incredibly, the pact does not require the Japanese government or its corporations to contribute to the compensation fund to be set up for those who toiled under brutal conditions in Japanese factories and mines during the war. Also absent is any plan for a new apology from Tokyo or the corporations. South Korea alone will foot the bill for the special "Foundation for Supporting Victims of Imperial Japan's Forced Mobilization."
“This is a total victory for Japan," a prominent LDP member told the conservative Sankei Shimbun. “We didn’t have to concede anything.”
Yoon's pact, however, will encourage "voluntary" contributions from Mitsubishi and other Japanese corporations that exploited wartime labor. It will also seek donations from Korean enterprises financed by Japanese capital reparations after South Korea and Japan normalized relations in a 1965 treaty. Japan has held since then that all compensation issues were settled then, a position it reiterated this week.
To many Koreans, the 1965 treaty, signed under martial law during the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee, is problematic. It, too, was the result of intense pressure by the United States, which wanted to bring Japan back to its former colony to shore up U.S. anticommunist alliances during the Vietnam War. But it locked South Koreans into a position in which they could not legally demand compensation without violating an international treaty, a situation that came back to haunt the country after its democratization in the 1980s.
The current dispute with Japan was triggered in 2018, when South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled that the 1965 treaty did not override the compensation rights of Korean slave laborers. Yoon, seeking to explain why Japan would not pay reparations this time, said the latest agreement will “respect the positions of victims" and "align with the common interests and future development of both South Korea and Japan.” Sounding more like a collaborator than an ally, he declared that “Japan has changed from a militaristic aggressor to a partner."
That was clearly the sentiment at the White House, the State Department, the think tanks, and the media. In a well-coordinated campaign, they spent much of the week trying to convince Americans that Yoon's agreement was a triumph of diplomacy that showed how the people of Japan and South Korea have finally come around to their tough stance in Asia. Typical was a Reuters dispatch reporting that Yoon has ended "a dispute that has undercut U.S.-led efforts to present a unified front against China and North Korea."
The Post was the most aggressive in the effort to burnish Yoon's reputation. "The rapprochement between Seoul and Tokyo," its lead story proclaimed, "marks the latest example of U.S. friends and allies in Asia building a network of ties in a way that is unwelcome in Beijing." A story breaking the news of Yoon's upcoming summit with Biden noted that "the only other leader who has received the pomp and circumstance of a state visit" is French President Emmanuel Macron.
Meanwhile, in the Post's opinion section, neoconservative Max Boot joined with Sue Mi Terry, a former high-ranking CIA analyst, to embrace the agreement. At the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which has been lobbying for a trilateral security alliance for decades, former Bush adviser Victor Cha called the agreement "a major achievement that signals the arrival of a durable and much closer partnership between Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington."
Korean progressives saw right through this. The American position, the Hankyoreh noted in an editorial, "is a reflection of the US’s own strategic considerations as it attempts to counter China with stronger trilateral solidarity with South Korea and Japan. Yoon, for his part, is focusing solely on coordinating with the US, even if that means violating South Korea’s own principles."
Moreover, there is nothing particularly new about Yoon's agreement or the Biden administration's approach to the disputes over Japan's colonial past. As I reported in this publication in 2020, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines were instrumental in pushing through a similar agreement on slave labor in 2015. At the time, they made clear they were seeking to "avoid gaps" in the three-way alliance with Tokyo and Seoul.
But that attempt failed. After taking office in 2017, President Moon Jae In repudiated the pact and demanded new negotiations, infuriating the LDP government in Tokyo and setting up Yoon's latest negotiations. In its editorial, Hankyoreh described the Yoon pact as "even worse" than the 2015 agreement, which it noted "ended up crashing and burning due to its disregard for a victim-centered approach."
Without a mechanism for reparations or a formal apology from Japan, the same fate is likely to meet this one.
