As inter-Korean tensions rose this week, another familiar trope of South Korean politics reared its head: paranoia and angst about a former colonizer.

Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the opposition Democratic Party, described joint U.S.-ROK-Japan naval exercises as an “extreme pro-Japanese act” — a major insult in Korean political vocabulary. The DP leader then approached what many outside Korea see as tinfoil hat territory when he suggested the Japanese military will return to the Korean Peninsula under the banner of imperialism. 

Then on Oct. 12, DP lawmaker Kim Byung-ju, a retired four-star general, claimed that “Japan is a future threat”