2 Asian leaders to meet with much on the line

Toyko, Seoul have had frosty relationship.

TOKYO — South Korea’s president has been promoting the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang as the “peace games,” a way to bring North Korea into the international sports community for at least a few weeks and lessen the tensions on the peninsula.

But South Korean conciliation is proving harder with another neighbor: Japan.

The precarious relationship between the United States’ two most important security allies in Asia is currently in a low phase, brought down by a long-simmering dispute over history and complicated by differences over how to deal with North Korea.

“This is and always has been one of the most serious problems for U.S. policy in northeast Asia,” said Daniel Sneider, an East Asia specialist at Stanford University. “We’ve been trying to push our allies together since the Korean War and we’ve made only incremental progress over almost 70 years.”

Progressive South Korean President Moon Jae-in will meet with his conservative Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, for talks at the Winter Olympics site on Saturday, the day of the opening ceremony.

Until last week, it wasn’t even clear that Abe would attend.

But the Trump administration intervened to ask him to go - not least because Vice President Mike Pence will be traveling from Tokyo to Pyeongchang for the opening ceremony. The White House “strongly urged” Abe to attend the ceremony, a senior Japanese government official told the conservative Sankei Shimbun newspaper.

Together, Abe and Pence will be able to send “a strong message to South Korea” not to be too conciliatory toward North Korea and also to abide by their bilateral agreements, the paper reported.

This has sparked talk in Tokyo that Abe and Pence are going to Pyeongchang to “gang up” on Moon, who favors closer relations with North Korea as a way to bring Kim Jong Un’s regime in from the cold.

Despite his efforts to include North Korea in the Olympics, Moon has publicly said he supports the “maximum pressure” approach espoused by the Trump and Abe administrations.

The trip to Pyeongchang is aimed at making sure Moon sticks to that vow, said Kiichi Fujiwara, professor of international relations at the University of Tokyo.

“If we don’t engage the Moon administration, they might get too far ahead of the U.S. and Japan on North Korea, and that would not be beneficial for Tokyo or Washington,” he said. “So we should put aside our differences.”

Still, a slew of ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers have criticized Abe’s decision to go to Pyeongchang - not because of the North Korean issue, but because of South Korea’s behavior.

“He absolutely should not go,” Takashi Nagao, an LDP representative in the lower house, wrote on Twitter, saying that Abe is just helping Moon boost his popularity by stoking anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea.

This relates to Moon’s criticism of a 2015 deal, which was supposed to be “final and irreversible,” on sexual slavery during World War II.

“Even if there’s some agreement to be reached in South Korea, we’ve seen over and over again that they don’t stick to their agreements,” Nagao said, echoing the sentiments of many in Japan.

But issues relating to Japan’s occupation of the Korean Peninsula during the first half of the 20th century continues to plague relations between Tokyo and Seoul.

Historians say as many as 200,000 women in occupied countries were coerced by the Japanese Imperial Army to work as sex slaves.

The Japanese government has issued repeated statements expressing remorse for the practice and set up a fund in the 1990s to help the women. But some Japanese right-wing politicians and academics have continued to insist that the women were prostitutes or that the number of sex slaves was much lower.

This has angered South Koreans, who view these critics as the equivalent of Holocaust deniers.

The issue has festered for years, often consuming meetings with the United States and even overshadowing discussions on the North Korean threat.

But the two countries seemed to reach a breakthrough at the end of 2015, when Abe expressed “his most sincere apologies”and Japan put $8.3 million into a new fund to help the surviving women.

When the deal was reached, there were 46 comfort women in South Korea. Today, there are 31 still alive.

Moon, who became president last year, has called the deal “seriously flawed” but said he would not seek to revise it.