Recently, the Japanese government has withdrawn their envoy\u00a0the country of South Korea. Why? Because South Korean activists are simply reminding Japan of it’s past offenses regarding treatment of Korean women during the second world war. The general gist of the story is, Korean activists erected a statue of a Korean “comfort woman”, to represent the over 200,000 women and girls forced into sex slavery by the Japanese. Over a year ago, the two governments reached an agreement, where Japan would pay over one billion yen to any surviving victims of Japan’s sex slavery; while accepted by both governments readily, a large amount of the Korean people were still dissatisfied with this resolution. That statue remained intact; however, a copy of that very statue was just recently erected outside of Japan’s consulate in the city of Busan. It was promptly removed; however, authorities did not stop the statue from being put back in place by activists, this was the move that drove the Japanese to withdraw their envoy from the country of South Korea. The Japanese government is persistent in urging the Korean’s to quickly remove the statue, though that seems unlikely given the large number of protests by the South Korean people. For instance, one South Korean monk went as far as to light himself on fire in protest of the Japanese, deeming the settlement reached last year, as unsatisfactory. While it’s doubtful an all out conflict will erupt between South Korea and Japan, I suspect the two countries will grow to further resent each other within the coming decades, a sticky situation, given that we are strong allies with both countries. What is most interesting about this situation however, is Japan’s approach to their historical behavior. While other past offenders (i.e. Germany) have acknowledged their past and actively work to prevent it from reoccurring, Japan seems to take a much more oppressive route, almost pretending it didn’t happen. This approach is very similar to that taken by the Turkish government in regards to the Armenian genocide, they very much deny it’s occurrence. This strategy often leads to protest, as were seen in Turkey recently, and the anti- Japanese protests occurring in South Korea as of now. It’s possible this relationship may be amended, if Japan was more open to accepting what happened, and giving fair reparations, hopefully to a more loyal Korean ruler.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently, the Japanese government has withdrawn their envoy\u00a0the country of South Korea. Why? Because South Korean activists are simply reminding Japan of it’s past offenses regarding treatment of Korean women during the second world war. The general gist of the story is, Korean activists erected a statue of a Korean “comfort woman”, to represent the over 200,000 women and girls… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":443,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420\/revisions\/443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}