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Title: At the Olympics, South Korea Says “Enough” to a Century of Japanese and U.S. Betrayal
Published: 2018-02-12
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9kWGL0JslA
Title: At the Olympics, South Korea Says “Enough” to a Century of Japanese and U.S. Betrayal
Published: 2018-02-12
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9kWGL0JslA
1/20
[Music] hi I'm Peter Lee and this is news buds Asia brief this week's episode shame in San Francisco American betrayal at the 1951 San Francisco peace conference and the roots of Korean Japanese conflict a continuing frustration for US strategic planners is the deep mistrust and division between Japan and South Korea you'd think it would be you hate communists we hate communists you hate China we hate2/20
China we're both US allies we should hang out but it's never like that as US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has found out as he tries to wrangle Japan and South Korea into line on North Korea policy the current friction point is furious sparring over the placement of a comfort woman statue in front of the Japanese Consulate in Busan South Korea it is there to confront3/20
and shame Japan over its use of 200,000 Korean women as sex slaves for the Japanese army throughout Asia during World War two Japan decided to be angry instead of ashamed and withdrew its consul from Busan as a sign of its disapproval the rancor between Japan and South Korea is deep and has its roots in a century of injustice awkwardly for the United States the key injustice4/20
is the u.s. and Japan ganging up to screw Korea at the san francisco peace conference of 1951 the San Francisco conference was the announcement of the new Cold War order in Asia in which Japan was rehabilitated as America's indispensable partner against communist expansion world war 2 was officially in the rearview mirror and Japan's victims were called on to suck it up and let bygones be bygones5/20
the biggest ripoff of the San Francisco treaty was to allow Japan to set aside indefinitely the issue of reparations for countries it had ravaged during the war like Korea as for Korea nobody wanted to talk about Korea in fact keeping Korea out of the San Francisco conference and the Koreans in legal limbo was vital to the joint u.s. Japanese effort Japan had annexed Korea to the6/20
Empire in 1910 Japanese rule over Korea did not go very well rule was often clumsy and brutal and it was resisted and when the horror of world war ii descended Korea was stripped of hundreds of thousands of its people to serve the Japanese war machine as soldiers and policemen workers in its mines and factories and sex slaves approximately half a million died because of the 19107/20
annexation Koreans lived and died as full citizens of the Japanese Empire according to the u.s. and Japan all those things that Japan had done to Koreans before and during World War 2 were legal because Koreans were citizens of the Japanese Empire and subject to Japanese law just like Japanese citizens on the main islands therefore they were not entitled to compensation for their suffering and ill treatment8/20
during the war but as the japanese empire crumbled in the waning days of World War two it appears Japan decided to abandon its dreams of empire and reinvent itself as a mono-ethnic nationalistic bastion as Ataturk reinvented the core of the Ottoman Empire as Turkey after the catastrophe of World War one that meant dumping Korea and forgetting the Koreans especially the hundreds of thousands of Koreans still9/20
living in Japan as a result of Japan's colonial adventure on the Korean Peninsula and its wartime need for Korean labour the US government colluded with Japan to exclude Korea the Korean people and their awkward and embarrassing legal financial and moral issues from the peace conference and give Japan a free hand in handling its Korean problem as soon as the san francisco treaty was ratified and japan10/20
regained its sovereignty it passed a law stripping Koreans of their Japanese citizenship and turning them into stateless persons in 1965 South Korea's Park dictatorship concluded an agreement to normalize relations with Japan that many Koreans regarded as a sellout Japan promised 300 million dollars in cash and 500 million dollars in soft loans and with the encouragement of the United States the Republic of Korea endorsed the San11/20
Francisco treaty as a final settlement the resultant demonstrations and rioting brought martial law to the streets of Seoul as far as Japan was concerned that was the end of it it had no obligation either for 35 years of colonization or for its conduct during the war but for Korea it was just the beginning of decades of legal arguing and moral hectoring in an attempt to get12/20
Japan to acknowledge it had done wrong on the Korean Peninsula the issue that has come to define Korean Japanese confrontation is that of the comfort women this was an especially compelling issue because apparently only Korean and Chinese women were subjected to forced conscription as sex workers serving the Japanese military non ethnic Japanese or Okinawans this gave the lie to Japanese claims of equal treatment to Koreans13/20
as full Japanese citizens during the war and exposed the exploitative and colonial aspect of Japanese rule the Japanese government bobbed and weaved to try to minimize the public relations fallout of the wrenching testimony of Korean women who were taken from their homes shipped overseas to military brothels and forced to have sex with up to 50 Japanese soldiers a day no smearing them as willing prostitutes was14/20
not the way out the Japanese government stammered out some apologies and mediated the establishment of a comfort woman fund funded by private contributions in other words no acknowledgement of Japanese government responsibility no admission of legal liability for acts during the period of Japanese rule and no obligation to pay compensation when arch nationalist Shinzo Abe a came to power Japan rejected the victors Justice of World War15/20
two and changed the frame of Korean dialogue to Japan's victimhood instead of talking about the millions of Korean lives shattered by Japan's imperial misdeeds he obsessed on 13 Japanese abductees kidnapped by North Korea and by an act of the Japanese Parliament it was officially confirmed that Japan had never officially apologized for the treatment of the comfort women no surprise then that resentment still smolders at the16/20
heart of Japanese Korean relations in the United States jumping into bed with Japanese war criminals is seen as George Kennan's masterstroke that kept America in the game in western Pacific after the Second World War in fact the post-world War two security structure in Asia is called the San Francisco system as one group of US diplomats put it beginning of a beautiful friendship the US has pretty17/20
much written the betrayal of Korea at San Francisco out of history maybe that's why it finds Korea Japan hostility so baffling let me try to help instead of the beautiful relationship between the United States and Japan think of San Francisco as the horrible end of a horrible relationship between Korea and Japan a bad marriage the husband Japan beat the wife Korea rape the daughters sent the18/20
sons off to die on battlefields and in the mines then he abandoned the family found a crooked court and bribed the judge he got an ironclad divorce and dodged alimony then the husband married the crooked judge the United States and started living a new life of riches and honor and then they came back to tell the ex-wife she's not doing enough to make the relationship work19/20
if Koreans don't find that kind of relationship beautiful maybe we can forgive them for news but members who want to learn more about the US and Japanese governments 60 year effort to evade responsibility for Japan's dark legacy of colonial rule over Korea an expanded version of this report is available on the news bud website as an audio file thanks for watching and thank you for watching