Vol.086 Special Feature: Power and Popular Opinion
Articles

Be Mature and Distinguish the “Forest” from the “Trees” Overcoming Korea-Japan Disputes Based on Incompatible National Historical Narratives

By Seung Hyok Lee

Government-level policy agreements are mere patches
It is already well known that in December 2015, the governments of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and Japan finally reached an agreement on the resolution of the highly publicized and politicized comfort women issue. Despite the fact that the future prospect of the agreement seems to be somewhat questionable now as a result of recent domestic political turmoil and the publicization of the issue by some potential presidential candidates in South Korea, it is hard to deny that the agreement was a result of the two governments’ rational realization that resolving the issue would be an integral pre-requisite for broader cooperation between the two countries, including in the security arena. The agreement is undeniably one of the most significant events in the history of the post-World War 2 South Korea-Japan bilateral relations, and considering that it is impossible to satisfy everyone in the two countries, the grand deal to set aside this issue as history and move on was indeed a controversial but courageous step.

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Even in the absence of the current political turmoil in Korea, however, I am not optimistic that the bilateral relations would have fundamentally stabilized as a result of the agreement. I believe that sooner or later, public voices demanding nullification and/or renegotiation of the agreement would have been raised from within South Korean society, and in this regard, it can be said that the fall of President Park Geun-hye's regime which signed the agreement in the first place, and the current re-rise of the "progressive" left-wing political camp which is highly critical of the agreement, have simply sped up the inevitable.

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It is because despite the two governments’ policy-level improvement, I believe that agreements such as the one in 2015 are mere “patches” over visible symptoms that fail to address a deeper structural cause that underlies all history-related disagreements at the societal/citizen-level. Agreement or not, there is still pervasive disagreement among substantial parts of the public in both countries over the truth of the comfort women issue – in particular regarding the extent of the Japanese government’s direct involvement, the involved women’s intentions, and the nature of the recruiting process; and such disagreement cannot be fundamentally overcome by treaties. After all, such disagreement is one symptom of a more deeply-rooted general trend; there is an acute divergence in the history-related national narratives that are embraced by ordinary, moderate citizens, both between these citizens and their governments, as well as between these citizens and their South Korean/Japanese counterparts.

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As previous research by Korea-Japan relations experts such as Jennifer Lind, Alexis Dudden, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Kan Kimura, and Taku Tamaki has already suggested, there are widening disagreements over the contents of the two national historical narratives at the societal-level, further consolidating negative mutual images in the bilateral relationship. This has profound policy implications. Although managing symptoms on specific cases such as the comfort women issue can provide us with a temporary illusion of progress, failing to address the cause will have long-run detrimental effects, and even raise the cost of addressing similar symptoms in the future.

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Despite the fact that South Korea and Japan increasingly disagree on what happened in the past, what I will argue is that the underlying pattern of how specific national historical narratives permeate each society is similar. I do not attempt to address the validity of particular conflicting claims, whether about the comfort women issue, the Dokdo/Takeshima territorial dispute, or any other issue linked to the shared history between South Korea and Japan. On these details, official Korean and Japanese claims, domestic interpretations widely promoted by nationalist groups, and numerous academic works have already become clichéd. Instead, I will examine two overlooked ideational patterns/backdrops that propel the two societies and their disagreements.

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The first is a belief in national exceptionalism entrenched among ordinary citizens - a sense of pride in their country’s unique collective achievement in the broader context of world history despite difficulties and tragedies brought on by external powers. Relatedly, the second current is a prevalent societal belief that these unique historical accomplishments are now being subjected to their neighbor’s defamatory distortion. Each country’s citizens, in turn, perceive this as a potential threat that, if left unchecked, could cause the international community’s under-appreciation or unfair judgement of them. Therefore, both societies are currently compelled by a defensive instinct to protect and transmit their proud and unique "story" beyond their borders. The current rise of divergent national historical narratives in South Korea and Japan, therefore, is a movement to correct perceived misrepresentations about how each nation should be portrayed by themselves and by others, and the movement is motivated by a sense of injustice and unfairness from the “other side”. Critically, most citizens in each country are unaware that the two same ideational patterns of pride/exceptionalism and the defensive instinct/victim mentality might be equally at work on the other side.

