Japan and South Korea Grow Closer

The Trump effect on Japan–South Korea relations

By Daniel Sneider, lecturer in East Asian studies at Stanford University, non-resident distinguished fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America, and APP Member. 

First Published July 12, 2026 at the East Asian Forum.

The August 2023 Japan–South Korea–US trilateral summit at Camp David provided powerful impetus for Tokyo and Seoul to restore warm ties, an undertaking initiated by former South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol.

The momentum in Japan–South Korea relations has continued, surviving changes in leadership in all three countries. Even the potentially disastrous pairing of a conservative nationalist government in Tokyo and a progressive administration in Seoul has not slowed the pace of the bilateral partnership’s deepening.

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and South Korean President Lee Jae-myung sit at two ends of the political spectrum, but their May 2026 meeting in Lee’s hometown of Andong on 18-19 May, was marked by a spirit of warmth. Even Lee’s critics, who feared that his long-held harsh views on the legacy of Japanese colonial rule would reverse progress, were pleased.

Former Korean Ambassador to Japan Shin Kak-soo was ‘quite impressed with how [Lee] handled South Korea–Japan relations after taking office’, noting that the meeting in Andong ‘went very well’ — a view shared by senior South Korean officials in off-the-record discussions.

This success can be credited to Japan and Korea’s shared challenges of hedging against both China and an unpredictable United States, with US President Donald Trump’s trade wars and military interventions sending shocks across both economies. Lee’s decision to avoid past sources of contention like wartime history issues with Japan can be read as a calculated effort to use closer ties with Tokyo to insulate South Korea from growing chaos in an unpredictable security environment.

The most powerful factor in this is the prospect of US withdrawal from global leadership under Trump 2.0. Another South Korean senior official noted off the record that South Korea and Japan have ‘shared anxieties about Washington’ and that ‘it is not about China’.

Senior South Korean officials are discussing the need for closer security ties with Japan in response to US retreat, including potentially finessing the territorial disputes by signing a non-aggression pact and moving towards a mutual defence treaty. While this would go beyond what most South Koreans would tolerate — and much less in Japan — its mere consideration is a remarkable sign of the impact of Trump-driven uncertainty.

This tightening is taking place without active US involvement at the highest level. While trilateral meetings are still being held among senior officials and statements are being issued with common views on regional and global security issues like North Korea, this is the product of institutional inertia created by former US president Joe Biden’s administration. There is no evidence of a connection between those official pronouncements and the White House and Trump has never expressed any interest in trilateral cooperation, nor is he eager to follow in Biden’s footsteps.

Despite the factors impelling closer ties, there are serious concerns in Seoul and Tokyo that the rhetoric of bilateral partnership has not been sufficiently reflected in concrete actions.

The most cited example of this is the potential admittance of South Korea to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, a move which could forge closer trade and investment alliances and counter US mercantilism. While Seoul has expressed its interest in joining, it has yet to formally apply. Domestic politics remain a constraint, reflected in the ongoing restrictions on the purchase of Japanese seafood due to the Fukushima nuclear accident and its aftermath.

A similar dynamic is visible in the arena of defence cooperation. Japanese Defence Minister Koizumi Shinjiro visited Seoul in June 2026 and reaffirmed tightening defence ties and trilateral cooperation with the United States. But he was unable to get Seoul to sign off on a long-sought military logistics pact which would institutionalise joint operations. Lee told reporters earlier in June that public sentiment on history issues were the obstacle to signing what would otherwise be a logical agreement.

Beyond immediate issues, two policy areas — China and North Korea — could also drive the neighbours apart.

Lee has been careful to maintain good ties with Beijing, both in the economic realm and in potentially seeking China’s help in dealing with North Korea. The divergence between Lee’s policy towards China and the hostile state of Japan–China relations was noted at the Andong meeting.

Both governments share a commitment to the eventual denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. But Lee seems ready to back a possible Trump summit with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un which could offer de facto acceptance of North Korea’s nuclear status. Japan has always been fearful that this outcome could lead to a separation of the Korean peninsula from US extended deterrence commitments and leave Japan exposed to Pyongyang’s nuclear threat.

The relationship also remains marred by the lingering issues of wartime history and justice that have been carefully put aside but not resolved. Compensation cases against Japanese companies for wartime workers in Japanese mines and factories continue to make their way through South Korean courts. Takaichi has carefully avoided doing anything to inflame Seoul, but it would only take a visit to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine — something she did regularly for several decades — to relight the fires of South Korean patriotism.

For now, the path to improved ties looks open, thanks in large part to Trump and to a lesser extent to Chinese President Xi Jinping. But the question of how long it will remain so is far less certain.

Revisionist Japan returns to Asia

Gathering right-wing storm in Tokyo shadows Seoul’s APEC moment

Takaichi April 2015

Takaichi-led Japan will be less inclined to confront historical issues, putting a potential brake on improving relations with S Korea

by Daniel Sneider, lecturer in East Asian studies at Stanford University, non-resident distinguished fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America, and APP Member
First Published October 17, 2025 on the Peninsula Blog of the Korea Economic Institute.

The upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit was intended to showcase South Korea’s claim to leadership on a range of issues from free trade, digital and artificial intelligence, and democracy. Instead, the Lee Jae Myung administration finds itself beset by shifting geopolitical winds.

A potential meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, or perhaps a three-way session including North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, will likely overshadow anything else that occurs at APEC. Elsewhere, the unsteady Gaza armistice and a renewed attempt by Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin to forge a Ukraine deal continue to dominate headlines.

There is also the imminent shift in leadership in neighboring Japan. Despite efforts to maintain the momentum of improvement in South Korea-Japan relations, embraced by Lee and Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, South Korea faces the prospect of a new Japanese government less inclined to confront historical issues.

Japan’s unstable politics
Japan is experiencing a level of political instability and uncertainty not seen since the early 1990s, when the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) suffered electoral setbacks, splintering defections, and a loss of power.

Following the resignation of Prime Minister Ishiba, the LDP somewhat surprisingly elected hardline conservative Sanae Takaichi to lead the party and form a new government as prime minister.

But Takaichi’s path to power has been anything but smooth. A deep loyalist to the late Shinzo Abe, she is mistrusted within her own party and by most of the opposition. Her victory inspired the Buddhist party Komeito to end its quarter-century coalition with the LDP, citing Takaichi’s apparent alignment with anti-reformers and unrepentant views on Japan’s wartime and colonial history, symbolized by regular visits to the Yasukuni Shrine.

The LDP lacks a majority in either house of the legislature, so it had to form an alliance to garner enough seats to form a minority government. Ishiba governed this way for the last several months.

The backlash against Takaichi prompted the main opposition parties – the Constitutional Democratic Party, the Democratic Party For the People and Ishin no Kai, also known as the Japan Innovation Party – to consider forming a government. The three parties combined would have been able to name a prime minister. The Komeito might also have back such a coalition.

That was not to be. Instead, Takaichi and the LDP have lured one of those three, Nippon Ishin no Kai, the most conservative of the opposition parties, into a new coalition. Together, they are just two seats short of a majority in the lower house and five seats short in the upper house.

Takaichi also met separately with Sohei Kamiya, leader of the ultra-right-wing nationalist Sanseito party – which holds a small but significant number of seats – to discuss cooperation. A parliamentary vote is expected to occur on October 21.

A right-wing Japanese government
The prospect of Takaichi as Japan’s next prime minister alarmed observers in South Korea even ahead of the LDP intra-party vote.

“Takaichi is a disaster for Korea,” a former South Korean ambassador to Japan told this writer at that time. Former Ambassador to Japan Shin Kak-soo similarly warned against the “election of a hawkish PM who might derail the restoration process of Korea-Japan relations.”

Some have held out the hope that Takaichi would moderate her views for the sake of pragmatism, emulating the way Abe governed. There have been reports she will name Abe’s foreign minister, Toshimitsu Motegi, to the same post.

She has also been advised to stay away from Yasukuni. Abe was the last sitting prime minister to visit the shrine, twelve years ago.

“I will make a decision on how to pay my respects and pray for peace at an appropriate time and in an appropriate manner,” Takaichi told reporters after winning the LDP vote earlier this month.

But in the LDP race last year, Takaichi made it clear she would visit Yasukuni, which she has done regularly as a cabinet minister. “At an appropriate time, I want to visit properly, calmly and as I usually do,” she said.

In a defiant statement at a symposium in 2022 hosted by the shrine authorities, she declared: “Stopping visits midway or acting half-heartedly only emboldens the other side. No matter how much criticism I face, I will continue calmly and matter-of-factly.”

This is only a small window into Takaichi’s view of Japan’s wartime past and cynicism toward pacifism. In a recent book based on a series of dialogues with right-wing commentator Yoshiko Sakurai, she argued that, “If a nation succumbs to aggression and loses sovereignty, it loses its existence as a nation – language, culture, and territory will be all be taken away.” She also warned that, “Other nations will not come to the aid of a country that lacks the will and courage to defend itself.”

In this spirit, Takaichi is a vocal advocate of assertive patriotism, both in defense policy and historical memory. Japan’s problem, she argues, is not what it did in World War II but that it lost.

“If Japan had won the war, Japan probably wouldn’t be blamed by anyone now, and those who started the war would be heroes,” she said. “When victors judge the vanquished, it creates an enduring misery of defeat and hardship for future generations. Yet I believe it is wrong for Japanese people to apologize endlessly simply for being born Japanese.”

