Why an agreement between Korea and Japan on forced labor would be difficult

Korea Herald editorial: History stands in the way of Korea-Japan cooperation against North Korea

The groundbreaking Phnom Penh Statement that the United States, the Republic of Korea, and Japan agreed to on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit has been well-received in South Korea—with reservations.

The reservations come because of Korea’s conflict with Japan over history. Korean courts have ruled that Japanese companies must compensate the remaining survivors of wartime forced labor. Japan’s government protested the 2018 final ruling, and Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi have refused to pay.

One way or another, South Korea and Japan are going to need to reach an agreement to settle the matter if they are to build closer relations. The trouble is, the Korean press and the Korean public doesn’t trust Japan and hardly trusts its own government to negotiate a deal.

This problem goes back to the 2015 deal Korea’s Park Geun-hye government made with Japan to “finally and irreversibly resolve” the dispute over comfort women. The agreement didn’t resolve the issue for so much as a minute before activists and citizens began protesting it and Moon Jae-in campaigned against it in his successful 2017 election following Park’s impeachment.

Now the Korea Herald warns against Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol making a similar agreement. In an editorial, the newspaper’s opinion staff writes:

But Yoon should not repeat the same mistake made by his predecessors to resolve the issue in a hurry. Japan is still unwilling to recognize the brutalities of the colonial aggression and its politicians continue to visit or send offerings to the Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrine[s] Japan’s infamous war dead. Furthermore, Japan has not changed its unilateral position that all matters of compensation were resolved under a 1965 bilateral treaty.

It should be noted that the Japanese media have long been quoting Japanese diplomatic sources as saying that “the ball is now in South Korea’s court” -- a suggestion that Japan does not want to lift a finger concerning the compensation issue and South Korea should resolve the issue by itself.

Against this backdrop, Yoon might go for another unfair deal with Japan, which may help improve ties with Japan for the short term, but leaves the fundamental cause of frictions largely unresolved.

What kind of agreement would be deemed acceptable by the press and public in Korea? Representatives of the victims are said to be against receiving compensation from the Korean government (as opposed to it coming directly from Nippon Steel). That would be “undesirable and not appropriate”—so said a ROK Foreign Ministry spokesperson. Japan takes the same hard position against its companies having to pay.

Almost any agreement would be open to harsh criticism in Korea. Focus on the compensation and President Yoon trying to pay off victims at the expense of receiving an apology. Focus on a negotiated apology, which would hardly be sincere, and he could be said to neglect the victims’ needs.

Yoon is so unpopular now, and even an agreement on such a contentious issue made by a popular leader could be picked at to shreds. Park never submitted her 2015 agreement to the National Assembly. Having it pass Assembly muster could lend an agreement added credibility. But selling it to the Assembly, where the opposition party controls a large majority, would be just as hard.

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