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These two ideational patterns underlie the increasing support by ordinary citizens in both countries for more positive national accounts of particular periods in the bilateral relationship, even if mainstream citizens in both countries are not necessarily nationalistic in their daily lives. Because they are convinced that the other side is unlikely to be even partially willing to listen to their version of the “story” – their national historical narratives – superficially positive policy developments cannot mitigate entrenched societal frustration or cynicism about the prospect of genuine reconciliation. The prospect that any policy agreement will be a truly sustainable step toward reconciliation is wishful thinking if these common ideational patterns propelling incompatible national historical narratives remain unaddressed among the two countries’ wider populations. Since the two ideational currents are lurking in the background of any history-linked bilateral interaction, we must look beyond the government-level and focus on the extent to which policymakers are exposed to the domestic atmosphere. In short, the main cause of the ongoing bilateral disputes is not necessarily the surging of “revisionism” in Japanese politics, nor is it the South Korean government using Japan-bashing for domestic purposes, as widely believed by many policy experts and journalists mainly focusing on government-level interactions.

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What is to be done, then? First, the public in both countries must consciously recognize and acknowledge that the two aforementioned ideational patterns are prevalent in both of their respective societies. The recognition that common traits are propelling their self and mutual images in their respective national historical narratives will, in turn, slowly lead to the “maturation” of popular historical perspectives, by gradually embedding in both publics a mutual understanding of the origin and the nature of the other side’s historical claims and reactions.

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Secondly, this “maturation process" among the majority of both countries’ citizens must be further facilitated by the promotion of the common sense idea that the "real" history of any region can never be captured in black and white, or in a good versus evil dichotomy. If there were basic agreement on the “big picture” – the “forest” – of what had happened in the past, i.e. regarding those most general facts that cannot be denied, other micro-level “smaller pictures” on the ground – the “trees” – in the two national historical narratives could – and should – be diverse in their content. During the maturation process, both societies must be ready to embrace the fact that certain aspects of mature history will rub them the wrong way and challenge their national pride and taboos. Nonetheless, the permeation and the consolidation of a “big/small” / “forest/tree” distinction among mainstream citizens of South Korea and Japan is where the current divergence of the two national historical narratives could be resolved.

Pride and defensiveness in South Korea and Japan’s national historical narratives

Contention between South Korea and Japan’s national historical narratives boils down to what happened in their bilateral relations from the 19th century up to the mid-20th century, although the disagreeing parties often reach back to more ancient times to find rationalizing evidence for their version of the story.

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The bilateral contentions over widely-accepted national historical narratives concerning the comfort women, the Dokdo/Takeshima Island dispute, or the Yasukuni Shrine controversy do not need to be reiterated here, but both countries’ overarching narratives have been constructed out of favorable interpretations of various historical episodes. The two shared ideational patterns – the sense of pride in their country's unique historical achievements, and the defensiveness and victim mentality against the perceived injury of this pride by their neighbor – reinforce the national historical narratives’ explanatory power.

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Needless to say, historical disputes can exist in any region in the world. There is a substantial volume of literature in peace and conflict studies dealing with the power of historical narratives in framing disputing parties’ images of self and other, and consequently, their mutual behavior. For example, writing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Padraig O’Malley introduces the “parity of esteem” concept in his book The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine – A Tale of Two Narratives. Israeli scholars have also tackled this problem. Daniel Bar-Tal, for example, utilizes the concept of an “ethos of conflict” in his article “Societal-Psychological Foundations of Intractable Conflicts.” O’Malley explains how two sides that rely heavily on their historical narratives as tools to justify their sense of victimhood in a conflict always fail to allocate the same level of “esteem” they give to their own national narrative to that of the other side, making it impossible to find common ground. Bar-Tal suggests that if contradictory national historical narratives occupy a central position in such a conflict, constituting its “ethos,” the people of one side tend to regard all the other side’s claims as lies not worth reflecting on, making mutual understanding based on equal esteem for both sides’ stories highly unlikely.

