Foreign minister calls for 'desirable' ties with Japan

[benihime99.livejournal.com]

Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan on Friday called on Japan to steer a new course of "desirable cooperative relations" amid diplomatic tensions stemming from Japan's colonial rule over Korea. Kim made the remarks during a meeting in Seoul with a group of Korean and Japanese university professors, who are involved in a joint government-funded project to explore new ideas to move bilateral relations forward.

"Minister Kim asked them to come up with many ideas as to how Korea and Japan can usher in a new era of desirable cooperative relations in the rapidly changing global environment," a senior ministry official said on the condition of anonymity.

The joint research team was formally launched in December last year, some two months after President Lee Myung-bak and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda agreed to do so during a summit. The team is scheduled to submit a report on the future of bilateral relations to both governments in the first half of this year.

Many Koreans still harbor deep resentment toward Japan due to Tokyo's atrocities during World War II, when the Korean Peninsula was a Japanese colony.

Seoul has been calling for official bilateral negotiations to resolve a long-running grievance regarding aging Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. Despite repeated demands from Seoul, Japan has been sticking to its previous position that all issues regarding the colonial rule were settled in a 1965 package compensation deal that the two countries reached while normalizing diplomatic relations. (Yonhap)

Source: Koreatimes

Comments

[deerlike.livejournal.com]

I really can't help but feel that if Japan had adopted a similar attitude as Germany post-war, coming out in full admission of their war crimes, a lot of these present-day tensions would be significantly mitigated. Reparations mean nothing if there isn't culpability to back them up.

I mean, ideally, that goes for any country that engages in war and commits "collateral damage". There needs to be greater transparency and culpability, because (one hopes) that might discourage so-called civilized nations from committing them in the first place.