[WHY] Why do Koreans think Japan isn’t sorry?

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[WHY] Why do Koreans think Japan isn’t sorry?

Published: 08 Jul. 2023, 07:00 Updated: 13 Jul. 2023, 17:24

Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, second from left, and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, second from right, lay flowers at the memorial to Korean atomic bombing victims in Hiroshima on May 21. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

Sixty-three.

That is the number of apology statements offered by Tokyo to Seoul addressing just the issue of “comfort women,” or Korean sex slaves forced to service the Japanese military during the war years, since the two countries signed a 1965 treaty establishing diplomatic relations, according to one scholarly estimate in 2022.

This topic, along with that of Korean forced labor during World War II, are some of the highly emotive issues stemming from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula that plague Korean-Japanese relations to the present.

The most recent apology statement was made by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who said, “Personally, I feel strong pain in my heart when I think of the extreme difficulty and sorrow that many people had to suffer under the severe environment in those days” at a joint press conference with Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol during his visit to Seoul in May this year.

Kishida’s comments came amid a recent bilateral push to overcome a years-long chill in relations over Korean court rulings ordering Japanese companies to compensate Korean forced laborers and Japan’s subsequent decision to block key exports of technology and materials for Korea’s semiconductor industry.

For Korea, this rapprochement entailed establishing a foundation to compensate forced labor victims with funds from Korean companies that benefitted from development aid given by Japan as part of the 1965 treaty, while Japan restored Korea to its “white list” of approved trade partners and agreed Japanese companies could voluntarily provide money to the Korean foundation.

But despite these recent steps and the number of Japanese apologies to Korea over the years, most Koreans do not believe that Japan actually feels sorry for its 35-year rule of the peninsula.

In a poll by Gallup Korea conducted in early March, an overwhelming 85 percent of Korean respondents disagreed with the notion that “Japan repents over its past history,” while two-thirds of Koreans said in another poll that they disagreed with “an indirect apology by Japan” via the mainly Korean-backed fund.

The apparent failure of Japan’s repeated apologies to resonate with Koreans bodes ill for a lasting improvement in their relationship — and perhaps more importantly, raises questions about what has gone wrong, and what can be done better.

When is an apology statement not an apology?

Headlines in Korea after Kishida’s remarks focused mainly on one peculiarity: he admitted no wrongs.

“It would have been better [for Kishida] to say in his apology statement that he was speaking on behalf of the Japanese people and also acknowledge victims, admit wrongdoing and accept responsibility,” said Roman David, a professor of sociology and social policy at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University who specializes in historical justice and has studied the issue at length through survey experiments in Korea and Japan.

In one such study published in 2022 under the title “Apology mismatch: an experimental approach to Japan’s apologies to Korea,” David and fellow Lingnan professor of social psychology Victoria Yeung counted 63 official apology statements by Japan to Korea concerning comfort women and examined the four most frequently occurring components of the statements — “remorse,” “acknowledgment of victims’ suffering,” “acceptance of responsibility” and “admission of wrongdoing.” They then randomly presented the components as hypothetical sample vignettes to 210 Koreans to measure their psychological response and also asked them to rank them in order of importance.

Their findings were stark: while Koreans ranked “admission of wrongdoing” as the most demanded and essential apology component, it was the component that was least present in actual apology statements by Japan, appearing in only 14 out of 63.

“We found that the ‘admission of wrongdoing’ component generated the greatest positive impact [in Korean respondents] across various measures, including justice perception, acceptance of apology, positive impression of the transgressor, as well as a reduction in negative attitude and revenge motivation towards the Japanese,” Yeung said.

Paradoxically, the study’s participants ranked “remorse,” which occurred most frequently in Japanese apology statements — 51 out of 63, and sometimes multiple times within the same statement — to be the least important aspect of apologies, and the two professors found it elicited the smallest improvement in attitudes towards the perceived transgressor.

David said that although apologies can be an “extremely effective method of dealing with the past,” the components of the apology, as well as its messenger and recipients, are important factors to consider.

“For instance, it’s more effective to say ‘we are sorry’ instead of ‘we regret,’ to acknowledge the wrongdoing instead of watering it down, and accept responsibility instead of just saying something ‘is a historical fact.’”

He also noted that the Japanese prime minister “is a more effective agent of apologies than the emperor or the minister of foreign affairs, and it is also more important to name the Korean people as the addressees, rather than people in Asia.”

Yeung, who also examined Kishida’s apology statement, said, “Its particular combination of remorse and acknowledgment of the victims’ suffering may not be deemed as an effective apology by the Korean public, who seem to place greater importance on hearing an explicit admission of wrongdoing.”

Yuji Hosaka, a political science professor at Sejong University who has dedicated his career to studying Korea-Japan relations, similarly noted missing factors in Kishida’s comments to explain why Koreans might see his words as insufficient.

“While some interpreted the prime minister’s remarks as being directed at Korean forced labor victims, he actually never mentioned them at all; the so-called apology was addressed to ‘many people,’ which can just mean all imperial subjects at the time.”

Hosaka also noted the missing “sorry” in Kishida’s remarks.

