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History Too Long Denied: Japan's Unresolved Colonial Past and Today's North Korea Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Gavan McCormack
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The year 2010 will mark the centenary of Japanese colonial rule over the Korean peninsula, but, 64 years after that colonial rule was liquidated, North Korea, Japan's neighbour, remains the one country in the world with which it has no relations. That failure to reconcile and to normalize has had, and continues to have, large consequences. The bitterness and anger that feed on the absence of normality fester and threaten to plunge the region back into war. If Asia is to have a future beyond conflict, the “North Korea problem,” meaning that country's unresolved colonial relations with Japan (which is much different from the meaning usually intended by US and Japanese policy makers, as discussed below), and its unresolved war with the US and UN, must be addressed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 7 , Issue 29 , July 2009 , e1
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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Copyright © The Authors 2009

References

Notes

[1] Richard L. Armitage and Joseph S. Nye, “The US-Japan Alliance: Getting Asia right through 2020,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, February 2007.

[2] LDP Secretary-General Hosoda Hiroyuki, 7 June 2009. At the same venue, outside Kichijoji station in Tokyo, Prime Minister Aso declared that the country's security could not be guaranteed unless “we have the determination to fight when the time to fight comes,” leaving no doubt that he was thinking of preemptive war on North Korea. (“Tai-Kita tatakau-beki toki wa kakugo o',” Yomiuri shimbun, 7 June 2009.)

[3] As recommended by the Defence Subcommittee of the LDP's Policy Research Council on 26 May and by Prime Minister Aso on 28 May 2009 (“Teki kichi kogeki ron,” Asahi shimbun, 2 June 2009).

[4] Australia under John Howard was intent on getting Japan to scrap its constitutional inhibitions and adopt a “more active security posture within the US alliance and multinational coalitions.” (Department of Defence, Australia's National Security – Defence Update 2007, Canberra 2007.) Australian political and media elites seem to harbor no doubts on this and, to my knowledge, no public figure in Australia supports Japan's constitution (with its Article 9 pacifist commitment.

[5] Gavan McCormack, Target North Korea: Pushing North Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, New York, Nation Books, 2004 (Japanese version from Heibonsha, Tokyo, and Korean from Icarus Media, Seoul).

[6] For some of my essays on the problem subsequent to Target North Korea, see The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, or, for two recent essays, “North Korea and the Birth Pangs of a New Northeast Asian Order,” in Sonia Ryang, ed, North Korea: Towards a Better Understanding, Lanham, Md, Lexington Books, 2009, pp.23-40, and “Northern Smoke Signals,” Kyunghyang shinmun, Seoul, 9 June 2009.

[7] In the words of the message published in all national newspapers in December 2006. See Wada, “Abe rosen no hasan to shin Chosen seisaku,” p. 89.

[8] Wada Haruki, “Japan-North Korea Relations – A Dangerous Stalemate,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 22 June 2009. This is not the place for detailed discussion of the abduction matter. Suffice it to say that the national campaign has been driven by political, rather than scientific or moral considerations, and that it has accomplished little.

[9] The 2000 and 2007 South North agreements in the case of South Korea and the Pyongyang agreement of 2002 in the case of Japan.

[10] Statement by President of the Security Council, 13 April 2009.

[11] Gavan McCormack, “Security Council condemnation of North Korea's ‘UFO’ deepens Korean crisis,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, No 3121, 15 April 2009.

[12] Scott Ritter, “Up, up and away: The West's hysterical reaction to North Korea,” “Truthdig,” 17 April 2009.

[13] Security Council Resolution 1874, SC/9679, 12 June 2009.

[14] See, for example, Michael Parenti, “North Korea: ‘Sanity’ at the Brink,” Z-Net, 24 June 2009.

[15] Other counts vary, up to approximately 2182. All agree that an overwhelming proportion have been by “great” powers (as North Korea's Foreign Ministry spokesman stressed on 29 May 2009).

[16] See my discussion in “Northern Smoke Signals.”

[17] The UN, its member states and their citizens, are responsible inter alia for the way that atrocious war was conducted, including for the massacre of around 100,000 civilians by UN forces in its first year. (Gavan McCormack and Kim Dong-choon, “Grappling with Cold War History: Korea's Embattled Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 21 February 2009.)

[18] Quoted in Hamish McDonald, “No rush to placate North Korea,” Sydney Morning Herald, 20 June 2009.

[19] The diffusion of Japanese colonial prejudices against Korea to the US and beyond is a subject that deserves serious attention. On its origins (in 1945), see Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947, Princeton, 1981, pp. 126-7. The classic study, Gregory Henderson's Korea: The Politics of the Vortex, Harvard 1968, lent itself to the view of Koreans as chaotic and emotional people who cannot really run their own affairs and need calm, rational people - like the Japanese or the Americans - to look after them.

[20] See especially the “Introduction” to the Chinese, Japanese and Korean editions of Client State (from Social Science Academic Press of China, Gaifusha, and Changbi respectively.)

[21] Japan sent its forces to Iraq because, as then Prime Minister Koizumi put it, if ever Japan were to come under attack it would have to depend on the US, not the UN. (Client State, p. 56).

[22] For detailed analysis: Gavan McCormack and Wada Haruki, “Forever stepping back: the strange record of 15 years of negotiation between Japan and North Korea,” in John Feffer, ed, The Future of US-Korean Relations: The imbalance of power, London and New York, Routledge, 2006, pp. 81-100, Gavan McCormack, “Japan and North Korea: The Long and Twisted Path towards Normalcy,” Working Paper series, WP 08-06, US-Korea Institute at SAIS (Johns Hopkins University), November 2008, and Wada Haruki, “Dangerous Stalemate,” cit.

[23] Especially on the Fukuda government approach to the North Korea problem, see Wada, ibid.

[24] Tamogami testimony to the sub-committee on defense and foreign affairs of the Diet's House of Councilors on 11 November 2008. “Murayama danwa to mochiron wa betsu,” Asahi shimbun, 11 November 2008 (evening edition).