The alliance with Ishin no Kai is likely to be amenable to these views. The party is primarily focused on domestic issues – specifically, the interests of the Kansai region, centered on Osaka, where it is based. But to the extent it has dealt with these questions, the party leans revisionist.

More radical is Sanseito, which takes an extreme nationalist stance and frequently discusses Japan’s war period.

Ishiba’s farewell address
Prime Minister Ishiba has long opposed this wing of the LDP.  The triumph of Takaichi and the prospects of a conservative nationalist government clearly concern him. On October 10, Ishiba delivered a lengthy statement on the eightieth anniversary of the end of the war, which contained unmistakable warnings against the shift to the right seen not only in Japan but beyond.

Ishiba wrote that Japan’s defeat had been inevitable. He asked rhetorically, “Why did the leadership of the government and the military plunge headlong into a reckless war that resulted in the loss of so many innocent lives, both at home and abroad, and why were they not able to make decisions to avoid the war?”

The answer, he continued, was a failure of civilians to control the military, erosion of democracy, violent extremism, nationalism and a failure to understand the world outside Japan’s borders.

Ishiba drew lessons from this past for the present, lessons that are clearly aimed at the current shift to the right. “Healthy discourse, including mission-driven journalism is necessary. During the war, the media stirred up public opinion, ultimately leading the nation into a reckless war. We must not fall into excessive commercialism, or tolerate narrow-minded nationalism, discrimination or xenophobia.”

Japan, he cautioned, must learn from history. “What matters most are the courage and integrity to squarely face the past, classical liberalism that values the tolerance of listening humbly to the arguments of others, and a healthy and robust democracy.”

Ishiba’s successor will face a significant challenge in not undermining the progress made in South Korea-Japan relations and in addressing the geopolitical shifts that are unfolding. That same challenge faces President Lee, during and after the APEC gathering.

In the best of circumstances, the South Korean and Japanese leaders will join hands and lean on each other, as their predecessors have done over the last few years, and confront ongoing geopolitical challenges together.

Contested History's Shadow

US Moves To Lock In Gains At Camp David Trilateral Summit

By Daniel Sneider, Lecturer, International Policy at Stanford University and APP member

First published in The Oriental Economist, August 14, 2023

When the leaders of Japan and South Korea join President Joe Biden at Camp David on August 18, it will cap a year of remarkable progress in bringing relations in the region back from the depths of dysfunction.

The summit will showcase the attempts by the Biden administration to institutionalize trilateral security cooperation – tying the three countries into a pseudo-alliance built on intelligence sharing, missile defense, cybersecurity and strengthened nuclear deterrence.

For American security officials, these steps have gained fresh urgency from the tightening of another alliance – between North Korea, China and Russia. In an eerie echo of the Korean War, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made a highly symbolic visit to Pyongyang in late July, along with a senior Chinese Communist Party official.

The irony is that Moscow is now seeking arms from North Korea, rather than providing them. But in any case, the Kim Jong Un regime now feels emboldened, marrying new missile tests with bombastic threats.

The Pyongyang axis was perhaps also energized by the efforts of the U.S. to shore up its pledge of nuclear deterrence – so-called “extended deterrence” – to both Seoul and Tokyo.

Before the Shoigu visit, the U.S. and South Korea convened the first official meeting of a new Nuclear Consultative Group (NCG) in Seoul, attended by senior U.S. national security official Kurt Campbell, designed to reassure Koreans of the American pledge to come to their defense and deter a North Korean nuclear attack. The meeting was dramatized by the visit of an American nuclear missile-armed submarine to South Korea, the first since 1981.

The Camp David summit will offer some new icing on the trilateral cake that has been baking for the past year. That will take the form of a joint declaration, still under negotiation, that will set out a shared security perception and interests, with some reference to North Korea and China, as well as the war in Ukraine. An agreement on mutual consultation in case of crisis and the convening of annual trilateral summits is also on the agenda. Economic security issues like cooperation on semiconductors and technology ties to China will also be part of the summit.

But this is short of what the Americans originally had on the agenda.

The Americans want to create a trilateral extended deterrence dialogue – broadening in effect the NCG created with South Korea. But senior American and Korean officials in Washington told this writer that these plans were opposed by both the Japanese and Korean governments.

Japanese officials are wary of any multilateral nuclear discussions, which are considered beyond the political limits in Tokyo. And the Koreans do not want to dilute the importance of their bilateral Washington Declaration, adopted earlier this year in the Biden-Yoon summit.

The Camp David summit is actually a rescheduling of a meeting that was planned for the sidelines of the G7 meeting in Hiroshima but did not take place due to Biden’s need to rush home to deal with the U.S. debt limit negotiations.

U.S. security officials had hoped to follow up on earlier agreements to share missile defense information in real-time, formalized at the trilateral defense ministers meeting in June in Singapore, and the establishment of trilateral joint exercises for anti-submarine and missile defense.

Locking in the gains

The symbolism of a stand-alone summit at Camp David, site of many famous meetings, will still capture the headlines. But behind this lie serious concerns about the fragility of this progress, no matter how much it will be celebrated in all three capitals.

The Biden administration is trying to lock in the gains of the past year to create structures of cooperation that can endure beyond the current administrations in power in Seoul and Tokyo. Lurking behind that there is a fear, strongly felt in Japan and South Korea, that the U.S. elections could return to power an American president who has no real commitment to these alliances.

There are considerable forces in both Japan and South Korea that seek to undermine, if not reverse, what has taken place in the past year. Both South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio suffer from low popularity and ongoing challenges to their leadership.

Serious unresolved issues in the realm of wartime historical justice could re-emerge at any moment. And there are gaps in strategic perception among all three countries that remain largely unaddressed, especially in Washington.

The failure to forge an effective regional trade strategy on the part of the Biden administration undermines whatever progress has been made on trilateral security. The most obvious and effective vehicle for cooperation remains the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

There is a clear benefit if South Korea joined the CPTPP, particularly if China seeks to join the grouping. But the Biden administration, for domestic political reasons, can offer no public push for that move.

While South Korea and Japan are bound by their alliance with the U.S., they do not share the same priorities.

For Korea, the central issue has been and always will be the division of the Korean peninsula and the ongoing threat of the North Korean regime to seek reunification by military means. While Seoul worries about the Sino-Russian partnership that has emboldened Pyongyang, Korean policymakers are reluctant to be drawn into an overt balancing strategy against the PRC.

For Japan, while North Korea is a shared threat, the main security focus is on China and on the tightening alliance between China and Russia, propelled by the Ukraine war. The possibility of Chinese use of force in resolving the Taiwan question has become a much more urgent issue as a result.

But the Japanese also reflect the same views as Koreans about the need to avoid a path toward full-scale economic war with China and to continue to seek ways to engage Beijing.

“Amid the intensifying rivalry between the United States and China, Japan finds itself in an increasingly delicate situation, caught between its security guarantor and its leading economic partner,” former Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs Tanaka Hitoshi wrote recently.

“As a staunch ally of the United States, Japan is committed to reinforcing the alliance framework to deter unilateral changes to the status quo and uphold regional stability. At the same time, despite significant debate and diverse views on its China policy, Japan’s geographic proximity, extensive people-to-people connections, and strong economic ties with China mean that it must carefully navigate tensions and avert unnecessary instability or chaos.”

Ironically, that is true as well for the U.S. although its current political climate does not allow a frank discussion of this reality, though that is changing slightly.

The politics of normalization in Korea and Japan

The greatest source of potential challenges to this progress toward a trilateral security pact is the attempt to push ahead in Korea-Japan relations without really resolving the issues of colonial and wartime history.

The normalization of relations is largely the consequence of the change in administrations in Seoul, though even during the previous progressive administration there was a growing conviction that the severe downturn in relations needed to be reversed.

Yoon has very clearly repudiated the use of anti-Japanese tropes in Korean domestic politics and taken steps to unilaterally resolve the forced labor issue, the Fukushima nuclear wastewater discharge controversy, the export control problem and lingering barriers to security cooperation such as the fire control incident of 2018.

Still, Yoon’s personal popularity remains relatively low, though support for his administration has stabilized somewhat. That said, the polarization of Korean politics remains unchanged. The opposition Democratic Party is gearing up for what promises to be a highly contested and crucial election next spring for the National Assembly, where the Democrats still hold a majority.

The key issues pushed by the progressives are aimed squarely at Yoon’s foreign and security policy agenda, as well as at issues of domestic economic reform. These include the Fukushima discharge, the confrontation with trade unions over labor policy reforms, the unilateral and unreciprocated settlement of the forced labor compensation suits, and the charge that Yoon is undermining Korean independence by subordinating policy to the U.S. and Japan.

The Korean left argues that Yoon’s tilt against China is dictated by the US and Japan and endangers the Korean economy, which is suffering from slowing growth driven in part by a steep decline in exports of Korean semiconductors, batteries and other technology goods to China.

Even among conservatives in Korea, there is a growing concern that while Korea has embraced a confrontation with China, it may find itself alone as the U.S. pursues the resumption of engagement with Beijing. If the economy continues to suffer, with Korean businesses seeming to be put at risk due to the anti-China policy, this may shape the coming election as a potential turning point for Yoon’s foreign and security policy shift.