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Since no two regions share identical experiences, adapting concepts from one regional case for use in another always involves a certain risk. This is especially the case here, considering that the nature, the intensity, and the magnitude of the dispute between South Korea and Japan can never be equated to those of the Middle East. Nonetheless, I believe that concepts from other parts of the world provide us with interesting ideas to ponder when we turn our attention to South Korea and Japan.

Japan

It is well known that Japan’s historical narratives have always emphasized its uniqueness; this is a major source of national pride. As an island nation, Japan incorporated continental Asian and Western culture in its own way. One of the greatest historical achievements embedded in Japan’s collective psyche is the fact that it became the only non-Western modernization success story in the 19th century in the midst of a predatory world order, and this constitutes the first of the two fore-mentioned ideational foundations frequently mentioned in the Japanese national narratives.

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Japan’s modernization was far from an easy process of simply copying the West, and there is a certain justification for the Japanese claim that the country’s embrace of imperialism in the early 20th century, after gaining confidence in its ability to stay independent, was not very different from the practices of other contemporary industrial powers. Moreover, Japan’s initial rise was seen as a source of vicarious satisfaction and a model for many non-Western nations, although many people in the Asian countries that eventually suffered from Japanese military conquest prefer to ignore this. It is hardly surprising that many Japanese still look back with nostalgia at the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the country’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, often through movies, dramas, and literature. These episodes are held up as proof of Japan’s uniqueness and pride-worthiness in modern world history. This is also why many Japanese still emphasize widely-accepted domestic narratives that the Turks and other Central Asians wildly rejoiced when Japan beat the Czarist Russian might in 1905. An even more relevant source of pride and validator of uniqueness for many contemporary Japanese is Japan's transformation after World War 2. Indeed, Japan has been held up as a model of democracy and economic prosperity for many developing countries.

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For many Japanese, it is therefore frustrating and telling that only the two Koreas and China doggedly cling to the collective memory of Japan as inherently evil based on their history of suffering at the hands of the Japanese prior to 1945, while other victims of past Japanese aggressions seem to have more or less “gotten over” their prewar and wartime relationship. From the Japanese point of view, the Koreans (and more intensely, the Chinese) fail to fully appreciate Japan's transformation into a liberal democratic state that is widely appreciated by the world society; they are increasingly regarded as petty-minded people who are intentionally and unreasonably dwelling on the past and continuing to use Japan as a convenient scapegoat both domestically and internationally in order to overshadow their problems at home.

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It is especially annoying for many ordinary Japanese to observe South Korea’s Japan-bashing, as it shares political, economic, and security models with Japan, not to mention the high degree of interaction at the citizen-level. The current Japanese society’s growing desire to stand up to what it regards as defamation and criticism by its neighbor, therefore, extends logically from the people’s urgent desire to defend against what they view as an unjust project by Korea to highlight and magnify the negative aspects of Japan's past, while ignoring what Japanese feel to be uniquely positive contributions to world history. This domestic trend constitutes the second part of the aforementioned ideational patterns found in the contemporary Japanese societal context. An example of the defensiveness reflected by Japan against alleged defamation by Korea is the strong Japanese reaction against the efforts by Korean organizations to raise awareness of the comfort women issue at the United Nations and in various American media outlets and State legislatures. News of Korea’s publicized international campaign in this “historical image war” is always regarded with alarm in Japan.

Korea

The identical pattern of national pride in their uniqueness in world history on one hand, and the sense of defensiveness and victim mentality on the other, equally governs how the Koreans react to any history-linked bilateral issue.

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Koreans have a strong sense of pride in the fact that the nation has maintained its distinct culture and identity and avoided becoming Japanese or Chinese, despite being situated close to China and having been a victim of neighboring empires’ power games for millennia. Koreans accredit this historic feat to a myth – although one that has been challenged in recent years. They hold that their nation has always been made up of a distinct and homogenous people, and that their ancestors were politically savvy enough to recognize acute power shifts among surrounding empires, using their pride and hubris to placate them with tributes in order to avoid being directly governed by any foreign power (until 1910, that is, when Korea officially became Japan’s colony). Moreover, although Korea’s national history in geographical terms gets locked into the Korean Peninsula from the medieval period, the ancient glory of conquest and control over Manchuria by the ancient Korean kingdom of Goguryo is still an integral part of the national psyche in both North and South Korea.

