Japan Rejects Seoul's History Lesson
The Age
Tuesday July 10, 2001
TOKYO
Japan has aggravated relations with its closest neighbors, the two Koreas and China, by rejecting their demands for changes to high school textbooks they claim glorify the nation's war past.
The Japanese Government formally notified Seoul and Beijing yesterday that it would allow the textbooks - including one published by a right-wing group determined to end the nation's ``self-flagellistic" approach to its 20th century history - to be distributed virtually intact.
It said it had no power to force the changes on publishers because it could not be proved that they contained ``clear-cut factual errors".
South Korea and China responded with fury, insisting they would continue to pressure Tokyo for a backdown on the grounds that the history and civic texts approved by the Education Ministry contained gross distortions and blatant attempts to paper over atrocities committed by Japan's Imperial Army.
The escalation of tension - with Seoul describing the move as ``throwing cold water" on the improving bilateral relationship and Beijing certain to follow it with a new round of diplomatic reprisals - marks a new, dangerous phase in northern Asian politics.
Japan has worked hard over recent years to improve its links with South Korea and China, but the diplomatic mood has soured markedly over the past six months.
Both countries have frozen high-level contacts over the textbook issue, while the secretive regime in North Korea has responded with a marked increase in its anti-Japanese rhetoric.
At the same time, the new conservative administration in Tokyo is openly bickering with its neighbors on a number of trade fronts.
China and Japan are caught in a tit-for-tat war over trade sanctions, while Tokyo has stepped in to block an agreement between Seoul and Moscow on fishing access in the disputed territory to Japan's north.
Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is promising to make matters worse with his highly controversial decision to visit the Yasukuni Shrine to pay his respects to the Japanese war dead on August 15.
The Shinto shrine, containing the spirits of a number of war criminals, is reviled by Koreans and Chinese as a symbol of Japan's militarist past.
Mr Koizumi has visited the shrine before, but he has pledged to become only the second Japanese prime minister to do so in his official capacity since the war.
The textbook row is provoking as much emotion as the planned Yasukuni visit.
South Korean Foreign Minister Hang Seung Soo told Japan's envoy that the decision threatened to send Korean-Japan relations back to the dark days before 1998.
Largely through the efforts of reformist President Kim Dae-jung, who made a historic trip to Tokyo that year, Seoul has been unwinding bans on cultural and other forms of contact with its neighbor to the east. But Mr Han said Tokyo's refusal to ``correct" the textbooks was ``throwing cold water on the steady development that has been made in bilateral relations".
China's Foreign Ministry dismissed Tokyo's response as unacceptable, saying Japan's willingness to come to grips with its war past was pivotal to the relationship between the two nations.
Seoul is signalling it may delay market openings to Japanese cultural products and extend its existing diplomatic snubs to a number of regional forums.
© 2001 The Age
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