This is big. The animosity between them runs deep.
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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We can only hope. The Japanese royal family has acknowledged to be directly descended from one of the three kingdoms of ancient korea. Their kingdom crumbled under attack and there was a mass exodus to Japan. Later Korean soldiers would attack Japan twice under the banner of the khanate. And Japan would attack Korea under hideyoshi. There has never been friendship between Korea and Japan although the japanese royals are ethnically koreans
I suspect what we’ll see is an anti China alliance between Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, and Vietnam as Chinese influence grows. Probably won’t be something official like NATO but it does seem to be in their strategic interest to make this happen. Especially now that US support is iffy.
And my understanding is that the current generations have less animosity.
Almost an Onion headline.
... they weren't? Is it really just down to WW2 history and chauvinistic sentiments, which are the only concrete issues the article mentions? Looking in from the outside, that's pretty absurd.
Why absurd? Not all neighbors are friends. Some barely tolerate each other, others are neutral. And some are straightforward enemies.
You are much more likely to fight your neighbors than anyone else.
Japan and South Korea have similar political systems and similar human development indexes, which implies relatively similar sets of values. And they're fairly alone with those in their corner of the world. They both have to deal with being adjacent to Russia, China and North Korea, which aren't exactly the best neighbors. And they face similar social issues, e.g. extremely low birth rates.
In short, it would be very beneficial for them to be friends.
It doesn't work this way. At all.
Russia and Ukraine have many similar things. And what?
Half of Afrika shoots each other while being indistinguishable from an outsider's point of view.
USA despises Canada while Canada helped USA many times and the last war between them wasn't even between them but between metropolias.
Want me to provide another hundred of examples?
Most of these have actually quite different political systems. e.g. Putin's Russia is a dictatorship, while Ukraine is a somewhat imperfect democracy that has been on the road to become more similar to EU countries. Trump might despise Canada, but is that true for Biden and other prominent Democrats, too? Was that true for pre-MAGA Republicans? Either way, Trump's USA is a rightwing dictatorship while Canada is a democracy.
Also, even if a set of relatively similar countries isn't actually friends, it would still be very beneficial for most them, certainly more beneficial than going to war with each other.
Canada: the only American enemy to actually burn down the White House. Nevar forget! /s
Yeah well, it's not always easy to be friends when one invades and commit countless of atrocities against the other.
I suppose I took it for granted how well my own country was able to deal with that kind of situation.
Yeah, that's an interesting point. Perhaps there are cultural difference that makes it more difficult to let go of old grudges.
Or maybe Europe is just more used to fighting eachother and becoming friends again once it's over.
I mean, I'm Swedish, we may joke about the Danes and talk shit about them. But if something serious were to actually happen we'd stand behind them no questions asked. And I'm pretty sure we have the record for most wars and battles fought between two nations.
One issue is that Japan was treated with kid's gloves after WW2 unlike Germany, the Germans were made keenly aware of how much they fucked up and the allies spent some effort to "denazify" the country - even if it was incomplete, it was still a lot more than what was done in Japan.
Now that I think about it, it probably also helped a ton that the EU wasn't just two countries, but pretty much from the very beginning a round table of more-or-less equals. Really takes the edge off animosities between any two countries in a way that's probably impossible when all you have is bilateral relations, even when there's a guarantor like the USA that would prevent any active hostilities.
That makes perfect sense if you have no sense of the historical context of relations between Japan and Korea or the major factors of racism and historical revisionism at play.
Since the end of WWII, Japan has actively downplayed and minimized its own historical atrocities against Chinese and Korean civilians. Mass rape, torture, and indiscriminate massacre aren't things a proud culture like Korea are gonna just "get over" on a short timescale. The fact that racism against Koreans in Japan is still rampant is just icing on the shit cake.
One of the other articles linked to from the OP article mentions that, while two Japanese companies (Mitsubishi and Nippon Steel) have voluntarily offered reparation payments to "forced laborers" from WWII recently, this has actually inflamed tensions because they have also notably not offered apologies. The money is seen as a dirty bribe to shut up about the whole "nearly a million people pressed into slavery" thing.
This is happening now because both of these countries have relatively similar political values and are being squeezed by both sides by China and the US. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Oh my god. One of them tried to colonize the other. In living memory! Atrocities were visited. Why is this hard to understand? Because they look the same to you from a distance, apparently.
in fact, those who are most similar often fight the most
consider dogs. typical dogs are pretty chill and get along with practically everyone, except other dogs. at least that's my impression. when they see another dog, they start barking like there's no tomorrow, because they sense competition. somebody who's completely different than themselves is no problem because they occupy a different niche, so they're not competition.
Many dogs I see bark at people, while many other dogs are quite happy meeting other dogs. Probably depends on the breed and whether the owner is a dipshit.
Let's just say my Filipino wife is no fan of the Japanese due to the horrors they inflicted in WWII. LOL, and she's half Japanese.
Let's not forget it's convenient for conservative parties of BOTH sides to have some red meat to throw to their country's nationalists. Normal, everyday people scarcely have the time or interaction to have strong feelings about another country whose people they don't encounter that often, independent of history. But when you stir up your constituents to unite against an out-group, you can get them out to the polls and have a nice convenient threat to accuse the other guys of being soft against. They will become real friends when the real threat from China is greater than the political benefit of using each other to keep a united nationalist wing.
now that is commendable
how was the situation till now? japan, korea and china all hate each other for some reason?
for some reason?
I don't mean to be a dick, but it might have something to do with the Japanese Empire having massacred them in the past.
ok lol i didn't want to come across as disrespectful, i just have zero knowledge about the history of the far east.
Check out Wikipedia's many articles on imperial Japan's invasions of China and Korea. Relations are still frosty I believe primarily because Japan's (mostly conservative) leadership has been steadfast in refusing to acknowledge the vast majority of wrongdoings of the past with respect to China and Korea.