The Formation of Japan-ROK Security Relations: Meeting the Evolving Cold War Challenge

There is often a tendency in modern political analysis, especially in the non-specialised academic domain, to read current political trends into the past, with the implication that thoroughly contemporary rivalries are explained away as the product of timeless processes. Thus the bloodshed engendered by the trauma of the break-up of Yugoslavia into its constituent ethnicities is somehow read as the manifestation of centuries of inchoate anger, the creation of Pakistan in 1947 is seen as the ultimate expression of communal destiny–and tensions between Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea) are seen as unavoidable clashes between an oppressor’s historical blindness and a victim’s demand for justice. In so doing, obfuscated is the fact that Japan played a vital role in the emergence of today’s ROK, though the relationship undoubtedly remained tinged with historical wariness.