President Barack Obama's attempt to refocus his foreign policy on Asia is running into centuries-old animosities that are seared into the psyches of U.S. allies in the region but barely remembered by most Americans.
Fostering closer cooperation between Japan and South Korea, the region's largest democratic economies, is crucial to the administration's ambitions for maintaining stability in the Pacific. The alliance between the two countries is an important counterbalance to nuclear-armed North Korea and a more assertive China.
Those efforts have been stifled by a widening rhetorical gap between the two countries' leaders over the forced prostitution of Korean women by members of the Japanese military during World War II.