The politics of normalization in Japan are not nearly as perilous as those of Korea. Prime Minister Kishida’s efforts to improve the optics of relations – the visit of Yoon to Japan, the reciprocal visit to Korea, and the joint appearance at the memorial for Korean victims of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima – are generally viewed positively in Japan.

Within elite policy circles in Japan, based on this writer’s conversations in Tokyo this year, there is recognition that President Yoon has taken serious and even politically risky steps to improve relations and that it is the Japanese interest to support those efforts. Skepticism about Korean commitment to normal relations and the easing of anti-Japanese feelings in Korea has eased considerably.

The history problem will not go away

However, Kishida has been unwilling – and perhaps politically unable – to offer significant concessions on the historical justice issues, most specifically to encourage Japanese corporations to offer contributions to the fund used by Korea to compensate forced labor victims and their descendants.

Nor was Kishida willing to directly address the issues of Japan’s wartime conduct or its colonial rule. All of that was widely noted by Koreans and influenced the view held by Koreans that Yoon made all the concessions on this issue and the Japanese did essentially nothing.

Kishida remains effectively constrained by the strength of the more conservative and historically revisionist elements of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), mainly organized by the former Abe faction but not confined to its members alone.

He may not feel able to take the steps needed on history issues until he holds another general election under his leadership and, if successful, ends the constant discussion of his succession within the LDP. Kishida, however, also shows no personal interest or conviction to confront the history issues more directly.

There is a belief in Tokyo, echoed in Washington, and to some degree in the Presidential administration in Seoul, that the history issues have been effectively contained and even resolved. That will probably be reflected in the outcome of the Camp David summit. But that is an illusion, and a dangerous one.

A Narrow Conservative Victory In Korea

Brings Relief, But Also New Challenges

By Daniel Sneider, Lecturer, International Policy at Stanford University and APP member

Toyo Keizai, March 10,2022

US and Japanese officials will breathe a sigh of relief behind closed doors at the victory of conservative Yoon Suk-yeol in the South Korean presidential election.

On the campaign trail, and in articles and interviews with senior aides, Yoon pledged to pursue all the policies that Washington and Tokyo are looking for in the next Korean administration: A tough line toward North Korea; a readiness to take on regional and global roles in coordination with the U.S. and its allies, even at the expense of ties to China; and a desire to drag Korea-Japan relations out of the deep hole they have sunk into.

But welcome as these words may be, the new Korean president will find it much harder to carry this out in practice.

Yoon will inherit an extremely challenging domestic political environment. Even by the normal standards of Korea’s rough and tumble politics, this election campaign was particularly nasty and neither the progressive nor the conservative candidates could overcome negative perceptions.

The extremely narrow election result, with the two candidates separated by less than one percent of the vote, demonstrated how deeply divided Koreans have become, not only by traditional factors such as regional identity, ideology, and class but now also by gender and generation.

The National Assembly will remain under progressive control for the next two years plus, facing off against a Korean president who has enormous constitutional powers. And Yoon, a former prosecutor, and outsider, will also face challenges, as was already clear in the campaign, from within the conservative party.

“Yoon will be better at managing the international community than domestic politics,” predicts Scott Snyder of the Council on Foreign Relations. “He could turn out to be exactly what we want to hear, but weak.”

Unfortunately for the new South Korean president, the international situation is particularly problematic. The geostrategic and global economic environment is now fundamentally changed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. No matter what the outcome on the battlefield, we are now plunged into a highly militarized and deeply split world, one where Korea will find it increasingly difficult to avoid hard choices.

South Korean foreign policy, under both conservative and progressive leaders, has always tried to walk a delicate line between the great powers that surround it. While relying on the security alliance with the U.S., the Koreans have cultivated close economic ties to China, and reached out to Russia as well. In large part, that was driven by the goal of using China and Russia to put pressure on North Korea.

In an essay in Foreign Affairs, the leading American policy journal, published in early February, Yoon rejected the focus of the Moon Jae-in government on engagement with North Korea, at the expense of a broader global role. He embraced a strategic alignment with the U.S. that goes beyond dealing with Pyongyang, even advocating some participation in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad).

While favoring ongoing cooperation with China, Yoon was notably critical of the Moon administration’s eagerness to yield to Chinese pressure. His views reflect growing anti-Chinese feeling in South Korea, showing up in polling results. The shift in public opinion, while perhaps not permanent, may have marginally impacted the election results, argued Stanford’s Gi-Wook Shin.

“The divided electorate is partly the result of Korea’s location, having to take into account China, Japan, Russia and the U.S.,” observes former senior State Department Korea hand David Straub. “The deep and angry division makes, and will continue to make, it very difficult for South Korea to forge a viable and sustainable policy toward the great powers.”

The Ukraine crisis has sharpened those policy choices. While Japan moved surprisingly quickly to join the U.S. and EU sanctions regime against Russia, the Moon administration hesitated at first. Publicly the Biden administration praises Korea for its decision to join forces – the President pointedly gave credit to Korea, along with Japan and other countries, in his State of the Union address. But privately senior officials admit that South Korea was shamed into it.

Relations with China pose a particular conundrum for the traditional Korean policy of ‘The United States for security, China for the economy.’ Yoon has pledged a “comprehensive strategic alliance with Washington,” one that includes coordination on multilateral issues in the Indo-Pacific and on issues like supply chain resilience and trade.

But, warns Snyder, “Yoon hasn’t grappled in public with the likelihood that South Korean relations with China will be impacted by enhanced alignment with the U.S.”

China’s decision to back Russia’s aggression is already leading to threats to impose additional sanctions against Chinese firms that supply Russia with semiconductors and other key technologies. Korea, and Japan, will be pressed to join in those moves.

The North Korea question

Ukraine may also significantly undermine the stated goal of shifting focus away from North Korea. Up until now, the Biden administration has been content to maintain the status quo with Pyongyang.

It has gone out of its way to accommodate the Moon administration’s desire to restart diplomatic engagement with the North, mostly confident that Kim Jong Un is not really interested in talks. The new administration in Seoul would seem to be even more ready to move in step with Washington, as Yoon as made it clear he is not interested in easing pressure on the North.

But Ukraine may shape North Korea’s own readiness to break free from the status quo, well beyond the latest increased tempo of missile testing. The just issued annual threat assessment report of the U.S. intelligence community states that in January, “North Korea began laying the ground for an increase in tensions that could include ICBM or possibly a nuclear test this year.” Satellite photos show evidence of early steps to repair the nuclear test site.

Bruce Klingner, a former U.S. intelligence analyst on Korea, sees hints of preparations for something to coincide with the celebration of the 110th anniversary of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung’s birthday on April 15. Some kind of major escalatory test is coming, he believes, “it’s just a question of when.”

While the testing plans have their own internal rationale and timetable, the North Koreans must be carefully watching Russia’s war and its use of nuclear threats to ward off U.S. intervention.

“The longer-term and more consequential impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lies with whether Russia’s attempt to erase an international border might stand as a precedent for North Korea, which harbors its own revisionist aspirations regarding the erasure of the armistice line dividing the Korean peninsula,” Scott Snyder wrote this week in Council on Foreign Relations blog post.

The Japan-Korea question

The thorniest issue for a Yoon administration’s foreign policy may be relations with Japan. During the election campaign, Yoon and his aides repeatedly criticized the Moon administration for its mishandling of relations with Japan.

He called for a “rethink” of relations with Tokyo, harkening back to the spirit of the joint declaration issued in 1998 between South Korean leader Kim Dae Jung and Japanese Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo.

The Biden administration has been pounding away at both Seoul and Tokyo to improve relations and to tighten trilateral security coordination. Senior State Department officials express some hope that the advent of the new government in Seoul could provide a window of opportunity to break through the current impasse in ties.

They point to the small progress represented by the recent meeting of Japanese and Korean foreign ministers in Hawaii, under the watchful aegis of the U.S.

Privately, however, U.S. officials express some frustration not only with Korean insistence on dealing with the history issues but also with Japan’s continued actions that have only worsened ties.

The Hawaii meeting, they say, was undermined by Japan’s decision to seek UNESCO status for the Sado Island mines without any admission of the role played by Korean forced labor in those mines.

The idea that trilateral relations can be improved without confronting the problems of wartime history simply ignores the role as well of Korean public opinion, and of Japanese domestic politics.

“With Japan, there is a better chance that relations could be improved under Yoon,” says Klingner, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, “but any Korean is going to set a high bar for Japan to improve relations. Yoon is more likely to focus on current threats but there will always be conditions that Japan will have to fulfill.”

And this puts pressure on Prime Minister Kishida Fumio who seems to be unwilling to break free from more hardline conservatives in the ruling party. Ironically, having a conservative government in power in Seoul, ready to engage, may pose even more of a problem for Japan.

“The Japanese will get a South Korean counterpart but one that also looks like it wants to do a lot more with Japan then [sic] the traffic seems to be willing to bear on the Japanese side,” says Snyder. The issues of forced labor and comfort women are not going to go away, he says.

The Biden administration will be watching this closely, especially if the President goes ahead with plans to hold a Quad summit in Japan in late May. There will be a crucial period between the election and the inauguration of the new President on May 10 when American officials will be exploring these issues with Yoon. He will likely send a transition team to Washington led by the next foreign minister and senior officials in the Biden administration are already preparing an agenda for those talks.

