Japan and R.O.K. Face-off

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had the first dialogue with new President of South Korea, Moon Jae-in through telephone on Thursday. While they reconfirmed necessity of maintaining bilateral relationship between Japan and South Korea, two leaders clearly disagreed on implementation of the agreement in previous administration of Republic of Korea, which determined finalizing the dispute over comfort woman. It is unlikely for Abe administration to force its policy against overwhelming people’s resentment against government of Japan as it does in constructing new military base in Okinawa.

In the first telephone talk with Moon, Abe reiterated his willingness to build future-looking bilateral relationship with South Korea, which was based on common strategic interests of neighbor countries. “I am looking forward to welcome you in Japan,” told Abe with congratulation for Moon’s victory in the election. “I hope we will make efforts to build good and credible relationship,” told Moon. They agreed on having bilateral meeting in early timing and Abe requested to have trilateral summit meeting including China.

They knew that they had different approach to the agreement between Abe and former R.O.K. President Park Geun-hye in December 2015. Abe told that he wanted to manage their bilateral relationship in appropriate manner. Not referring to his campaign promise to renegotiate the agreement, Moon insisted on the importance of future-looking attitude and required to construct good relationship racking their brains. While Abe had been using “future-looking” to put comfort woman issue aside, the word was quoted by the South Korean President to leave the bilateral agreement behind.

The agreement required Japanese government to donate ¥1 billion yen to supporting organization for former comfort woman, with recognition of involvement of Japanese military in the issue. R.O.K. promised its effort to appropriate settlement of the problem of setting statue of comfort woman in front of Japanese Embassy in Seoul, which has not implemented yet.

According to announcement of R.O.K Blue House, Moon explained that most South Korean people were too emotional to accept the agreement and government of South Korea was facing its difficulty in solving the problem in public area. Moon also required succeeding basic concept of the statements of Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono in 1993 or of Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama in 1995, which apologized on Imperial Japan’s colonial ruling and comfort woman issue. As long as seeing firm standpoint of Moon on historical issues between two nations, early settlement of bilateral dispute over the comfort woman agreement is not likely to be achieved.