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Comment by baolongtrann | Hacker News Reader

Have to admit I am clueless about the history between these two. Why don't they like each other?

Japan invaded the Korean peninsula as well as a sizeable portion of China and enacted horribly cruel war crimes against the citizens of those places. I won't get into details, but this comment would be akin to asking "What's the history between the Germans and Jews? Why don't they like each other?". The primary difference being that Germany had a reckoning with the history of what happened during that time, while the Japanese Government has mostly denied that any of its war crimes even happened which never allowed tensions to drop as much as they may have in Europe.

Actually, Japan has apologized repeatedly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements...

However, Japan has more than its fair share of far-right fruitcakes who deny everything, and in both Korea and China politicians have found Japan to be a convenient whipping boy whenever they need a distraction from domestic problems.

However, Japan has more than its fair share of far-right fruitcakes who deny everything

They elected a far right "fruitcake" to the post of prime minister.

To be fair, they only elected the conservative party, the LDP; the party elected the prime minister. Granted, they've elected the LDP almost continuously since 1955. Of course, they tried electing the other party in 2009, but their leadership kept resigning. Of course, given the LDP's stranglehold on politics, one has to wonder why they feel a need to pander to the nettouyo.

I stopped paying to attention to politics about 5 years ago and am very surprised to learn that the major opposition party (DPJ?) has essentially fractured into multiple, smaller parties, all using a variation of the same name.

At this point, I'm not even sure who to vote for anymore.

The problem is that Japan has a history of doing things like this:

> In October 2006, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe's apology was followed on the same day by a group of 80 Japanese lawmakers' visit to the Yasukuni Shrine which enshrines more than 1,000 convicted war criminals.[57] Two years after the apology, Shinzo Abe also denied that the Imperial Japanese military had forced comfort women into sexual slavery during World War II .

This is from your link.

Japan demands the issue to be "settled" or "forgotten" after mulling quick apologies. Imagine Germany demanding that the Holocaust be forgotten.

Germany's the exception, not the rule. Most countries's governments like nothing more than to behave as if their past transgressions never happened. And even then Germany has had no shortage of politicians who say "Germany has apologized enough".

Japan and South Korea signed an agreement in 1965 that was supposed to settle all financial claims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Basic_Relations_betw...

This agreement is about property claims, not about war crimes against civilians.

The agreement is about "property and claims" between the two states. Of course, individuals can and have sued various Japanese entities, some successfully.

It's worth pointing out, I think, that nowadays most Germans and Jews get along perfectly fine, despite their history a few generations ago.

So just citing that case isn't a full explanation of the enmity between Japanese and Koreans.

They do like each other. Koreans love Japanese food and many Japanese also like Korean food. They watch TV shows from each other. Many TV shows are often just translated versions from the other country.

It's actually the politicians who want the people to have enmity to each other and some people are vulnerable to the propaganda. The existence of the North Korea regime and their history of kidnapping Japanese people also don't help. Much of their economic strength also overlaps, so there's competition as well.

If you still don't understand, think about close European countries. They probably get along just fine, but Brexit happened..

Oh yeah, I understand. That's why I brought up the last part. Germany did a relatively good job after the war of apologizing for its warcrimes and rooting out the toxic culture that led to them. I was trying to describe the gravity of the crimes that happened during the war with that comparison, less so the modern day feelings.

Historically, Korea was repeatedly invaded by Japan. More recently, Korea was a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945, during which the Japanese ruled with an iron fist and did their best to destroy Korean identity by forcing people to take Japanese names etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_under_Japanese_rule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan%E2%80%93Korea...

The identity-destroying part only came after 1938. They were trying to do 내선일체 [內鮮一體] (not sure how to translate this in English).

Before that, they actually helped Koreans learn Hangul. I was also very anti-Japan as a I grew up under typical Korean parents.

But after reading the actual history, there were some good parts during the colonization. Although, I'm not denying the horrific parts caused by war. But that's just war. It's horrible to begin with. Not to mention what Koreans did in the Vietnam War to the locals.

I think part of the hostility from either of the countries is caused by only seeing part of the reality.

I guess the word you are looking for is "cultural assimilation". 内鮮一体 is the specific case of Japan and Korea.

The Japanese were fresh out of their own industrial revolution so had plenty of experience to do the same thing in Korea. The legacy of that is that Korean and Japanese societies have a lot in common eg Chaebol and Keiretsu. Following the war Japan sheltered people persecuted by the ROK dictatorship (eg Kim Dae-jung, Lee Byung-chul)

> I think part of the hostility from either of the countries is caused by only seeing part of the reality.

It's tribal. East Asian People are racist against each other and each other's countries, but East Asian Persons get on just fine.

> The identity-destroying part only came after 1938. They were trying to do 내선일체 [內鮮一體] (not sure how to translate this in English). Before that, they actually helped Koreans learn Hangul.

Banning Hangul and erasing Korea's independent cultural identity intentionally traced the pattern of Japan's nearly identical actions a few decades earlier in conquering Ryukyu, including classifying each suppressed language as a "dialect" of Japanese.

As a contrast to Korea, the former Ryukyu Kingdom is now fully subsumed as the Okinawan islands and its original languages, religions, and culture are, in practice, nearly extinct.

Which certainly explains why Korea doesn't like Japan, but why does Japan seem to dislike Korea so much?

Xenophobia and belief in Japanese racial superiority:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron#Specific_theses

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_Japan#Pre-war...

Much of it can be blamed on propaganda driven by economic decline and political scapegoating. While Korean music, drama, and movies are popular in Japan, consumers are mostly women. Among small but growing and very vocal population of Japanese men, Korea-bashing books and manga are popular. Later trend is not unrelated to continuing economic decline of Japan. And Japanese politicians are leveraging and fueling that trend to divert the blame.

Maybe because they're not Japanese enough.

See https://www.upi.com/TOP_NEWS/WORLD-NEWS/2019/04/17/ANTI-KORE...

One small chapter of the history "The Mimizuka ... is a monument in Kyoto, Japan, dedicated to the sliced noses of killed Korean soldiers and civilians as well as Ming Chinese troops taken as war trophies during the Japanese invasions of Korea from 1592 to 1598."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimizuka

Wikipedia has a short page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan–Korea_relatio...