Whatever celebration is going on behind closed doors in Washington and Tokyo is not likely to last for very long. The hard work awaits.

A Leadership Vacuum

On Japan–South Korea cooperation

East Asia Forum, 11 July 2021

by Daniel Sneider, Lecturer in International Policy and East Asian Studies at Stanford University and APP member

The dysfunctionality of Japan–South Korea relations led many to despair about whether the two Northeast Asian neighbours can l ever get along. Efforts by US officials to create trilateral opportunities on security, climate or cybersecurity have largely foundered.

History provides two lessons, which point in contradictory directions

The first is that the tensions are deeply rooted and fundamental to national identity in both countries. The other is that progress is possible, but requires political leadership and the help of the United States. While historical enmity remains, strategic and even tactical conditions can create opportunities.

Specifically, two moments in Japan–South Korea relations provide relevant lessons: the 1965 treaty to normalise relations and the 2015 agreement on so-called ‘comfort women’*.

Post-war efforts to establish relations began in 1951 amid fierce fighting in Korea and with Japan on the verge of restoring sovereignty. The United States was eager to bind its two allies together, but neither South Korean leader Syngman Rhee nor Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida were enthusiastic about dealing with thorny issues, such as the treatment of the Koreans living in Japan and compensation for Japanese colonial rule.

Successful talks on a treaty to normalise relations and settle post-war claims finally took place in 1965. Despite strong opposition in both countries to the compromises needed to reach a deal, the treaty became the legal foundation for post-war Japan–South Korea ties.

A change in leadership was needed to make that possible, particularly in South Korea, where the military-led regime of Park Chung-hee had taken power in 1962. A Japanese-trained officer in the wartime Imperial Army, Park was determined to follow the Japanese model of export-led industrialisation and needed Japan as a source of aid, investment and technology. The Japanese government of Eisaku Sato understood that this was the best partner they could hope for and saw economic opportunity.

The strategic situation also pushed them together. China tested nuclear weapons in 1964 and 1965, the Vietnam War was in full swing and North Korea was emboldened. The United States saw a Japan–South Korea partnership as crucial to meeting the communist threat. Washington made normalisation a priority in every meeting with South Korean and Japanese leadership, pushed for the treaty and intervened when talks hit snags.

A similar convergence led to the 2015 comfort women agreement, which created a Japanese-funded foundation to provide compensation to survivors and affirmed Japan’s responsibility for wartime acts. The then South Korean president Park Geun-hye, daughter of the late military dictator, held a strong personal concern for the women but wasn’t wedded to the progressive narrative of victimisation. Then Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe advocated a conservative revisionist narrative, but was also pragmatic and not vulnerable to criticism from the Japanese right.

Strategic realities also played a key role then. The Chinese challenge was manifest. North Korea’s nuclear program was progressing rapidly and efforts at negotiation had stalled.

Japan–South Korea relations dived after Abe’s December 2013 visit to the Yasukuni shrine to Japan’s war dead, but once Japanese and South Korean officials began talking to each other again, the United States combined direct pressure from the President and behind-the-scenes mediation to help facilitate a deal.

Renewed cooperation seems unlikely today, but this could change. The South Korean government of Moon Jae-in, reflecting long-held views of South Korean progressives, and prompted by court decisions, has challenged both the legitimacy of the 1965 treaty and moved to effectively dismantle the 2015 agreement. From this perspective, the deals were unequal bargains, compounded by Japan’s ongoing denial of its war crimes.

For the Japanese right, this gives credence to their insistence that South Koreans are unreliable partners, unable to hold an agreement. They dismiss the progressive government in Seoul as de facto partners of China.

The strategic situation, however, lends weight to those who argue that the threat from China and North Korea should bind them together. In Washington, the broad effort to encircle China requires close ties to allies and between them. Both Tokyo and Seoul nominally support trilateral cooperation.

The US role has also shifted back toward bringing Tokyo and Seoul together. When relations took their latest nosedive, the Trump administration was notably disengaged. But the Biden administration is emphasising the role of allies and actively encouraging trilateral meetings.

Perhaps partly in response, the Moon administration has signalled, but not manifested, a desire to step back from its opposition to the 1965 treaty and the 2015 agreement. But Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, confident in his alignment with Washington on China policy, has so far not reciprocated.

The missing element to bilateral cooperation then is political leadership. Moon is deeply committed to the progressive agenda and his party faces a serious challenge in next year’s presidential election. Suga is weakened, facing challenges both from within his ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party and from the liberal opposition. Neither man seems personally inclined to take on the risks of compromise.

The Biden administration may have concluded that any breakthrough will have to wait until next year and a change of leadership, perhaps in both countries.

Yet officials in Tokyo and Seoul are quietly working to lay the groundwork for a potential deal on wartime history issues and it is essential that the United States makes clear, from the highest level, the imperative to repair relations. The coming Summer Olympic Games, which Moon is planning to attend, could provide a moment to set relations on a different path. History shows that progress is possible with leadership and patience.

*This is only an agreement to Westerners. Neither country describes it as such. There is no one, signed document approved by the legislature. There are two different summaries of a discussion. 

The Japan-Korea History Wars

Will Not End, For Now

By Daniel Sneider,  Lecturer, International Policy at Stanford University and APP Member

Toyo Keizai, April 30, 2021

Inside the Biden administration, there is a deepening frustration over what is described as a “painful” breakdown of relations between Japan and South Korea. In meeting after meeting, American officials from the President on down are preaching the importance of trilateral cooperation between the United States and its two key allies in Northeast Asia.

That cooperation is a key piece of the Biden administration’s broader strategy to confront China. The administration’s North Korea policy, nearing the end of its review, depends in part on the three countries lining up together.

Publicly, the U.S. extracts ritual statements of support for trilateral coordination, and holds meetings of senior officials, focused on forging a joint response to North Korea, and hopefully China. Privately, senior U.S. officials are pushing Korea and Japan to make real progress in restoring working relations, even to resolve the issues of wartime history that continue to plague their relations. So far, however, there is no evidence of serious talks on the history issues.

The recent decision of the Seoul Central District Court to dismiss a suit by Korean victims of wartime sexual servitude, so-called military comfort women, has generated some hopes that both governments might find a route out of the current impasse.

The South Korean government of President Moon Jae-in has been signaling some flexibility and interest in improving relations. Senior Korean officials have gone out their way to tell their American counterparts that it is the Japanese who are holding up any progress.

The Japanese government has indeed offered a cold response to the Korean signals, arguing that they first need to see actions to shut down the legal challenges over comfort women and forced laborers. Japanese officials have written off the Moon government and place their hopes on a conservative government coming to power next year in South Korea.

Both Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide and President Moon are weakened politically and their room to maneuver is even less than previously.

“It is unlikely that the Korean government would change its positions and suggest mutually agreeable solutions to Japan,” says former South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung Hwan, a key bridge between the two countries. The losses by the ruling progressive party in the Seoul and Busan mayoral elections, and Moon’s plummeting popularity, make it highly unlikely there will be a breakthrough until after the presidential election next March, predicts Yu, who previously served as Korean Ambassador to Japan.

The recent Japanese parliamentary by-elections have similarly weakened Suga and made him even more under the sway of hardline conservatives in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party who oppose any concessions on wartime history issues. Japanese public opinion, shaped in part by conservative media in Japan, reflects the view that Korea is an unreliable partner.

“Suga has to pay attention to public opinion because the LDP is facing difficulties in the coming election of the House of Representatives this year,” observes Tokyo University Professor Kawashima Shin, an expert on wartime history issues. “If Suga makes any positive response to Moon’s approach, it would be a negative factor for Suga and for the LDP.”

The war for Washington’s favor

At the moment, the two American allies are engaged in a fierce, though undeclared, the war in Washington, trying to convince the new administration to take their side.

The latest exchange of fire took place when Prime Minister Suga visited Washington in April. The attention of Japanese and American media was focused on the discussion of China, and on Taiwan. Most observers missed the rather blunt statements on Korea issued by Suga, first at his joint press conference with Biden and then again in an appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

While making a nod toward trilateral cooperation, Suga pointedly pressured the U.S. not to retreat from a commitment to complete denuclearization of North Korea, using a term favored by the Trump administration, calling for “CVID,” or Complete, Verifiable, Irreversible Denuclearization.

Suga’s remarks were a clear effort to head off any move by the Biden administration, after its policy review, to seek an arms control style deal with Pyongyang that would leave its shorter-range missiles, and its existing nuclear arsenal, intact.

He called recent tests of short-range ballistic missiles by the North Koreans a “clear violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions” and a “threat to the peace and security” of Japan and the region. Negotiations, he said, must eliminate the threat of “ballistic missiles of all ranges possessed by North Korea.”

President Moon, who is heading to Washington in May, responded with an interview with the New York Times. Moon laid responsibility on Donald Trump for the failure of the summit talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. His message to Biden was to resume direct talks with the North Koreans as early as possible, a goal that is central to Moon’s own political agenda.

The court ruling opens a door – will Suga and Moon walk through it?

Despite the battles for Washington’s favor, the April 21 decision by the Seoul District Court could have a significant positive impact on the history wars. The decision effectively contradicted the decision by a similar level court in early January which had ruled that the Japanese government had to provide compensation to 12 former comfort women, supporting the argument that principles of international human rights overrode claims to exemption from such suits based on state sovereignty.

