Park was not about to reconsider the signing of the treaty on account of the opposition; nevertheless, he did have to postpone it until the domestic situation cooled down.
The treaty documents were signed at the Japanese prime minister’s official residence, and the treaty bills were ratified by the South Korean National Assembly and the Japanese lower house on August 14 and November 12, 1965, respectively. The Japanese upper house followed with its ratification on December 11. Throughout 1965, Park resolutely put down anti-treaty demonstrations. Some universities were closed down to contain the spread of demonstrations. In Japan, contrary to the LDP leadership’s fear that the treaty would trigger a security crisis, there were only some qualms about the way the bills were handled in the Diet. With the ratification process completed, the treaty documents were officially exchanged on December 18, 1965, at the central government building in Seoul.
The treaty was not about which side got the better of the other. Rather, it was about what the two sides could agree on within the tight constraints of their respective domestic political and economic situations in 1965. As
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much as the normalization treaty failed to reconcile the two countries’ historically constituted self-identities, this failure of political reconciliation was counterbalanced by the firm interest-based groundwork laid for a much better future relationship. Economically, Japan’s assistance in the form of private property claims, grants-in-aid, and commercial loans, as well as technology transfers, helped to build the foundation for South Korea’s economic growth. Militarily, the normalization treaty reinforced the security of both South Korea and Japan by consolidating—albeit with some limitations—U.S.-South Korea-Japan triangular security cooperation against the threat of communist aggression and expansion in East Asia.
Politically, the normalization treaty sowed the seeds for the development of a closer relationship between the two countries on the basis of shared values and interests. The opposition attacked the treaty as a sell-out, but its rather exaggerated claim that the treaty was a replica of the £lsa Treaty of 1910 backfired. The parallels drawn by the opposition between the 1910 and 1965 treaties made the opposition look more radical, alienating many of the moderate opponents of the treaty.
Beyond the Settlement
The timing for the settlement was right. Economically, South Korea was in dire need of foreign capital to move ahead with its ambitious economic development plans. For its part, Japan had fully recovered from World War II and was searching for a new role in global and regional arenas. Putting its militarist past behind it, Japan was keen on building a new reputation for itself as a pacifist liberal democracy. The settlement with South Korea was in a sense a litmus test for Japan’s genuine conversion into a liberal democratic player. The timing of the intensification of the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s also contributed to the settlement. Considered central to U.S. efforts to consolidate an anticommunist military front in East Asia was a good working relationship between South Korea and Japan. The coinciding of the anticommunist Park and Sato governments also helped to bring the erstwhile enemies together. The two leaders shared pragmatic goals of military deterrence and economic cooperation. Without the convergence of these economic and security interests in the conclusive stage of the normalization talks, it would have been difficult to motivate the two countries’ leadership to reach a comprehensive settlement in the mid-1960s.
Moreover, in the mid-1960s, state-centric, export-led industrialization faced little resistance from great powers and the world economy, in contrast to the1970s and 1980s when the forces of protectionism in developed
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countries would certainly have narrowed the window of opportunity for late developers relying on state-subsidized programs of export promotion.
In the 1990s and thereafter, the forces of financial globalization would have made it even more difficult for a state to use subsidized “policy loans” for developmental goals. In other words, South Korea may have faced much more difficulty in relying on the same growth strategy had it pursued it at a later stage. The normalization treaty with Japan was instrumental in jump-starting the whole process of development at the most op-portune time.
On the other hand, for the South Korean–Japanese bilateral relationship, the ratification of the treaty in 1965 was followed by remarkable cooperation through the end of Sato Eisaku’s premiership in 1972. Within a year after their normalization of relations, Japan surpassed the United States as South Korea’s single largest trading partner. Japanese exports to South Korea surged from an annual average of $180 million in 1965 to $586 million in 1970. From 1971 to 1975, the figure tripled to $1.8 billion. South Korean exports to Japan also increased substantially, but not enough to prevent South Korea’s trade deficit from rising equally high. The expansion of commercial activities between the two countries constituted one of the engines driving South Korea’s hyper economic growth. At the same time, Japan’s economic assistance and compensation became Park’s seed money to finance some of his strategic FYEDP projects and laid the basis for heavy and chemical industrialization in the 1970s. Besides the booming bilateral trade and the timely implementation of economic assistance programs, the two countries raised their level of cooperation in the military realm under the watchful eye of the United States. In the Nixon-Sato joint communiqué issued on November 21, 1969, a “Korean clause”
was introduced whereby South Korea’s security was to be considered essential to that of Japan.59
But at the same time, it is important to underline the limits of the two countries’ rapprochement. The eclipse of Sato Eisaku’s leadership, which coincided with a series of dramatic changes in East Asian security relations—Nixon’s declaration of the Guam Doctrine (1969), China’s entry into the United Nations (1971), and Nixon’s visit to China (1972)—ushered in a difficult period for Park. First, Japan followed the American lead in improving bilateral relations with communist China. What is more, Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei reviewed his nation’s relations with the two Koreas. Arguing that the newly initiated Red Cross meetings between the two Koreas at P’anmunjôm in September 1971 had the effect of reducing military tension on the Korean Peninsula, Tanaka departed from the “one Korea policy” espoused by his predecessors. Tanaka resorted to a more
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pragmatic and flexible approach in dealing with the two Koreas, not unlike the days of Hatoyama Ichiro (1954–1956). Tanaka argued that the détente on the Korean Peninsula rendered the 1969 “Korean Clause” no longer pertinent.
