Despite mending ties, public opinion unaffected by diplomacy makes summit with Kishida a political liability for Yoon
The Yoon Suk-yeol administration’s quick denial of recent Japanese media reports about Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s visit to South Korea for a summit reflects a strategic balancing act between diplomatic engagement and domestic political considerations.
Despite the Yoon administration’s efforts to improve bilateral ties, including resolving disputes over the issue of compensating Korean victims of Japanese forced labor during World War II and participating in a historic trilateral summit at Camp David, the South Korean presidential office stated that “no relevant actions are currently underway.”
The notion that Kishida’s visit could bolster the Yoon administration and the ruling People Power Party ahead of April’s parliamentary elections, as initially reported by Japanese media, contrasts sharply with the ROK presidential office’s response, suggesting it might see a potential summit with Kishida as a political liability rather than an opportunity to showcase its diplomatic prowess.
This situation spotlights the challenges both countries face in advancing their relationship amid historical grievances and evolving public sentiments, exemplified by the shift from a “No Japan” boycott to a more conciliatory “Yes Japan” trend in South Korea.
However, the depth of this shift and its impact on the political landscape remains to be seen. Further, patterns in the history of bilateral ROK-Japan relations suggest that boasting about Yoon’s Japan policy may not be politically advantageous ahead of the election.
A FAMILIAR PATTERN
Although the Yoon administration’s diplomatic outreach to Japan perpetuates the narrative that South Korean progressives tend to worsen ties with Tokyo while conservative ones improve them, this has historically not been the case.
Prior to today, ROK-Japan ties were arguably at their peak during the Kim Dae-jung administration. The 1998 summit between Kim and then-Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi led to the declaration of the “New Korea-Japan Partnership toward the Twenty-First Century.”
In the document, both countries declared their intent to “squarely face the past and develop relations based on mutual understanding and trust.” They outlined numerous areas of cooperation, despite later being undermined by disputes over the revision of Japanese textbooks in 2001.
President Lee Myung-bak made similar attempts to sidestep contentious historical issues in 2008, resulting in then-Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda attending his inauguration in Seoul.
Despite Lee’s promise to refrain from raising thorny historical issues during a summit in Japan in April 2008, this period of warm ties eventually faltered due to escalating tensions over territorial disputes.
Seoul recalled its ambassador to Japan in July 2008 over the issue of sovereignty over Dokdo before Lee famously visited the disputed islets himself in 2012.
These episodes illustrate a recurring pattern where attempts to strengthen ties are frequently derailed by historical issues, suggesting that such efforts, regardless of the administration’s political orientation, face inherent challenges.
Park Cheol-hee, a professor at Seoul National University and chancellor of the Korean National Diplomatic Academy, noted that South Korean presidents tend to seek to improve relations with Japan, only to be often obstructed by Japanese actions on sensitive historical matters, further highlighting the cyclical nature of these diplomatic efforts.
Park’s analysis also suggests that political calculations, including leveraging nationalistic sentiments in response to these provocations, can offer short-term domestic benefits for South Korean politicians.
This historical trend raises questions about whether the Yoon administration will sustain its current approach to Japan or adjust it in response to domestic political pressures and historical legacies that have long influenced the trajectory of ROK-Japan relations.
SUPERFICIAL CULTURAL TIES
The recent “Yes Japan” trend, marked by a growing interest among South Koreans in Japanese cultural products and travel to the country, has sparked discussions on whether these changing cultural dynamics could lead to a more favorable political climate between the two nations.
In theory, improving mutual perceptions could make it less politically expedient for ROK politicians to engage in Japan-bashing.
However, historical trends and recent public opinion polls show it might be too early to be optimistic about a permanent thaw in Seoul-Tokyo relations.
Japanese cultural influence in South Korea is not a recent phenomenon. South Korean newspaper editorials in the late 1980s lamented the willingness of South Korean youth to enthusiastically consume “low quality” Japanese cultural products.
The lifting of the ban on Japanese cultural products by the Kim Dae-jung administration was a significant step toward normalizing cultural exchanges after decades of prohibition following Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945.
This history of cultural interaction, evolving from manga and anime to J-pop, suggests a layered relationship that oscillates between acceptance and resistance.
Thus, the recent trend of young South Koreans becoming enamored with Japanese culture likely marks the start of a new wave. This trend may have been propelled by the easing of the global pandemic, which previously limited such cultural exchanges and the gradual decline of the “No Japan” movement that emerged in 2019.
Japan removed South Korea from its white list of trading nations in 2019, imposing export controls on three essential materials for semiconductor manufacturing, ostensibly in response to South Korean Supreme Court rulings requiring Japanese firms to compensate Korean forced labor victims from the period of Japanese colonial rule.
Further recent trends, such as the increased patronage of Japanese brands like Uniqlo and a surge in travel to Japan, seem to have had little impact on how South Koreans view Japan.
The 2023 East Asia Institute (EAI)-Genron NPO survey indicates that despite a noticeable rise in travel to Japan, driven in part by economic factors like a favorable exchange rate, a significant majority of these travelers already harbored positive views of Japan, meaning that those with negative views continue to stay away.
As such, the travel boom may not necessarily indicate a broad-based shift in public opinion.
Moreover, the survey highlights that 93.5% of Koreans reported having no Japanese friends or acquaintances. While the number of South Koreans who hold a favorable view of Japan has risen from 12.3% in 2020 to 28.9% in 2023, 53.3% still view Japan unfavorably.
The Yoon administration’s push to improve ROK-Japan ties seems to have done little to create this result. When South Koreans who responded that they had a “favorable” or “mostly favorable” view of Japan were asked why they viewed the country positively, only 3.1% stated it was because of the “significant progress in ROK-Japan relations over the past year.”
People were more likely to cite the “kind and hard-working” character of the Japanese people or the appeals of its “high-quality products” and “food culture and shopping.”
This distinction underscores the limited impact of high-level diplomatic initiatives on public sentiment, which remains influenced by historical grievances, short-term economic interests and cultural exchanges.
RETURN TO CONTENTION
In sum, the “Yes Japan” phenomenon, to the extent that such a movement actually exists, appears to represent both a renewed interest in Japanese culture among South Koreans — a sentiment that has ebbed and flowed for decades — and an outcome of favorable economic conditions that make Japanese products and travel more appealing.
Moreover, there is little evidence to link this trend directly to the broader political dynamics between the two countries.
When the ROK established a compensation fund for the victims of wartime forced labor, analysts warned that the South Korean people were unlikely to accept the Yoon administration’s Japan policy without reciprocity from Tokyo. As of the end of 2023, no Japanese company has contributed to the fund.
This situation suggests that the Yoon administration might have gained minimal political benefits in the polls, and it is likely that its Japan policy is a political liability. As such, Yoon could dramatically shift his policy if political expediency demands, considering his persistently low approval rating.
The increased engagement of South Koreans with Japanese culture, therefore, might be superficial, failing to address the underlying tensions that make the relationship between South Korea and Japan challenging.
Thus, a summit between Yoon and Kishida, should it occur, may not yield the positive political outcomes Yoon and the ruling party might hope for.
Edited by John Lee
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