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President Yoon Suk-yeol of South Korea and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan bow to the flags of their nations held by the honor guard at the prime minister’s office in Tokyo, Japan, on March 16, 2023. (Yonhap)

By Gil Yun-hyung, editorial writer

“Prime Minister Shinzo Abe intends to use the political clash between South Korea and Japan to rationalize the enactment of a new constitution and run for another term in office. As an economic and political invasion, we should not think that one field is more important than the other. Our current feud with Japan is linked to our history and our future politics.”
 
While Kim Min-seok, a high-ranking member of the Democratic Party, may not remember the poignant words he said five years ago, they are resolutely engraved in my memory.
 
I heard those words on Aug. 8, 2019, when tensions between South Korea and Japan were at their height following the South Korean Supreme Court’s October 2018 ruling on the compensation of victims of forced labor mobilization during the Japanese occupation of Korea and Japan’s consequent removal of South Korea from its “white list” of trusted trading partners.
 
During a forum held in August 2019 at the Kyungnam University Institute for Far Eastern Studies titled, “How Must We Reconcile South Korea-Japan Relations?” Kim made no attempt to disguise his distrust of Japan when saying how the problems were solved would be a matter of our nation’s destiny and honor.
 
“The nation’s destiny and honor hang on this issue, and the destiny of the administration hangs on whether it can resolve this issue effectively. If someone in the Abe administration said that they had no choice but to uproot the Moon Jae-in administration, I want to say that these problems will be solved when the Abe administration steps down.”
 
I was initially so shocked by his remarks that I criticized him in my book “New Cold War: The Battle between Korea and Japan,” published in 2021, by saying that his flawed argument was based on misunderstandings that verged on conspiracy theories. However, after five years of watching the Yoon Suk-yeol administration’s relentless tantrums, I can't think of any other analysis that so accurately captures the painful essence of the conflict between Korea and its neighbor.
 
The battle between South Korea and Japan was an existential one concerning the past and future of the two countries, a fight in which everything was at stake. Unfortunately, the Moon administration was the one to falter, not Abe’s.
 
As a result, we have forgotten our history, as can be seen in how we have made unilateral concessions to Japan regarding the Supreme Court’s ruling on compensation for forced labor mobilization and the diplomatic disaster of the inscription of the Sado mine complex — a site of forced Korean labor — on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Not to mention how we’ve renounced our national identity, as demonstrated in the push for a new “State Foundation Day” and erroneous remarks by those in power to the effect that Koreans were “Japanese” during the Japanese occupation. To top it all off, we have been forced into military cooperation as the junior partner in the US-Japan military alliance, as shown by the statements that came out of Camp David.
 
If we widen our horizons, we can see there were two paths that South Korea and Japan could have chosen in the late 1980s as the Cold War drew to a close.
 
The first path we’ll dub the “Kim Dae-jung Path.” This was a path that stipulated that in order for South Korea and Japan to build a sincere friendship, Japan should not shy away from expressing its “deep remorse and heartfelt apology” for past wrongs, as written in the 1998 New Japan-Republic of Korea Partnership between the Twenty-first Century declaration.

It was a path that encouraged us to be courageous and actively engage in dialogue with those we were uncomfortable with to resolve the painful legacy of the Cold War: the North Korea issue.
 
Kim Dae-jung kept true to the spirit of this particular path by meeting with then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in June 2000 and then-Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in September 2002. Back then, it seemed that peace was within our reach.
 
Another path we will call the “Abe Path” stopped any of that progress in its tracks. Abe aggressively put forward the issue of North Korea’s abductions of Japanese citizens to nip the normalization of diplomatic relations between North Korea and Japan in the bud, even when Kim Jong-il had apologized.
 
After returning to power in late 2012, Abe released a statement in 2015 that declared that Japan should not let its “children, grandchildren, and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize,” and promoted a “proactive contribution to peace” and a free and open Indo-Pacific strategy by stymieing the rise of China and sanctioning North Korea.
 
The fate of South Korea and Japan was decided at the second North Korea-US summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, in late February 2019. Abe had former US President Donald Trump’s full attention, kneecapping the Korean Peninsula peace process, which aimed to improve inter-Korean relations and promote North Korea-US dialogue to end the Cold War paradigm in East Asia.
 
In July 2019, he retaliated against the Moon administration by declaring South Korea’s exclusion from its “white list” of trading partners.
 
This defeat led to the complete and utter failure of the path set forth by Kim Dae-jung. My heart has been heavy ever since, completely closed off to joy. The subsequent Yoon administration is actively transplanting Abe’s dream political order into South Korea.
 
This country no longer prioritizes the South Korean people but, to quote principal deputy national security adviser Kim Tae-hyo, focuses on “what lies in the hearts of the Japanese people. The most pressing issue of our times is to submit wholeheartedly to the strategies of the US and Japan and rush headlong onto the front lines of a new cold war armed with nothing more than a rifle.
 
Such a mindset can only be observed in one who has been brainwashed by colonial rule, and there is no other phrase that accurately depicts the current state of the Yoon administration.
 
Where is the Republic of Korea we know and love? To borrow the words of Yi Yuk-sa, a Korean poet and independence activist who died in prison in 1944, “There is nowhere for us to take even one step.”

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