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Obama’s Pivot to Asia and Its Failed Japan-South Korea Historical Reconciliation

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Abstract

Since the 1980s, Japan’s war memory has strained its relations with South Korea and China, to a less degree, the USA. Two of the thorniest issues are the comfort women and the US atomic bombing of Japan. Before the Obama administration announced its policy pivot to Asia in 2011, both Japanese and American leaders were reluctant to make amends for the past acts of their countries. However, in 2015, the Japanese conservative Prime Minister Abe reached an agreement with South Korea that “finally and irreversibly” resolved the comfort women issue, thus achieving a historic reconciliation between the two countries. In 2016, then President Obama visited Hiroshima to commemorate the atomic bomb victims. Then, in December 2016, the comfort women issue resurfaced in Japan and South Korea relations, indicating a failure of the reconciliation. Why did the USA change its policy on historical issues involving Japan? Why did Abe and the South Korean President Park Geun-hye settle the comfort women issue? Why did Obama visit Hiroshima? Why did the reconciliation fail? In this article, I propose a rational choice theory to answer these questions. Applying the proposed theory and relying on available evidence, I argue that the settlement of the comfort women issue and Obama’s visit to Hiroshima are important components of Obama’s pivot to Asia to balance China’s rise. The reconciliation failed mainly because it did not resolve the historical justice issue promoted by the human rights norms. I discuss some implications for reconciliation in Northeast Asia.

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Notes

  1. Japanese prime ministers’ paying tribute at the Yasukuni Shrine has been one of the most controversial issues in Japan’s domestic politics and in its relations with China and South Korea. Such visits convey significance for different domestic and foreign audiences: (1) mourning of dead soldiers, for the benefit of the bereaved families; (2) state intervention in religion, for those who hold different religious beliefs from Shintoism; (3) justification of Japan’s aggression to the foreign victims of Japan’s war crimes; and (4) Japan’s official rejection of the view of history imposed by the Tokyo trial, for those who aim to overturn the trial’s verdict. As a result, China and South Korea, the main victims of Japan’s aggression and colonialism, have strongly protested Japanese prime ministers’ visits to the Yasukuni Shrine. Yet, inside Japan, these protests are strongly criticized because they are considered an intervention in Japan’s domestic affairs by a foreign government [41, 74] [71, pp. 129–130].

  2. It is worth noting that Japanese strategic bombing in China destroyed Chinese cities and killed more than 260,000 civilians [47] [53, p. 337].

  3. Ku uses the instrumental perspective and the transnational-political activism model to explain Japan’s state policy on comfort women issue during the 1950s–mid-2000s [38]. Since the civil groups in the transnational activist networks mainly use human rights norms to exert their influence on state’s policy on the comfort women issue (e.g., apology and compensation issues) [38, pp. 247, 256–257], it overlaps with the proposed rational choice theory; the difference between the two is that the former takes the process of network into consideration while the latter mainly considers the effect of human rights norms.

  4. Although North Korea’s nuclear threat was also a concern, the pivot aimed to counter the rise of China.

  5. Ahn Jung-geun assassinated Hirobumi Ito, the first resident Japanese governor of Korea, in 1909. He is revered in South Korea as a national hero but is regarded as a terrorist by the Japanese government. Japan hung Ahn in 1910 for the assassination.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by a Wagner College Faculty Research Fund. The author would like to thank Edmund Worthy for his valuablle comments, suggestions, and edits. The author would also like to thank two East Asia reviewers for their helpful reviews.

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    Chien Liu

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Liu, C. Obama’s Pivot to Asia and Its Failed Japan-South Korea Historical Reconciliation. East Asia 35, 293–316 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12140-018-9304-7

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