The April decision in a suit by a separate group of women was in line with established international law, say Korean legal experts and likely to be upheld over the earlier decision.

“The court came back to the classical authentic attitudes on the sovereign immunity issue,” Seoul National University legal scholar Heo Seongwook told me. “Most probably, this conclusion will be maintained at the appeals court.”

In his ruling, Justice Min Seong-Cheol also significantly referred to the 2015 agreement reached by Japan and the previous conservative government of Park Geun-Hye in South Korea to attempt to settle the issue of compensation and apology to the Korean women victims.

That agreement created a Japanese-funded Fund which provided compensation, accepted by two-thirds of the surviving victims, along with an expression of apology. The suits were filed on behalf of supporters of the Korean organization representing those who rejected this settlement.

Justice Min acknowledged that the results of that agreement may not have been “fully satisfactory compared with the pain they had to suffer through in the past,” but that it did have validity as an existing agreement and was a Japanese offer of a “remedy for the violation of rights.”

The progressive government had unilaterally dismantled the 2015 agreement, closing down the operations of the Fund in support of activists who opposed the deal. But following the January court decision, which triggered a harsh response from Tokyo, Moon reversed course slightly. He expressed dismay at the decision and acknowledged that the 2015 agreement remained in force as an official pact.

Moon’s shift seems to have set the stage for the reversal in the District Court. “President Moon’s remarks…indirectly influenced the decision,” says Professor Park Cheol Hee, a prominent expert on Japan at Seoul National University. “Still there is no evidence that Blue House gave any guideline to the court.”

By reaffirming the 2015 agreement, the Korean court and Moon have “opened the door to diplomatic negotiation between Korea and Japan,” says Professor Park. But the obstacles remain considerable. On the Korean side, Moon is reluctant to take the next obvious step and reopen the comfort women fund established in 2015, accepting that as the basis for dealing with those victims who remain to be included.

Japanese official response to the court decision has been extremely cautious, led by the Prime Minister’s Office and the LDP.

“I think that now it depends on Suga,” says former foreign ministry official Togo Kazuhiko, who has been a voice for compromise on history issues. “If Suga sees this verdict as an opportunity, he has a room to move.” And if the April ruling loses on appeal, Suga can always argue that he did his best to improve relations, says Togo.

The other time bomb hanging over this is the potential decision of the Korean courts to dissolve the assets of Japanese corporations which were judged to have to pay compensation to former Korean forced laborers from the wartime period.

That case is legally more solvable as it involves individual plaintiffs and private firms but the Japanese government has pressured the firms not to yield, arguing it is a violation of the 1965 treaty which normalized relations between the two countries and settled, in principle, such wartime claims.

In Japan, there are voices in favor of improving relations with South Korea, echoing American officials who see the strategic importance of bringing Korea in with Japan in the broader response to China. But Suga personally opposes any concessions and shares a deep mistrust of the Moon administration, based on his eight years as Chief Cabinet Secretary to Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, says Professor Kawashima.

That leaves Washington waiting for an opening to help repair these damaged relations.

“President Biden fully understands the delicate history issues between Korea and Japan,” former South Korean foreign minister Yu told me. Biden played the role of mediator on these issues during the Obama administration, setting in motion the diplomatic engagement that led to the 2015 agreement, in which Yu played a key role. But conditions may not yet be ripe to repeat that effort.

“I believe President Biden will wait until next year, when a new team is installed in both Korea and Japan and ready for compromise,” the Korean diplomat says, “a compromise for the sake of their legacy and also for the betterment of all involved, including the United States.”

Biden's Japan History Relationship

Why Biden Will Embrace The American Alliances in Northeast Asia

By Daniel Sneider, Stanford University and APP member

First appeared in Tokyo Business Today, November 23, 2020

In the halls of the Prime Minister’s Office and the Foreign Ministry, it is popular to express anxiety about the future of relations with the U.S. under a new Biden administration. Fed by the conservative media in Japan, officials and ruling party politicians revive familiar claims that Democrats are ‘anti-Japan’ and ‘pro-China,’ or even worse, ‘pro-Korea.’ Some see evidence of this in the RUMORED appointment of Susan Rice as Secretary of State, while others point to former President Barack Obama’s cool relations with then Prime Minister Abe Shinzo.

Interviews with former senior Obama administration officials from the State and Defense departments, as well as current Biden advisors, most of whom preferred to speak on a background basis due to the sensitivity of the transition, paint a very different picture. President-elect Biden will bring to the White House not only his experience as Obama’s Vice President for eight years, but even more importantly, 36 years in the U.S. Senate, where he twice chaired the Foreign Relations Committee. Biden is a consummate politician, sensitive to the limits on foreign policy imposed by domestic politics but also confident in his ability to use personal relationships to shape foreign relations.

The Vice President draws upon his own experience of personal tragedy – the death of his first wife and daughter, and later of his son Beau – and his sense of history, derived in part from his Irish heritage. He brings to foreign policy “a sense of Greek tragedy but also of the importance of individual destiny,” says a senior Democratic party Congressional aide. “He believes in personal diplomacy, in a way that Obama did not and that Donald Trump never did for reasons of lack of empathy.”

Based on his experience in the Senate, and as Vice President, the Congressional aide describes him as “fluent in Asian style diplomacy.” Biden, he adds, “is a true believer in alliances. That is a deep fiber of his being.” For the incoming administration, alliances are central to their major goals – crushing the pandemic, tackling climate change, and restoring economic growth.

Biden’s views on the centrality of alliances were shaped by the Cold War and his early focus on the Soviet Union and on the role of the NATO alliance. Though he was placed on the Foreign Relations Committee by Senator Mike Mansfield, who later served as Ambassador to Japan, Biden has mostly been a Western Europe centered politician. When it comes to Asia, however, Biden has been influenced by longtime aides who see Japan as the most important U.S. partner.

Biden in action – the Asia swing of 2013

Biden’s trip to Japan, China and South Korea in December 2013 offers a unique window onto his views. The Obama administration was looking to deepen its ‘pivot’ toward Asia and, as a key part of that strategy, conclude negotiations to form the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Hopes for a close partnership with China were fading as the Chinese flexed their military muscles in the East and South China Seas. Meanwhile, North Korea conducted it third nuclear test in February, along with numerous missile tests.

The U.S. was eager to bring Japan and South Korea into closer security cooperation, tightening trilateral coordination as a counter to China. There was growing concern about South Korea drifting into the orbit of China, propelled partly by the election of conservative President Park Geun-Hye who was eager to improve ties with Beijing.

Park was deeply uneasy with Abe, who had come to power in December 2012. The conservative Japanese leader had signaled his intention to roll back previous Japanese government statements on wartime history, particularly the Kono statement on Comfort Women and the Murayama statement on the war issued in 1995. By the fall of 2013, relations were almost entirely frozen.

In November, China announced the establishment of an “East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone,” covering most of the airspace of the sea, including territory administered by Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. China’s provocative move was at the top of Biden’s agenda when he arrived in Tokyo on December 2, making the need for trilateral security cooperation even more urgent.

“We believe that Northeast Asia will be strongest when its two leading democracies work together to meet common threats, and when the three of us – the United States, Japan, and the Republic of Korea – work together to advance common interests and values,” Biden told the Asahi ahead of his trip.

Privately, Biden pressed Abe on the need to reach out to Park and hold a summit to break through on relations. He left that meeting convinced that Abe was ready to meet.

His decision to get engaged in this effort was made against the recommendation of his advisors, according to a former senior State Department official who was based in the region.

“We wanted the Japanese and Koreans to do a better job of getting along,” the official told me, “but we didn’t recommend that Vice President Biden jumps into that issue.” American officials were pleased with Abe’s stance on alliance issues, particularly the TPP. “But the one low mark he was getting from the U.S. was on history issues,” the official explained. Still, American diplomats were wary of getting in the middle of history issues, fearful that it would only anger both sides. “But Biden was a confident American politician,” said the official, believing that his personality “might make a difference.”

Biden went next to China and spent some five hours in talks with Xi and other Chinese leaders, pushing back on the ADIZ declaration and pressing the Chinese to improve ties with Japan and South Korea. They also spent considerable time talking about North Korea, with Biden hoping to win Chinese help to bring Pyongyang back to the bargaining table.

The last stop was Seoul, on December 6-7, where Biden and Park had a somewhat difficult conversation. They spent a lot of time talking about defense cost-sharing with Biden pressing the Koreans to do more. Biden told Park that Abe was ready to meet, putting pressure on her to agree to a summit.

“There is a growing frustration in Washington without assigning blame to Park,” a senior American diplomat told me and a small group of Stanford visitors two days after Biden left Korea. “We may get historical issues, but we still think these countries should get along.”

When I and my Stanford colleagues met Park, the Korean leader was visibly upset about the squeeze being put on her by Biden. The Koreans clearly felt the Americans had misread Japanese intentions. She took office prepared for cooperation with Japan, Park told us, but Japanese officials, including deputy Premier Aso Taro and Abe made statements that either ignored or sought to revise the previous Japanese positions on history issues.

