You owe me

By Deauwand Myers

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is lauded for his brave and prophetic voice in the civil rights movement. People often forget that during the last few years before his assassination, Dr. King's approval ratings among white Americans, and even the black community, precipitously declined. There are two main reasons for this.

Firstly, Dr. King started to seriously interrogate the Vietnam War, calling the conflict unjust. The backlash from this was swift, vociferous, and predictable. Eartha Kitt, from my home state of South Carolina, experienced the same backlash for the same reason, and she had to move to Europe to continue her career long after the Vietnam War ended.

The second reason Dr. King lost favor with the American public was because of his calls for economic justice. His last speech was all about living wages, the dignity of fair remuneration for a person's labor, and addressing the poor working conditions of the working class.

More succinctly, Dr. King admonished America to invest into the black population with actual dollars. This was money, King argued, long promised by the American government to citizens of African descent after the abolition of slavery, a debt compounded by governmental policies like redlining (discriminatory housing practices forcing black Americans into predatory lending and housing insecurity, a direct result of which is a huge, generational wealth gap between blacks and their white counterparts).

In a rare clip not long before his untimely death, Dr. King notes how the American government gave out millions of tracts of land, low interest loans, and sponsored land grant universities to the benefit of European peasants, whilst ignoring the land grant promises it made generations earlier to freed slaves. In this economic justice campaign, King declared, "we're coming to get our check."

Reparations isn't a new concept, though it is fraught with political, and often geopolitical, implications. Funds to the victims of the Holocaust, the establishment of Israel, indigenous land reserves in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand come to mind.

One of the most recent and contentious examples of historical misdeeds and calls for reparations is between Korea and Japan.

Imperial Japan colonized Korea from 1910 to 1945. During World War II, Japan forced many Koreans in Korea and Japan to work in squalid, dangerous conditions to support the war effort.

Last year, Korea's Supreme Court ruled that Japan owes the survivors and descendants of said workers financial compensation. In retaliation to this ruling, Japan has levied targeted sanctions against private Korean firms, tightening the export of critical materials used in the manufacturing of high-tech products such as computer chips and display screens.

Last week, Japan also decided to remove Korea from its "whitelist" of 27 countries entitled to preferential treatment in trade. This decision has further aggravated the already frayed ties between the two countries.

Disingenuously, the Abe administration claims these are routine economic decisions made in the best interest of the Japanese economy. They are not. Moreover, Japan acts as if the Korean government is China, where the political party controls the judiciary. The Moon administration has no sway over the judicial branch, as with all liberal democracies.

Prime Minister Abe's cynical move to hamper the Korean economy, one heavily dependent on high-tech exports (Samsung is the biggest chipmaker in the world, and besides the Korean government, the largest single employer of salaried employees in Korea), is petty and shortsighted.

Like it or not, Korea and Japan are in similar economic situations. Both have a rapidly aging population, stagnant economic growth, negative birthrates, poor wage growth, a manufacturing sector heavily reliant on high-tech exports, and both are engaged in a complicated dance with their largest neighbor, China, which is rapidly modernizing its economy and producing sophisticated technology on a par with Korea and Japan, all while doing so at a lower price for the global consumer.

Korea and Japan should be working together to address their mutual economic and geopolitical challenges, not mired in trade disputes unrelated to whether or not Japan owes Korean victims money.

The question of reparations here is a difficult one. Japan has given money to Korea several times for its wartime atrocities, the most recent example of which has been the controversial compensation to so called "comfort women," Korean women forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers during WWII in the Pacific theater.

"Comfort women" is a euphemism; of course, this was forced, prolonged rape ― sex slavery, by another name, and with it all the attendant horrors such a brutal enterprise entails.

I say that which I have said before. Instead of the revisionist, apologist, nationalist rhetoric Prime Minister Abe and his conservative party, the LDP, engages in, a rhetoric that stokes resentment and causes pain to a lot of Asian countries, the Japanese government should sincerely and unequivocally apologize for its war crimes, publicly, and in writing.

Starting a punitive, petty, and unproductive trade dispute with an ally, one it shares America's nuclear umbrella with, is the exact opposite of a sane, sage, and mature foreign policy.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul.