This year marks the 100th anniversary of Japan’s invasion of the Korean peninsula, which started a 35 year period during which the entire nation of Korea was officially annexed by Japan — high schools in Pyonyang even participated in the Koshien high school baseball tournament in Osaka, the same Koshien that’s celebrated in baseball manga today. I’m going to use my great knowledge of Japan and predict that the Japanese government will issue an apology to the governments of the two Koreas over the next few weeks. I’ll go out even further on a limb and state that, although this will be the eighth official apology Japan has made to Korea (this doesn’t include numerous heartfelt expressions of regret by the Emperor of Japan, whose statements lack the force of law), people on the other side of the Sea of Japan the Eastern Sea will not be impressed. There will be angry words exchanged between netizens of Japan’s 2ch BBS and their counterparts in South Korea, and maybe a new wave of DDOS attacks back and forth. Business as usual, in other words.
As I’ve written before, it’s hard to know how to feel about all this. Japan did terrible things, and hasn’t properly educated its young people about what it did. On the other hand, over-educating your population on every wrong that was done to you in the past, as Korea (and China) do regularly, is just unhealthy. They also beat the dead horse of Japan’s WWII crimes to create a nationalistic unity, deflecting cricitism against their own failings and winning votes as good as any American politician who raises fears of attacks by Muslim terrorists if the other party wins the election does. Japan did bad things, but part of the reason we judge them so harshly is that it happened during 20th century, the era of photography, rather than in the 19th century or early, when Great Britain was doing the exact same things — creating an empire by force, starting with the country that lay immediately to the west of it — without it being documented photographically. Or have I lived in Japan so long that I am hopelessly biased to their side of things? Love to hear your thoughts.
Maybe South Korea can take this opportunity to thank Japan for whatever apology that is coming and say, “Okay now, it’s been a century, you don’t need to apologize any more. We’re moving on.” But that would probably be overly optimistic.
Tensions ahead for Korea and Japan?