“I am not closing the door to a meeting and dialogue is important,” Park said. “But it is important that for a summit to be successful, Japan should not be glossing over these issues.” It would be worse, she continued, if Abe were to emerge from a meeting and make controversial statements about the past or even visit the Yasukuni shrine to the war dead. Park spoke passionately about the problem of the surviving Comfort Women. “They will not live much longer,” Park told us. “This issue involves more than just these women. It involves the human rights of women in wartime. We cannot afford to see Japan deny responsibility for such a grave issue.”

Park insisted that a summit had to be based on a firm commitment from the Japanese government to confirm the validity of the Murayama and Kono statements and refrain from any provocative actions. It was a message, U.S. Embassy officials told us, she had conveyed very clearly to Biden.

Evan Medeiros, the NSC official and Asia expert who accompanied Biden on this trip, insisted that the Vice President “didn’t try to mediate between Japan and Korea,” as he put it to me. “He raised issues about history with both Park and Abe and encouraged both to be flexible and reasonable.”

The Yasukuni crisis

Some days later, Biden held a long phone call with Abe, briefing him on his trip and his discussion with Park. He had pressed Park to meet, Biden told Abe, but she was worried about what might happen afterwards. Abe did not make any firm commitments in the call, but U.S. officials, and Biden himself, were left with the clear impression that Abe would not visit Yasukuni shrine or take other actions that might undermine the attempt to hold a summit.

Biden’s efforts came crashing down when, to the surprise of the Americans, Abe visited Yasukuni shrine on December 26. “Biden inserted himself and it didn’t work,” the former senior State Department official told me.

When the news hit Washington, it was Christmas day and the White House, with Biden’s involvement, authorized the Embassy to issue an unusual statement expressing “disappointment” (失望)with Abe. “What Abe said and what Biden heard might have been different things,” the former official admitted. “I think the entire U.S. government was pissed off at Abe. Japanese were shocked and were really worried. And that was the intended impact.”

Despite that moment, however, Biden did not come away with any grudges, the senior official told me. Instead, Biden, with the President himself now engaged, pressed ahead. In March 2014, Obama hosted Park and Abe at a trilateral meeting on the sidelines of a nuclear security summit in the Hague, trying to use North Korea as a way to bring them together. In April, Obama visited both Japan and South Korea and took his own stab at addressing the history issues, carefully avoiding them in his public statements in Tokyo while openly acknowledging the pain of the past in Korea.

The next year, Abe and Park made separate visits to Washington. Abe tried to meet American concerns by toning down his statement on the 70th anniversary of the war. When Park visited in the summer, Biden had a long lunch with her at the Vice President’s residence. He talked about Ireland and why history matters.

“Biden clearly understands the history issues,” a former senior Obama official who was directly involved in these talks told me. “What makes him unique is that he understands them from a policy standpoint but he also gets it as a politician. It is a political issue and it takes somebody at the leader level to understand the contours of this. It is not pressuring. It is understanding that it is important to the United States.”

The meeting had an impact, the former official believes. “There was some Biden magic,” he said. Park left that meeting and delivered a speech where she declared she was ready to meet Abe. The two leaders finally got together in November, on the sidelines of a trilateral summit with China, leading to a breakthrough in the long-stalled talks on a Comfort Women agreement, finally announced that December.

Biden and Suga – a match?

Today, we are at a similar moment. The incoming Biden administration will have to forge a new approach to China, but its priority will first be to strengthen alliances. Once again, the tensions between Japan and Korea stand in the way. But Abe is gone and the Koreans are apparently seeking a way out of the history impasse.

Does that mean Biden will personally get involved? Most Biden advisors believe he will empower others to act – probably Tony Blinken, likely to be Secretary of State. During the Obama administration, Blinken forged a vice-ministerial level trilateral coordination dialogue with Japan and Korea.

Personal diplomacy is likely to be essential, say Biden advisors. “Suga has a great personality for dealing with Biden,” says a former U.S. official who met him regularly. “In private, he has a good sense of humor, he can be garrulous, sharp and tough. He has a good chance of having a decent relationship with Biden.”

Biden advisors dismiss Japanese concerns about a ‘pro-China’ approach, or the role of Susan Rice. “I don’t think this matters,” one senior advisor told me. Whether the bureaucrats of Kasumigaseki believe that is another matter.

Glimmers Of Hope For Japan-Korea Relations

by Daniel Sneider, Lecturer, International Policy at Stanford University and APP Member
Toyokeizai Online, January 2, 2020

This past year marked the lowest point in relations between Japan and its neighbor, South Korea, since the two countries established diplomatic relations more than a half century ago. As the new year dawns, however, there are glimmers of hope that the tide is slowly turning.

The meeting in China between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in China at least demonstrated that channels for dialogue remain open. Before that, trade officials met in Tokyo to discuss the export control measures imposed by both sides, followed by a small step from Japan to ease restrictions on key exports to Korea related to semiconductor manufacture.

And with the threat of a court order to seize the assets of Japanese companies looming, Korean legislators are discussing a compensation plan for former forced laborers that might offer a way out of that difficult issue of wartime justice.

This is a fragile process that could break down in the blink of an eye, but informed actors in both Korea and Japan see reasons for guarded optimism.

“Our bilateral relations now cannot get worse and there is a growing consensus among our people that Korea cannot afford to let its relations with Japan break down completely,” former South Korean Foreign Minister and Ambassador to Tokyo, Yu Myung Hwan, told me. “I think we have passed the lowest point,” says Yu, who has been a key figure in Japan-Korea relations.

Still, Yu warns, “one time-bomb is left – when, and how, the seized assets of Japanese companies might be cashed in.” For now, Korean courts have only taken preliminary steps to sell those assets, but if they actually move to do so, “Abe will have to respond likewise and that will surely provoke another downward spiral in relations,” he predicts.

The lawyers for the Korean laborers who brought the suit claiming compensation remain in a dialogue with the Moon administration, delaying the next steps. But this will not last forever – “I am not fully optimistic at this point,” Yu told me.

A veteran Japanese journalist specializing in foreign affairs takes a somewhat less upbeat view of where things may be headed. “I hope this bilateral relationship has hit the bottom, but I don’t find a solid reason to say so,” the senior editor told me. “I am one of the guys who predict that this cold war between Abe and Moon is likely to go on in a mild way next year.”

The political dimension
For now, there is a cease-fire in this crisis. But neither Moon nor Abe are highly motivated to find an early solution.

The impact on Japan from the economic boycott in South Korea, most visible in the dramatic drop in Korean tourists coming to Japan, is still minor. Combined with pressure from the U.S. to ease tensions, “Abe has some incentive to move,” says Tokyo University Professor and foreign policy expert Ryo Sahashi. But there is very little potential political upside in improving relations for the Japanese leader, especially among conservative voters and lawmakers.

“Diplomacy with South Korea only costs him political capital,” Sahashi told me, “he doesn’t gain anything from it.” Still, Abe seems unlikely to take further steps to provoke a Korean reaction, as happened with the export controls imposed last summer.

Moon, for his part, faces crucial elections to the South Korean National Assembly in April. The possible return to serious tensions in relations with North Korea potentially undermines support for the ruling progressive party which has put North-South Korea engagement at the top of its agenda. A possibly unpopular move to reach a compromise with Japan on the forced laborer issue might be too much of a risk for Moon. But a worsening of relations would also not help Moon, observers believe.

“The upcoming parliament election in April 2020 will be an Armageddon for the government party since it will be a sort of midterm evaluation of the incumbent Moon administration,” observes Yu, a veteran diplomat. “And the worsening of the relationship with Japan would not help before the election unless Japan provokes further in a nasty way. But I think Abe wouldn't do that again. I believe that after the general election next year the Korean government will be more flexible in dealing with Japan.”

Until then, however, Moon continues to be very cautious. He has not embraced the effort to find a compromise solution to the forced laborers problem led by South Korean National Assembly Speaker Moon Hee-sang. Speaker Moon introduced legislation to establish a foundation formed by voluntary contributions from both Korea and Japanese companies, and individuals, to compensate the former laborers.

The proposed fund is modeled on the German Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation, formed in 2000, which paid compensation to all those forced to work in German mines and factories during the war. It was funded by both the German government and by the German firms who used that labor, just as Japanese companies did during the war.

The model is cited by many experts, but the decision of the Moon government to dismantle a similar fund created to compensate the so-called Comfort Women in the 2015 agreement between Japan and South Korea undermines the viability of this proposal.

The new proposal does not yet have the support of those who filed suit in Korean courts, and their lawyers. The Abe administration has also been cautious toward this proposal, even though it does not demand either official Japanese funds or a formal apology to the victims.

“Speaker Moon's idea is not perfect,” notes Tokyo University’s Sahashi. “It would be better if the fund was divided equally between South Korean companies, the South Korean government and Japanese companies. But even this solution would face domestic criticism in both countries. Still, I can’t imagine any other option.”

South Korea’s former foreign minister Yu, who played a key role in setting up the Comfort Women foundation, agrees with this assessment. “Speaker Moon's proposal is not a bad idea at all if it can be passed as a bill in the parliament and Japan is willing to participate in ‘donating’ money to the Fund,” he says.

But Yu worries that the Assembly leader does not yet have sufficient support in the legislature to pass the bill and may have higher priorities, such as passage of an election law and a reform of the prosecution system. “I wonder whether he can spare some of his political assets to push through his idea to resolve the ‘war-time forced labor issue’ once and for all,” he told me.

