South Korea and Japan: Forever 1920

Korean women born in 1940 carrying photos of men who died in 1910.

The United States’ two indispensable allies in East Asia are at each other’s throats — again.

A South Korean court is expected to start the process of seizing some $350,000 worth of shares in a local joint venture held by Japan’s Nippon Steel, as compensation for wartime labor during Japanese colonial rule. This is the same issue that compelled Japan last year to strike back with a number of measures aimed at exploiting South Korea’s dependence on certain Japanese high-tech materials. That, in turn, led to the suspension of a trilateral intelligence-sharing pact that an exasperated U.S. had been trying to get Seoul and Tokyo to implement for years.

Tokyo is again threatening to retaliate, but its options are dwindling. Its trade moves arguably backfired by accelerating South Korea’s pursuit of alternate suppliers of the materials its tech sector needs, hurting Japanese industry, and now Japan is mired in a deep recession.

Either way, the never-ending spat isn’t going away anytime soon. This reflects deeply entrenched political forces in both countries. It also signals a divergence of strategic interests between Japan and South Korea and an accelerating loss of U.S. influence, particularly in Seoul. Washington’s influence historically helped bridge the divides across the Sea of Japan, and it will be needed to forge anything close to a united front in the region against China and North Korea.

While Japan’s history in South Korea is very ugly, as we also pointed out in our special series “The Curious Case of South Korea,” no country lets its past poison its future or damage its interests more than South Korea.

Yet, given where they are in the world, no two countries in the world have more good reason to make-up than Japan and South Korea. China wants it empire back. Succinctly, Xi Jingping’s vision for One Belt, One Road is designed to secure first the resources of Central Asia to build an impenetrable economic empire and then use that to project sea power that would make all of Eurasia plus Africa China’s sphere of influence. It’s outlined here in our primer on Mahan and Makinder.

As Americans believe their country is a “shining light on a hill,” Chinese believe a world with Beijing at the center of a new tribute system is the natural order of things. The education system in China explicitly teaches this. In our Foreign Policy primer, we discuss how history creates national expectations. Foreigners kow-towing is China’s national expectation.

Or as China’s former Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi put it, “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that's just a fact.”

South Korean and Japan need to wake-up and realize they will stand together or kow-tow together … and that’s just a fact.