Old rivalries stir in Japan and Korea

By David Pilling

South Korean leadership elections are held every five years. Japanese ones come around about every five minutes. This month, the two arch rivals – Asia’s second and fourth-largest economies – will pick a new leader within three days of each other. 

Japan has had so many prime ministers in recent years that almost everyone you can think of has already had a go. Shinzo Abe, who had a brief turn in 2006 – since when no fewer than five prime ministers have served – is very likely to get a second bite at the cherry. His election would mean a lurch to the right of a Japan increasingly fearful of a rising China. It would also mean the comeback of the Liberal Democratic party after a three-year absence. 

South Koreans, meanwhile, must choose between Park Geun-hye on the right and Moon Jae-in on the left. The two are running neck and neck following the withdrawal of independent candidate Ahn Cheol-soo, a popular software entrepreneur who pulled out last month to the dismay of many young voters who had been invigorated by his unconventional campaign. 

There are some similarities between the elections in two of Asia’s most democratic nations, especially when you compare them with the stage-managed coronation of Xi Jinping as China’s leader, let alone the hereditary succession of Kim Jong-eun in North Korea. In both, independent candidates will have played an important – if ultimately not a decisive – role. Mr Ahn, a man with no political experience, represented a rejection of the two main political wings that have slugged it out since South Korea became democratic in 1987. In Japan, the popularity of Shintaro Ishihara, the maverick rightwing governor of Tokyo, and Toru Hashimoto, the outspoken mayor of Osaka, both represent a rejection of the mainstream politicians who have so failed Japan in the past 20 years. Their newly combined Japan Restoration party deliberately alludes to the Meiji Restoration, conjuring up prouder times. 

Yet it is the differences between the two elections that are more striking. Japan’s frustration with politics as normal has produced a third force on the right. Mr Ahn, South Korea’s third force, was a more progressive, forward-looking figure. Even the conservative Ms Park has had to adopt some of the left’s language, favouring more equitable distribution of wealth and an economy less beholden to the chaebol family-owned conglomerates that have steered the country’s remarkable economic transformation.

In Japan, there is a harking back to the old days – the very old days in the case of the Japan Restoration party with its echoes of the 19th century. Mr Abe has never seen the need to distance himself from his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who, as part of Tojo’s wartime cabinet, had once been considered a war criminal but who was rehabilitated to such an extent he became prime minister in the late 1950s.

In South Korea, conversely, Ms Park has had to make a show of distancing herself from her father, Park Chung-hee, who seized power in a military coup in 1961 and remained in office until his assassination in 1979. Her apology for human rights abuses during his dictatorship, in the context of Korea’s tradition of filial piety, was described by one observer as the (politically necessary) equivalent of “spitting on his grave”.

South Korea, not yet as rich as Japan, feels the need to forge ahead. Japan, frustrated with the present and fearful of the future, is tempted to look back. Even if Koreans choose Ms Park, in some ways a throwback, they will have elected the country’s first female leader, something Japan has never managed.

South Korea is, to some extent, treading a path Japan has already followed. Japan, too, once it had caught up with western living standards in the 1980s, began to worry about how to wean itself off an export-dependent model in which the interests of consumers were sacrificed to those of Japan Inc. It never really managed that transition – to its continuing cost. Now South Koreans worry that the chaebol are too strong to the detriment of both ordinary workers and to the development of an economy with more strings to its bow. The policy response to that issue will go a long way in determining Korea’s economic course for the next generation. 

If Korea is concerned about how to spread wealth more evenly, Japan is primarily worried about producing growth of any kind. Mr Abe has adopted semi-radical ideas on monetary policy designed to force the central bank to engineer the mild inflation that some economists believe could lift Japan off the rocks. 

Finally, foreign policy plays a larger role in Japan’s election. South Korea’s poll will not be determined by the candidates’ policies towards Pyongyang. Japan’s contest, conversely, is being shaped by Beijing, whose more assertive stance over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands is nudging the Japanese to the right.

Some way behind that as a foreign policy issue is whether or not Japan should join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a high level proto-trade group that some think could help revive Japan’s industrial competitiveness. Mr Abe is reluctant to commit for fear of offending the farmers who support his party. 

Neither Japan nor Korea figures much as an issue in each other’s election. But rivalry and suspicion, a hangover from Japan’s brutal 35-year occupation of Korea, still runs deep. It is manifested in territorial and historical disputes. Mr Moon’s party is less willing than Ms Park’s to let bygones be bygones. Mr Abe sees little to apologise for in Japan’s history. If both Mr Moon and Mr Abe are elected, trouble may flare again. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012