2024-02-26
Rather than being “a historically self-centered country” (a senior Foreign Ministry official), South Korea is like a child that cannot understand international relations or the feelings of people in other countries
February 24, 2018
The following is from today’s Sankei Shimbun front-page column, Sankei-sho.
Given the current international situation, the result is hardly surprising.
In a Gallup poll conducted this month asking which country was “America’s greatest enemy,” 51% of Americans named North Korea, putting it in first place.
Russia came second (19%) and China third (11%), which also seems reasonable from the United States’ perspective.
But what about neighboring South Korea?
To coincide with the closing ceremony of the PyeongChang Olympics, South Korea is expected to receive a high-level North Korean delegation headed by Kim Yong-chol, a close aide to Workers’ Party Chairman Kim Jong-un who is said to have once directed a terrorist attack against South Korea.
This is despite the fact that he is subject to sanctions imposed independently by both South Korea and the United States.
The United States has also expressed its displeasure.
Meanwhile, on the 22nd, South Korea’s Minister of Gender Equality and Family, Chung Hyun-back, announced at the United Nations Office in Geneva that a provisional “Comfort Women Research Institute” would be established to draw attention to the comfort women issue.
She also used the term “sex slaves,” a term whose use had been acknowledged as inappropriate under the Japan–South Korea agreement.
At a time when cooperation among Japan, the United States, and South Korea matters above all else, South Korea does things that could undermine that cooperation without showing any remorse.
Rather than being “a historically self-centered country” (a senior Foreign Ministry official), perhaps South Korea is like a child that cannot understand international relations or the feelings of people in other countries.
Former President Roh Moo-hyun, under whom President Moon Jae-in served as chief of staff, astonished the American side by declaring, “Japan is a hypothetical enemy,” at his first meeting with then U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
In July 2006, Roh also authorized “use-of-force warning shots” that could have resulted in the sinking of a Japan Coast Guard patrol vessel.
Before August four years ago, I knew nothing of the true nature of media organizations such as the Asahi Shimbun and NHK, and I watched TBS’s News 23 almost every day.
This was when Tetsuya Chikushi was its presenter.
When Roh Moo-hyun became president, Tetsuya Chikushi not only welcomed him enthusiastically but also treated him as though he were a respectable person.
Imitating an American format, he seated people of all ages, mainly young men and women, in a circle around Roh and welcomed him as though he were a hero.
I regret having watched that scene without knowing anything about the true nature of Tetsuya Chikushi, and at the same time I feel an anger toward TBS greater than any I have felt before.
Watching the warm exchanges between Japanese and South Korean athletes at the PyeongChang Olympics makes one want to dream that Japan and South Korea might someday become friends, but that is unlikely.
Unless South Korea ends the anti-Japanese education that has continued since its first president, Syngman Rhee, and changes its view of Japan, genuine friendship is unlikely to take root.
As readers know, this final observation is exactly the same as the argument I have made ever since I first began writing here.