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From the late-19th century, Korea was dominated by modern Japan in every respect. In order to make up for the victim mentality associated with this relatively modern tragedy, Korean narratives emphasize the ways in which the Korean nation culturally influenced Japan in the remote past. For example, history textbooks, literature, and popular culture tell the stories of the supposed Korean origin of the Japanese imperial family, the influence of abducted Korean pottery workers on the rise of Japanese porcelains in the 17th century, and the reverence given to Korean Chosun Dynasty envoys by Japanese intellectuals during their voyages to Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo) at the invitation of the Tokugawa Shoguns during the same period. Many average Koreans embrace the myth that most Japanese cultural achievements have their origins in the Korean Peninsula, even when there is strong evidence that Japan had already surpassed Korea in terms of modernization and economic power by the 16th century, not to mention its access to "outside knowledge" through its interaction with European powers.

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Koreans also take pride in the “unique” tenacity of their national character and their eventual economic and democratic achievements in the face of a tragic history of colonization, war, and national division in the 20th century. Although this pride takes many forms, one peculiar example is their emphasis on famous Zainichi (Koreans born in Japan as permanent residents) in sports and entrepreneurship; achievements that came despite discrimination, which limited the Zainichi’s social mobility, supposedly demonstrate the inherent tenacity of "Korean blood" regardless of environmental constraints.

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The second narrative foundation – the defensiveness and the victim mentality arising from feeling unjustly robbed of their achievements by their neighbors’ defamation – exists in the Korean collective psyche just as it does in Japan. Despite their sense of unique achievement, Koreans constantly feel vulnerable and are sensitive to the role of national power in transmitting one’s version of history abroad, and to how this plays out in the international arena in terms of competition among different national historical narratives in East Asia. As such, modern Koreans feel that it is crucial to make the international community understand the “historical truths” that flow from their deeply felt collective psyche, by actively promoting Korea’s version of the regional historical narrative. This communicative endeavor is felt to be a race against time, since Korea is a late-comer in modern world history compared to Japan or China, and since the world has, until recently, been used to viewing Korea through the prism of Japanese or Chinese narratives, which Koreans believe unduly belittle Korea’s position vis-à-vis its neighbors. Koreans feel that if they fail to catch up, their distinct cultural existence and their version of history will be in jeopardy.

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This sense of vulnerability has lessened over the years as Korean brands and cultural exports have found success abroad, but this deep-rooted historical anxiety still persists. Koreans believe that their neighbors are deliberately stealing Korean culture and historical achievements, and are especially anxious because the Japanese and the Chinese already have powerful “cultural brands” and soft power with which to eventually appropriate Korea’s cultural contributions as their own on the world stage. People outside of East Asia, especially foreigners who have a background in Japan or China studies and who are used to associating everything from the region as either Japanese or Chinese, would mostly accept this appropriation without checking its truth, which would further undermine the Korean cultural position vis-à-vis their neighbors.

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The Korean sense of defensiveness and victim mentality is acute, because the competition over national historical narratives also has regional security implications. From the Korean perspective, Japan is understood to be deliberately transmitting its own national historical narratives – especially to their common ally, the United States – arguing that Korean history is but a small part of continental Asian history and that Korea merely copied Chinese civilization and made no original contributions of its own. Koreans widely believe that Japan’s centuries-old portrayal of the East Asian continent as having a singularly Sinic civilizational orientation, in contrast with Japan’s distinctiveness, undermines Korea’s historical and cultural heritage by dismissing the peninsula as a perpetual cultural satellite of China. Many informed Koreans believe that such deliberately defamatory activities – particularly by the conservative, right-wing elements of Japanese politics and society – will result in a situation in which the United States ends up ignoring Korea’s importance and relying more on Japan in the current volatile period of China’s rise.