“The expression he used in Japanese to describe his heartfelt pain gives the appearance he is speaking as an individual, not as a representative of the Japanese state.”

What is behind the word choices in Japanese apologies?

Kishida’s remarks are the latest in a long line of official statements from Tokyo that obfuscate the country’s imperial and colonial history — a past that conservative sentiment within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has governed Japan almost continuously since the end of the 1945-52 Allied occupation, would like to deemphasize.

According to John Nilsson-Wright, a professor of Japanese and Korean politics at Cambridge University, this constituency wants to bolster Japan’s legitimacy as a nation-state and as a global player — while also embracing a more assertive historical revisionism.

“There is an increasingly strong constituency within the LDP after the end of the Cold War that wants to not only resurrect national pride but also challenge the postwar national consensus reflected in the rulings of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, which they see as overly focusing on the Japanese government’s wrongs in the 1930s and 40s and its wartime responsibility,” he said.

Both the conservative faction within the LDP and its views on historical issues constrain Kishida, both politically and practically, in what he can say by way of apology to Koreans.

Shinzo Abe, Japan's longest-serving prime minister from 2006 to 2007 and again from 2012 to 2020

“Past cabinet statements carry the force of official policy that influence what a later prime minister feels at liberty to say,” Hosaka said, noting that “under [late former Prime Minister] Shinzo Abe in April 2021, the Japanese cabinet decided that the expressions ‘comfort women for the Japanese military’ and ‘forceful relocation’ [regarding Korean workers] cannot be used anymore in history textbooks,” which require government approval for use in schools.

Effectively, Abe’s old policies serve to prevent admissions of wrongdoing from featuring in more recent apology statements.

Abe’s stance, according to Nilsson-Wright, represented “his personal mission to correct what he saw as Japan’s masochist reading of history and reaffirm its pride in the past.”

Abe’s maternal grandfather and former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, who was briefly imprisoned as a suspected war criminal during the Allied occupation, was known for his view that the story of Japan being an aggressor in the war was too simplistic and that Japan’s imperialist invasions were not too different from what other powers were doing at the time — a view that is advocated by Nippon Kaigi, an ultraconservative lobby group that counts over 200 LDP lawmakers as members in both houses of the Japanese Diet.

Nilsson-Wright noted that although Kishida personally is considered to be moderate, “he needs to retain broad support across the party, including the late Abe’s faction, if he wants to be re-elected as its president in 2024” — and thus keep his premiership.

How do mutual perceptions affect Japanese offers, and Korean reception, of apologies?

For Koreans, not only does the wording of official Japanese apologies fall short of admitting wrongdoing, but their neighbor’s actions seem to indicate the opposite of remorse.

Sohn Yul, president of the East Asia Institute and a professor of international and Japanese political economy at Yonsei University, summarized the Korean perception of Japanese apologies in two words: “two-faced.”

“Japanese leaders say one thing to appease Korean opinion, but they then say something to assuage their Japanese constituents that contradicts the spirit of their previous comments,” Sohn said, citing the example of Abe, who told a journalist that he had “absolutely no desire” to apologize over the comfort women issue again.

This habit of Japanese leaders was not missed by Yeung and David, who in their study identified at least 32 statements that they believed “seemed to signify various ways of denial, which may have been aimed at the domestic audience in Japan as a part of a political contest between the government and the opposition.”

Sohn further said that an apology statement made to appease — and followed by contradictory domestic discourse — “is no apology at all.”

In another example, Hosaka pointed to Abe’s widely criticized suggestion in 2014 that he would seek to revise the 1993 Kono Statement, named after then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, which acknowledged for the first time the Japanese Imperial Army’s role in recruiting comfort women and establishing military brothels where they were forced to serve soldiers.

For a Japanese leader to hint that a landmark apology should be revised “only feeds into Korean mistrust regarding Japan’s sincerity,” Hosaka observed.

He and Nilsson-Wright both noted Tokyo believes that the 1965 treaty, which it negotiated with an authoritarian Korean government led by then-President Park Chung Hee, not only settled all individual claims to compensation, including then-unknown issues such as the comfort women, but also obliges Korea to stop raising past issues.

But this “strictly legalistic” position, in Nilsson-Wright’s words, risks minimizing Korean questions over the treaty’s legitimacy and fuels Korean anger over issues of history and compensation that they believe were not satisfactorily addressed or settled by the original agreement.

Efforts by Japanese leaders to relegate the country’s colonial past to history are also seen by Koreans as attempts to wash their hands of it entirely.

“Abe said that he wants the problem of Japan’s history settled with his premiership, and that his children and grandchildren should not have to keep apologizing for the war,” noted Sohn, adding that “it sounds like he believes Japan should no longer bear responsibility for what it did to Korea.”

