なぜ韓国人は、嫌われるのか？

"Japan must create the necessary environment and conditions" for a meeting between the Chinese president and Koizumi, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi said last week.

"Japan has seriously damaged Sino-Japanese relations," Huang Xingyuan, a diplomatic counselor at the Chinese Embassy here, said in an interview Thursday. "There's a Chinese proverb: 'He who starts trouble must act to end it.' We will wait to see whether Japan does that."

"It's a very tough attitude, a very tough reaction on the part of the Chinese and Koreans," said Yoshiyasu Peter Sato, who was Japan's ambassador to China in 1996 when relations took a plunge over a similar historical issues and a dispute over eight small islands in the East China Sea. But "as far as I remember, this kind of contact has never been refused by the Chinese side," he said.

The chill in relations is likely to be felt in both symbolic and real ways. Organizers of the 2002 World Cup soccer championship jointly hosted by South Korea and Japan, worry about a pall over the games and a damper on travel between the two countries if the animosity persists. Already South Korea has canceled dozens of educational and cultural exchanges with Japan.

Diplomatically, shared anger toward Japan nudges Seoul and Beijing closer together, and can put strains on Washington's blueprint for stability in the region: a common front of Japan, South Korea and the United States.

"We have to be more concerned about the relations with Asian countries," said Tomohisa Sakanaka, former director of the Research Institute for Peace and Security here. "The historical recognition problem is not a new thing. It will take time to convince China and Korea."

Indeed, the present dispute shows the enduring grip of history on current relations. Japan occupied Korea and much of Southeast Asia, and fought fiercely in China until its defeat in World War II. The homage paid by Koizumi to the war dead at Yasukuni Shrine, where thousands of top and mid-level war criminals are honored, and the government's approval of a textbook that plays down Japan's transgressions in the war, are seen overseas as evidence that Japanese leaders are unrepentant about the nation's past.

"The Japanese are having hardships with their economy, and they are turning more conservative, right-wing," a South Korean diplomat said. "It's very worrisome to us."

Japan has long sought to convince its neighbors that it is peaceful and trustworthy, deserving of a leadership role in Asia. It seemed to have turned the corner with Seoul in 1998, when Kim Dae Jung and then-Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi signed a pact in which Japan offered sincere apologies for the past and South Korea promised to end its historical grievances.

Since then, relations have improved tremendously. Japanese visitors have flocked to South Korea, younger Koreans have embraced the wave of Japanese pop culture, and Tokyo and Seoul have often taken a similar diplomatic course.

Social ties with China are not as close. But business ties have boomed, and Japanese companies are investing heavily in China. China is now Japan's second-largest trading partner after the United States.

2001 The Washington Post Company