Citizens as “watchdogs”

Academic research and the media frequently report that there is increasing public support in both South Korea and Japan for “not budging” on history-related bilateral issues and for hard-line claims espoused by nationalist groups. On the surface, it seems as if the public in both countries is turning more nationalistic. However, most Korean and Japanese citizens are not, in fact, inclined to be politically extreme in their daily lives. How can we explain this discrepancy as we look under the surface, and what are its bilateral implications?

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As mentioned earlier, for many ordinary Koreans and Japanese, when the other side is seen to be distorting and undermining their proud historical legacy, this constitutes an insult and challenge to their core national identity. Increasing numbers of citizens and policy makers feel that as the other side shifts the competitive stage from the bilateral to the international-level, a distorted and falsified historical narrative of the other side could become normalized unless they actively engage in this contest. Both countries now compete to win more global supporters of their own national historical narratives.

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Popular support and sympathy for hardline domestic arguments in bilateral historical disputes does not mean that the mainstream public in both countries fully agrees with the details of the claims made by chauvinistic minorities on the extreme right-wing. But because most ordinary citizens subconsciously embrace the two ideational patterns/undertones that guide their national historical narratives, the core issue for them is not necessarily the historical accuracy of the entire arguments put forward by these groups. Ordinary citizens are much more concerned with protecting their own sense of identity and the perceived legitimacy of their nation. As a result, the current societal environment in both South Korea and Japan is making it easier for a substantial proportion of the public to align themselves emotionally with nationalistic interpretations out of frustration with the other side.

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Citizens in any democratic state surely embrace a variety of opinions about their past and present. Nevertheless, there is often a majority voice on a given publicized issue that is either tacitly or actively supported by most members of the public despite minority domestic opposition. This phenomenon has political implications for politicians, academics, journalists, and other social elites, as democratic systems can impose substantial risks on those who go against mainstream public opinions, especially when these opinions have a strong emotional or identity-based foundation. Therefore, citizens are in a strong position to act as "watchdogs" who can scrutinize their government and other societal elites’ ability to be tough defenders and promoters of national historical narratives in the international arena.

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Engaged citizens see national promotions and diplomatic negotiations on the world stage as a testing ground for policymakers’ ability to “set the record straight” and fight to preserve national dignity. With diverse means of communication increasingly amplifying and expanding the reach of domestic voices, it is understandable that policy leaders and lawmakers often defer to clear societal preferences, because this involves less career fatigue and fewer professional risks. Although policy-oriented officials sometimes manage to overcome the domestic environment in order to reach compromises, the general pattern is one in which subjective domestic interpretations of national and regional history have put increasing pressure on the executive and legislative levels of governments in both countries. The unfortunate fact is that the more resources and effort that both societies and governments invest in winning this contest over regional history in international media and political forums, the less energy they will be able to allocate to mature and productive bilateral dialogues.

Pursuing maturity and distinguishing the forest from the trees

Whenever a history-linked diplomatic issue causes a souring of South Korea-Japan relations, policymakers and academics tend to focus on visible “symptoms” and not on underlying “causes.” The cause that makes the bilateral disputes chronic – incompatible national historical narratives which, ironically, entrench two common ideological patterns – is not addressed, and only the symptoms are addressed in an ad hoc fashion.

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While discussing the comfort women issue, for example, commentators tend to delve into the history of that specific issue and the details of the 2015 governmental accord, but generally fail to situate it in the context of the larger forces of pride and defensiveness that make the issue so intractable at the societal-level in the first place. Government-level summit meetings and agreements aimed at preventing worsening relations on specific bilateral topics do not constitute genuine progress, since what may be seen by elites as a rational quid-pro-quo solution will always be seen in a different light by a substantial portion of the public. Domestic backlashes by societies that are immersed in emotional contests over their national historical narratives always complicate the implementation of any government initiative that involves compromise.

