2 June 2010
Japan’s unendurable Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has resigned over his unfulfillable promise to close the Futenma U.S. Marine Corps Base on Okinawa. Good riddance. Although the Futenma issue was the direct cause of Hatoyama’s fall, North Korea’s sinking of the Cheonan forced Hatoyama to climb down on Futenma, which means that Hatoyama’s political career was the one casualty of the Cheonan Incident I won’t mourn.
Jay Solomon of the Wall Street Journal writes that big changes may be coming for the South Korean military. In addition to slowing down the dissolution of Combined Forces Command, South Korea understandably wants to acquire better weapons to deter North Korea. As a firm believer in a strong and independent South Korean defense, I certainly support the latter move. Ten years of leftist rule resulted in defense cuts that hollowed out the South’s defenses, leaving it to American taxpayers to take up the burden. Solomon tries to explain the inexplicable:
Many in South Korea have viewed North Korea’s million-man military as largely targeted at the U.S. South Korea’s late President Roh Moo-hyun successfully pushed for the U.S. to lower it military profile in his country and to transfer control of the joint military command to South Korea’s defense department.
Hello out there in the Treasury Department! Aminex, the Anglo-Irish consortium that wants to drill for oil off the North Korean coast and give Kim Jong Il’s regime all the money it needs to buy baby formula build nukes, upgrade its military, and thwart international sanctions, turns out to be owned in part by America’s own JP Morgan Chase. For Chase to let its money be used in this way is simply unpatriotic, and it should hear from its shareholders.
At True Slant, Nathan Epstein has written a must-read post raising serious questions that prominent lefty bloggers were taken in by ChiCom propaganda portraying the Chinese land clearances as examples of the state’s beneficence. Picking up on this, Chris Badeaux writes in the New Ledger:
What’s sad is that Yglesias and Klein are simply going to feed a torrent of uncritical, uncomprehending commentary about a China on the rise, missing the human dislocation, misery, and instability being cemented into that base; what’s sadder is that most people, right and left, won’t pick up on it, and our political class, which may be even thicker than the useful idiots they read, will miss the truth of China that’s there to read, right before everyone’s eyes.
Surely Aminex has tried before?
I forgot to include a link to the Yasukuni-14 who were secretly enshrined thirty years ago.
And when Koizumi first visited in 2001, it was the first such official visit since Nakasone in 1985. Ultimately he made six such visits, each one ticking off the neighbors and many Japanese.
Glad to be of service, angrysoba, and I concur on pretty much everything you said after that.
My interest in Yasukuni and other such issues is not to wield a hammer with which to bash Japan. Rather, I would very much like to see Japan and South Korea have a much tighter relationship, one with a great deal of economic, military, and political cooperation, plus a great deal of social interaction. But that is a tall order when the words and deeds of so many right-wing politicians who just can’t accept Japan’s negative role in the first half of the last century effectively keep ripping off the band-aid.
I’ll miss Hatoyama’s fashion sense, at least.
http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/Asia/Story/STIStory_531583.html
Thanks, kushibo.
I also would really like to see closer co-operation between Japan and South Korea. As a resident of Japan I hope I don’t sound too biased in favour of my hosts but I really do believe that a lot more work needs to be done on the other side of the Sea of Japan/East Sea than on this side of it. From what I have seen, Japan is quite ready for a much greater friendship at almost all levels with South Korea than South Koreans are with Japanese.
I am also pretty sure that such things as visits to Yasukuni shrine by school children – if they actually happen at all – are incredibly rare compared to (unless my sources are incorrect) South Korean children being taken to War museums in which they are not simply educated in their country’s history but told to actively hate the Japanese.
I also find it quite tragic to read people such as B R Myers who point out – and I have no reason to disbelieve him – that there is a greater sympathy for the North Korean *government* than there is for either that of the US or Japan – or of South Korea. I find it shocking that the US and Japan have been two of the greatest aid providers to the people in North Korea and yet they are still, in so many quarters, unwelcome by Koreans either side of the 38th parallel.
Oh well, I suppose things will change for the better at a glacial pace.
Offtopic, I have a piece up on Aminex at another blog where Soba and I comment (I as Kehaar), and see this response:
Aminex is a good company with operations in the US too, but markets are not going to price in anything for North Korea, because markets will rightly suspect that once oil starts flowing, the capitalist dogs namely Aminex & Chosun Energy will be gently (or not so gently) pushed out.
Can’t believe companies are still falling for this old chestnut.
angrysoba wrote:
Have you been to such museums? I think your characterization is a bit off.
At any rate, Japanese children being sent to, say, Yasukuni Shrine’s Yushukan Museum (if that really happens) would be a completely different animal from Korean children being sent to, say, the War Memorial (which heavily bashes on North Korea more than anything). Apples and oranges, given the historical role of the two countries involved.
The simple act of teaching Korean history runs the risk of generating hatred toward the countries that invaded it. Germans and Japanese are, to an extent, still vilified even in the US today (I live near Pearl Harbor), so I’m not sure how to teach history without hatred.
If it makes you feel any better, Korean schoolchildren “learn to hate” two types of people: foreign aggressors and Korean traitors. If Lee Wanyong is not the most vilified person in Korean history, he probably comes in at #2 (behind Ito Hirobumi).
In short, niggling little ways in which the “we regret, but…” so-called apologies and other backtracking on WWII- and colonial-era responsibility (of which Yasukuni/Yushukan is a part). When I take a friend’s Japanese friend to Pearl Harbor and she announces there that “this all is very sad, but America forced Japan to do this, didn’t they?” then the ball is sort of in Japan’s court for coming to grips with what happened. Sure, Korean leaders (namely Roh) can be very ham-handed, but if someone really wants to bash Japan, Japan’s right-wing is the gift that keeps on giving.
Sorry, I’d find links for some of these things, but I’m rushing out the door.
“Have you been to such museums? I think your characterization is a bit off.”
You’ve rumbled me. No, I haven’t. I am basing this on second-hand information. I think I will pay a visit to the War Memorial next time so that I can see for myself but I have certainly noticed that a number of South Koreans have a passionate grievance against the Japanese. As you point out there is certainly a justification for this. In Japan, on the other hand, there is often complete bafflement at the news that they aren’t considered greatest thing since sliced bread (this is out of ignorance of their history more than anything else).
I’m not surprised Ito Hirobumi is… unpopular in South Korea. He’s probably better known there than he is here (where he always seems to be referred to as Hirofumi). What do people make of Toyotomi Hideyoshi?