Other events also erupted to test the strength of South Korean–Japanese relations following the normalization. One of the most damaging was the kidnapping of Kim Dae-jung, the South Korean opposition leader then living in Japan, by KCIA agents in August 1973. The candidate of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in the 1971 presidential election, Kim Dae-jung was then trying to mobilize international opinion in denouncing Park’s promulgation of the yushin constitution in November 1972 that was to perpetuate his political rule. Park accused Kim Dae-jung of plotting to set up a provisional government in Japan. He also accused Kim of links with pro-Pyongyang chosoren in Japan. When Kim Dae-jung was kidnapped from his hotel in Tokyo on August 8, 1973, by KCIA agents, Park’s image became seriously tarnished. Angered by the event that took place on Japanese soil, many Japanese opinion leaders became openly critical of Park’s dictatorial rule. Damage might have been contained at the governmental level, but Park became angry at what he considered Japanese intervention in South Korean domestic politics. In February 1974 he banned the circulation of Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese progressive daily newspaper.
When, in August 1974, an ethnic Korean residing in Japan, under a false Japanese identity, shot and killed South Korea’s first lady in an assassination attempt on Park, emotions flared to new heights. South Koreans held the Japanese government responsible for the incident. When the Japane
se government refused to apologize for what had taken place, as demanded by the Park government, widespread demonstrations were touched off, even leading to a raid on the Japanese embassy in Seoul.
Shiina EtsusaburÃ’s timely mediation helped to calm the raw nerves, but the damage was already done. The bilateral relationship was at its lowest possible point since the 1965 normalization of relations. But even then, the South Korean–Japanese relationship survived. As in the two countries’
signing of a normalization treaty in 1965, it was regional power politics that halted the deterioration of relations during the 1970s. The United States’ military withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1973 and the subsequent communist takeover of Saigon in 1975 alarmed Japan and moved it to combine its new engagement strategy of détente with its earlier cold war position of military containment. Given the continued military threats from China and North Korea, Japan could not maintain Tanaka Kakuei’s alleged policy of “equidistance” between the two Koreas. Instead, Tanaka’s successors came to reaffirm the “Korean Clause” in the
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1969 Nixon-Sato joint communiqué that had held South Korea to be the sole legitimate state on the Korean Peninsula. Prime Minister Miki Takeo, who replaced the scandal-plagued Tanaka Kakuei in December 1974, decided to part with the equidistance policy, convinced that a communist takeover of the Korean Peninsula would pose a serious problem for Japan’s own security interests. This meant patching up the differences Japan had with South Korea over the kidnapping of Kim Dae-jung.
Alarmed by the specter of a domino effect triggered by the fall of South Vietnam, Park also left behind the issue of his wife’s death. The rapprochement continued under both Fukuda Takeo and òhira Masayoshi, the last two Japanese prime ministers Park faced before his own assassination in October 1979. In fact, just a few months prior to his death, Park was able to take the bilateral relations to new heights, going beyond economic cooperation to lay the foundation for cooperation in the security realm. Beginning with historic visits to South Korea by both Nagano Shigeo, chief of staff of Japan’s Land Self-Defense Forces (SDF), and Yamashita Ganri, head of the Japanese Defense Agency, lawmakers from both sides established a formal parliamentarian council to discuss security issues.60 The South Korean–Japanese relations had indeed come a full circle. The outstanding territorial, history, and political issues notwithstanding, the two nations managed to go back to the cultivation of a mutually beneficial, comprehensive relationship that they began with the normalization of relations in 1965 on the basis of common security interests.
At the same time, it is also important to note that the dynamics of market integration unleashed by Park’s decision to normalize relations with Japan in 1965 became a new safety valve, in addition to the old security rationales of cold war containment, protecting South Korean–Japanese relations from political setbacks and conflicts. As their bilateral economic cooperation continuously deepened and widened, South Korea and Japan thought they could not afford to let political conflicts disrupt their relationship. It was in this creation of new economic rationales for nurturing a robust South Korean–Japanese relationship that Park’s greatest legacy lay.
Just as Syngman Rhee’s political rule marked the coming of a distinctive era in South Korean–Japanese relations, Park’s rise to power ushered in a new era in the two countries’ relationship. Having set the normalization of relations with Japan as a national foreign policy goal, Park, by the time of his death, achieved what he set out to do. Despite bad patches in the first half of the 1970s, South Korea and Japan came to enjoy flourishing commercial ties, all the while consolidating their anticommunist security link.
Respect from Japan may not have come at a national level for South Korea, but it certainly came at the individual level as many Japanese leaders
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in the government and big business came to appreciate Park’s developmental vision, leadership style, and commitment to strengthening bilateral ties.