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As I have argued in this article, a genuine and sustainable improvement in South Korea-Japan relations does not depend on the number of governmental agreements that the two countries are able to reach. In the end, I believe that the true solution turns on whether mainstream publics in the two countries can cultivate a societal atmosphere in which citizens can recognize that the two common ideational patterns/undertones in their respective national historical narratives have indeed governed their mutual images and interactions, and leverage this understanding as a basis for "mature" historical issue-addressing in the region. Without such a shift in citizens’ mindset about the nature and the origin of their national narratives, and the resulting maturation of historical perspectives embraced by the public, any efforts to ameliorate visible symptoms will be meaningless patches in the long-run.

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This process of nurturing maturity in bilateral historical perspectives must be further facilitated by an additional recognition among the general public that any history of any region can never be accurately portrayed in black and white terms. Again, take the comfort women issue: even if we were able to truly grasp the real picture in its entirety as it unfolded, the real truth of the story would be –– as in any war – “messier” than both countries’ publics would like to accept. The extent to which coercion and trickery were used in the recruiting process, of the Japanese government and military’s direct involvement in its planning and implementation, or of the collaboration of non-Japanese brokers, are all highly sensitive, complex, and controversial inquiries. In trying to reconstruct the fates of possibly tens of thousands of women, any objectively-minded researcher is forced to accept that the multi-faceted nature of the issue defies accepting in its entirety either of the simplified, emotionally-fraught narratives promoted by nationalist groups in each country. A public exercising common sense might draw the same conclusion.

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Regardless of the complexity of the issue, however, wide-ranging research on the topic has revealed accounts of Japan's involvement in the creation and management of the comfort women system, and the forceful means by which many of the victims were enticed to serve. Let’s call this undeniable overarching historical fact a “big picture” – the “forest.” On the other hand, there are surely bound to be vast variations in the experiences of individual women linked to the case. Many of their stories will be advantageous for the Korean claims and reinforce the big picture, but others may bolster the claims of many Japanese. These varied individual accounts of the women’s lives, on the other hand, are the “small pictures,” – the “trees.”

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A mature approach to understanding regional history – the result of mutual recognition by the two societies of the two common ideational undertones propelling their respective national historical narratives – would thus also involve recognition that as long as both sides agree to maintain a minimum level of common depictions of facts regarding the forest, they must also accept the inevitable diversity of the trees. It is not mature for an aggressor state (Japan) to make generalizations about the entire case by selectively using evidence from the trees in order to reinforce its emotional presuppositions. Neither is it mature for a victim state (Korea) to deny the inevitable complexity in the tree-level history, and to criticize those who delve into the messy reality on the ground. However, the ongoing emotional showdown between the two national historical narratives has made the act of openly distinguishing between the forest and the trees, and of moving away from a black and white dichotomy, difficult in both societies.

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Finally, there are certain domestic prerequisites that must be met if this "mature history project" is to take firm hold. First, Korea must discard the prevalent collective mentality that blames almost all of its historical tragedies on Japan. This victim mentality is certainly an easy shortcut to explain complex and contextually grounded historical events, but it is not sustainable in the eyes of the international community. In nurturing mature approaches to national and regional history, Koreans must be open-minded to learn from the mistakes that led to the various historical tragedies by focusing more on what they themselves did – or failed to do – and less on Japan. Their current national pride must not be linked to winning the negative international campaign against Japan, but rather to the nation's numerous post-independence achievements in spite of those tragedies.

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In Japan’s case, the mainstream public and elites at the national level must first accept that the forest of regional history must be shared with their neighbors, as this is the minimum common denominator for a mature regional interaction. As long as the current societal anxiety in Japan is not about the majority of Japanese desiring to wholly revise the overall forest from its very foundation, the trees could always be diverse. It must be made clear, both inside Japan and to outside observers, that it is unacceptable to take an extreme revisionist stance on the forest itself. Such revisionism must be placed outside the bounds of mature societal discourse.

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Of course, a maturation of a society’s approach to its own and that of its neighbor's historical narratives is far easier said than done. But I do not see any other option that would lead to genuine and sustainable betterment in South Korea-Japan relations. We must expect that the endeavor will surely require decades of committed efforts by societal elites in both countries to mobilize the support of the moderate public that longs for positive and cooperative bilateral relations for future generations.