Behind this lurks the status of the 1965 treaty which normalized diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea and dealt with the problem of compensation for forced laborers and others through a large transfer of Japanese grants and loans. Those funds were used to finance the industrialization of South Korea, though limited individual compensation was also paid out.

The progressives in South Korea have long challenged the legitimacy of this treaty, arguing it was forced on Korea by the United States and was the creation of a ‘pro-Japanese’ regime led by military leader Park Chung-hee.

The Japanese government continues to insist this issue was settled by the treaty and proposed to deal with the current crisis through a third-party arbitration process set out in that treaty. The Moon government has so far sidestepped whether they still feel bound by the 1965 treaty, carefully avoiding triggering the question of renegotiating the entire treaty.

Even Korean scholars who have been critical of Japan question this ambiguous position taken by the Blue House. The Korean government should clearly communicate through official channels that it will respect the treaty, Professor Chung Jae-jeong, the former head of the Northeast Asia History Foundation, said in a recent interview. “This will facilitate negotiations on how to resolve the current disputes,” Professor Chung said. “I think we as a country have passed a stage where we approach state-to-state conflicts emotionally. They should be handled with professional judgment and knowledge.”

The geopolitics of the Japan-South Korea dispute
The prospects for improvement in Japan-South Korea relations will undoubtedly be affected by the broader geostrategic environment in Northeast Asia. If tensions rise again with North Korea, that may drive Japan and South Korea closer together, though it will not in itself overcome the underlying historical issues.

American policy makers have persistently urged the two countries, both allied to the U.S., to focus on their shared security interests. And that pressure at least yielded some results in the Korean decision to back off from abandoning the defense intelligence sharing agreement. But the forces of nationalism in both countries tend to overwhelm those appeals to joint security interests.

The withdrawal of the U.S. from its traditional leading role as the guarantor of security in Northeast Asia has left Japan and South Korea increasingly on their own in managing out these long-standing tensions. And it has left open the door for China to assert its leadership role, as took place at the trilateral summit in Chengdu. President Moon, speaking at the summit, evoked the “common destiny” binding the three countries together.

“This is a new trial for both countries to explore their own capability to sustain and develop the East Asia order which has long kept the stable environment since the end of World War Two,” comments the senior Japanese foreign affairs journalist.

“In that sense, the trilateral dialogue framework of Sino-ROK-Japan should have more and more implication for the future to come. I have no doubt Japan’s bond with the US will stay firm and solid regardless of whatever chemistry will emerge in the Sino-Korean-Japan relationship. But when it comes to South Korea’s position, frankly, I am much less certain.”

Northeast Asia unraveling amid US retreat

Bolton and Kono

We are left now watching events unfold in East Asia in the absence of American leadership and a cogent strategy

By Daniel Sneider, Stanford University lecturer, Asia Policy Point member, and associate editor of Washington’s Nelson Report, in which this article originally appeared on July 25, 2019. 

While Americans become increasingly preoccupied with their own domestic descent into dysfunction and political civil war, the rest of the world moves on without them.

The United States is not responsible for much of what we see happening in the world, but the consequences of American retreat from leadership are visible and disturbing. Nowhere is that more evident than in East Asia.

At one moment, we are witnessing multiple challenges to the international order that has maintained peace and stability in the region. Japan and South Korea, the anchors of the American security system, are now locked into a political and economic war without any end.

China and Russia staged an unprecedented joint air patrol right down the heart of the Sea of Japan, simultaneously challenging South Korea, Japan and the United States. North Korea tested a new short-range ballistic missile system, with a message aimed at the US-South Korea military alliance and the happy talk about a new Trump-Kim bargain.

Meanwhile, off in the corner, the Chinese regime is letting both Taiwan and Hong Kong know that the days of “one country, two systems” are almost over.

The Japan-South Korean tensions continue to ratchet upwards. Yesterday at the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Geneva, the two governments exchanged nasty accusations over Japan’s export control measures aimed at supplies of key chemicals from Japanese firms to Korean tech companies.

No talks are scheduled and Japan could move as early as next week to remove Korea from the “white list” that allows for simplified export procedures. Removal would potentially disrupt the entirety of bilateral trade. As the Wall Street Journal reports, American tech firms issued a warning that this “could wreak long-term damage across an already-buckling supply chain.”

Tokyo has massively miscalculated the response to these measures, hiding behind the transparently less than credible claim that this has nothing to do with the long-standing disputes over wartime history issues.

But the Moon Jae-in administration in Seoul lit the fire a year ago by tearing up the 2015 Comfort Women agreement and pushing the Korean courts to move ahead with a decision demanding compensation from Japanese firms for Korean forced laborers and their descendants, potentially a massive claim on the companies’ assets that would effectively cripple bilateral investment.

The impact on security relations is already clear. Quiet cooperation between the militaries of both countries, with US facilitation, was already impaired by an incident last December when a South Korean frigate painted a Japanese patrol aircraft with its fire control radar.

Privately American military officials in the region worry that an exchange of actual fire is now possible. Now Seoul is threatening to withdraw from the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), an intelligence sharing agreement that was brokered by the US. It provides a formal structure for very important cooperation, including the direct exchange of tracking data on North Korean ballistic missile firings.

The impact can be seen in the reaction to the Russian intrusion into Korean airspace and the Sino-Russian joint patrol. These should have been seen as serious challenge to both South Korea and Japan. Instead, both governments spent more time airing their rival claims to the islands that the Russians overflew.

Neither side shows any sign of desiring to bring this fight to a halt. The Moon administration mainly works to try to get the US to take its side. Threats to withdraw from GSOMIA are heavy-handed efforts to do this.

Just listen to the words of Hankyoreh, the leftwing daily close to Blue House: “The US continues to maintain a neutral stance on the South Korea-Japan conflict. But if the conflict continues and starts impacting military issues, the US will inevitably lose out. The South Korean government needs to keep hammering on such points to bring the US around to its side.”

The Japanese government, for its part, is also mainly making its case in Washington, counting on the Abe-Trump relationship to keep the Americans from intervening. Unlike Seoul, the Japanese don’t see US mediation as a goal.

But even Japanese foreign policymakers who blame Moon for this fight recognize the severe danger this represents and see little hope for a diplomatic outcome. “I am more inclined to be very pessimistic, and feel that unless and until the relations become much worse and a great many people realize that such a situation actually damages both of us, we cannot expect any improvement in our bilateral relations,” a senior Japanese foreign ministry official told me privately.

Meanwhile, as we know, the Russians and Chinese chose this moment to mount a joint air patrol of four aircraft, including Russian strategic bombers, on a route down between Japan and Korea.

“Such patrols will become a regular feature under a new agreement soon to be signed between Moscow and Beijing,” Dmitri Trenin, the astute analyst of this relationship at the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote. “Russo-Chinese entente grows thicker.”

Trenin has argued in the past that this entente is not yet an alliance and both countries have different agendas and interests. But both share a common goal in diminishing the US presence and in establishing a new balance of power.

The conservative Seoul daily Chosun Ilbo pointed a finger at the Moon administration for encouraging both Russia and China “to ride roughshod over it” by seeking itself to overturn the Cold War order in the region that had previously united Japan, South Korea and the US against North Korea, China and Russia.

The North Korean regime sensed the same opportunity. The test of two new short-range ballistic missiles was meant to accompany a demand that Seoul back off from a planned joint military exercise with the US At the same time, Pyongyang was sending a message to Washington that if Trump wants a deal to show off on the campaign trail, he will have to come bearing the gifts they demand.

The message was delivered in typical fashion – a sudden decision to call off a trip by North Korean foreign minister Ri Yong Ho to the ASEAN Regional Forum in Bangkok next week, where he was expected to meet Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

As all these events were unfolding, National Security Advisor John Bolton and his Asia director Matt Pottinger traveled for two days to Tokyo and Seoul. There was an expectation, one fed by the NSC itself, that the administration was prepared to seriously intervene into the Japan-ROK dispute. “We’re on it,” this writer was told at senior levels.

Mr. Bolton did raise the issue in his talks in both capitals but he also decidedly avoided any talk of American mediation, on any level, preferring to tell both sides that they should settle their problems. This is not inconsistent with past American responses to these tensions.

“I’ve never had any expectation that Bolton was going to offer to mediate,” Evans Revere, former principal deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, told me. “My understanding is that the key task for him was to convey in both capitals that the current dispute between Seoul and Tokyo was undermining security cooperation in Northeast Asia, negatively affecting US interests, working to North Korea’s advantage – and that its continuation was not acceptable to the United States.

“In that context, Bolton was probably tasked with telling the Japanese and the Koreans to ‘fix’ it.” Revere believes that without any obvious solution to impose, the main goal was “to convince the disputants that there were limits to US patience.”

In the past, this might have had some effect. “That’s how the game has been played before,” a former senior US official told me, “though that doesn’t mean these guys know what they’re doing or care enough.”

One problem with the Bolton/Pottinger effort is that without the clear backing, in public, of the President or at least the Secretary of State, the private concerns conveyed by Bolton and Pottinger have limited impact. The President, as often happens, undercut them by telling reporters before they left that he had no intention to intervene in the conflict.

Second, simply telling the two sides to fix it ignores the fact that they have simply not shown themselves capable of pulling themselves out of the deep holes they have dug. There are steps that can bring this back from the brink – Japan should not remove Seoul from the white list; Seoul should agree to Japan’s proposal to create an arbitration panel under the 1965 treaty to deal with the dispute over compensation for forced laborers. The US should tell both governments to do this, in unambiguous, even angry, fashion.