Japanophile that he may or may not have been, Park’s pragmatic and forward-looking vision helped to reshape South Korean–Japanese relations. Founded in the spirit of the normalization treaty of 1965, the new, carefully cultivated South Korean–Japanese relationship has in many ways contributed to South Korea’s growth as an economically vibrant, modern nation as we now know it. This is what Park wanted all along.
c h a p t e r
s i x t e e n
The Security, Political, and
Human Rights Conundrum,
1974–1979
Yong-Jick Kim
Relations between SouthKoreaandtheUnitedStatestookasharp downward turn in the mid-1970s with the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter, who introduced a new South Korea policy that diverged from the United States’ traditional cold war stance in three crucial respects. First, Carter put the issue of human rights abuses by President Park Chung Hee’s yushin regime (1972–1979) at or near the top of the U.S. foreign policy agenda. Second, Carter campaigned for the complete withdrawal of U.S. ground troops from the Korean Peninsula as part of America’s military disengagement from East Asia that had begun with Richard M. Nixon’s 1969 Guam Doctrine. The disputes over human rights and military withdrawal almost crippled the alliance as they spilled over and magnified political tensions that culminated in the third conflict, which became known as “Koreagate” and involved the yushin regime’s alleged effort to buy support in the U.S. Congress with illegal funds.
The crisis in the alliance developed over time. The human rights dispute began with U.S. congressional hearings in 1974 and 1975, when Park turned to emergency decrees to crack down on the rising opposition. The ensuing repression prompted many U.S. legislators to argue for cuts in military aid in order to compel Park to be more responsive to U.S. concerns on human rights. Then came the plan for U.S. ground troop withdrawal in 1977 on the basis of Carter’s presidential election pledge in 1976. The Koreagate scandal also began developing in the mid-1970s, with media re-
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ports of illegal South Korean lobbying on Capitol Hill, which aggravated the situation even further. With anti-Park sentiment growing in the United States, the Carter administration persisted in a punitive South Korea policy that, had it been successful, could have seriously damaged the U.S.–
South Korean security alliance.
In an interview with the Washington Post on January 16, 1976, then–
presidential candidate Carter declared his intention to withdraw ground troops and nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula. The Trilateral Commission, a new multinational private group organized by David Rockefeller, convened in May 1976 in Kyoto and gave Carter’s new policy credibility with its endorsement of troop withdrawal. In March 1977, Carter officially declared his plan to withdraw U.S. ground troops from South Korea completely within four to five years. Over Park’s strong protests, Carter was implementing his election pledge at a pace alarming to South Koreans. The following two and a half years bore witness to what were undoubtedly the two countries’ worst bilateral relations since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
To oppose Carter’s new policy, Park adopted the strategy of categori-cally denying the existence of any human rights problems in South Korea.
Claiming that Carter had failed to understand South Korea’s unique circumstance of national division and military confrontation with the “rogue state” of North Korea, Park’s advisors criticized Carter’s policy of military withdrawal not only as an act of betrayal but also as an ill-informed policy that would hurt the U. S. interest in maintaining the status quo on the Korean Peninsula. The Carter administration, by contrast, stressed that human rights abuses were neither necessary nor justifiable even in South Korea’s difficult military situation. On the contrary, such practices were a direct result of Park’s attempt to maintain authoritarian rule in the face of rising domestic political opposition. On the whole, the two governments
never questioned the strategic importance of the U.S.–South Korean alliance; nor were they really disputing the existence of human rights abuses.
Park could not escape charges of oppression and torture by both U.S. officials and domestic political opponents. The real question was the legitimacy of U.S. intervention in South Korean domestic politics. Given the extensive U.S. role in South Korea, from a supplier of economic aid to a provider of military deterrence to a patron of democracy, the United States was de facto intervening in South Korean domestic politics, whether it did or did not act on its missionary instincts to spread democratic values. As Park’s opponents in South Korea and the United States argued, inaction strengthened Park’s hold over domestic politics as much as action weakened it by depriving him of economic, military, and ideological resources.
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The United States’ hegemonic presence in South Korea made any action or inaction by the United States automatically an act of intervention.
Ironically, the three disputes that profoundly destabilized South Korea and threatened its military deterrence were of Park’s own doing. To defend his yushin regime, Park relied on emergency powers to repress chaeya dissidents and opposition party politicians, which only strengthened his opponents’ will to resist. To slow down, if not reverse, the United States’ military disengagement as enunciated in its Guam Doctrine, Park had Pak Tong-sôn lobby for U.S. congressional support, which boomeranged into not only U.S. investigations but also domestic criticisms.
The three disputes, however, came to an anticlimactic ending. The bilateral disputes over U.S. ground troop withdrawal, Koreagate, and human rights violations did not end with Carter’s victory, not because Park resisted, but because U.S. domestic politics turned against Carter and U.S.
policymakers redefined American strategic interests after the euphoria of détente receded with a crisis in the Middle East. When Carter linked the issue of human rights abuses with his campaign pledge of troop withdrawal, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and Congress—not South Korea—
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