Japan and South Korea need to rise above the historical baggage of the past

SOUTH Korea and Japan are at each other's throats again. And now thanks to the example of US President Donald Trump, trade and diplomatic ties have become weaponised to serve the political agenda of both sides.

Worse, the current dispute between Seoul and Tokyo - which has its origins in the period of Japanese colonial rule between 1910 and 1945 over the Korean peninsula - may prove to be the most intractable. It has left Koreans with an unquenchable thirst for retribution and compensation. Equally, present-day Japanese resent having to apologise for their history over and over again and want the past buried once and for all.

The latest row took hold late last year, when South Korea's highest court ordered Mitsubishi to pay reparations for its use of slave labour during the Japanese colonial occupation and World War II. The same court had delivered a similar verdict against Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal a few weeks earlier. Japan's Prime Minister Abe Shinzo was duly incensed. The Japanese feel the issue of compensation was settled under their 1965 treaty, which came with hundreds of millions of US dollars in aid and soft loans as compensation. There is also the 2015 agreement between the two countries that was supposed to put the issue of "comfort women" - South Korean women recruited to provide sexual services to World War II Japanese soldiers - to rest. But a change of government in Seoul revived the issue once again and the pact is barely surviving under South Korean President Moon Jae-in.