Year One: Korea and Japan in the Evolving China-US Relations

The second theme tackles the structural embeddedness of the San Francisco System to East Asia. While the American designed hub-and-spokes system benefited both the US and its allies in supporting the former’s hegemonic projects and the latter’s security and economic interests, it is undermined by unsettled historical issues. Japan-South Korea relations, I believe, aptly demonstrate the inseparability of geopolitics from normative issues of reconciliation, where the former is sometimes instrumentalized to pursue the latter. As the participants discussed, Japan’s pursuit for normalization appears to be part of a wholesale package to rewrite history, and consequently triggers anti-Japan sentiments from South Korea. This cascaded to informally invalidating previous reconciliation agreements on the state level, and the Koreans’ boycotting of Japanese products. A point of convergence, however, complicates the situation. Both Japan and South Korea are US allies, and in being so, the two “spokes” have been more preoccupied in acting on American interests in the region, rather than concentrating on their problems. Thus, so far, means to resolve geostrategic and historical issues have fallen short of transforming unequal relations, and remained within the rigid confines of the 68-year old San Francisco system.

Yet, the problem is not exclusively about how state leaders conduct international politics. The third theme highlights the responsibility of scholars and other non-state actors in dealing with the history problem. An outstanding problem is the tendency of each country to write their own history (and mythologies) without promoting inter-cultural/historical understanding. Prof. Brendan Howe’s characterization aptly summarized the condition: “Japan escapes from history, Korean maintains it, China invents it.” Because it has been proven difficult to tackle this within the state-centric framework, third parties such as National Libraries, the academe and civil society from across the region should work together to rectify both the West’s historical misreading of the region, and to make their existing projects be heard, if not central to state-level discourse on the issue.

Indeed, the prospects appear gloomy. This does not, however, stop the participants of the project to think about areas where Japan and South Korea could collaborate. During the association for Asian Studies Conference in Asia (AAS-in-Asia 2020), they gathered virtually in
a Special Roundtable entitled, “Japan and Korea in the US-China Relations: A Reappraisal of the Post-War Order”. During this session, each discussant offered their perspectives on how a Japan-South Korea partnership could influence China-US relations. Three spheres of possible cooperation stood out: (1) non-traditional security; (2) multilateralism; and, (3) technology. With he insufficiency of Westphalian system in addressing transnational issues, such as the OVID-19 pandemic, refugees and cybercrime, Japan and South Korea as middle powers should take advantage of this opportunity to play their shared strengths of understanding non-state-centric threats. The major problem that befalls the two, however, is their respective nationalist government’s tendency to politicize and securitize non-traditional security issues, thereby turning them into traditional security concerns. Another challenge is the geostrategic differences between the two, especially when it comes to North Korea and Pan-Korean nationalism, where Japan assumes a peripheral role. Considering South Korea’s domestic and alliance politics, Japan arguably has a less complicated position in dealing with China and the US.

Multilateralism appears to offer a viable alternative, that is, considering a third-party state as a space for collaboration. Clashes in security and trade between China and the US paved way for recent trends towards multilateral frameworks, guided mostly by the strategic visions of middle and emerging powers. Bilateralism, in the context of Japan-South Korea relations, appears to have short-term results but lacking in concrete, sustainable outcomes because they are not institutionalized, something a multilateral structure could address. A multilateral relationship with India, in particular, provides a promising opportunity for Japan and South Korea to work on shared functional interests, such as infrastructure cooperation, where India could supply human resources, and Japan and South Korea offering experience and technology respectively.

Still, China and the US remain significant to Japan-South Korea relations, especially in the domain of technology. The existing technological disputes between the two, along with the changes the COVID-19 brought in how the world use the internet has made predicting the future of tech wars more difficult. It is important to look at the political economy of tech wars, especially the goal of the US to curb advanced semiconductor access to China, to understand how this could pose another challenge to possible cooperation between Japan and South Korea.

Clearly, the lines that divide Japan and South Korea are both geostrategic and ontological. While they share similar concerns regarding the security and stability of the region, the issues of national identity and historical interpretation loom large in the background. However, as these problems are historically constituted and contemporarily conditioned, the project thus far has demonstrated that there is a chance to reconstruct their relations, for their own sake and the benefit of the region. Casting the net further than what the Westphalian state system could can help broaden our perspective and shed light to the existing efforts that bind Japan and South Korea, which have been thus far rendered secondary to traditional security interests. While the challenge of COVID-19 pandemic is out of Japan and South Korea’s control, there remains the persistent humanitarian and developmental concerns that are within their reach.