type:P(論文)

South Korea-Japan relation as the pseudo-alliance mediated by USA, constrained by the Cold War, had promoted South Korea-Japan normalization by putting top priority on strengthening anti-communist bloc through economic cooperation while containing the emergence of problems concerning decolonization. At first, although the South Korean government claimed that Japan must make reparations for its thirty six year colonial rule, Japanese government refused it because Korea had not been a member of the United Nations during the war. Then the South Korean government insisted that Korea had the rights to get compensation for the damages caused by the colonial rule, but the Japanese government at first tried to counterbalance South Korean claims by insisting that Japan also had the legal rights to recover the property rights of Japanese living in Korea during the colonial period, and later demanded that the South Korean government should provide the concrete proof materials validating how much the South Korean government could demand as Korean property claims against the Japanese government. The South Korean government could not have enough proof materials because the Japanese government, rather than the Korean government, had much more proof materials. At last the South Korean government, especially the Park Chung Hee administration established after the May 16 military coup d'etat in 1961, and the Japanese Ikeda administration agreed that the problem of Korean property claims against the Japanese government should be resolved as the economic cooperation politically rather than legally. The volume of money, goods, and services the Japanese government was obliged to transfer to South Korea was agreed as 300 million dollars grant, 200 million dollars soft official loan, and more than 300 million dollars investment or commercial loan. That is the content of the 'notorious' Kim-Ohira memorandum. Such political dynamism of Korea-Japan relation, however, has been changed especially after the end of the Cold War. Firstly, South Korea and Japan share market democracy as their common political economic values. Secondly, South Korea and Japan become relatively equal nations in terms of power. Thirdly, South Korea and Japan can narrow the perception gaps by making their mutual perception more balanced. Fourthly, South Korea-Japan relations are perceived to be not only the relations between them but also the collaborative ones supplying public goods. Lastly, South Korea-Japan relations are more active, two-directional, and multi-dimensional including the civil society relations. South Korea-Japan relation after the end of the Cold War has been unstable in terms of the fact that the two countries cannot have a clear momentum which can contribute to connecting both societies instead of a momentum as anticommunist countries under the Cold War. It is exactly in such an atmosphere that the mutual frictions concerning the territorial problems and the different views of their common history were caused early in 2005. Some analysts say that South Korea -Japan relation cannot be friendly so far as the different views of past history lie between the two countries. However, the impacts of the structural changes of South Korea-Japan relation gradually have made and will make their interactions collaborative, reliable, and productive. I suggest that South Korea and Japan should play the role of providing public goods not as hegemony but as the alliance of middle powers in Northeast Asia. What is desirable for South Korea and Japan is that they will create a peaceful and non-hegemonic regional order. Japan cannot create such order by itself alone, and neither South Korea. But the collaborative relation between South Korea and Japan will make such a peaceful and non-hegemonic order possible by overcoming the prisoners' dilemma.