SEOUL, South Korea — It’s an old and long-repeated pattern in Indo-Pacific politics: Japan and South Korea, indispensable U.S. allies in the region, are engaged in yet another squabble over World War II and how to remember a tangled and troubled past.
Multiple indications suggest the latest flap was based on erroneous Japanese news reports, a development that could leave some diplomatic faces red.
Even so, the latest blow-up — concerning the remembrance of wartime laborers in Japanese mines — fits into a feedback loop that has plagued Seoul-Tokyo relations for three decades. The pattern is familiar: A historical wrong, related to Japan’s colonial control of the Korean peninsula for decades ending in 1945, is raised. Japan apologizes. South Korea rejects the apologies as insincere or incomplete. Bad feelings intensify on both sides. Repeat.
It is a trend that can be seen in the long-running tensions of Korean “comfort women” for Japanese soldiers and in grievances over forced labor practices by Japanese authorities at the time.
With significant prodding from the Biden administration, South Korean and Japanese leaders, despite domestic political complications, have sought to break the pattern in recent years, in an effort to promote trilateral coordination between the three democratic allies in Northeast Asia.
But now, yet another controversy has hit the front pages in both countries, shining a fresh light on the potency of historical tensions and the still-precarious state of bilateral ties. It also presents the incoming Trump administration with a tricky diplomatic balancing act to carry off in Northeast Asia.
The flap began Sunday when South Korean officials declined to attend a memorial ceremony at Japan’s Sado Mine complex, where copper and gold were extracted. During World War II, Japan mobilized laborers — including an estimated 1,500 Koreans, who were at that time, colonial subjects — to work in difficult conditions underground at Sado.
Tokyo has long sought to turn the mine complex and other sites of its early industrialization into UNESCO World Heritage sites. For that, it requires the support of Seoul, which has a seat on the World Heritage Committee. Seoul agreed to the designation — on the condition that Japan admit to the use of forced Korean workers, and hold an annual memorial in their honor.
Japan accepted, and on Sunday went ahead with a commemoration at Sado led by Parliamentary Vice Foreign Minister Akiko Ikuina. Ms. Ikuina acknowledged the “dangerous and harsh conditions” Korean laborers endured, but did not mention coercion and did not offer an apology.
Japanese tourism promoters did not skip a beat, immediately promoting on social media a ”new, unique travel destination” in “unseen Japan,” touting the fact that the Sado Mines were now an official UNESCO World Heritage Site.”
But Ms. Ikuina’s presence at the event already raised South Korean hackles: In 2022, according to Japanese press accounts, she visited Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, a touchstone for Japanese conservatives and revisionists where, among the country’s millions of war dead, 14 Class-A war criminals are also enshrined. Both China and South Korea regularly protest such visits, saying it celebrates Japanese militarism dating back to the war.
South Korean government representatives and families of the laborers boycotted the Sunday ceremony. And on Monday, they held a separate commemoration at the site of a workers’ dormitory at Sado.
South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung, a likely presidential candidate in 2027, used the incident to attack conservative President Yoon Suk-yeol, who has actively pushed for better relations with Japan and the easing of war-related grievances.
No fan of the government’s policy of upgrading ties with Tokyo, Mr. Lee charged Monday that the “forced mobilization of over 1,500 Koreans has been erased from history” and attacked the Yoon government for what he called “submissive and conciliatory diplomacy.”
The left-leaning Hankyoreh newspaper on Monday echoed Mr. Lee’s cry, calling Seoul’s stance “groveling.”
But a potentially embarrassing new development has cast a new light — it turns out reports Ms. Ikuina had visited the controversial shrine three years ago were wrong. Even as the brouhaha was building, Kyodo News admitted late Sunday that it had misreported her visit, and the media company’s president apologized to Japan’s deputy foreign minister for the error on Tuesday.
Though Seoul “denied that Ikuina’s attendance at the memorial influenced its decision [to boycott Sunday’s event,] Japanese media reports suggest that the news spread within South Korea and could have impacted Seoul’s decision,” Japanese political commentator Rin Nishimura wrote on X.
That analysis is backed by multiple South Korean press reports that came out before Kyodo’s admission: “Scrutiny over Ikuina’s past participation in ceremonies paying respects at Yasukuni Shrine prompted the Korean government to boycott the [Sunday] memorial service,” the Seoul-based newspaper Hankyoreh wrote under a picture of Ms. Ikuina, citing South Korea’s respected Yonhap News Agency for the caption. The government-run KBS radio offered a similar reason in its reporting.
The conservative Chosun Ilbo news website wrote that Seoul boycotted the ceremony “after Japan demonstrated … an insincere diplomatic choice by sending Akiko Ikuina, … who had previously visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in 2022.”
Both sides have tried to contain the diplomatic fallout. The South Korean Foreign Ministry tried to clarify its stance. Contradicting a slew of news stories, the ministry said South Korean officials did not attend Sunday’s event because Japan’s memorial address at the Sado ceremony “fell short of the level agreed upon.”
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi called Kyodo’s erroneous report “extremely regrettable.”
The Japanese and South Korean foreign ministers, meeting on the sidelines of the G7 meeting in Italy on Tuesday, agreed to maintain momentum on bilateral cooperation despite the Sado controversy, Seoul’s Yonhap News Agency reported.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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