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Over the last week, we have been treated to another installation of the Korea-Japan history wars. Sadly, Japan once again managed to shoot itself in the foot on the issue. Seeking to register a number of Meiji-era factories as UNESCO World Heritage sites, Japan proposed--and Korea rightly accepted--wording that acknowledged that the factories had later employed forced labor. But the precise wording mattered and it read (in the official English version) as follows: "There was a large number of Koreans and others who were brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions in the 1940's at some of the sites." Korean representatives and press pointed out--perhaps too eager to press their advantage--that this amounted to a confession that forced labor had in fact been employed during the war, which is beyond dispute. Fearful that this could raise new compensation claims that the Japanese believe were settled in the 1965 normalization--and above all pandering to its right wing--Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida immediately began backpedaling. "The remarks by the Japanese government representative did not mean 'forced labor,'" he reportedly told the press, seeking to open daylight between "forced to work" and "forced labor." The press then went on to provide its own interpretation--or go silent on the issue altogether--undercutting the important gesture the government had made.
That these sort of tussles are damaging to public opinion is once again made clear in a recently released report sent to us by Jaesung Ryu put together jointly by the East Asia Institute in South Korea and the Genron NPO in Japan. In the last few years Japan-ROK mutual perceptions of each other have been poor to say the least and this poll suggests things have not improved that much.
The majority of citizens from both countries have an overall negative view of the other with South Koreans more solidly negative. But Japanese views have moved more than South Korean ones and in the wrong direction. The report continues to find that the source of friction is history. When asked to give two responses for why they had a negative view of Japan, 74% of South Koreans listed that “Japan does not properly reflect on its wrong doings” and 69.3% listed the Dokdo-Takeshima territorial dispute as the other.
But history has a somewhat different implication for the Japanese. Only 36.5% listed the Dokdo-Takeshima issue as the source of their adverse views of Korea but 74.6% (the poll allowed for multiple responses) said that “Korea continues to harp on historical issues.”
When asked if Japan-ROK relations were important, 87.4% of Koreans and 65.3% of Japanese said yes and almost in equal numbers, 67.2% of Koreans and 67.8% of Japanese, said that deterioration of public perceptions was “a cause for concern or a situation that needs to be improved.” The study argues that one such way to improve relations is through increasing cultural ties and exchanges. The report found that Koreans who had visited Japan and Japanese who had visited Korea had more favorable impressions than those who never had traveled to the other’s countries. But this could reflect the fact that those with already favorable opinions were more likely to visit in the first place.
More hopeful is the fact that the younger generations from both countries are more favorable than the older, with inter-generational differences much sharper in Korea than in Japan; indeed, those in their 60s and older are overwhelmingly negative. But even among the most favorably-disposed cohort—those in their 20s and younger—those with a negative view outweigh those with a positive image by two to one.
A final finding is that these views are quite volatile, particularly in Korea. After a period of relatively negative views in Korea, relations improved in 2009-11. Not surprisingly, this improvement coincided precisely with the election of the Democratic Party of Japan and the short-lived ouster of the LDP. In 2011, 68% of South Koreans had favorable impressions of Japan’s international role. This share plummeted to only 15% in 2014. The reasons are fairly straightforward: Prime Minister Abe’s reelection in 2012, Koreans’ perceptions of Abe’s unwillingness to address historical reconciliation and perhaps his move to unshackle Japan’s military. Abe’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in December 2013 and the bobbling of a Japanese government review of the 1993 Kono statement, which had accepted blame for the Japanese military’s role in the sexual slavery of Korean women during World War II, were obvious low points. The Korean public was particularly outraged by the finding of the Review that the statement was the result of a “political compromise”, which South Koreans perceived as undermining the very spirit of the statement. Sound familiar?
But what struck us most about this report is how negative sentiment spirals. Japanese opinion of the South had been somewhat more stable and in 2011 in Japan, 62% of Japanese had “feelings of friendliness towards Korea.” But this dropped sharply in 2012 to 32% after President Lee Myung-bak’s visit to Dokdo-Takeshima and has stayed low as Korea has continued to press the issue under the Park administration and bilateral relations entered a freeze from which they may only just now be emerging; we will provide more coverage of these moves in subsequent posts, but these findings are a reminder of how much damage there is to repair.
