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Reviewed by:
  • Changing Power Relations in Northeast Asia: Implications for Relations between Japan and South Korea
  • Lam Peng Er (bio)
Changing Power Relations in Northeast Asia: Implications for Relations between Japan and South Korea. Edited by Marie Söderberg. Routledge, London, 2011. xvi, 188 pages. $130.00, cloth; $130.00, E-book.

Marie Söderberg’s edited volume is likely to become the standard reference for the study of contemporary Japan–South Korea relations. Hitherto, the definitive book for this bilateral relationship was Victor D. Cha’s Alignment Despite Antagonism: The United States-Korea-Japan Security Triangle. According to Cha, the United States is the key driver of relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK), and this explains the volatility in ties between the two “quasi-allies” in Northeast Asia. He wrote: “The primary determinant of these variations is the fear of U.S. abandonment. When this fear is high, as a result of weak U.S. defense commitments and/or salient external threats, Japan and Korea are more willing to put aside friction arising from conflicting abandonment/entrapment concerns and show greater cooperation.”1

Cha’s elegant model plausibly explained why Japan-Korea relations blew hot and cold in alternation notwithstanding latent historical enmity during the cold war era. However, Söderberg notes that although the cold war persists in Northeast Asia (primarily due to an incorrigible and nuclearized North Korea), the world has become globalized, China is rising rapidly, and economic and cultural ties are deepening between Japan and South Korea. Paradoxically, the historical issue occasionally became more problematic between the two neighbors than in earlier decades. [End Page 240]

Söderberg asks at least two core questions in this edited book. First, is Cha’s U.S.-centric model as the driver of Japan-Korea relations still useful today? Second, how do we explain the increasingly complex and multifaceted nature of this important bilateral relationship in Northeast Asia? In chapter 2, “How Can We Cope with Historical Disputes? The Japanese and South Korean Experience,” Kan Kimura examines why historical disputes continue to bedevil bilateral ties notwithstanding the manifesto of the new ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to embed bilateral relations in an overarching East Asian Community. Kimura notes: “[H]istorical disputes in East Asia, especially those between Japan and South Korea, are not simply concerned with historical facts but rather with perceptions. Thus, the disputes cannot be resolved just through simple fact-finding” (p. 21). That issues like forced Korean labor and comfort women gained saliency from the 1980s “should be understood as the result of a typical ‘rediscovery of the importance of the past’” (p. 26). Kimura concludes that in order for the Japanese government to realize its dream of an East Asian Community, “it has to have concrete ideas about how to do this, and make serious efforts to persuade people to agree to it. And once it succeeds in making people realize the importance of their neighbours there will be possible effects for South Korea” (p. 37).

In the next chapter, “A Whirlpool of Historical Controversies in Widening Waters of Cooperation,” Cheol Hee Park has a more upbeat view of Japan–South Korea relations despite historical controversies. “Troubled ties” between the two countries, he believes, are often trapped in disagreements over historical issues. “[M]any lose sight of the deepening and widening cooperation between them. . . . To put it simply, history is not all that matters” (p. 40). In Park’s view, the political and economic systems of Japan and South Korea are drawing closer together, “in contrast to their ties with China, which has yet to be democratized and cannot yet be called a fully fledged market economy” (p. 44). Park concludes that trilateral cooperation between South Korea, Japan, and China is indispensable to establish an East Asian Community in the future (p. 51).

Unlike Cha’s model which gives little weight to domestic politics, T. J. Pempel argues in the next chapter “that foreign policy for all three countries is an outgrowth of domestic politics” (p. 56). Pempel’s chapter, “Japan and the Two Koreas: The Foreign-Policy Power of Domestic Politics,” magisterially analyzes the regime types of Japan, South...

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