Photo/IllutrationDelegations from Japan and South Korea sit next to each other at the General Council meeting of the World Trade Organization on July 24 in Geneva. (Shinya Wake)
Japan and South Korea staged a high-profile verbal battle in an arena for multilateral trade diplomacy on July 24.
The two countries presented their arguments at the World Trade Organization, an international framework to protect free trade, which is vital for both, in an escalating trade dispute.
It is difficult not to wonder how the bitter row between Tokyo and Seoul was viewed by the international community.
At the WTO’s General Council meeting in Geneva on July 24, South Korean officials criticized the trade restrictions Japan has slapped on South Korea, saying they are “unfair.”
Japan countered South Korea’s argument, but the delegates of the two countries apparently talked past each other.
While no other country spoke about the bilateral tussle at the meeting, there is no doubt that the heated exchanges at the WTO meeting between Tokyo and Seoul made many other countries aware of the acrimony of the trade conflict.
In addition to stricter export controls Japan has already imposed on materials used to manufacture semiconductors to South Korea, Tokyo is also preparing to remove the neighbor from its “white list” of nations that have only the minimum level of trade restrictions placed on them.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Cabinet will soon formally endorse the plan to take South Korea off the list of nations it views as posing no security concern in trade.
The Abe administration’s actions against South Korea could put a drag on the Japanese economy as well as hurt the South Korean economy while offering no prospect of remedying the soured bilateral relations. The Japanese government should retract the unproductive trade measures.
As Abe and some other Cabinet members initially suggested, one key factor behind these actions is the administration’s distrust of the South Korean government, especially with regard to its response to South Korean Supreme Court rulings ordering a number of Japanese companies to pay compensation to wartime Korean laborers.
But linking its trade management to such political and historical issues undermines Japan’s commitment to its basic principle of promoting free trade.
The relationship between Japan and South Korea has gotten caught in a downward spiral of acerbic mutual criticism. Japan’s top diplomat recently took a disturbing action that has only compounded the situation.
Foreign Minister Taro Kono, during his recent meeting with South Korean Ambassador Nam Gwan-pyo over the wartime labor compensation dispute, interrupted the South Korean diplomat’s remarks and denounced them as “extremely discourteous.”
Such unusually harsh treatment of a diplomatic mission makes cool-headed dialogue difficult and hampers efforts for a solution.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in, for his part, has responded to Japan’s trade restrictions by stirring nationalistic sentiment, saying that South Korea has overtaken Japan in areas where Japan once had an absolute competitive advantage.
But Moon has defaulted on his own responsibilities by failing to agree to Japan’s request for establishing an arbitration panel to deal with the compensation issue for wartime workers while offering no specific proposal to handle the sticky issue.
As the trade conflict has worsened, it has begun to affect private-sector businesses and exchanges between the two countries. A decline in the number of South Korean tourists visiting Japan is one clear sign.
In addition, a growing number of local governments have started reviewing friendship events while airlines have begun to cancel regular flights between the two countries.
The Russian and Chinese militaries have made a disquieting move that seems to be designed to take advantage of the turmoil in the Tokyo-Seoul relationship.
The two countries jointly took provocative acts by making their bombers fly in areas near both Japan and South Korea, including areas around the disputed Takeshima islets. Experts say that Moscow and Beijing tried to test how Japan, South Korea and the United States would react to such operations.
There are a wide range of areas where Japan and South Korea can and should work together, including security cooperation with the United States and the handling of North Korea’s arms programs.
Both governments should realize the futility and absurdity of forgetting this fact and taking steps that damage their own interests concerning their competitive industrial technologies and private-sector interactions.
An international conference that will bring together senior officials from Japan, the United States, South Korea and other Asian nations is scheduled to start in Bangkok at the end of this month.
The foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea will also attend the conference. The two countries should take this and other diplomatic opportunities to make meaningful efforts to find a way to fix the current damaging situation of the bilateral ties.
Instead of hard-line rhetoric to dredge up antipathy toward each other and threatening diplomatic theatricals, the two nations should start taking actions based on greater diplomatic sensibility and intelligence.
--The Asahi Shimbun, July 26