Finally, Bolton muddied his message by focusing much more on his efforts to push Japan and South Korea to join in some unspecified, as yet, joint maritime security effort in the Persian Gulf.

The Japanese are highly reluctant to go down this road – it is politically very difficult given the requirement to seek parliamentary approval for any collective security mission and the Japanese believe their role is to encourage diplomatic negotiations between Iran and the United States, as Abe did last month in his visit to Tehran.

The South Koreans hinted they may be willing to join this new coalition of the willing, but for very cynical reasons. Not unlike the decision of the last progressive government to join the US war in Iraq, the Moon administration sees some value in using participation, however nominal, in a Gulf operation to leverage US backing vs Japan and for a new North Korea deal.

We are left now watching events unfold in East Asia in the absence of American leadership and a cogent strategy. All the actors – from Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang to Seoul and Tokyo – feel that reality, and are proceeding on that basis. Meanwhile, Americans are mired in their own mess

Role of South Korea in US-Japan Strategic Islands Defense

It is rare to get an honest answer from a Japanese as Korea is repeatedly and regularly ignored in their grand foreign policy or security visions.

Thus, it was startling and refreshing to hear Hudson Institute's Senior Fellow Jun Isomura give that rare answer. He brushed off cooperation with the Koreans because they are just too emotionally unstable.

He spoke at a September 21, 2018 program introducing Hudson's report U.S.-Japan Strategic and Operational Cooperation on Remote Island Defense, that gave lay recommendations for how the United States and Japan can strengthen their operational and strategic cooperation in defense of the Ryukyus. The writers believed that the U.S. would more likely come to the defense of the Ryukyus (Okinawa Prefecture, Pop 1.5 million), sparsely populated islets in the East China Sea, than of Taiwan, which is at the end of this island chain.

Below is the clip of Mr. Isomura explaining why Japanese leaders avoid including their Korean counterparts in regional plans.

Comfort Women "Her"story in Washington

Korean, Chinese, Filipino, Dutch former sex slaves

On December 28, 2015, the Foreign Ministers of Japan and South Korea issued a joint statement on the issue of ‘comfort women’. In the December statement, Japan acknowledges that the Comfort Women existed because of “an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time” and passed on Prime Minister Shnizo Abe’s “sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women.” 

The statement committed the Japanese government to contributing to a fund to assist surviving South Korean former ‘comfort women’. South Korea, in turn, pledged to refrain from discussing the Comfort Women issue in public and, possibly, to remove from the entrance of the Japanese embassy in Seoul a statue symbolizing the Comfort Women. The agreement is to ensure that “this issue is resolved finally and irreversibly.”

The statement ,which reflects no written agreement, is controversial. It will not be approved by the Japanese Cabinet, thus it exists in the same legal limbo as the Kono Statement, a 1993 apology to the Comfort Women. It is unclear when the funds will be delivered to South Korea, whether the survivors will accept it, and whether there will remain any survivors. In addition, the agreement is not applicable to all the other survivors throughout Asia (at least 27 nationalities) who were forced into becoming sex slaves.

Also concerning is the Japanese Government’s statement on February 16 to the meeting of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) that no documentation exists describing the forcible taking of women, that the women were not sex slaves, and that the Japanese military was not responsible for recruitment. The Japanese government response is significant as it is likely the first time that such a senior Japanese government official has addressed CEDAW.

In addition, eight ad hoc Japanese Comfort Women denier groups submitted their opinions for the record to the CEDAW meeting. These are less cautious, often racist repeats the government position. Four groups also spelled out what the Japanese government meant when it said it found no documents regarding the Comfort Women in the U.S. National Archives. This is a reference to an inaccurate interpretation of the work of the Congressionally-mandated Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group at the National Archives.

A number of prominent scholars who research the history, sociology, and politics of the Imperial Japan’s sex slave system will be in Washington, DC the week of February 29th to participate in a series of seminars and programs. In addition to private briefings on Capitol Hill and a private screening of the Song of the Reed, a documentary on Taiwanese Comfort Women hosted by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Organization (TECRO), they will speak at Johns Hopkins University, SAIS and George Washington University on March 1 and 3. The schedule is as follows:

Unfinished Apologies

Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves of Wartime Asia

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

8:30am-3:00pm

Johns Hopkins University, SAIS

REGISTER HERE 

WEBCAST through this link

Speaker Biographies

8:30-9:00am – Registration/light breakfast, purchase books

9:00-9:15am – Welcome
Jae Ku – Director US-Korea Institute, SAIS
Mindy Kotler – Director, Asia Policy Point

9:15-10:30am - Framing the Comfort Women History – Japanese Comfort Women and their Antecedents

Dr. Caroline Norma, Associate Professor in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, author, The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery during theChina and Pacific Wars (2016)

Discussant: Dr. Katharine (Kathy) H.S. Moon - inaugural holder of the SK-Korea Foundation Chair in Korea Studies and senior fellow at the Brookings Center for East Asia Policy Studies; author, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations(1997)

10:30-10:45am – Break

10:45am-12:30pm – The Comfort Women of Japan’s Occupied Asia

Dutch, Indonesian, Australian, British and American – Ms. Griselda Molemans, Dutch investigative reporter and researcher, founder of the Task Force for Dutch Indies War Reparations (Dutch acronym: TFIR; Task Force Indisch Rechtsherstel) author of Erfgenamen van Indië [Heirs of the Dutch East Indies] (2004), Zwarte huid, Oranje hart [Black Skin, Orange Heart] (2010), and Opgevangen in andijvielucht [Welcomed by the Smell of Endive] (2014), and the forthcoming Levenslang oorlog [A Lifetime of War] (end of 2016)

Indonesian/Dutch – Ms. Hilde Janssen, Dutch journalist and anthropologist; author Schaamte en Onschuld [Shame and Innocent] (2010) and Troostmeisjes/ComfortWomen with photographer Jan Banning, bilingual Dutch and English photo book (2013)

China – Dr. Peipei Qiu, Professor of Chinese and Japanese on the Louise Boyd Dale and Alfred Lichtenstein Chair, Vassar College, author ChineseComfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves (in collaboration with Shanghai Normal University professors Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei, 2014)

Philippines – Ms. M. Evelina Galang, Professor of English, University of Miami, author, Angel de la Luna and the 5th Glorious Mystery (2013) and the forthcoming nonfiction Lolas’ House: Women Living with War

Pacific Islands – Dr. Caroline Norma, Associate Professor in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University, Australia

Taiwan -  Daniel Kuo-ching Chen, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) in the United States.

Moderator: Dr. Yukiko Hanawa, Senior Lecturer of East Asian Studies at New York University

12:30-2:00pm - Lunch & Keynote

1:15 - Keynote: Women in Warfare, how far have we come? Taina Bien-Aimé, Executive Director, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
Introduction: Dr. Jae Ku, US-Korea Institute

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2:00-3:00pm - Book signing of Speakers’ books Norma, Qiu, Janssen, Galang, and Stetz/Oh books

The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery during the China and Pacific Wars – Caroline Norma

Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves – Peipei Qiu

Troostmeisjes/Comfort Women - Jan Banning, with an introduction by Hilde Janssen, bilingual Dutch and English photo book

Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II – Co-editors: Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware and Bonnie B.C. Oh, retired as the Distinguished Professor of Korean Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, the University’s Main Campus Ombuds Officer, and a past director of Women’s Studies at Georgetown University. (2001)

Angel de la Luna and the 5th Glorious Mystery – M. Evalina Galang

Researching and documenting 

the Comfort Women History

What documents exist and where; 

how one analyzes them; working with oral history

Thursday, March 3, 2016

12:45-2:00pm

Sigur Center, George Washington University

Register Here

Researching Japanese
War Crimes, NARA
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Mr. Christopher Simpson, professor of journalism, School of Communications, American University, adviser to the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial GovernmentRecords Interagency Working Group of the National Archives; editor of the Holmes & Meier series on Science and Human Rights of which the first book was Comfort Women Speak (edited by Christopher Simpson and Sangmie Choi Schellsted), contemporary photographs by Soon Mi Yu.

Ms. Griselda Molemans, Dutch investigative reporter and researcher, founder of the Task Force for Dutch Indies War Reparations (Dutch acronym: TFIR; Task Force Indisch Rechtsherstel) author of Erfgenamen van Indië [Heirs of the Dutch East Indies] (2004), Zwarte huid, Oranje hart [Black Skin, Orange Heart] (2010), and Opgevangen in andijvielucht [Welcomed by the Smell of Endive] (Amsterdam: Quasar Books, 2014), and the forthcoming Levenslang oorlog [A Lifetime of War] (end of 2016)

Ms. Hilde Janssen, Dutch Journalist and anthropologist, author Schaamte en Onschuld [Shame and Innocent] (2010) and Troostmeisjes/Comfort Women (2013) with photographer Jan Banning, bilingual Dutch and English photo book

Ms. M. Evelina Galang, professor of English, University of Miami, author, Angel de la Luna and the 5th Glorious Mystery (2013) and the forthcoming Lolas’ House: Women Living with War

Host/moderator: Mike Mochizuki, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Japan-U.S. Relations Chair in Memory of Gaston Sigur, George Washington University