What makes it so difficult for Japan to apologize to Korea

By Eugene Lee

Even if it has been a year since President Yoon Suk Yeol's inauguration and the media is trying hard to find his "achievements," my rationale for criticism has been replaced by something more significant.

While observing the obvious unease on the face of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida during the South Korea-Japan summit a week or so ago and expecting to see a much-hoped-for breakthrough by Yoon, which never came, a question rose in my head: would Japan actually ever be able to give a full-hearted apology to South Korea? Inadvertently, these thoughts have led me to do some brief research on the complexity of reconciliation. Strangely enough, it all ended up somewhere else.

A few years ago, while at a conference dedicated to international politics, someone asked why South Korea had no Nobel Prize winners. I argued that for a country to have anything after colonial plunder is already a historic feat, let alone having any Nobel Prize laureates. But then a bell rang in my head with the name of President Kim Dae-jung, who actually did get a Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for trying to heal the rift with the North. Then I looked at the list of Japanese laureates and at the top of it, I saw the name of Hideki Yukawa, a theoretical nuclear physicist from Kyoto Imperial University.

In 1933, at the age of just 26, Yukawa got a job as an assistant professor at Osaka University. Several years later, he would be back at Kyoto Imperial University, where he earned several top government decorations. After Japan's capitulation, he was surprisingly hired as a professor at Columbia University in 1949, where he earned himself the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Though Wikipedia gives hardly anything on the nature of his research, I felt there was something to it. Such an enigmatic figure intrigued me even more as I opened new links on the internet. And then a bombshell: I found a book titled Scientific Research in World War II, edited by Ad Maas and Hans Hooijmaijers, two Dutch academics, published in 2008.

In that book, a professor from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Masakatsu Yamazaki, states the following: "There were two nuclear weapons projects in Japan during World War II: an army program called 'Ni-go Research' and a much smaller 'F-Research' of the navy. 'Ni-go Research' was directed by Yoshio Nishina, a leading nuclear physicist at the Riken, the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research. The experimental physicist Masa Takeuchi (1911-2001), a member of Nishina's nuclear research group, became one of the key ?gures of the army project. This paper will take Takeuchi's case as an example of Japanese scientists involved in wartime research during World War II. His case illustrates how Nishina's nuclear group adapted for survival to an extraordinary research environment in wartime."

You'd be thinking, "Nuclear weapons projects in Japan during World War II were run by its scientists!" Wow! And not just one, but two! A few articles further, I discovered that Nishina's research was bombed during an American air raid in 1943 and was essentially a cold turkey. But what happened to Yukawa's project at Japan's Imperial Navy?

Further investigation led me to yet another book by investigative reporter and historian Robert K. Wilcox, titled "Japan's Secret War." In it, he brings out yet another location for Yukawa's project. And where do you guess it would be? In colonial Korea! Specifically, on the territory of North Korea today. Robert, in his book, makes yet another very bold claim. He says the foundation for the North Korean nuclear program was laid by Yukawa's research in the so-called "N-Z plant." He even talks about a probable nuclear detonation blast sometime then. We simply do not have any way of knowing all the details as the location is in North Korea, plus all the equipment and supplies were taken away by the Soviets then.

After thinking over and over, and trying to process all I have learned in just a few days about Japan's nuclear weapons program, the horrors of the biological and chemical research of Unit 731 and even the lingering controversy of the repatriation of the Ainu people's human remains unethically collected by Japanese researchers and stored in university institutions throughout the twentieth century, it got me thinking deeply about Japan's academic culture and their Nobel prize research. And then suddenly I saw a connection ― as all that research has been deeply flawed ethically, Japan's foreign policy today is very much the same.

Japan will not apologize! In the way it perceives itself, it simply does not see the need for an apology. All this time, we have been lying to ourselves, hoping that Japan will one day become a normal country. And all this time, we have seen over and over again, Japan's top politicians visiting the Yasukuni Shrine and worshipping its ancestors along with the war criminals who committed atrocities.

President Yoon, your job is to stop living a fantasy and instead get down to the country's reality of a dwindling economy and start working on making Korea united again. Even then, when dealing with North Korea, you are dealing with what Japan has started. So, whether you want it or not, Japan will be able to reconcile with South Korea only when it is able to reconcile with its own past.

Eugene Lee (mreulee@gmail.com) is a lecturing professor at the Graduate School of Governance at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. Specializing in international relations and governance, his research and teaching focus on national and regional security, international development, government policies and Northeast and Central Asia.