Business leaders from Japan and South Korea pledged to work more closely on chips and technology on Friday, seeking to put behind years of acrimony over wartime history that have stoked South Korean public anger.
“Both governments will do everything to create opportunities to interact and do business with each other,” he said.
But it is unclear whether those efforts will be able to escape the pull of history, given the backlash in South Korea, where many feel Tokyo has not sufficiently atoned for abuses during its 1910-1945 colonization of the Korean peninsula, including the use of wartime forced labor. Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, said Yoon “sold out our country’s pride, the victims’ human rights, and the justice of history, all of that, in exchange for a bowl of omurice”.Relations between the two countries plunged to their lowest point in decades after South Korea’s Supreme Court in 2018 ordered Japanese firms to pay reparations to former forced laborers. Fifteen South Koreans have won such cases, but none has been compensated.
A turning point came this month when South Korea said its own companies – several of which benefited from the 1965 treaty – would compensate forced laborers.
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