[News analysis] Recent moves by Yoon prove he sees eye to eye with Japan’s far right (2024)

The South Korean government’s agreement on July 27 to include Japan’s Sado mine complex on the UNESCO World Heritage list was a preview of things to come.

On July 31, Dongguk University Emeritus Professor Kim Nak-nyeon — someone who has argued for the positive contributions of Korea’s colonization to modernization — was appointed director of the Academy of Korean Studies. Six days later, the figure appointed as president of the Independence Hall of Korea was Korea History and Future Foundation chairperson Kim Hyoung-suk, someone who has justified Japan’s colonial rule of Korea and defended pro-Japanese collaborators.

With these appointments, the Yoon Suk-yeol administration has well and truly crossed a line.

In a special talk Saturday at the Heritage of Korean Independence’s academic center, the organization’s chairperson Lee Jong-chan said he would be boycotting this year’s National Liberation Day event, scheduled for Thursday, explaining that he felt a “sense of crisis that South Korean traitors are scheming with the Japanese right, meaning that they are holding hands with those who uphold values of prewar Japan.”

History groups have also been making preparations for a joint statement — insisting they can no longer stay silent about the Yoon administration’s activities.

In retrospect, the administration’s actions have been nothing if not consistent.

It began on March 6, 2023, when it announced a “third-party compensation” solution to the forced labor mobilization issue, waiving Japan’s responsibility and having a Korean government-affiliated foundation provide compensation to the victims instead.

Since then, Korea has found itself caught up in an ideological war that has seen the erasure of Japan’s responsibility for historical actions, the disparagement of independence activists, and the “reevaluation” of pro-Japanese collaborators.

Crucially, the Yoon administration has been edging deeper and deeper into throwing its support behind the idea that Japan’s colonization of Korea was “lawful” — a core argument of the Japanese right.

In his special talk on Saturday, Lee Jong-chan commented on core issues surrounding the push to commemorate 1948 as the year of the Republic of Korea’s national foundation, which have been resurfacing since the Yoon administration took office.

“The [selection of] 1948 [as a basis for the] national foundation day amounts to Korea recognizing the Japanese government’s claims that the country did not exist before that,” he said.

“If 1948 is regarded as the date of national foundation, that means Japan’s 36 years of colonial rule from 1910 to 1945 are legitimized,” he added.

Korea and Japan have been sharply at odds over a provision from the signing of the basic treaty for the normalization of their diplomatic relations in 1965, which stated that any treaties previously signed with Japan were “already null and void.”

Korea has maintained that the Eulsa Treaty of 1905 and the Annexation Treaty of 1910 were void from the time of signing. In contrast, Japan has asserted that they were lawful at the time but were subsequently invalidated with Japan’s World War II defeat in 1945 and the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951.

If Japan’s position is regarded as correct, this would mean the drafting of comfort women and laborers was neither forcible nor illegal because Koreans were “Japanese citizens” at the time.

This has been the point of contention regarding the Yoon administration’s position on the UNESCO World Heritage registration of the Sado mines.

An official with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) had previously told reporters that Japan had “promised to reflect the entire history” and “already taken practical measures.” Yet the actual Japanese exhibition included no mention whatsoever of “forced mobilization” or “forced labor.”

In response to questioning from Democratic Party lawmakers, the MOFA belatedly explained, “During discussions on the exhibit content, we requested Japanese historical materials and exhibit information including the word ‘forcible,’ but Japan ultimately did not agree to that.”

During negotiations between South Korea and Japan involving the latter’s registration of the Sado Island gold mines as a UNESCO World Heritage site, Tokyo refused to include language about Japan’s forced mobilization of Korean laborers in the registration. This refusal should be viewed within the context of Japan’s shift to the right.

On Aug. 14, 2015, in his statement to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe attempted to justify Japan’s colonization and imperialist aggression in Asia: “At the beginning, Japan, too, kept steps with other nations. However, with the Great Depression setting in and the Western countries launching economic blocs by involving colonial economies, Japan’s economy suffered a major blow. In such circ*mstances, Japan’s sense of isolation deepened, and it attempted to overcome its diplomatic and economic deadlock through the use of force. Its domestic political system could not serve as a brake to stop such attempts. In this way, Japan lost sight of the overall trends in the world.”

Abe went on to acknowledge that Japan’s path of aggression was wrong. However, he insisted that current generations should not be made to apologize for the wrongdoings of the past.

“In Japan, the postwar generations now exceed 80 percent of its population. We must not let our children, grandchildren, and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize. Still, even so, we Japanese, across generations, must squarely face the history of the past. We have the responsibility to inherit the past, in all humbleness, and pass it on to the future,” he said at the time.

Based on this stance of historical denial, the Japanese government has consistently ignored the 2018 ruling of the South Korean Supreme Court regarding ordering Japanese corporations to compensate victims of forced mobilization. The problem with the Yoon administration is not its historical viewpoint but its willingness to accept and internalize Abe’s historical denial.

Experts are worried that President Yoon Suk-yeol views the Japan policies of the preceding Moon administration as a complete failure, and is willing to acquiesce to Japan’s justifications of its imperial conquests to accomplish his mission of “normalizing” relations with Japan.

“The problem is that in the name of national security, the current administration has become complicit in Japan’s refusal to abide by a Supreme Court ruling on the illegality of forced mobilization. It is also normalizing anti-Korean thought in the name of countering North Korea,” said Nam Ki-jeong, professor at the Seoul National University Institute for Japanese Studies.

“We are getting to the point where people within Japan are claiming that, in order to counter the strategic threat of China, Japan needs to take responsibility for the security of the Korean Peninsula. Meanwhile, the Yoon administration seems to be leading us back to the South Korea-Japan relations of the Park Chung-hee era. We are on an ahistorical and dangerous road,” Nam added.

By Park Min-hee, senior staff writer

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