Pulling the plug on the Japan complex

healthy relations with Japan will only happen when the japan complex ends.

Chang Se-jeongThe author is an editorial writer of the JoongAng Ilbo. This year’s Aug. 15 Liberation Day failed to become a festival of national unity. After President Yoon Suk Yeol appointed Kim Hyoung-suk as the new director of the Independence Hall of Korea based on the recommendation of the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs, Lee Jong-chan, head of the Heritage of Korean Independence, abruptly protested, stirring up political conflict.

The opposition and the left attributed it to the president’s appointment of Kim as the new head of the Independence Hall in South Chungcheong, while the governing People Power Party and the right blamed Lee’s stubbornness to challenge the presidential decision for the friction. This is a bitter déjà vu of the 1945 liberation period, when conservatives and liberals were ferociously confronting each other.

In May, a recommendation committee to select a new director of the Independence Hall was established with seven members including Lee. In July, six of those members, including Lee, attended the interview process. After Kim, whom Lee had given the lowest score in the interview, was selected as the top candidate, Lee became furious.

Lee has a personal relationship with Yoon. As his son was Yoon’s classmate during elementary school and the College of Law at Seoul National University, Yoon called Lee “father.” When Yoon was a presidential candidate, Lee declared his support and volunteered as a political mentor, so Lee could have felt upset when Yoon didn’t listen to him. However, could Lee’s boycotting of the Liberation Day ceremony really deserve praise? To make matters worse, National Assembly speaker Woo Won-shik skipped the government-hosted ceremony as if he was just a member of the opposition.

The Independence Hall, a public institution and museum, does not have specific qualifications for its director. Instead, descendants of independence fighters have traditionally served as the head of the hall, a vice-ministerial post with three years of tenure. But the Roh Moo-hyun administration named a senior official of the Democratic Party (DP) as the director of the hall. The Moon Jae-in administration appointed a professor of history as its director.

Kim, the newly appointed director, is a historian who worked in both university and civil society. He served as the first secretary general of the Korean Sharing Movement, a progressive civic group founded in 1996 to give humanitarian aid to the North. Kim also worked as head of the Korea History and Future Foundation, a conservative organization.

In his book “A History War That Should Be Ended,” published on Liberation Day in 2022, Kim praised both Syngman Rhee and Kim Koo, who were political rivals. He championed a historical perspective of national unity through respecting opponents’ views while not denying the raison d’être of Korea’s existence after being obsessed with the people and unification tenet.

But Lee labeled Kim as a part of the “New Right.” He can criticize Kim’s professional qualifications, but it goes too far if he still labels Kim as a New Right person when he fiercely denies it. Lee’s grandfather, Lee Hoe-yeong, was an anarchist independence activist. He was arrested by the Japanese police, was imprisoned in 1932 and died while in jail. This may be the background of Lee’s emphasis on the legitimacy of the provisional government in China. But Lee Hoe-yeong’s younger brother, Lee Si-yeong, served as the first vice president of the country under founding President Syngman Rhee.

Lee Jong-chan, a graduate from the Korea Military Academy, served as a senior official at the Korea Central Intelligence Agency under the Park Chung Hee government. He also served as a member of the National Security Emergency Committee under the Chun Doo Hwan regime and as the secretary general of the governing Democratic Justice Party. During the Roh Tae-woo administration, Lee was a four-term lawmaker of the governing Democratic Liberal Party. In 1995, he joined the Democratic Party and served as head of the intelligence agency and the National Intelligence Service in the Kim Dae-jung administration. He would be embarrassed if someone labeled him as a New Left person based on his conversion from the conservative to the liberal side.

We still see the habit of trying to gain political advantage by labeling rivals as pro-Japan. Former Justice Minister Cho Kuk is a classic example of this. It is anachronistic to see the world through a binary lens of pro-Japan and anti-Japan.

Japan today is not the colonial Japan of the past, and Korea is one of the world’s top 10 economies and the fifth strongest military power. Last year, Korea’s per capita income surpassed Japan’s for the first time. “Having studied Japanese politics at Columbia University, I have no sense of victimization toward Japan, and I think Korea and Japan are equal,” said Korean Ambassador Park Chul-hee in a recent meeting in Tokyo. Healthy bilateral relations and security cooperation with Japan will only be possible when Korea pulls the plug on the Japan complex and becomes confident.