News Analysis: Conflicts go on between S. Korea, Japan 50 years after normalized ties

On June 22, 1965, South Korea and Japan signed the so-called Settlement Agreement that normalized diplomatic relations between the neighboring countries some 20 years after the Korean Peninsula was liberated from the 1910-45 colonial rule of Japan.

Half a century have passed since the agreement ushered in the " 1965 regime," but wounds and scars are still left in the hearts and minds of South Korean victims, including sex slaves and slave laborers forcibly mobilized, as the Japanese government refrained from making a sincere apology for past atrocities committed by their ancestors.

After 14 years of marathon negotiations, then South Korean President Park Chung-hee, father of current President Park Geun- hye, decided in 1965 to receive 300 million U.S. dollars of economic cooperation funds from Japan by signing the agreement.

His decision was, and is even now, censured by some as humiliating diplomacy as the agreement failed to contain Japan's sincere apology for and repentance over past brutalities during the colonial period. It was blamed for the ongoing pains and heartbreaks inflicted on the victims as Japan insists that all damages claims were resolved via the agreement.

Others praised, or praise, the elder Park for his decision as the funds from Japan served as part of seed capital to develop the war-ravaged country, caused by the 1950-53 Korean War, into the Asia's fourth-largest economy. The country's GDP increased from three billion dollars in 1965 to 64 billion dollars in 1979, the last year of the elder Park's presidency.

GEOGRAPHICALLY CLOSE, EMOTIONALLY DISTANT

Except for China, South Korea has the closest geographic proximity with Japan, but the latter is the most distant neighbor emotionally as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe refuses to put a period to the militaristic past with a sincere apology and start anew with neighboring countries.

"Diplomatic provocations" repeatedly came from right-leaning Japanese politicians, preventing Japan from curing the scars of history and mending ties with neighboring countries. The rightist shift has only deepened enmity among people of the two countries.

According to a joint survey conducted by South Korea's East Asia Institute and a Japanese civic group between March and May, 72.5 percent of South Korean respondents showed hostility toward Japan for absurd remarks by Japanese politicians. More than half of Japanese respondents felt the fatigue with South Korea's calls for apology.

Many South Koreans have got sick and tired of anachronistic words and actions by Japanese conservatives, led by Abe who has refused to apologize for Japan's wartime crimes such as "comfort women," or women coerced into sex slavery at Japanese military brothels during the World War II.

Abe described the "comfort women" as "human trafficking" by private agents, seeking to shun responsibility of the government. South Korean victims of the sex slavery and civic activists have held a rally every Wednesday in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul since Jan. 8, 1992, calling for apology and reparation from the Japanese government.

According to historians, at least 200,000 women, mostly Koreans, were deceivably or forcibly mobilized to the so-called "comfort stations" of Japan's Imperial Army in Japan, China, Southeast Asia and islands of the South Pacific. Among 238 Korean women who identified themselves as former sex slaves, only 50 are alive as five passed away in 2015 alone.

Adding fuel to resentment of South Koreans, the Abe cabinet has been seeking to list 23 facilities of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution as UNESCO World Heritage sites. The attempt ignored the historical facts that tens of thousands of Koreans were mobilized for forced labor at seven of the facilities during the colonial period.

Japan has firmly insisted that the issues on sex slavery and forced labor were all resolved through the 1965 treaty, but South Korea's supreme court ruled in 2012 that forced labor victims were entitled to private damages claims as the mobilization was an " unlawful act under Japan's forced annexation of Korea."

South Korea's constitutional court ruled in 2011 that it was unconstitutional for the South Korean government not to make efforts at resolving conflicts between "comfort women" victims and the Japanese government. From April 2014, director general-level diplomatic talks began between Seoul and Tokyo to discuss the " comfort women" issue.

President Park has refused to sit down face-to-face with Abe since her inauguration in early 2013, criticizing Abe for his wrong perception of history. Endi