The Japan Factor

A phrase that has been used frequently to describe the character of Japan–Korea relations over the years is “so near, yet so far.” Indeed, distance seems to make Japan's political heart grow fonder. Japan and Korea are so close geographically (in the case of South Korea), ideologically, and developmentally, yet they are so far apart in myriad other ways. Of the Big Four, Japan is beyond compare on Northeast Asian identity politics because Tokyo serves as a clear and present reminder of (wounded) national identity for Korea and China, and as a lightening rod for domestic politics in Seoul, Pyongyang, and Beijing. Of the Big Four, Japan has been the most significant negative other in the making of modern Korean national identity and nationalism.

As one of a few true nation-states – the state's jurisdiction coincides perfectly with its own nation (homogenous people) – Japan should have escaped the wrenching national identity difficulties that have afflicted so many states old and new. Yet, by a more synthetic notion of national identity, the state defines and differentiates itself not only essentially by what it is – what the Japanese refer to as kokutai (national essence) – but also behaviorally by what it does in international relations.

Some of the manifest symbolic and behavioral anomalies in Japanese foreign policy cannot be fully explained by realist and liberal theories.

The U.S. Factor

Without a doubt, the United States remains the most dominant external actor on the Korean peninsula. Although U.S. primacy at almost any point on the globe is widely accepted, the description is particularly apt: history, geopolitics, and geoeconomics all drive U.S. interest in NEA, and Korea's location at the strategic crossroads of the region makes it a natural place for the United States to concentrate its concern.

The Korean peninsula, although situated at the crossroads of Northeast Asia, has often been home to political entities that sought isolation from the world outside. In the twentieth century, however, Korea's attempts to maintain itself as the “hermit kingdom” were overthrown in succession by Japanese colonization, the World War II settlement, the beginning of the Cold War, the end of the Cold War, and the intensification of globalization. Because of the course of international history following World War II, on the Korean peninsula today there are two Korean states, whereas for the 1,269 previous years there had been only one. North and South Korea as we know them today do not exist as entities entirely of their own making but rather as two incomplete nation-states with national identities crafted in the cauldron of Cold War conflict and galvanized in the post–Cold War age of globalization.

With a synthetic interactive approach to studying foreign relations as its starting point, this book explores how the identities of North and South Korea have evolved in relation to the Big Four of Northeast Asia: China, Japan, Russia, and the United States. Just as for individuals there can be no definition of the self without reference to some other, so with nation-states there can be no development of national identity without reference to the set of other actors in world politics.