As someone living in Japan, I can't comment on his domestic policies (except this 69-hour proposal, which was utterly stupid), but at least he isn't like his predecessor, constantly vilifying Japan and trying to cozy up with NK. Japan and SK should be strong allies against the nearby dictatorial regimes, and the leftists in SK have been doing everything they can to ruin SK's relationship with Japan.
Because there is no rightist in korea to be honest. Most of Korean do not think like that. President Yoon and his father studied at Japan. Getting an apology from Japan's sexual slavery victims for the Japanese imperial army, it is not vilifying Japan.
> Japan has issued lots of apologies over the decades for that, and paid reparations.
I don't think any of those stuck. Japanese education and history still doesn't put on the forefront the atrocities. And that's the lens through which the whole region sees Japan. Until Japan owns their history and forms national identity around it, similarly to what Germany did, no apology will ever be believed to be sincere.
Instead Japanese companies, like Toyota, use their influence to suppress promotion of historical books documenting Japanese atrocities in the west.
Atrocities is not something you can apologize for and demand to move on. You never become ex muderer.
It was an analogy. Person committing murder is analogy for country commiting atrocities. If country doesn't accept having committed attrocities into their culture, education and history through and through, there's no hope for it to ever be forgiven let alone forgotten.
i have traveled through many countries and found this attitude to be extremely rare. most are easy to blame others for atrocities committed against them but extremely few were willing to admit their own atrocities against others.
germany is strongly condemning their own past so i guess this comes close. new zealanders feel some guilt about their treatment of the maori, and in other countries i came across the occasional critic, but only because the FOSS community tends to attract them. but general acceptance is almost nowhere to be found.
So when is South Korea going to apologize for the atrocities they committed in Vietnam, and put that in their school textbooks, and form a national identity around it?
Totally false. President Park even did not notice exactly information to victims from agreement between SK and JP in 2015. They always have been trying to hide information and ignore victim's opinion.
Man, this is an 80 year old issue. Move on already. The people that did that aren’t even alive anymore. And their offspring have a totally different government from the one that did the atrocities.
This is simply not how the world thinks. Look at the renewed effort for reparations in the US for example. Affirmative Action is an example of a form of reparation as well as black-only scholarships[0]. So thoughts like this do exist and are pretty widely accepted.
