US scholar calls Japan stance on Dokdo ‘inexcusably hypocritical’

Japan’s position on Dokdo, Korea’s easternmost islets in the East Sea that Japan claims as its own, is “inexcusably hypocritical,” according to a US academic.

“Japan doesn’t want that territorial dispute (Dokdo) to go to the International Court of Justice because then China would have moral leverage,” said Walter Hatch, an emeritus professor of government at Colby College in Maine, referring to the Japan-controlled islands in the East China Sea disputed by China -- Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese.

The comments were made during a media interview Thursday ahead of the “Paths to Historical Reconciliation” forum in Seoul on Friday, hosted by the state-run Northeast Asian History Foundation.

“Japan really doesn’t want the ICJ to have anything to do with the Senkaku issue. So Japan’s position on this is quite inconsistent, I think, politically,” Hatch noted.

The international relations scholar whose work focuses on the three Asian countries also touched on the longtime unease between Korea and Japan over the World War II-era forced labor issue.

In a March deal last year, Korea decided to compensate Korean victims with Korean company funds over Japanese opposition to a Korean court ruling that ordered Japanese companies to do so.

Critics have since called the deal “too soft” on Japan, which has not directly apologized to the victims.

“A failure on the Japanese part to demonstrate a serious willingness to cooperate with Korea outside of the US umbrella leaves many Koreans suspecting that Japanese apologies are insincere,” Hatch said, referring to a US push to mend Korea-Japan ties to forge a stronger three-way front on dealing with North Korea’s nuclear threats.

Falk Pingel, former deputy director of the Germany-based Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research Education, said a political apology does not make sense unless it comes from the perpetrator.

“As someone who didn’t take part in these crimes, the first step is to take over responsibility for what has been done in the name of your own nation,” Pingel said

Only then would a “common understanding of the concept of war crimes” take place, Pingel noted, adding differences over understandings of shared histories are often resolved best when they don’t involve politics.

“Reconciliation is still possible,” said Eckhardt Fuchs, director of the Germany-based Leibniz Institute for Educational Media.

Pointing out that the comfort women issue was not part of any history textbook 20 years ago, Fuchs said textbooks now explain how Korean women were forced to work in Japan’s wartime brothels during World War II.

Those textbooks fall short of labeling the acts war crimes, but the fact that they have now been cited publicly means there is room for improvement, according to Fuchs.

Different interpretations of history have to be taught, said Fuchs, a history educator who helped publish joint textbooks involving Germany, France and Poland.

“And we have a transnational approach, which means this isn’t a national history of German or Polish history, but it’s a European history that locates both countries in a wider regional context,” Fuchs added, describing the international collaboration as one way to overcome contested issues in shared histories.

At Friday’s forum, the three scholars elaborated on their approaches to reconciliation. Park Ji-hang, president of the Northeast Asian History Foundation, said she hoped the forum would shed light on finding peace with neighbors, the most pressing challenge facing humanity now.