During his recent visit to the United Nations, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reasserted his eagerness to improve relations with Japan's East Asian neighbors, but the reaction from Beijing and Seoul was tepid.
That's because in both China and South Korea, Abe is reviled for his revisionist views about the region's shared history with Japan. He and other reactionaries have convinced the Chinese and Koreans that Japan is monolithically unrepentant about its pre-1945 regional depredations. This is untrue, but Abe's pernicious whitewashing of this history has derailed relations with nations that already harbor and orchestrate animosity toward Japan over its imperialist excesses stretching from 1895 to 1945.
The tensions have spread to unlikely battlegrounds, including the War Memorial of Korea, a museum in downtown Seoul that honors those who fought and died in the fratricidal Korean War (1950-53). In July, it became another arena for the history battle between South Korea and Japan when it abruptly canceled an exhibition based on the Japanese manga "One Piece." The reason was that the series, which features the adventures of pirates and outlaws searching for treasure, contained depictions of a flag that resembled the Rising Sun, a symbol that Koreans associate with Japanese colonialism. The flags, which are scattered across dozens of volumes of the manga since 1997, are flown by the protagonists' enemy and therefore not glorified.