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Will: Japan inflames South Koreans’ emotions

By George Will

Published: October 6, 2019, 6:01am

In 1950, when Han Sung-joo was 10, shrapnel from an artillery shell lodged in his hip. This happened as Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s troops, fresh from the bold Incheon landing, were retaking Seoul — it would be lost and retaken again — after North Korea’s June invasion. The shell fragment was still there when Han served as South Korea’s minister of foreign affairs (1993-1994) and as ambassador to the United States (2003-2005). He lives today with this metallic reminder of the fact that his nation lives in a dangerous neighborhood. His brother-in-law died when North Koreans killed 17 South Korean officials in a 1983 attempt to assassinate South Korea’s president during a visit to Burma.

North Korea’s opaque regime possesses nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and conventional artillery and rockets that could devastate large portions of this metropolitan area of 25 million without any infantry or armor crossing the 38th parallel. But North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un is less unpopular among South Koreans than is Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Japan’s 35-year colonization of the Korean Peninsula ended with World War II. Seventy-four years later, South Korea, where the anniversary of Japan’s 1945 surrender is a national holiday, is jeopardizing its and Northeast Asia’s security in order to pursue war-era grievances concerning Japan’s exploitation of forced labor. Japan says this issue, including expressions of remorse and restitution, was settled in 1965 — many more years ago than the Japanese occupation lasted. South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in, whose party is facing a general election in 2020, has agitated this dispute, and a Korean court recently reopened it. Many Koreans say Japan’s reparations have been insufficient and its apologies insincere.

South Korean polls reveal troubling age differences and a small middle ground. Young people are much less sanguine about their northern neighbor than Moon. South Koreans in their 20s are the most hostile to warmer relations, or unification, with North Korea. Progressives are often middle-aged and some protest the statue of MacArthur in Incheon and are skeptical about U.S. policies and motives.

‘Nuclear power’

Four U.S. presidents prior to the current one toiled to stop North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. This continued until — if you believe the current one — he and Kim spent a few hours together in Singapore, “fell in love,” and their conjugal relations produced this presidential tweet: “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” If, however, today’s president is mistaken, so has been the durable belief that cajoling lubricated by bribery (food, energy, assistance building light-water reactors) would deflect North Korea from its decadeslong nuclear project. The failure is writ large in the fact that North Korea has placed in its constitution the description of itself as a “nuclear power.”

Han Sung-joo is so given to softly spoken understatements that, he says, he hardly seems Korean: He says that his countrymen are “emotion-prone.” So, attention must be paid when he says his country is more than “polarized,” it is afflicted with “cleavages.”

Americans have a seemingly endless series of high-decibel shouting matches over this or that supposedly “existential” matter. South Koreans actually live with such a threat, one that Moon minimizes, and that events might be maximizing.

‘Nuclear power’

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