While Japan’s decision to retaliate economically to the Korean Supreme Court’s forced labor compensation rulings against Mitsubishi Heavy and Nippon Steel “amplified Koreans’ perception that Japan is once again acting in a bullying fashion,” it reflected “Japan’s belief in the legal sanctity of the 1965 treaty and a sense of exasperation and irritation that the Korean government does not honor its past agreements by continually demanding that Japan make further amends,” Nilsson-Wright said.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, center, pays homage at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on Oct. 17, 2005. [REUTERS/YONHAP]

Hosaka argued that this exasperation was exploited by Abe, “who cast Korea as a country that can’t keep its promises, even though it was Japan that reneged on past pledges, such as establishing a war memorial that doesn’t honor Class A war criminals, unlike Yasukuni Shrine,” where visits by previous Japanese prime ministers, such as Junichiro Koizumi, have periodically enflamed tensions between Seoul and Tokyo.

Mutual frustration is apparent in polls in both countries that show a majority of Koreans do not believe Tokyo has sufficiently repented over its past history and that a majority of Japanese people say it is not necessary to offer additional apologies to Korea.

But surveys indicating Korean “apology mistrust” and Japanese “apology fatigue” form only part of the whole story, according to Nilsson-Wright.

“Korean nationalism itself was shaped by the experience of Japanese colonialism, so while South Koreans are divided over many issues, such as North Korea, China and the country’s own authoritarian past, Japan is one of the few political and historical issues where politicians both left and right have historically seen eye-to-eye,” Nilsson-Wright said.

As for Tokyo’s conservatives who want to downplay culpability over the war, or Japanese liberals who believe that their country’s ledger was wiped clean by the Allied occupation and pacifist postwar constitution, Korean demands for apologies are not only unwelcome reminders of a dark past, but also an issue where leaders who appear too accommodating are vulnerable to domestic criticism.

Sohn cited the example of liberal former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who was called “foolish” by the conservative Abe for apologizing to Korea in a 2010 speech marking the centennial of Japan’s annexation of the peninsula.

Japanese confidence, grounded in its historical economic success, “is also threatened by three ‘lost decades’ of stagnation and Korea’s rise as a cultural and policy entrepreneur, which makes it less willing to be generous or broadminded when dealing with Korea,” according to Nilsson-Wright.

But Sohn also said it is “unfortunate” that Korean media coverage of Japanese apologies focuses primarily on the shortcomings of Japanese apologies, instead of engaging in a deeper examination of anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea.

“I don’t think the Korean media really asks if we reject their apologies simply because they are flawed, or also because we once lost our country to them,” he noted.

What can Korea and Japan do in the future?

One oft-mentioned model for lasting rapprochement between Korea and Japan is that of the Franco-German partnership after World War II.

“If Japan issued an unequivocal apology, repeated it annually and jointly commemorated the past with Korea, relations between Japan and Korea could be as good as relations between Germany and France,” said David, who noted that “political will” in Paris and Berlin made lasting reconciliation possible.

Hosaka went further, arguing that Koreans could believe that their neighbor is truly sorry if Japan “substantiated its apologies with appropriate measures” akin to those adopted by postwar Germany, such as “educational reforms that ensure Japanese students are taught about Japanese invasions, as well as laws that punish acts that justify or glorify Japan’s past wrongs.”

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and his wife Yuko Kishida pay their respects during their visit to Seoul National Cemetery on May 7. [REUTERS/YONHAP]

According to Nilsson-Wright, “there are encouraging attempts by Japan to show genuine contrition” in this vein, such as Kishida’s visits in May to Seoul National Cemetery, where Korean independence fighters are buried, and later to the Korean atomic bombing victims’ memorial in Hiroshima during the Group of Seven summit.

But he cautioned that rising “emotional drivers” of domestic politics in both Korea and Japan would likely inhibit political will on both sides for deeper reconciliation or atonement.

“Part of the problem is that Korea and Japan have competing internal narratives over their respective paths to statehood, and we can see partisan and national identity politics in both countries assuming greater importance as their people shift blame for their loss of agency amid social disruption to external threats,” he said, adding that “both Korea and Japan can be easy targets for one another, especially if political parties and people feel they can fulfill emotional needs by delegitimizing each other or the other country.”

Yeung noted the possibility that “those who strongly identify with their Korean national identity may feel stronger for the issue — and more difficult to accept the apologies — than those with a lower level of national identity identification,” but that this theory would require further study.

Polling studies conducted by the East Asia Institute over the past decade also show a widening gap between Koreans on the left and right on how to approach relations with Japan, according to Sohn.

“While liberal Koreans express the belief that relations with Japan can only improve if historical issues are resolved, more and more conservative Koreans believe that security and economic cooperation with Japan should take precedence and that better relations — and a resolution of the history problem — will naturally follow,” he said.

Nilsson-Wright also highlighted “common mounting security challenges in the region, such as China’s increasing assertiveness and North Korea’s advancing missile and nuclear weapons arsenal, which beg the question of whether Koreans can accept that the Japanese government may never offer the degree of contrition they want, but still move forward for the sake of cooperation.”

Sohn similarly said that an apology “that meets the expectations of most Koreans” might be hard to realize, “especially given the constraints of sovereignty on what we can tell Japan to fix,” and that the best Korea could hope for is that Japan engages in “more vibrant and open discourse” on the subject of its colonial past.

“We may never get the apology we want, but if Japan has vibrant domestic discussions and open civil discourse about its history, is it not better than if they try to whitewash and bury it entirely?”

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]