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| Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe meets with the U.S. president (unseen) during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Biarritz, southwestern France, Sunday, on the second day of the annual G7 Summit attended by the leaders of the world's seven richest democracies, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States. AFP-Yonhap |
By Park Ji-won
More Japanese politicians have raised their voices against the Abe administration's recent moves against South Korea, urging Tokyo to look back what the country did to South Korea.
Regarding Seoul's decision to withdraw from the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) with Japan, Aug. 22, Rep. Shigeru Ishiba, a member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Japan's House of Representatives, wrote in his blog Aug. 23 that "there are many problems created by the fact that Japan didn't take responsibility for the war after being defeated in the past and those are surfacing now."
Claiming the Japanese government has made achievements after the war despite difficulties, however, he said "Japan should recognize the fact that Japan is different from Germany which took responsibility [for the past] by themselves adding to the outcome of the Nuremberg Trials."
He also stressed that many Koreans and Japanese support the two countries repairing relations as in the past when Kim Dae-jung and Obuchi Keizo were their leaders.
Seoul decided not to extend the intelligence-sharing pact with Tokyo last week in an apparent move to protest Japan's decision Aug. 2 to remove South Korea from its list of trusted trading partners. The agreement has been considered a show of trilateral military cooperation between Seoul, Washington and Tokyo against North Korea's military provocations.
It is notable that Ishiba, a former LDP secretary general, stood openly against the direction of the Abe administration, which expressed regret and criticized the South for what it called a "betrayal of trust" over the decision. This is based on the fact that currently it is hard to speak out against Abe, according to politicians who visited Japan recently.
The former defense minister may have made such remarks simply to criticize Abe; he has been a long-time political foe of the prime minister and leads a faction in the LDP not aligned with him. However, political sources say it could be a sign that a certain number of LDP members strongly oppose the administration's current decisions to create conflicts with Seoul, which may negatively influence upcoming elections including a by-election in October and those for the House of Representatives in 2021.
Regarding the GSOMIA, former Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama also tweeted Aug. 23 that the root of the conflict "was created by Japan as it had hurt the Korean people by colonizing the Korean Peninsula."
Experts urged the South to join hands with groups that oppose Abe's administration.
"What is important for Japan now is for the so-called anti-Abe groups to unite," a politics professor in Seoul said. "There are many people who oppose the government's historical revisionism. The South Korean government should work together with those people to resolve the current disputes with Japan," Park Won-gon, a professor of international politics at Handong Global University, said.
