South Korea: A Change in Moodo

SOUTH KOREA

For the first time in two decades a Korean last week was granted an audience with the Emperor of Japan. He was South Korea’s Foreign Minister, Dong Won Lee, and during his six-day visit to Tokyo he received the full red-carpet treatment, from a 19-gun salute to a cocktail party in the glittering Pearl Room of the Tokyo Hilton.

Herded Fishermen. What made the festivities unusual is the heritage of bitterness between the two nations. For 35 years Korea was a Japanese colony, and its people either were ruthlessly suppressed as rebels or treated with contempt as second-class citizens. On gaining its independence after the war, Korea adopted a hard-nosed policy toward Japan. South Korean President Syngman Rhee banned Japanese fishing boats within 60 miles of the Korean coastline. Over the years the Koreans seized a total of 326 Japanese trawlers, and still hold 182 of them. Nearly 4,000 Japanese fishermen were herded into a detention camp near Pusan to serve terms ranging from a few weeks to a few months. Rhee also demanded $8 billion in reparations to cover the alleged expropriation of gold bullion and art objects, and the forced labor imposed on Koreans during the occupation.

Yet last week, as Dong Won Lee and Japanese Foreign Minister Etsusaburo Shiina conferred on a draft treaty, it was clear that the long and bitter relationship was yielding to a more conciliatory mood—or, as the Japanese put it, moodo. Though Japan’s Prime Minister, Eisaku Sato, made it very clear that Japan and South Korea were not entering into an anti-Communist pact, both countries unquestionably had been pushed together by Red China’s explosion of a nuclear device.

Sold-Out Country? At week’s end the conferees were reported in full accord on 1) a new fisheries treaty that will redraw the old Rhee line, 2) a trade agreement under which Japan will postpone repayment of South Korea’s $45 million trade debt and increase imports of Korean raw materials, 3) a redefinition of the rights of the half-million Koreans living in Japan, and 4) reparations, which will probably come to $300 million in grants and $200 million in long-term credits.

The new moodo did not please everyone. Students in Seoul denounced the treaty as “a sellout of the country.” Opposition parties expressed fear that normal relations would “bring Korea again under Japan’s economic and political domination.” In Tokyo, South Koreans paraded under a banner reading, “Don’t sell our fatherland for cheap money.” But such peripheral protests are not likely to affect the draft treaty, and both countries seem to have concluded realistically that neighbors living in the shadow of Red China had better be friends than enemies.